We've made it to Genesis chapter 5. My sermon title this morning is, The Family Tree. The Family Tree. You know, one of the things that people complain about when reading through the Bible is all of the genealogies, all the genealogical records. It'll say, so and so begat so and so, and so and so begat so and so. Well, we come to the first of those this morning. And of course, what makes a family tree the most interesting is when it's your family tree. And when you think about it, this is, first of all, our family tree, because this is the line of Noah, who is the father of us all. Shem, Ham, and Japheth all came, all the nations came from Noah. And so we have this new family line through the line of Seth. We read last week about the family line of Cain. But the family line of Cain, except for maybe by marriage, the family line of Cain died out in the flood. And so what we have here in Genesis chapter 5 is the family line of Noah and therefore our family tree. This is our family tree. And the family tree is very, very important because as we're going to see what it shows is that the keeping of these family records demonstrates that God keeps his promises. We have read in previous weeks about how God made a promise that the seed of the woman would crush the serpent's head. Did God keep his promise? God will make more promises. He makes promises to Noah, to Abraham, to Jacob, to David to Solomon. He makes these promises and as he does make these promises, he narrows down the promise narrower and narrower until we get to Christ. The Messiah, the anointed one that will crush the serpent's head, will be of the family of Seth, of the family of Noah, of the family of Shem, of the family of Abraham, of the family of Isaac, of the family of Jacob, of the house of Judah, of the house of David. He'll be born in Bethlehem. He'll be born in a particular place. He'll be born under certain circumstances. And all of these prophecies are God fulfilling His promises. And He's saying, see, I keep my promise. And that's very important. Because our right relationship with God depends on us believing that He is a covenant-keeping God. Our right standing with God on the Day of Judgment won't depend upon how faithfully we attended church or how honest a person we were, or how hard-working we were, or how generous we are. But ultimately, our eternal destiny depends on whether or not We trust God's promise. Whether we will not, as we talked about last week, when men began to call upon the name of the Lord, and we apply that in the new covenant, those that call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. When we call upon the name of the Lord on his terms and his conditions, and we confess that Jesus Christ is our Lord, and we trust that what he did on the cross is applied to our account, it's on the basis of that that God says, I esteem this person righteous. Our right standing with God depends upon God keeping his promises. And so the genealogies are a way of saying, here's the record of me keeping my promise. I said very particularly, the seed of the woman will crush the serpent's head. And lo and behold, the virgin born Jesus fulfilled that promise. He said, particularly of the house of Noah, the house of David, house of Abraham, et cetera. And God keeps his promises. So when God makes a promise to you, an actual promise, not just a principle or a precept, but an actual promise to you and you trust in it, you adhere to it, you rely on it, then you are accepted. And Jesus Christ and his genealogy, as we shall see, becomes your genealogy. Because his father becomes your father. Let's all stand this morning for the reading of God's word in Genesis chapter 5. This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female, he created them. And he blessed them and named them man when they were created. When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered his son in his own likeness after his image and named him Seth. The days of Adam after he fathered Seth were 800 years, and he had other sons and daughters. Thus, all the days of Adam lived were 930 years, and he died. When Seth had lived 105 years, he fathered Enosh. Seth lived after he fathered Enosh, 807 years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus, all the days of Seth were 912 years, and he died. When Enosh had lived 90 years, he fathered Kenan. And Enosh lived after he fathered Kenan, 815 years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus, all the days of Enosh were 905 years, and he died. When Kenan had lived 70 years, he fathered Mahalalel. Kenan lived after he fathered Mahalalel, 840 years, and he had other sons and daughters. Thus, all the days of Kenan were 910 years, and he died. When Mahalalel had lived 65 years, he fathered Jared. And Mahalalel lived after he fathered Jared, 830 years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus, all the days of Mahalalel were 895 years, and he died. When Jared had lived 162 years, he fathered Enoch. Jared lived after he fathered Enoch 800 years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Jared were 962 years, and he died. When Enoch had lived 65 years, he fathered Methuselah. And Enoch walked with God after he fathered Methuselah 300 years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were 365 years. Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. When Methuselah had lived 187 years, he fathered Lamech. Methuselah lived after he fathered Lamech 782 years and had other sons and daughters. Thus, all the days of Methuselah were 969 years and he died. When Lamech had lived 182 years, he fathered a son and called his name Noah, saying, Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands. Lamech lived after he fathered Noah 595 years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Lamech were 777 years, and he died. After Noah was 500 years old, Noah fathered Shem, Ham, and Japheth." You may be seated. Well, I am not going to go by verse by verse with this this morning. I'm not going to go into all the depth. I'll follow up another sermon from this text probably next week. And I just want a high view of what's going on here, a high view of genealogies and why genealogies are important. Our genealogy this morning, it ends with Noah having three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And when he was 500 years old, it makes me wonder if the three of them were triplets, because it doesn't say he fathered them and then time passed. I don't know for sure that that's true. Maybe that's just the way it's written, but perhaps they were triplets born at the same time. I don't know. But he has three sons, and his name is Noah, Nuach in Hebrew, which means rest. It's taken from the word rest. And in this verse, when Lamech names him Noah, he says in verse 29, Now that alludes back to Genesis chapter three, the curse, the cursing of the ground. And I think also it's alluding back to the promise that there's gonna be a deliverer, there's gonna be a Messiah. And so through Noah, God gives a certainty to Lamech that through Noah is going to come the promise of rest. One of the things we read about Jesus in Hebrews chapter three is that we have rest in Christ. Those that have trusted in Christ have rest rest from their own toil. Because if I'm always trying to evaluate how good I am and I'm looking at God's law, like I look into a mirror, you look in a mirror, James 1 speaks of this, you look into a mirror to see what you look like in the morning. And so the law is like a mirror, you look at it and it shows you your sin. You look at God's righteous, holy standards, and what it should do is humble us. It should not make us, if you look at other people, you may be puffed up because you say, well, I'm better than that guy. I'm not as bad as that person. I'm certainly better than this person. It's one of the things that drives me crazy when I go to a funeral. And the pastor gets up and talks about how wonderful the person is. That's what a eulogy is. A eulogy means a good word. So we say good words about the person that has passed. And then people hear the pastor or the preacher sometimes say, this person is in heaven. And people are left with the impression that you get to heaven by being a good person. And that person may be a good person in human terms. But compared to the holiness and righteousness of God, none of us are good. None of us. And so it drives me crazy when I go to a funeral and I hear a cowardly preacher get up and want to say something good about the dead, and they talk about how wonderful they are. Sometimes they're lying. We all know they're lying because we know the person. And sometimes they're not. And then they're talking about how good they are, and they neglect to tell us why is this person dead? You notice this genealogy is full of death. He lived so long, he had children, he died. He lived so long, he had children, he died. He lived so long, he had children, he died. It's full of death. Why do we die? We die because of sin. We die because our first father, Adam, sinned and death came into the world by sin. We continue the sin and rebellion when we all sin and we will all die. We will all stand before the judgment seat of Christ. We will give an account for what we've done in our bodies here on earth. We're all gonna die. If a pastor gets up in the future, funeral and doesn't say the reason the person is dead is because he's a sinner and if he's in heaven which we don't know because we're not God if he's in heaven it's by the grace of God that pastor has preached a false gospel by omission Because the impression is left, if you're a good person, you go to heaven, and if you're not a good person, you go to hell. And the fact of the matter is, good people, there's one of them, he died for our sins, and the way we get to heaven is by trusting in him, surrendering to him, confessing our faith in him. That is the only way of salvation. We don't get to heaven by being a good person, because nobody's good. The law leaves us stripped of our self-righteousness. So at my funeral, if any of you get to preach it, please tell the people if he's in heaven, it's because of the grace of God. It's because he trusted in Christ. It's not by our works so that we could boast. It's by grace and grace is a gift. You cannot be saved by works. So what we have here in this genealogy, we don't, most of us don't keep genealogies anymore. There was a time where we kept family cemeteries. And so you could go and you could go to one tombstone. He was born and he died, another tombstone. He was born and he died, another tombstone. She was born and she died. And maybe they mention children. Maybe they mention their faith in Christ. Maybe they don't. We don't much look at genealogies, but the Bible's filled with them because God made a promise that through the seed of the woman, the seed of the woman would crush the serpent's head and he's going to keep his promise. And so Noah is named rest because Noah would live through the flood and through Noah would become the Messiah who would give us rest to our souls. Harkening back to Genesis 3, we read of the curse. Lamech mentions the curse, so here it was back, rewind a few weeks, months, whatever. The Lord said to the serpent, because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field. On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed, her offspring. