When was the last time you stopped to carefully read the family tree of Jesus found in Matthew 1, or in Luke 3, for that matter? My guess is that, like most of the rest of us, you just skim over that passage and move on to the birth narrative.

Those pesky genealogies are tough to read, aren’t they? They are monotonous and boring, and full of names that we generally don’t know how to pronounce. And so we skip them, or if we do read them, we skim them and don’t study them too deeply. And that’s to our detriment.

I think that the genealogies gives us a good look into the character of God, and they do so in several different ways. Matthew’s list of the names in Jesus’ family tree is especially beneficial, because it makes a very solid case that Jesus is the legal heir and descendant to King David, and further, the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham. Both of these would have been of critical importance to Matthew’s primarily Jewish readers.

That’s interesting in and of itself, but what if you aren’t Jewish? What’s the benefit for those readers? First of all, the importance of this passage for Jewish readers is also something for everyone to consider. The genealogy shows that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament promises of a Messiah to come.

But I think there are some more reasons why we can study these passages, and a lot we can gain from them.