July 26| The Scandal in Jesus' Family Tree: How Four Broken Women Changed Everything About Grace
When God wrote His Son's birth announcement, He included the very people religion tried to exclude. This changes everything about who belongs in God's family.
The Genealogy That Shocked the World
Four women. Four scandals. One bloodline that shattered every religious expectation.
When you crack open the Gospel of Matthew, you might expect to find a pristine list of holy men leading to the Messiah. Instead, you discover something that would have made first-century religious leaders drop their scrolls in horror. The scandal in Jesus' family tree wasn't hidden or explained away—it was highlighted, celebrated, and used as God's opening statement about grace.
In ancient Middle Eastern culture, women weren't mentioned in genealogies. Ever. The fact that Matthew included any women at all was revolutionary. But the women he chose? Their stories would make modern church committees nervous. These weren't the matriarchs you'd expect—no Sarah, no Rebekah, no Rachel. Instead, Matthew deliberately selected four women whose lives were marked by scandal, rejection, and what religious people would call "disqualification."
This wasn't an accident. This was God's manifesto.
The Women Who Broke Every Rule
Tamar: When Desperation Meets Determination
The first woman to appear in Christ's lineage carries a story so scandalous that most Sunday schools skip right over it. Tamar was a widow—twice over. According to ancient law, when her first husband died, she should have been given to his brother. This wasn't just tradition; it was her only hope for survival and honor in a culture where unmarried women had no rights.
But Judah, her father-in-law, kept making promises he wouldn't keep. First one son, then another, then endless delays. Tamar watched her life slip away, her chance for children vanishing, her place in society evaporating. So she did the unthinkable.
Dressing as a temple prostitute, she positioned herself where Judah would find her. The man who had denied her justice became the father of her twins. When he tried to have her burned for adultery, she produced his personal items—proof that the righteous patriarch was the father.
The scandal in Jesus' family tree begins with a woman who used deception to expose hypocrisy, who played the role of a prostitute to claim the justice she was denied. And God said, "She belongs in My Son's bloodline."
Rahab: The Prostitute Who Recognized God
If Tamar played a prostitute, Rahab was one. No euphemisms, no past tense—Matthew identifies her with the Greek word "porne," from which we get pornography. She ran a house of ill repute in Jericho, likely built into the city wall where travelers would seek her services.
Yet when Israel's spies needed shelter, this woman—whose profession made her the ultimate outsider—recognized what God was doing before anyone else in her city. She hid the spies, lied to the authorities, and hung a scarlet cord from her window. That red rope, reminiscent of the red lights that would mark such establishments throughout history, became her salvation marker.
The religious establishment would have seen Rahab as the last person God would use. She was a Canaanite (strike one), a woman (strike two), and a prostitute (strike three). Yet she became the great-great-grandmother of King David and an ancestor of Jesus Christ. Her faith accomplished what her profession never could—it brought her inside God's family.
Ruth: The Cursed Foreigner Who Showed Covenant Love
Ruth's inclusion might seem less scandalous until you understand the law. She was a Moabite, from a nation born through the incestuous relationship between Lot and his daughter. The Law was explicit: "No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the Lord, not even in the tenth generation" (Deuteronomy 23:3).
Yet Ruth's loyalty to her mother-in-law Naomi exceeded anything shown by God's chosen people. When Naomi released her to return to her people and her gods, Ruth clung tighter: "Your people will be my people and your God my God" (Ruth 1:16). Her covenant faithfulness put Israel's faithlessness to shame.
This foreign woman from a cursed nation didn't just enter the assembly of the Lord—she became the great-grandmother of Israel's greatest king. The scandal in Jesus' family tree includes a woman who, by law, shouldn't have been allowed in the parking lot, much less the bloodline.
Bathsheba: The Unnamed Survivor
Perhaps the most painful inclusion is the woman Matthew refuses to name. "David was the father of Solomon, whose mother had been Uriah's wife" (Matthew 1:6). Not Bathsheba. Not "David's wife." But "Uriah's wife"—forever linking Israel's greatest king to his greatest sin.
The story we know too well: David, staying home from war, sees a woman bathing. He sends for her. The language in Hebrew suggests no consent—kings took what they wanted. When she becomes pregnant, David recalls her husband from battle, tries to cover his tracks, and ultimately has Uriah murdered by putting him on the front lines.