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel. To the woman He said, I will surely multiply your pain and childbearing, and pain you shall bring forth children, your desires shall be contrary to your husband, but He shall rule over you. And to Adam He said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground because of you, and pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground. For out of it you were taken, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return." The man called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living. So this curse is pronounced. The ground is cursed, which Lamech refers back to. And this phraseology that the seed of the woman will crush the serpent's head. The offspring of the woman will crush the serpent's head. So a promise is made. And then what happens at the beginning of chapter 4? Eve, has a son with the help of the Lord. She has a son and she names him Acquired. The word in Hebrew, Cain, means acquired. I've gotten a man from the Lord. And you can imagine the optimism as we talked in previous works. Finally, the seed of the woman's here. Perhaps, perhaps she said this. I tend to think she did. She's like, I've gotten a man from the Lord. He said that the sea woman will crush serpent's head. If I were her, I'd be thinking, this is it. This is the one, finally. Whew, it's been maybe years, decades, who knows how long. I've gotten a man from the Lord. He's gonna crush the serpent's head. The promise is gonna be fulfilled. She didn't perhaps understand that no, not your firstborn, but down the line, well, We read the account. Cain, the elder, kills Abel, the younger, and thereby eliminates, it appears, both of them from candidates to be the deliverer, because they're even worse. Instead of Cain bringing relief from the curse, his curse is multiplied. Now the earth will be even more hostile to Cain, as it is to sinful men and nations when they reject the Lord. God makes the heavens as brass, and the earth as iron, and he holds up rain, and he sends forest fires, and he brings judgments upon the earth because of sin. Well, Cain just makes it worse. He's not a deliverer. He's more like the seed of the serpent than he is the seed of the woman. He ends up having a diabolical line, and we read the genealogy of Cain. The rest of that chapter, we talked about it last week. We talked about how humanistic and man-centered he was. He named cities after his own son. And his sons have, some of them have some pretty despairing names. His sons do wicked, self-willed things. His descendants, like Lamech, who takes two wives and kills a man just for insulting or wounding him. So far from getting better, it gets worse. And so at the end of the chapter, we read that Eve has another son. His name is Seth. And Seth implies a substitute. I've appointed, an appointed substitute for Abel. Because Abel was righteous, but he was martyred. And so Seth is named, appointed as a substitute for the one that was martyred. And we have a new family line. Now here, when we read in Genesis 5, let's take some note back in Genesis chapter 5. It says, this is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God, male and female, he created them and blessed them and named them man when they were created. When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered his son in his own likeness after his image and named him Seth. The days of Adam after he fathered Seth were 800 years and he had other sons and daughters. Thus, all the days that Adam lived were 930 years and he died. He had other sons and daughters. He had more than Cain, he had more than Abel, he had more than Seth, he had other sons and daughters. Why don't we have their genealogies? We have Cain's genealogy and we have Seth's genealogy. Well there's a contrast here. We've got this lawless This lawless group that comes from Cain, and it's interesting, some of his, probably talk about it more next week, some of his, the names in Cain's line match up with the names in Seth's line. So they're not the same people, they're very clearly different people, born in different birth orders to different fathers, but they have similar names. And so there's some comparison and contrasting going on here. You've got this one who's kind of like the seed of the serpent. He's gone the way, even the New Testament speaks of going the way of Cain in the book of Jude as a rebellious, self-willed, life. They've gone in the way of Cain. They've sought after Gain. They've perished in the rebellion of Korah. That kind of thing. It says in Jude, going in the way of Cain is a self-willed, rebellious way to live your life. And on the other hand, you have Seth. And the reason Seth's genealogy is relevant is because Seth is the line of Noah, the line of Shem, the line of Abraham, the line of Jacob, David, et cetera. It's the line of the Messiah. The reason this genealogy is important is because it is the genealogy of Jesus, the Messiah. As you can read about, the Messiah is going to come from this line. And so the first part, this verse one says, this is the book of the generations of Adam. He says this is the book of the generations of Adam. This is the book of the toledoth, the family record, the genealogy of Adam. This phrase appears multiple times. It's already appeared in chapter two when it talks about the generations of the heavens and the earth, the bringing forth, like literally the bringing forth of the heavens and the earth, the generation, the toledoth of the heavens and earth. account we have because God, I believe, is talking with Moses. on Mount Sinai, and he's saying, Moses, this is what happened. He was an eyewitness. He had face-to-face conversations with Moses, and Moses wrote it in the book. It's believed by many scholars, which I think I agree, that when it says, this is the book of generations of Adam, that this is the family record that likely Noah kept. It goes all the way from Adam to Noah. So Noah kept a book, a genealogy book of history. I need to write down what history I know I have, and I'm more interested in my spiritual history than my natural history. Natural history is interesting. It's fascinating to find out who your ancestors were, but I would like to write down for my descendants. On my mother's side, my great-grandfather fought in World War I, was gassed in the Argonne Forest over in France, And asked God to spare his life. He was found. He lived. He said to God, I'll