Pray the Word with David Platt is a resource from radical.net.

Matthew chapter 1, verse 1, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David,

the son of Abraham.

Oh, these introductory words, this introduction to Jesus is nothing short of breathtaking.

You think about what that verse means. We learned at least five things from this one verse about

Jesus. Think about it. The genealogy of Jesus. So this is his name, Jesus, which we see later

in Matthew chapter 1, but his name literally means Savior. He's the one who will save us from our sins.

You've got 39 books in the Old Testament before this, talking about showing us the sinfulness

of man before a holy God, and then bursting on to the first

verse, the first chapter of the New Testament, we see that God has sent Jesus to save us from our sins.

He's the Savior. He's Jesus Christ. So contrary to popular opinion, Christ is not his last name. Christ

actually means the promised one, the Messiah, who was promised all throughout the Old Testament. So

God had given promise after promise after promise in the Old Testament saying a Messiah would come,

who would save his people from their sins. And so

from the very first verse of Matthew, Matthew is saying, the promised one has come. He's the

Savior. He's the Messiah, the promised one. The number three, he's the son of David. He's from the

kingly line of David going all the way back in the Old Testament to Israel's most famous

king, most noteworthy king and God's promise to send one from the seed of David who would

be the king over all the nations. And then he's the son of Abraham. Matthew takes us all the way

back to Genesis and the father of the

people of Israel to say from the very beginning, all of history has been pointing toward him. And that's

the big picture reality we have here in Matthew chapter one. Jesus is the culmination and the center

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