Text: Matthew 1:18–25
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
What is Jesus?
This morning, we get a Christmas sermon in August. Turn with me to Matthew 1:18, if you would.
So far I’ve tried to show you how Matthew aims to highlight the incredible continuity between the Hebrew Bible and the Lord Jesus—that Jesus’ coming isn’t the end of that old story and the beginning of another.
But this morning, as we make our way through the rest of this first chapter, I hope you will see that Matthew also intends to show us that, in some ways, Jesus’ coming is a moment of radical discontinuity between what had been before and what would be after.
Jesus is no mere continuation of Israel’s story—he is the culmination of that story, unlike any other prophet or king or priest or holy man who came before in the pages of the Hebrew Bible.
Let’s get the text in front of us, and Lord willing, we will see this together. This is the Word of the Living God:
“Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:
“Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel”(which means, God with us). When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus.”
-Matthew 1:18–25
Thus ends the reading of God’s Word. May he write in on our hearts by faith.
As we dig into the words and cadence and emphasis of this passage, we’ll discover two cosmically important things that Matthew would have us understand about Jesus:
1. What is Jesus?
2. What does the identity of Jesus mean?
What is Jesus?
Let’s first make our way through the text and see how Matthew answers the question, “What is Jesus?” And I know that the sentence I just said is clunky and awkward sounding. I really didn’t mean to say “Who is Jesus?” No, I really do mean, “What is Jesus?”
As we carefully examine the text, you’ll understand why this is the right question to ask. Let me set it up like this: Remember where we just came from in the first 17 verses: Matthew introduced us to the story of Jesus by giving us his genealogy.
He launched his book with Genesis language: “The book of the genesis [or genealogy] of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” And then he gave us a series of people in Jesus’ genealogy, all of whom lead to Jesus’ adoptive father, Joseph. Then, in our text this morning, he transitions into the birth of Jesus.
So we have a series of births—Abraham fathered Isaac, who fathered Jacob, who fathered Judah, who fathered Perez and Zerah by Tamar, who fathered Hezron—and so on. These are all ordinary, natural births, the result of sexual union of a man and a woman.
But then, he moves into another birth—except this birth is emphatically not like those other births: It is a supernatural birth. Walk with me through the text, and see how many times Matthew emphasizes this discontinuity, this differentness, between the births leading to Jesus and the birth of Jesus:
“Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph , before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:
“Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel”(which means, God with us). When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus.”
-Matthew 1:18–25
This birth—unlike all of the more than forty births before it in Matthew—is a supernatural event, not a natural event. And you might ask, “So what?”And Matthew would respond, “Here’s what: This child is no mere mortal. This child is conceived by the Holy Spirit. Joseph may adopt this child, but he is the Son of God the Father.”
So back to our question: What is Jesus? Well, he is clearly no mere mortal. He is clearly not mere continuation of the line traced from Abraham. He is clearly no mere prophet, priest, king, or holy man. No, fundamentally, he is something different:
He is the God-Man.
All of this becomes unambiguously clear with Matthew’s quotation of Isaiah 7:14. This is the first instance in the gospel of Matthew of what will end up being something like a dozen or more statements to the effect of, “This happened to fulfill what the prophet wrote,” because again, Matthew labors to show in his gospel that Jesus has come to fulfill all of the Law and Prophets.
The context of the prophecy in Isaiah and how Matthew uses it casts a lot of light on what Jesus is. In the section of Isaiah, he quotes from Isaiah is prophesying in the midst of a political calamity unfolding in Judah, the Southern Kingdom of Israel. The wicked nation of Assyria is ascending and threatening the security of both the Northern and Southern Kingdoms.
So the Northern Kingdom, under the leadership of king Peka, joins with another nation, Aram, to pressure Judah to make a political alliance with them. But Ahaz, the king of Judah in the Southern Kingdom, snubs them and refuses.
So the the Northern Kingdom and Aram basically decide to plot a coup against Judah, to remove Ahaz from the throne, and then put a puppet king on the throne that they can control. Into this, the prophet Isaiah promises Ahaz that their plot will fail, that they won’t succeed. He promises them that God is still the Lord of his city, Jerusalem, and that he will crush the heads of these opposers.
God then, through Isaiah, promises that he will give a sign to show Ahaz that he intends to do this. The sign is a virgin who will give birth, and the son will be called “Immanuel,” which then happens. So there is an initial, partial, and incomplete fulfillment to this prophecy in Isaiah 7:14, and it is a sign of God’s triumph over the foes of Jerusalem—and Jesus then comes as the decisive, ultimate fulfillment of the prophecy, the actual God-Man, not just a sign of God’s presence, but his actual presence with man.