save you. I mean, I'll serve you. Came back to the United States. Got saved in a cornfield. And really gave his heart to the Lord. Became an itinerary country preacher. Didn't know a lot, but prayed a lot. and was known for seeing quite a few miracles. And I know this because my mother and my grandmother told me. It's a family history. And I could go on for quite a while, maybe not to your interest, but I could go on for a while about how my grandmother came to faith in Christ, and my mother came to faith in Christ, and then how I came to faith in Christ. And on my dad's side, I can also tell you a little bit about his life and how in the 1970s or so, actually I'm not sure about the year, some of these things I wish I would have written down, right? I'll get through this really quick, I know it's boring you. And I wish I wrote it down because I want to pass that heritage on to my children. Not so much our genealogy, but I want my children to know that their great-great-grandfather back in 1917 cried out to God and God heard his prayer and he got saved. And because of his prayers, you're growing up in a Christian family today. I wanna pass that heritage on. It means something to me. Probably means nothing to you. It's like, hurry up and get back to the Bible already. But to me, it's precious. And to the people that read this, it was precious. It meant something. This is our family genealogy. This is our Toledoth. And this is where we came from. Now you might be the first in your family line. And so it's time to start your book of generations of how we came to faith in Christ. And be sure to include in that all the wicked details of your life before. Your descendants will love it, right? And so they did. We have the record of Abraham and his lies, and Jacob and his deception, and Noah getting drunk and laying around naked. We have all of these things because we have the books of the generations of Adam, of Noah, of Shem, and they kept the family record. And they put at times very embarrassing details. This is how we know it's the word of God and we know it's history, is there's all kinds of embarrassing details in it. Like I heard a Jewish rabbi on the radio say one time, if the Bible wasn't written by God, it was written by an anti-Semite. Because it's full of embarrassing details of the family, about all their sins, and how they're a stiff-necked people, and how they rebel, and they fall away, and God says, I wanna destroy these people, and then through Moses, he intercedes, and he says, okay, I'll save them, but they're stiff-necked people. Lots of name-calling in the Bible, lots of anti-Semitic remarks, if you will, giving the truth about the human family, And so this book is the book of the generations of Adam as recorded by Noah. And then we'll pick up later on and it'll be, this is the book of the generations of Shem and et cetera. And when we get to chapter 10, there's whole lists of where the nations went and a lot of very interesting things to be said about that. But this is extremely important because it shows the promise kept. Now, how important are the genealogies? Well, in the book of Nehemiah, as I didn't go into all the detail, I've shown you Abraham's genealogy, et cetera, but in the book of Nehemiah, this is after the children of Israel, because of the disobedience, they're sent into Babylon, and they come back into the promised land, and it's time to return to their inheritance. They've been exiled from the land, they're coming back to the land, and they're coming back to their inheritance, and the priests, some of the priests have come back, And only priests of the line of Aaron were allowed to serve as priests. So we read about this in Nehemiah 7, 61. It says, The following were those who came up from Tel-Malah, Tel-Harshah, Cherub, Adon, and Emer, but they could not prove their father's houses nor their descent, whether they belonged to Israel. The sons of Deliah, the sons of Tobiah, the sons of Nakoda, also the priests, the sons of Hobiah, the son of Hakaz, the sons of Barzillai, who had taken a wife of the daughters of Barzillai, the Gileadite, and was called by their name. These sought their registration among those enrolled in the genealogies, but it was not found there, so they were excluded from the priesthood as unclean." Let me just sum up this for you. They come back from the land of Babylon, they're like, hey, we're priests, we're of this family of Barzillai, and like, eh, it looks like you married into the family. You're not actually a descendant, or you can't prove that you're a descendant of Aaron. What was the consequence? They could not prove their genealogical record, and because they could not prove it with a piece of paper, they were excluded from the priesthood. They were not allowed to be priests. That's very, very significant. If they didn't have a genealogical record that said, I'm the son of so-and-so who's the son of so-and-so who's the son of Aaron, they could not be priests. They were deemed unclean for the priesthood. It excluded them from the priests. Now today, there's a lot of Jews that have names like Levi. Obvious allusion to being a Levite. That doesn't mean they're of the house of Aaron, but they're a descendant of Levi. There's Jews, maybe a Meta Jew with the name Kohen. Kohen is the Hebrew word for priest. It implies that they claim to be the descendants of the priest like these people did. I'm curious, anybody know of any Jews that have a genealogical record that goes all the way back to Aaron that can prove it? Genealogies are very important. The Bible has a lot of them in there, a lot of genealogies. A lot of people say, I'm Jewish, but here's the problem. Throughout history, there have been people that said, I don't want to be a Christian, I want to be a Jew. So they got circumcised, they became a Jew, they married a Jewish woman, and then they identified as Jews. They might be of Judah, they might be of Levi, but