Bathsheba lost her husband to a king's lust and conspiracy. She mourned alone while the man who destroyed her life brought her to the palace. Yet from this relationship built on abuse of power and murder came Solomon—and ultimately Jesus. God took the victim of powerful men's sins and placed her in the holy lineage, a permanent reminder that even our greatest heroes need grace.
The Pharisees' Nightmare, God's Dream
To understand the earthquake these inclusions caused, you need to grasp first-century religious culture. The Pharisees had developed a system of 613 laws designed to keep people pure. They memorized genealogies to prove their unblemished bloodlines. They had careful rules about who could enter the temple courts and who had to stay outside.
Then God shows up with a family tree that reads like a rehabilitation center's guest list.
This wasn't just counter-cultural—it was theological dynamite. Every name was a declaration: "The people you've excluded are the very ones I'm including. The stories you've tried to forget are the ones I'm highlighting. The grace you've tried to limit is bigger than your categories."
The scandal in Jesus' family tree was really the scandal of a God who refuses to be tamed by religious systems, who insists on choosing the very people religion rejects.
What This Means for Modern Outcasts
Two thousand years later, we still play the same game with different rules. We might not check genealogies, but we check backgrounds. We might not have purity laws, but we have unspoken codes about who belongs and who doesn't.
The divorced woman who feels like damaged goods? She's Ruth, the outsider who became an insider through faith. The man struggling with addiction who thinks God is finished with him? He's got company with Rahab, whose profession didn't disqualify her from God's purposes. The person carrying secret shame from past sexual sins? They stand with Tamar and Bathsheba in the very bloodline of grace.
Consider the woman who told me she hadn't been to church in fifteen years. "I had an abortion when I was nineteen," she said, tears streaming. "I know God forgives, but the church never will." I opened Matthew 1 and showed her these four women. I watched her realize—maybe for the first time—that her story wasn't too messy for God's redemption.
That's the power of the scandal in Jesus' family tree. It's not just ancient history—it's present promise.
The Deeper Truth About Grace
Here's what religion struggles to understand: God doesn't need our perfection. He never has. What He desires is our permission to transform our messes into His message.
Paul would later write, "Where sin increased, grace increased all the more" (Romans 5:20). But God had already illustrated this truth in Jesus' DNA. Before Christ spoke a single parable about lost sheep or prodigal sons, His genealogy preached that the lost are found, the prodigals come home, and the disqualified become display pieces of grace.
This isn't God lowering His standards. This is God revealing that His standards were always different than ours. While we measure holiness by distance from sinners, God measures it by proximity to the broken. While we build walls to keep the impure out, God builds bridges to bring the wounded in.
Your Place in the Story
If you're reading this carrying shame like shackles, if you've believed the lie that your past disqualifies your future, then Matthew 1 is God's love letter to you. Your story—with all its broken chapters and plot twists you'd rather forget—is exactly the kind God specializes in rewriting.
The guilt you carry, the secrets you hide, the parts of your past you'd erase if you could—they don't intimidate the God who put prostitutes and murderers in His Son's family tree. In fact, they might just be the very places where grace grows best.
Because if the scandal in Jesus' family tree teaches us anything, it's this: God's grace doesn't erase your story—it redeems it into something holy. Those chapters you're ashamed of? They become testimonies. Those scars you hide? They become proof of healing. That past you run from? It becomes the platform for displaying God's power.
The Invitation That Changes Everything
The religious elite wanted a Messiah with a pedigree. God gave them a Messiah with a past—not His own past, but the accumulated past of all the broken people He came to save. In those four names—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba—God issued an invitation that echoes through history: "Come as you are. Bring your brokenness. I'm building My kingdom with the stones religion rejected."
Your disqualifications? God calls them qualifications for grace. Your failures? He calls them opportunities for restoration. Your biggest regret? It might just become the story that helps someone else believe grace is for them too.
The gospel began scandalous, and it remains scandalous. Not because God accepts sin, but because He accepts sinners. Not because He's lowered the bar, but because He's removed it entirely through the cross. The same God who included prostitutes and outcasts in His Son's bloodline is still building His family today.
And He's saving a spot for you.
The scandal in Jesus' family tree isn't that broken people are included. The scandal is that we ever thought they wouldn't be.
An Invitation to go Deeper….
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