Our Generation of God
OUR holy Gospel begins with a Book of generations, which commences with Abraham and ends with Jesus.
By this one move Scripture sums up the whole history of our human race, as ending in Christ at Bethlehem, and after that starting out again from Christ on Golgotha.
Everything that took place from Adam on to the Patriarchs, merely serves as a pedestal on which to place the Father of all the faithful. And when Abraham departs from Ur of the Chaldees, the course of history straightly directs itself to the Womanseed.
So every idea falls away, as though in the generations, succeeding one another, there was but a monotonous repetition of always other people, who were born and died. Such for the sake of sin it might be in Africa among the negro-tribes, where these many centuries a sea of humanity undulates hither and thither, without aim. But so it was not with that part of our human race, which held fast to the fear of God. The generation that fears God has a history. That is to say, with such a generation there reveals itself a plan, a counsel of God. Therefore our believing fathers placed a family-register in their Bibles. Something to which Scripture itself invited them; for it gives us both in Genesis for the Old, and in SS. Matthew and Luke for the New Testament, a Book of generations.
MORE still.
Matthew the Evangelist calls attention to the fact that in that stream of living beings, which we call an historic generation, there is not merely the monotonous succession of father and son, but also a certain grouping.
Abraham, David and Christ, the three names, whereby that grouping is indicated, while the Babylonian exile as an incision in the course of centuries indicates to us the humiliating fall of the once so far-famed generation.
So you receive the impression, as though all that lies back of Abraham, simply tended to have Abraham appear; as though everything that lies in between Abraham and David, has no other plan than to bring forth David; and as though everything that came before, in and after David, merely served as shadow, to make the light in the Christ of God to break through.
The Evangelist even took pleasure, to introduce some sort of rhythm therein. From Abraham to David there were fourteen generations. Therefore from Judah’s kings he only names fourteen. And equally fourteen descendants of Jechonias after the Babylonian exile.
The effort to take the sacred seven double, is here too perspicuous to need further explanation. Evidently the Evangelist wants to make us feel, how the stream of this sacred genealogical line flows onward with three broad wave-beats evenly from Abraham to Christ.
Everything tending to show how in this succession of generations it is not the individuals that follow one after the other, but God’s command and counsel that makes the history.
AND if you ask, in what light the Evangelist places this Book of generations before us, we answer: Truly not in the light of human greatness.
You see this in three particulars.
First in the mention of Tamar and of “her who had been Uriah’s wife.”
Not one great, mighty act of Abraham or Jacob, of David or Solomon is mentioned. Regarding everything that can exalt man, this Book of generations preserves absolute silence. But what is recorded, are two dreadful human sins. Altogether in harmony with the prophecy which presently follows, that Christ should come to save His people from their sins.
And not the little sin of a forgotten kind, but the terrible transgression of a Judah and the atrocious fall of King David are again immortalized by this Book of generations.
Even Bathsheba’s name is not mentioned, but her dangerous person is indicated as the seductive “that had been the wife of Uriah.”
Secondly you observe the human insignificance of this generation in the many, for the most part altogether unknown names, which are recorded here. What do you know of Esrom and Aram, what meaning has Azor and Achim for you? What promise of greatness regarding Christ is there in that series of men, that have come and gone, leaving little else behind them, than the memory of their gradually bastardized name?
For their names also, by the intermediary of the Greek translation, have gradually in pronunciation become almost irrecognizable. Hezekiah is called Ezekias, Perez (in Dutch version) has become Phares.
Even their name has no permanence.
To which is added in the third place, that all this once so celebrated and princely generation of Abraham and David, at length in the Babylonian exile goes under altogether, till in the days of Emperor Augustus you find Prince Joseph back again in forgotten Nazareth, with a leather apron over his knees and a wood-plane in his hand.
AND while this Book of generation so makes you see the sin and the sinking down into insignificance of the children of men, so that God’s counsel alone unites them into a generation and in their generation effects a history, this now is the glory, that into this generation the Holy Ghost descends from above, and so presents Christ to the world.
Herein alone this Book of generations finds its rest, that the virgin Mary was found with child of the Holy Ghost.
Of this patriarchical generation in the end nothing came. What was wrought in Abraham, was sinned away by Judah, and what seemed regained in David, was in David himself covered with the scum of sin.
So this generation does not climb, but sink.
Sinks ever deeper and ever more sadly.
And all that remains is the promise of God, which through all the stages of humiliation and self-disdain, keeps accompanying this chosen generation.
But when it comes to the point, the outcome shows, that there was nothing in this generation itself, by reason of which it was chosen, and that this election aimed solely and alone at what would be wrought by God Himself; not from below but from above; not from human efficiency but by the holy God.
Not this princely generation of David had borne a fruit of salvation for the world.
On the contrary, the stem of Jesse lay cut off. Only its root still hid in the earth. There was no branch and no leaf and no more blossom to it.
And yet a rod came up out of the barren earth.
God came to us. A virgin is become pregnant. And so the world received her “God with us,” her Immanuel, her Savior, Who would save her from death.
ALSO among men such family-records used to be made. One knows how far even a poet like Bilderdyk lost himself in this vanity.
We say in vanity.
For by itself of course it is good and praiseworthy that one honors his connection with the past, and attaches value to what lies in the interbraiding of the generations.
But the vanity of it is this, that such family-records are almost exclusively made, to show to what a noble family one belongs, with what great historical figures one is related, and to what remote antiquity one can trace the origin of his race.
This other people cannot do. Self can. And so these family-records tend to distinguish oneself, as belonging to a sort of higher race of beings.
And so it should not be.
In every generation one should have a family-tree in his Bible, and that family-record should be kept for God’s sake. For his sake, in Whose eye a day-laborer is of no less account than a prince of royal blood; and Whose providence-care is over the successive generations of poor and rich.
For the sake of the Covenant one should make record of his generation, and that Book of generations should preserve the memory, not chiefly of the high titles and quarters which human vanity had formed, but far more of what God’s grace and God’s favor had wrought, to enrich such a generation spiritually, and, as blessing in the external, from nothing to make it something.
As family-records now are, they for the most part stimulate human pride and are kept outside of God’s ordinance and the honor of His name.
So altogether different from this Book of the generations in Matthew’s first chapter, in which you see man in his sin and in his insignificance from generation to generation climb when there is fear of God, and deteriorate when the fear of God was lost, in order in the end to see the heavens rend, and from the throne of grace see the Salvation come down, for which this generation of Abraham and David has served in the counsel of God.
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