if they married a Levi, they may say, yeah, that's my family. Like these guys, these guys, they had taken a wife of the daughters of Barzillai, the Gileadite, but we don't know for sure. They can't confirm that they're actually a priest, so they're excluded from the priesthood. So those of you who are expecting a rebuilt temple, which I don't believe the New Testament ever says there's gonna be a rebuilt temple, but if you believe that, they gotta prove their genealogy going all the way back, because otherwise they would be excluded from the priesthood. Well, what does this do? This keeps impostors from becoming priests. This is a really big deal in the Old Testament. Not just here, I could go to other passages. I could go to the passage that talks about how Jeroboam, when Jeroboam became king, he had a new capital up in Samaria, he took 10 tribes, they had a civil war in Israel, and 10 tribes went up north, and then he had some Benjamites and Judah and Levites were down in the south, and so there was a split in the nation, and Jeroboam sets up a capital, and it says he set up two golden calves and said, this is Yahweh, he brought you out of the land of Egypt, we'll worship the golden calf again. And then he took the basis of the people and made them priests. In other words, he took people that didn't have a genealogy that could be traced back to Aaron and made them priests. This is a really big deal, this is very important. Those of you that come on Wednesday night, we've been going through the book of Numbers. So on last Wednesday, we're reading in the passage where they're saying, hey, you're no better than the rest of us, we're all holy to the Lord, we're all priests, we're all priest, egalite, fraternite, liberte, we're all priests. We're priests too. And God tells Moses, everybody take their staff, their tribal staff, and write your name on it and bring it before the tabernacle of the Lord and leave it overnight. So the heads, the chief of each of the 12 tribes, they take out their staff, their walking stick, and they write the name of their tribe on the stick and then they put it before They put it before the Ark of the Covenant overnight, and the next morning they come back, and when they come back the next morning, one of the staffs, this old dead stick, has blossomed and has ripe, not green, but ripe almonds growing on it. Obviously a miracle, an old dead stick resurrecting, new life coming out of death, that's the confirmation of a priesthood. Only Aaron's staff blossomed and brought forth almonds. And so they could say, this is Levi, this is the tribe of Levi, the house of Aaron, this is the priesthood. None of the rest of you are priests, only the priesthood of Aaron. Now God did promise that another priesthood would arise, called after the order of Melchizedek, which we're talking about on Wednesday nights. This is a plug. Come on Wednesday night. We can talk about it. But I'm not going to talk about it here. But Jesus is a priesthood also by a death, burial, and resurrection, not a dead stick bringing forth life, but dying on a tree. and bringing forth life by resurrection of the dead. But it was a picture of his endless life as a picture of his priesthood. But the point is, is that only a particular family were the family of the priest. Everybody else was disqualified. So when we read genealogical records, what it does, it establishes that a person is the fulfillment of that promise for that household. If you don't have a genealogy, you can't prove it, you're excluded in the Old Testament. And this was also a way of weeding out false messiahs. So for example, at the time of Christ, it was the time, the exact time that Daniel said the messiah would show up. Daniel gave a timeline, I'm not gonna go into that in the book of Daniel, and he gave a timeline when messiah would show up, and guess what? It's when Jesus showed up. But at the same time that he was born, there's a guy who's a king in Jerusalem. So it's the right time, but it's the wrong king. Why? Because Herod is an Idumean, which is an Edomite. He is not an Israelite. He is at best half Jewish. He's actually an Edomite. He's from the wrong family. And so what Herod does is Herod, knowing he did not fulfill the genealogical records, he had the depository of the genealogical records in the temple destroyed because he knew he couldn't fulfill it. You can read about it in Josephus if you wanna do the research. Herod destroyed the genealogical records because even though he was a king, even though man ordained him, even though Rome ordained him, he didn't have the qualifications. He wasn't of the tribe of Judah. He couldn't possibly be the Messiah because he did not have a line going all the way back to the house of David, to the house of Abraham, to the house of Shem, Noah, Seth, et cetera. And that's why the gospel of Matthew that emphasizes a lot Herod and how Herod wanted to kill Christ because he's born in the right place, Bethlehem, Micah 5.3. He who's going forth is from everlasting, will be born in Bethlehem. Jesus, the eternal God, took on flesh in Bethlehem, Micah 5.3. And they say, yep, he's gonna be born in Bethlehem. And what does Herod want to do? He wants to kill the child, just like Pharaoh wanted to kill the children of Egypt. Herod wants to kill the seed of the woman who's come to crush the serpent's head. And there's this, this genealogy is very important. So Matthew chapter one demonstrates that Jesus has a genealogy that can trace him all the way back to David and to Abraham, thereby fulfilling the promises that are about to come up in Genesis, Genesis 12, Genesis 15, et cetera, that he fulfilled the prophecy. Jesus has the genealogy that proves the descent, that he fits the criteria to be the Messiah. Now, in Luke 3, we also have his genealogy. I'm not going to read it all because it's very long, but I'm going to read some key verses because of their wording. In Luke 3, verse 