When tracing ancestry, whoever you stop at is usually the person you want to emphasize your relationship with. Matthew stops his list with Abraham, who is often called “the father of the Jews”. Luke stops his list with God Himself. But no matter how far back these men go, they are only proving biological facts about Joseph, not his illegitimate Son. Yet because no one in the Jewish community was about to take the miraculous conception story seriously, everyone assumed Jesus was Joseph’s blood relation. And based on this erroneous assumption, Jesus was considered a descendant of Judah because that’s what Joseph was. Therefore the prophecies of Jesus’ bloodlines were fulfilled—from a certain point of view. From another point of view, they were a bunch of baloney, for Jesus had no biological human father, therefore His only earthly bloodlines were through Mary, and we get the strong feeling that she wasn’t from Judah. So if we’re going to be technically correct, Jesus was probably the Lion of some other tribe.  But no one likes that idea so our Gospel writers conspicuously avoid the topic of Jesus’ maternal bloodlines and at the same time say, “Wow, look how Yahweh fulfilled His prophecies.”  And Yahweh smiles and says, “Yep, I sure did.”  Such is the wildness of our God.

As uncomfortable as these observations make us, the day comes when we need to stop avoiding the subject of how squirrely God can be. Whenever He predicts that something specific is going to happen in the future, there’s no way to know what form that fulfillment will take unless He provides extra clarification. Many is the time some Christian has heard God promise, “I will be with you,” only to end up devastated when that promise wasn’t fulfilled the way they expected. Sometimes God fulfills His promises to us in technical truths only—He doesn’t physically abandon us, therefore He can say “I was with you.” But while He was technically by our side, emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically, He left us feeling like He was a million miles away. Other times, God will make a promise that He never technically fulfills—He only seems to fulfill it based on false assumptions that people make, like this business of the Messiah being a blood descendant of David. God is wild.