Focus on Jesus

Matthew 1:18-25 Read the New Testament in a Year: Acts 1:12-26 Resolve to focus your life on Jesus. The Bible is all about Jesus. The New Testament opens with his family tree. As we read the list of Jesus’ ancestors it is encouraging to see that they include Tamar (the adulteress), Rahab (the prostitute), Ruth (the non-Jewish Moabite), Solomon (who was conceived after King David’s adulterous affair with Bathsheba), as well as many others. Thankfully, God uses sinful human beings and, therefore, can use us. Whatever your past, however broken your life may seem right now, God can use you to do something great with your life. The very name ‘Jesus’ means, ‘he will save his people from their sins’ (v.21). Every time we use the name Jesus it reminds us that our greatest need is not for happiness or contentment (although these may both be byproducts). Our greatest need, as with Jesus’ ancestors, is for forgiveness. Therefore, we need a Saviour. The beginning of Matthew shows us that Jesus is the completion of all that is recorded in the Old Testament: Jesus is the climax of history Matthew opens his Gospel by summarizing the Old Testament story in terms of Jesus’ ancestry (v.1–17). The Old Testament tells the story that Jesus completes. Matthew sets out the history of the people of God in terms of three equal periods: fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile and fourteen from the exile to Christ (v.17). In the genealogy, biological generations are skipped over (as was quite common in Old Testament family trees). Matthew was pointing out that Old Testament history falls into three approximately equal spans of time between crucial events. Jesus is the end of the line as far as the Old Testament story goes – the climax has been reached. In Jesus, all the promises of God are fulfilled Jesus is not only the completion of the Old Testament story at a historical level, he is also the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies and all of God’s promises.]]>