23, it says, Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about 30 years of age. By the way, that was the age that a person could become a priest. It's significant. Every detail is significant. Being the son, as was supposed, of Joseph. The son of Heli, the son of Methath, the son of Levi, the son of Melchi, the son of Jani, the son of Joseph. Now I'm skipping a whole lot of verses here, on down to verse 36. The son of Canaan, the son of Arphaxad, the son of Shem, the son of Noah, the son of Lamech, the son of Methuselah, the son of Enoch, the son of Jared, the son of Mahalalel, the son of Canaan, the son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God. You see what he did there? The son of God. What we read back here in Genesis chapter five is that Jesus, that Adam was made by God and was a son of God by virtue of creation, but Jesus is the eternally begotten son of God. He is the word made flesh because the Holy Spirit hovered over Mary And what was conceived in her was born of the Holy Ghost. So that for the first time in history, the virgin conceives. and gives birth to the Son of God. He was the eternal Son of God before He took on humanity. Now He is begotten of a woman, thereby fulfilling the promise that the seed of the woman, not the seed of the man, the seed of the woman would crush the serpent's head. Born in the right place, to the right family, at the right time, to the right family, At the perfect time, Jesus came into the world. His name is Jesus, Yeshua, which means salvation. Why? Because He shall save His people from their sins. And that's God saying, promise kept, sign sealed delivered, Jesus is the Son of God. In a greater way than Adam was the Son of God. Not merely by creation, for He's uncreated. He was never created. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. He wasn't created, but he has an eternal relationship with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, has now taken on true humanity without ceasing to be God. He took on humanity and he is the Son of God and the Son of Man because he's now, God has entered into humanity to be the last Adam, to be the new Adam. Now I thought about naming the sermon family trees and stand a family tree because you know I like wordplay but got a lot of trees that we've covered here. We have the tree of life in Genesis of which if they ate of it they would have eternal life. We have the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. which if they ate of it, they would die, which they did. And we read about their death one after another, and he died, and he died, and he died. And then we have the tree of obedience, the tree on which Christ died. And in between these trees, we have the family tree, the lineage from Adam to Jesus that demonstrates that God is a covenant-keeping God, that God keeps his promises. Now, this family, this sons of God, sons of man, the sons of the godly, the seed of the woman, the seed of the serpent, Jesus makes it clear that not everybody spiritually are sons of God. In fact, in John 8, 44, talking to a group of Jews, talking to Jews, talking to Israelites, who didn't believe the gospel, who didn't believe that Jesus was the Messiah, instead of saying, you're the sons of Abraham, which they insisted that they were, we are Abraham's children. He says, if you were Abraham's children, you'd do the works of Abraham. You'd believe like Abraham did. You'd obey like Abraham did, but you want to kill me. In John 8, 44, he says, you are of your father, the devil, and the lust of the father you will do. He was a liar from the beginning and a murderer and the father of it. What's he doing? He's saying, you're the seed of the serpent. You're not the seed of God. You're not born of God. You're rebellious and unbelieving and self-willed. You're like Cain. You're not like Seth or Noah. You're like Cain. You're of your father, the devil, not everybody. Not everybody has God as their father. By virtue of creation, you can argue a common brotherhood of man, but the relevant brotherhood is the brotherhood of faith, whereby we are united to Christ. We are in union with Christ by faith, so that what Christ has done is laid on our account. Now, I need to develop this some more, but it's interesting to me that Jesus, and I'm quoting it, I'm not showing you this morning, Jesus told Jews, They had a genealogy that was better than anybody in here. They probably still had their genealogy. They could tell you, I'm a Jew and I can trace my genealogy going back to Abraham, one of the patriarchs. And yet Jesus said, but you don't believe. You're still a murderer in your heart. And therefore you're of your father the devil. You're not a true Israelite indeed. Paul demonstrates this in Romans. I'm going to finish up here in Romans, a few verses in Romans, to follow a line of reasoning that Paul uses. Now it's important to mention that Paul himself was an Israelite according to the flesh. And he'll use that kind of phraseology, according to the flesh, a lot. Because there is according to the flesh, a person in his days did have a genealogy. There was also according to the spirit. So some people were Jews according to the flesh, but not according to the Spirit. And Paul uses this kind of reasoning quite a bit. So in Romans 2, 28, he says, For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man, but from of God. Now he's going to develop this in Romans when you read the book of Romans. He develops this thought because a lot of people are thinking, of course I'm right with God because I have a genealogy that traces me back to Abraham. And this was a common belief of Jews in the first century, Israelites in the first century. Paul himself was of the tribe of Benjamin, and he says so. I was a Benjamite, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, according to flesh. And so a lot of people were saying, of course I'm going with God, I'm Jewish. It's salvation by race. And