So in the initial context, God promised Judah security in the face of a violent threats, that he will be with them and save them. And in its decisive fulfillment in Christ, God promises his people security in the face—not of military threat from Rome or Egypt or Assyria—but of the most fell enemy ever to face mankind: Sin.
And for this enemy, God will not just send a child as a promise that he is with them, but he will himself come as a child, the God-Man, to be with them, to slay this enemy that they could not hope to face. This child in Matthew 1 is nothing short of God coming down into our camp to deliver us. This virgin-born God-Man is a sign that the people of God need not fear any foe, because our Deliverer has come.
This is one of those theological concepts that, if you lose it, you lose Christianity—and you lose hope along with it. At Chalcedon in 451, in the face of heretical opposition of false teachers, trying to teach that Christ was not truly God and truly man, the leaders of the Church convened, and affirmed that glorious truth: At the incarnation of Christ, what we are seeing is God in the flesh. If you see Jesus, you are seeing One who is truly God and truly Man.
Another way we could put it is that, when, as John writes, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” God added humanity to his deity. And is not some kind of theological nitpickery, either. And I believe you’ll see why that is the case as we answer that second question: What does Jesus’ identity mean?
What Jesus’ Identity Mean?
Jesus is the virgin-born God-Man—there’s the doctrine… But what does that mean? Matthew gives us a series of answers to that question in the text. Number one:
1. Jesus’ identity as the virgin-born God-Man means that he can be, that he will be, Jesus, the one who saves us from our sins.
Think this through with me: Why was Jesus’ born of a virgin?
Over the centuries, theologians have developed elaborate theories on this, usually trying to show that Jesus had to be born of a virgin to avoid the stain of original sin, of the sin of our father Adam, that sin nature.
So they come up with strange theories that sin is passed from fathers, not mothers. But where is that in the Bible? If our sinful fallenness is passed like that, why wouldn’t it come from Mary just as easily as Joseph? So the Roman Catholic Church invented another doctrine, the Immaculate Conception, that now Mary was also conceived by her parents with a special dispensation of divine grace, shielding her from sinful fallenness.
Oops. That’s not what the Bible teaches. And that ends up making you do all sorts of high strangeness with Mary—like elevating her to some kind of co-redemptrix, living in a special category above the rest of mankind.
But that’s not what Matthew does at all. His emphasis is not on Mary’s uniqueness, but on Jesus’ uniqueness. Why does Matthew say Jesus had to be born of a virgin? And over and over in the text, he emphasizes a single, all-important reason: Not that Jesus was sinless because of the virgin birth, but that the virgin birth is part of how we know that Jesus came to deliver us from sin.
We know that Jesus is free from any particle of sin’s stain. Hebrews 4:15 makes that plain. We don’t need elaborate, extra biblical theories to try to prove that. What we need to know is how we will be saved from our sin!
That’s the problem. Into that problem, the angel sent to Joseph answers: You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. That’s what the name means: Jesus, Yeshua, Joshua, meaning “God delivers.”
How? How can a man save a whole people from their sins? How can a man bear the wounds and stripes and punishment of a whole people? How can a people from every tribe and tongue and nation be delivered by a single human being? How can Jesus, by the end of the 28th chapter of this gospel, receive the worship of his apostles, and then claim to have all authority in heaven and on earth? That’s a lot of authority!
This text answers: No man can do any of this! At least, no mere man. But the God-Man? The virgin-born, God-with-us, Immanuel? He can do it. He can save us. His righteousness is sufficient to pay the debt of his people, because his righteousness is endless, divine righteousness.
There’s another facet to this salvation that is also wrapped up in Jesus’ virgin birth. Number two…
2. Jesus’ identity as the virgin-born God-Man means that his birth is the beginning of a new creation.
Remember, Matthew’s gospel began in the first verse by using a phrase that is an exact quotation from both Genesis 2:4 and Genesis 5:1, “The book of the genesis of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.”
He does that again in verse 18. In the sentence, “Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way,” the word “birth,” just like the word “genealogy” in verse 1, is actually the Greek word “Genesis.” And there is another related word that Matthew could have used that is more explicitly about giving birth. But he chose this other word, genesis, which means “origin” or “beginning,” an immediate call back for Hebrew readers to the book of Beginnings, Genesis.
Why was the genesis of Jesus a virgin birth? Why was he born of a virgin? Because in this child, God was beginning the work of new creation, a work of new creation that was promised all the way back at the Fall of the old creation, one that would take place through the birth of one who would be called “the Seed of the Woman.”
