Promises Kept

A Christmas Reflection

Every year around Christmas, people talk about wanting to focus on Jesus, and then skip the first seventeen verses of Matthew because it’s a wall of names they can’t pronounce.

I get it.

I still have to look up Shealtiel on YouTube, and Zerubbabel always sounds like I’m chewing gravel. But that list is there for a reason. Matthew starts his Gospel with it on purpose. It’s the “previously on” intro before the story kicks into motion, an Old Testament compressed into a line of fathers and failures so you can see the world Jesus is born into.

Matthew writes to Jews who grew up on the promise of a Messiah. These weren’t people fumbling through a new idea; they knew the Scriptures as well as farmers know the shape of their fields. They knew God had promised an anointed one, a prophet who would speak God’s Word without flinching, a priest who would offer the right sacrifice once and for all, and a king who would crush evil instead of making deals with it. And they knew all that while living in four centuries of silence. No prophets. No angels. Just the heavy quiet of God’s apparent absence and the scrape of Roman sandals over their own promised land.

So Matthew begins with a genealogy, not to test your patience, but to say: “God didn’t forget.”

Jesus’ family line runs straight back to Abraham and David. God made covenants with both men, promises that didn’t hinge on their moods or their moral streaks but on His own character. Abraham was told he’d become a great nation and that the whole world would be blessed through him. David was told he’d have a son whose throne wouldn’t ever crumble. Isaiah sketches this king: wise, steady, fearless, the sort of ruler who judges without bribery or blindness. The kind of leader everyone claims to want until he actually shows up.

Matthew leans in and says, “That King is Jesus.”

But Matthew also refuses to airbrush the family photo. He drags every skeleton in the closet into the light. You’ve got steady kings like Asa, Jehoshaphat, and Josiah. But right beside them stand Ahaz the child-burner, Joram the idolater, and Jeconiah, who helped drive the whole nation into collapse. Tamar and Rahab—both tied up with prostitution, are in the mix. Bathsheba is mentioned, but Matthew pointedly reminds you she “had been the wife of Uriah,” just so you don’t forget the scandal. There are drunks, liars, adulterers, cowards, schemers, and a whole row of people we know nothing about at all, faces lost in the dim corners of history.

And that’s the line Jesus comes from.

J.C. Ryle once said we ought to read this genealogy with gratitude because it reminds us that Christ’s compassion reaches farther than our shame. If Jesus wasn’t embarrassed to come from that crowd, He’s not embarrassed to take you in either. God never sanitized Jesus’ ancestry. He worked right through the mess, sins, scandals, and all, to bring the Savior into the world. It’s the kind of move God makes often: slipping past the proud and working with whoever is foolish enough to think He might still keep His word.

After the genealogy, Matthew moves to Jesus’ birth, and Joseph steps forward, a man who, in most Christmas sermons, gets shoved off to the edge of the Nativity scene like he’s an extra. But God entrusted His Son to him. Not to a scholar. Not to a priest. To a carpenter with calloused hands, a man who woke up early, paid his taxes, and tried to walk straight in a crooked age.

Joseph finds out Mary is pregnant, not from her lips, it seems, but from the family rumor mill. And he knows he had nothing to do with it. Imagine the blow. The mix of anger, confusion, and shame. The law allowed him to expose her publicly, even have her stoned, and you can bet there were folks ready to cheer him on. The text hints he struggled with the whole thing. He wasn’t some emotionless saint humming hymns while his life cracked in half. He felt the betrayal. He sat with it. He turned it over like a stone in his hand.

And somehow he still chose righteousness instead of revenge.

He decided to end the betrothal quietly. No spectacle, no public hanging of her reputation, no parade of self-pity. Just a quiet attempt at justice and mercy. That alone sets him apart in any age, but especially ours, where people line up to watch someone burn.

Then God speaks. After centuries of silence, He doesn’t thunder from a mountain. He appears to a tired man asleep in his bed. The angel tells Joseph that Mary isn’t lying. The child is from the Holy Spirit. This is the Messiah. Take Mary. Raise the boy. Protect Him. Name Him Jesus.

And Joseph obeys.

Every time God speaks to Joseph, every time, Joseph wakes up and does exactly what he was told. No bargaining. No spiritual theatrics. Just obedience. It’s quiet, unsentimental faith, the kind that actually changes your life.

We’re right to honor Mary. But Joseph deserves our respect, too. We need fathers who fear God more than public opinion, who don’t snap under pressure, who take responsibility when it’d be easier to slide away. We don’t need more celebrities. We need more Josephs.

Matthew then draws our eyes to two names: Jesus and Emmanuel.

Jesus means “Savior,” and He is exactly that. He came to save His people from their sins, not just the headline-making stuff, but the respectable sins folks carry around like pocket change. Every sin, hidden or obvious, is rebellion against God and deserves judgment. And a God who shrugs at sin isn’t holy; He’s corrupt.

So God sent a Savior.

Jesus takes the judgment we deserve so that we can be reconciled to God. That’s Christmas: God keeping His promise to Abraham to bless the nations and His promise to David to send the King who would rule forever.

But He isn’t only Savior. He is Emmanuel, God with us.

Adam once walked with God until sin drove him away. Christ brings us back. In Him, we get not just forgiveness but the return of God’s nearness. And one day, that nearness will eclipse even what Adam knew before the fall.

So here’s Christmas in plain terms: God keeps His promises. He keeps them through sinners and fools, through people who barely make the page, through fathers who drag themselves out of bed and try to do right. He keeps them in judgment and mercy. And He keeps them by giving us His Son: Jesus, Savior and Emmanuel, God with us.

Merry Christmas.

Painting: Cheri Dunnigan