Paul is one to say, you're not saved by race, you're saved by grace. Race can't save you. So what does John the Baptist say to the Jews coming to his baptism? Do not say we have Abraham for our father. God is able to raise up stones to be children of Abraham. So don't be arrogant against God, but repent and believe the gospel. And here he says he's not a Jew that has went outwardly. Physical circumcision is not what matters, it's he is a Jew that has went inwardly. You need a heart change to be a son and a daughter of God. This is what Jesus tells Nicodemus. Nicodemus comes to him by night, probably by night, because he didn't want to be seen with him in the day, because he was on the Sanhedrin, he was a politician, and he had a campaign to run. And so he comes by night and says, hey, Jesus, we know you're a teacher come from God. Nobody could do these miracles that you do unless God be with them. So I'm on your side, not wink. I'll work for you from the inside, right? And Jesus doesn't return flattery, Nicodemus. Except a man be born again, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. You need a spiritual change. Your genealogy is not enough. Your being raised in a Jewish household is not enough. The fact that you were circumcised the eighth day, not enough. The fact that you're on the Sanhedrin, not enough. The fact that you have the Torah memorized, not enough. You must be born again. That's which born of the flesh and has a genealogy is flesh. That's which born of the spirit is spirit. You must be born again. How can a man be born again when he's old? I don't understand what you're saying. Nicodemus, that which is born of the flesh is flesh, that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. The good news is, as God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Believe that, Nicodemus. Trust in the promise of God, because I didn't come To condemn the world. The world was condemned already. I came that you might have life, that you might have it more abundantly. Believe. Trust. Trust the promise of God. The promise keeping God. The God that gave us the genealogies to show us that He keeps His promises. Trust Him. Believe Him. Repent. Submit to Him. Be a Jew inwardly. And not merely of the flesh. Now Paul continues in Romans. And he develops this thought in Romans 9. some more about who is an Israelite, who is a Jew. Verse 6 says, but it is not as though the word of God has failed, for not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham, because they are the offspring, or seed, that's that word in Hebrew, it would be Zerah. But through Isaac shall your seed be named. This means that it is not the children of the flesh or the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. Those that trust in Jesus Christ, who trust in the promise of the Messiah, are going to be grafted in. But the people that had the right genealogy but they didn't trust, they're not drafted in. Now, Messiah had to have the right genealogy because God made a particular promise to a particular family. The Messiah's gonna come from you, Abraham. It's gonna come from you, Isaac. It's gonna come from you, Jacob. It's gonna come from you, David. So he needed to be of the right genealogy. You and I don't have to have the right physical genealogy. You can be from any nation under the sun, Jew or Gentile. And you can be grafted in by promise. You say, well, where is that taught? All right, chapter 11, going on down here to Romans chapter 11. Oh, boy. Sam, help me out here. It's not working. Oh, it is? That's weird. So here's what Paul says, developing his thought. Now, I'm speaking to you Gentiles. In other words, you goy out there that aren't Jews. Paul is a Jew. He's talking to us goy. And as much as then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I magnify my ministry in order to somehow to make my fellow Jews jealous, and thus save some of them. For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what shall their acceptance mean but life from the dead? If the dough offered as first fruits is holy, so the whole lump, and if the root is holy, so are the branches. Okay, so Paul says, you know what? My calling is particularly to the Gentiles. Even though I'm a Hebrew scholar and I trained under Gamaliel and all this stuff, my ministry is to the Gentile nations. That's my job, he says. And I magnify my office. I'm happy with what God's calling me to because I love Gentile people and I want to see them believe. But I'm also concerned for my fellow Jews according to the flesh. And I'm hoping as they see God move in among you Gentiles, I'm hoping some of them will get jealous. Oh, wow, Lord, we've strayed. We see all these Gentiles being blessed and we didn't believe in Jesus. We want to believe in Jesus too. That's what Paul is saying here. He's saying, I love my Jewish people. I love them. I want them to be saved. He continues, he says, but now he's going to go into a tree analogy, which is very helpful for our sermon because we're talking about trees. But if some of the branches were broken off in you, although a wild olive shoot, were grafted in among the others and now sharing the nourished root of the olive tree, do not be arrogant toward the branches. What's he doing here? Okay, he's saying, got this good olive tree, olive producing olive tree. And now we take this wild olive tree and the branches are being grafted into a good olive tree. Now this doesn't work. I've been told this doesn't work horticulturally. You can't take a wild branch and graft it in to a good tree and it produced good olives. But for the sake of illustration, by supernatural work, God can do that. And that's appropriate. God can take the Gentile nations to whom the promises weren't made and can take them and graft them in to Abraham and his family tree. He can graft them in. How? By covenant identification with Christ on our behalf. When we trust in Christ, we are grafted in to the family