Remember that promise from Genesis 3:15? After the fall of man into sin, God stepped in and made a promise to our first human parents, that the Seed of the Woman would crush the head of the Serpent. That this Seed of the Woman would stomp on the head of the Serpent, crushing his head, even though it would come at the cost of a crushed heel.
And so great was the hope of this promise that Adam and Eve named their firstborn son “Cain,” which means “gotten,” as in: “We have gotten the head-crusher!” But actually that son turned out to be the crusher, not of the Serpent’s head, but of his own brother’s head, a murderer.
No, the Savior Seed wouldn’t be one who is born naturally—he is not the seed of man. That’s a normal birth, right? The man provides the seed and the woman the egg. But this Savior would be the woman’s seed! Jesus is that Savior. He is the one who crushes the head of the Serpent—instigator of the fall of the Old Creation.
And with his coming and living and dying and crushing of the Serpent’s head, he began the work of new creation. That is why you and I and all who come to him to be delivered from our sin are called “new creations.” As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “…if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; beyond, the new has come.”
And that really brings us to reckon with the last implication of Jesus’ identity. Number three…
3. Jesus’ identity as the virgin-born God-Man means that your biggest problem is not external to you, but rather internal.
Jesus came, the virgin born Seed of the Woman, the God-Man, to save his people—from what?
From Rome?
From Egypt?
From Babylon?
From oppression?
From poverty?
No, he will be called Jesus, because he has come to save his people from their sin. You need to understand the implication of this fact for your life: If Jesus came to save you from your sin, then that means your biggest issue is not anything outside of you, but rather within you.
Your biggest issue is not your wife.
Your biggest issue is not your husband.
Your biggest issue is not your kids.
Your biggest issue is not your boss.
Your biggest issue is not your circumstances.
Your biggest issue is not your health.
Your biggest issue is not your job.
Your biggest issue is not the government.
Your biggest issue is not the liberals.
Your biggest issue is you. What you need more than any other thing is to be saved from your sin—from the cosmic penalty of divine wrath for your own wickedness in the past; from the very nature with which you were born, the nature you inherited from your father Adam, a nature that loves sin and hates God.
And what Matthew wants you to fundamentally see is that you are not up to the task of taking on this enemy of the fallen self. He would have you see that your only hope is deliverance through the work on Another. And Jesus is that Other.
This virgin-born God-Man is the the single and decisive link between heaven and earth—no other savior, deliverer, or rescuer will do.
This text should therefore make us hate our idols. It should make us repudiate any other thing we would cry out to for deliverance. Where do you go with your fear? Where do you go with your longing? Where do you go with your guilt and your shame? Where do you go with your inadequacy and weakness?
Do you go to the numbing anesthetics of food or pornography or spending or television? Do you cry out to the state to save you? Do you go to your wife or your kids or your husband or your job? Do you try to drown these things out in a sea of accomplishments and financial achievement and renown?
Whatever it is for you—whichever horses and chariots you are prone to cry out to for deliverance, whichever idols you are prone to present yourself to as a living sacrifice, to be cleansed and made whole and satisfied—know this: None of them will deliver, but Christ alone.
A Welcome & A Warning
So let me leave you with a last word, and it is a word both of welcome and of warning—because make no mistake: That is what this sign, this virgin birth, is.
Jesus is God with us, God come to save and rescue us from our own patterns of sinful self-destruction, from our hatred of the Good and the True and the Beautiful and our love of the Wicked, the False, and the Ugly. He has come—God with nerve endings!—to take the lash of a Roman whip. He took on human skin in order for that skin to be pierced by nails. He is God with us, because only the Son of God could drink down the cup of wrath for the sin of us all.
This sign, this virgin born Son, is a welcome, therefore. It is a big, neon sign that read, “Come and welcome to Jesus Christ!” It is a standing invitation: Be cleansed in the blood of the God-Man. Be clean from your sin. Be delivered from your enemy—and your enemy is you. Your enemy is sin and it is therefore death, because sin is the mother of death. But for this grace, death is our just reward.
And this is why this sign is also a warning. If Jesus is God with us, and if we do not receive him, it is not as if God ceases to be with us. There is no place we can go to hide from his sight. There is no place that you can flee from his presence.
And what does the presence of a holy God mean to those who trample underfoot the blood of the Son of God? What does God with us mean to those who spurn the Son and refuse his grace? It means that the God who came to be with us in redemption will be with us again in judgment.
This sign is therefore a warning to all who would refuse its welcome. So come—all you who are heavy laden, come. Come, and he will give you rest.