The Women of the Genealogy
The lines of promise and of kings were a means to an end, and that end was CHRIST. They were a means only, so far as His necessary links in the flesh were concerned, viz. His manhood and His royal descent. If men shine at all, or are blest at all, it must be through and by Him. Abraham, the fountain of promise derived from Christ, and found all his hopes in JEHOVAH-JIREH. If Christ were the offspring of David as to the flesh, He was David’s ROOT first of all. “I am the Root and Offspring of David,” CHRIST was ever before the mind of God. He gave power and virtue to every type; He was the fulness of every shadow, the raison d’étre of every personage who was linked with Him in promise, or type, or prophecy. He is the Sum and Sun and Centre of all God’s purposes and ways. Everything else was contingent on Him. Without Him we should never have had a Bible, without Him we should never have heard of Abraham, or Joseph, or David, or Solomon, for their lives would never have been delineated save as types of Him.
The Genealogy in Luke (ch. 3:21-23)
The genealogy in this Gospel consists of seventy-seven generations—a very significant number, for seven is well known to stand for perfection in Scripture. Six hundred and sixty-six will be the number of the Beast (Rev. 13:18), the highest pretension on the part of man to perfection, according to his own proud thoughts. But there is a great gulf fixed between that and perfection, the absolute perfection of the Lord’s humanity.
The genealogy of natural ascent through His mother up to Adam indicates His true manhood, an essential doctrine of Christianity, as is also His true Deity, and indicates that He came into the world to take up in His own person the consequences of the fall of the first man.
Lord Arthur Herveyvell observed, “The New Testament gives us the genealogy of but one Person, that of our Saviour. The priesthood of Aaron having ceased, the possession of Canaan being transferred to the Gentiles, there being now no difference between circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian and Scythian, bond and free, there is but One whose genealogy it concerns us as Christians to be acquainted with—that of our Lord Jesus Christ.” His is everything.
The Greatness of John the Baptist (Matt. 3; Mark 11:1-8; Luke 3:1-18)
John had the high honour of being the only servant of God (with the one exception of the blessed Lord) of whose ministry there was direct and specific prophecy in the Old Testament. This is not because of any inherent greatness in John, but because of his proximity to Christ as His forerunner and herald. His ministry was unique. It belonged neither to Judaism nor Christianity in the strict sense of the word This is proved by the text, “All the prophets and the law prophesied to John,” and by the fact that he was the forerunner of Christ, and that it was Christ Himself who inaugurated Christianity. If his proximity and service to Christ made him the greatest born of women, the least in that kingdom is greater than be, so glorious is it to be connected with the King, as belonging to His kingdom.
The Ministry of John the Baptist
Luke quotes more fully than either Matthew or Mark from Isaiah, giving his prophecy a world-wide application, and appeals not only to the multitude (at once enclosing more than the Pharisees and Sadducees, singled out by Matthew), but branches out in his address to the publicans, a hated class, reminding the Jews of the humiliation of their nation under a foreign yoke, and to the soldiers, who were still more hated. It is befitting that the writer appealing to Gentiles and whose subject is the grace of God should show how John’s ministry embraced such, how it reached to the most degraded and despised.