of Christ. His genealogy becomes our genealogy. We are grafted in like a branch being grafted into another tree from which it didn't come. We are grafted in. And he says, if you remember, it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you. So Israel supports you. We've been added onto Israel. We didn't replace Israel. We were crafted into Israel. God still loves Jewish people. God loves all nations. God didn't have a problem with the Palestinians either. He saves them all the time. God can save any nation. There's no nation beyond the scope of his saving grace. And so he says, verse 19, then you will say, branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in. Kind of like a holy statement. It's like, yeah, they were broken in so we could be the new part of the new part of Israel. He said, verse 20, that is true. They were broken off because of their unbelief. They didn't believe in God's promises, but you stand fast through faith. So do not become proud, but fear, for if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you. What's he saying? He's saying, you know what? You've been grafted into the family tree of Christ. But don't fall into the same mistake. I'll make it applicable here. Children growing up in Christian households don't say, well, of course, of course I'm a Christian. My parents are Christian. That's boasting against the branches. No, you too have to believe. You too have to trust. You have to put your faith in Christ. It doesn't matter what your daddy is unless your daddy's God. Verse 22. Now then the kindness and the severity of God, severity towards those who have fallen, but God's kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness. Otherwise, you too will be cut off. And even they, if they do not continue in their unbelief, will be grafted in. For God has the power to graft them in again. For if you were cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree and grafted contrary to nature, in other words, this doesn't really work. into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these, the natural branches, be grafted back into their own olive tree? What he's saying is he's saying if you Gentiles can be saved by grace through faith, how much more can a Jew who naturally has the law and the prophets and the family genealogy going back to Abraham, how much more can they be saved? It's like life from the dead. Now if I was to read on in this chapter, I believe it does prophesy a great in-gathering of Jews in the future. Right now, there's a lot of people coming to faith in Christ. There's a series of YouTube videos. I don't know what all their theology is. I'm not endorsing everything, but you can hear testimonies on One for Israel. You can hear testimonies of Jews that are coming to faith in Christ over in Israel. People that grew up, some of them in Torah observant households, some of them in secular Jewish households, but they come to faith in Christ and they believe in Christ. Sometimes I'll be watching those videos and I'll have tears come to my face. Just the joy. But how are they grafted back in? By faith. Faith in what? The promise of God. What does genealogy teach us? God keeps his promises. God is reliable. You can trust him. When he tells you that if you will call upon the name of the Lord in faith in Jesus Christ, if you will confess him as your Lord and believe in your heart that God's raised him from the dead, that you shall be saved, God keeps his promises and this promise is for you. Let's pray this morning. God, we do thank you, oh Lord God, We thank you that you are a covenant-keeping God. We thank you, Lord, that when you say something, you bring it to pass. Nothing can thwart the plan of God. You are sovereign over us. Praise you, Lord God. Praise you, Lord Jesus. Father, I pray for the person that may have a great deal of grief over their past and their history and their sins. And perhaps they think that's an obstacle, but Lord, that is That is itself a sin to not believe in your promise that you are gracious. I pray Lord that you would give hearts of faith this morning that would cling to the promises of God, that would trust in the work of Christ, that they would trust in what you've done on our behalf. They would not go in the way of Cain. They would not perish. and the rebellion of Korah. But God, they would trust in you. They would submit to you and believe on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you, Father, for saving and working in families. I pray, Lord, that these families here, that these children would grow up in the discipline and the admonition of the Lord. that you would give the parents in here the wisdom to speak your word, to speak your law, and to speak the gospel to these children, that these children would not be lost. They would not turn to the right hand or to the left, but they would save to the believing of their souls, and that God, you would add to our church. God, I thank you for the children that you're adding here. I thank you for the babies that are on the way. I thank you, Lord, for the children that are here, that are to come. Lord, we pray for them, Father, that you would spare them and that you would make their families a godly line of faith, one generation after another, that they would cling to the promises of God and these children would be saved and they're children's children. God, give us the grace to train them up and to keep them, Lord. Father, I pray also, I know there are parents here with hearts of sorrow because they have children that are are in rebellion and they're not walking with you. Lord, there's nothing outside of your control. We just pray right now that, God, you would send forth your word, that you would take the heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh, that you would save them by your grace, draw them to yourself, make them a new creature in Christ Jesus. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Well,