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The Unedited Genealogy of Jesus

“This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah…” — Matthew 1:1

We are accustomed to telling our stories selectively. We polish the edges, omit the failures, and highlight the moments that make us appear respectable. Scripture itself records that genealogies were often written this way—compressed, edited, and curated. Yet when Matthew opens his Gospel, he does something startling. He edits, yes—but not the way we would expect. He leaves the shame in.

The family line of Jesus Christ is not a showcase of uninterrupted virtue. It is a record of sinners, scandals, and severe moral collapse. Judah and Tamar. Rahab the prostitute. Ruth the outsider. David and “the wife of Uriah.” Kings who shed innocent blood and led God’s people into darkness. Matthew does not blur these names into obscurity; he underlines them. He insists that we see the Messiah standing at the end of a long, broken line.

This is not carelessness—it is purposeful. God is telling us something essential about the heart of redemption.

If Jesus were ashamed of broken people, He would have edited them out of His own family tree. But He did not. The people we would hide are the very people God highlights. The people we would disqualify are the people God deliberately includes. From the beginning, the incarnation declares that Jesus did not come from sanitized humanity, but from real humanity—and therefore He has come for it.

Here is the first truth we must face: anyone can belong to His family. Not because sin does not matter, but because grace matters more. The genealogy preaches before Jesus ever speaks. It announces that doubt, failure, addiction, and disgrace do not place you beyond reach—they place you precisely within the kind of reach Christ came to extend. The bloodline of Jesus says to the least and the lost, “There is room.”

But Matthew presses us further. This family tree also reveals that God redeems what we assume is ruined. David’s greatest failure is not erased; it is transformed. From a union marked by adultery and death comes Solomon—and through Solomon, the promises of God move forward. Redemption does not deny the damage of sin, but it refuses to let sin have the final word.

God takes what we are most ashamed of and makes it the very place where His life breaks through. What we call disqualifying, He calls redeemable. What we bury, He resurrects.

Do not ask whether Jesus can handle your past. Look at His genealogy. Do not wonder if your worst mistake is too far gone. Look at the cross, where the Son of God was hung on a tree, covered in the full weight of human shame, so that shame would no longer own us.

The question is not whether He can redeem—it is whether you will hand Him what needs redeeming. Bring it into the light. Invite Him into the place you avoid. He is not embarrassed by your story. He entered history precisely to transform it.

Let Him.