Matthew 1:18-25 – God’s Timely Gift

Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name.

There is a video on Youtube you may have seen titled “Basketball Awareness Test” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB_lTKZm1Ts). Two teams of four players — one dressed in white, one in black — pass a basketball between themselves. You are asked to track the number of passes made between the players on the white team. [Spoiler alert: the answer is 13.] After the passes are made you are asked if you noticed the moonwalking bear. The moonwalking bear? What? Yeah, there is a bear, rather a guy dressed up in a black bear costume, dancing across the screen and flailing his arms…and you probably never noticed it. Your mind is unwilling to notice anything other than the guys dressed in white passing the basketball and the bear’s costume is black. Okay, you’ve probably seen the video before, but the point is that while paying attention to one thing, we often miss other things.

When we read about the birth of Jesus in Matthew 1:18-25 our focus is usually on Mary and Joseph making a trip to Bethlehem. We might think about the manger, and we might think about how Joseph, after he found out that Mary was pregnant, wanted to divorce her but didn’t because God told him the baby came from the Holy Spirit. We might even think about the shame Mary and Joseph must have had to endure because of this — I mean, who is going to believe their child came from the Holy Spirit, not infidelity? We can get so focused on Joseph and Mary — the passes made by the team in white — that we neglect what else is going on.

This passage has eight sentences, but only one of them is focused solely on Joseph. It says, “And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.” It is important to notice that Joseph, even though divorcing was his right according to the law, decided to go about it quietly so as to not bring shame upon Mary. Joseph’s response is really quite noteworthy. Joseph was a good guy and there should be no debate about that. But what about the other seven sentences?

The other seven sentences describe God’s work. Mary was pregnant due to the work of the Holy Spirit; Joseph heard the details of the baby’s origin from the Lord’s angel; this same angel told Joseph that his son was going to save the people from their sins; God spoke through the prophet Isaiah, some 800 years prior, to herald the coming of this child in this particular way; the child was to be named Immanuel with means “God with us;” two sentences reference the son, Jesus Christ, the second person of the trinity; another sentence describes how Joseph listened to what the angel of the Lord told him.

Joseph and Mary certainly play a large part in this story, but the work of God, beginning in Isaiah’s day and culminating in the days of Mary and Joseph, is the big story to which we should pay attention.

The opening verses of Matthew (1:1-17) recorded the genealogy leading up to Jesus’s birth, but notably absent were any explicit comments regarding God’s direct involvement; we were left to infer God’s role in Jesus’s coming from Abraham and through David. But in these verses God’s role is explicitly described in the birth of Jesus; the curtain is pulled back and we see that there was nothing coincidental about this event.

Amos wrote, nearly 800 years before the birth of Jesus, “For the Lord God does nothing without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7). God doesn’t reveal warm fuzzies or slight impressions; God speaks very specifically. And when the Lord God spoke to Isaiah he said that a virgin would give birth to a son who is to be named “God with us” (Isa 7:14). Luke tells us that the angel Gabriel, sent by God, told Mary what was going to happen to her (Luke 1). Matthew records that God also sent an angel to reveal to Joseph the origin of the child as well as the fact that he was sent to save us from our sins. If this doesn’t tell you that the work of the Lord is beyond comprehension, I don’t know what will. No other god in the human imagination has the power to secure genealogies, prophecy the birth of a child some 800 years prior to the event, invade a man’s dreams with a specific message, and send a son to earth for the purpose of saving humanity from the debt we owe due to our sins.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name!

For those looking for a practical application from these verses, I urge patience. I’ve long thought that we have become all too pragmatic in our thinking. We want some sort of action point or application from the text to carry with us for the day. That’s the point of the Bible, isn’t it? To tell us how to live and help us make life decisions, both moral and amoral. Right?

Well, maybe not. We’ve been told for so long that we need an action point that we’ve forgotten that the Bible is, among other things, a revelation of God. Yes, it is the word that God has revealed to us, but it is also a revelation of God himself, of who he is; that’s the black bear to which we rarely pay attention as it dances across the pages of the Bible.

Sure, the Joseph and Mary stuff is good — and can preach well — but I’m not so sure this passage is primarily about Joseph and Mary. The black dancing bear stands in the middle of this section telling us that we serve a God whose name is great! It tells us that our Father in heaven is always in charge, that his name is above every name because he can do those things no one else can, and that there is no other God but our God.

And, this dancing bear should make us realize what is meant by the words, “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain” (Exodus 20:7). The name of our Father in heaven is hallowed because he alone is God; because He alone holds the sands of time firmly in his grasp; because He alone can, and will, announce and inaugurate events through time, even though his ways may seem contrary to nature and biology; and because he alone has the power to step into time and space in the form of a baby and bring to us the gift of salvation.

Actually, I suppose, after all, there is an action point to be made from this passage…

When you pray, pray then like this…

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

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