Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks.

Where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Tanya Wilmoth. Sometimes we come across something in

scripture that sounds like it is probably pretty important but we don't really

know why. And we know we need to give our full attention to it but we might not understand

what we're supposed to get out of it.

This is especially the case when things are repeated and this is what happened to me

when I was reading the geology of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. So at the end of the list of

names Matthew starts in Abraham and he goes all the way to Jesus. He wraps up his genealogy

in chapter 1 verse 17 like this. He says, thus there were 14 generations

and all from Abraham to David. 14 from David to the exile to Babylon and 14 from the exile to the Messiah.

Now there's lots of important information there about how the promise given to Abraham and the promised Messiah that would come from

David are being carried through to the arrival of Jesus. But the original audience

also would have understood the importance of the number 14.

In the first century letters were used in place of numbers, so each letter also represented something numeric.

For example, the letter D stood in place also for the number four.

So if you had a word with two D's in it, you would add them together to get eight.

The letter W represented a six.

David's name in Hebrew was spelled D, W, D. So that would be 4 plus 6 plus 4, which equals 14.

Matthew's focus on 14 generations emphasizes Jesus' kingship.

Matthew shows that Jesus is the legal claim to the throne of David.

Now why is this important? So one of the frustrations people had in the

...