The gospel of Matthew starts with a genealogy of Jesus, serving to affirm that Jesus is the promised Messiah. Matthew takes the reader through Jesus' adoptive father Joseph's line, demonstrating how his lineage fulfilled key predictions about the Messiah, including that he would be in the kingly line. Beyond that, it demonstrates that Jesus came from a line of broken, "normal" people--a fully human experience. It shows us that God moves toward us as we are, and doesn't expect us to clean up our act first.
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