Begat!

Like I said, I'll be doing the New Testament on weekends, mainly to keep things fresh, and only doing the NT two days out of the week will keep me from completely finishing it while I've barely made a dent in the Old. Not sure if I'll do all four Gospels in a row or do a couple of books and then come back. We'll see. But, for now: Matthew!

[Matthew 1:1-17]
Matthew was writing for a Jewish audience, so he puts a lot of emphasis on proving Jesus as the promised Messiah. With that as his goal, he starts with a genealogy, confusing everyone who is casually handed a Gideon Bible with just the New Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs. With some hardcore studying and an audience with a decent Bible education, you can do some pretty neat sermons based on the genealogy of Jesus, but that kind of prep is a bit beyond the scope of this blog. So, just a couple things.
With any sort of Bible education, you'll notice as you scan through this part trying not to feel happy that your Bible reading will go that much faster today (Come on...we've all thought it) that there are some big shot awesome people in here (David, Abraham,  Solomon), some sketchy characters (Rahab, Solomon) and a bunch of people you've never even heard of (Jothan, Abiud, and apparently a salmon.) All of these people ended up with the honor of being in Jesus' lineage. Even the people who screwed up and the ones who probably died without leaving a huge dent in the world and probably thinking they never accomplished much, by just being who they were and going where God led them, played a part in bringing Jesus into the world. So if you're walking with God and keeping your priorities straight, you never know what effects God will cause to ripple out even hundreds of years down the road.
Second, it's interesting that this traces the line through Jospeh, since Joseph contributed nothing genetically to Jesus. He married Mary while she was already pregnant with Jesus, and yet this was enough to satisfy the Jews to whom Matthew was writing that Jesus came from the line of David (Since that was one of the requirements for being the Messiah.) Even though Jospeh was not Jesus' birth father, he adopted Jesus into his family and that was good enough for God and the Jewish community. It's comforting, as a Gentile who came into the faith after the Jews, to know that God considers adoption just as binding and just as important as children born naturally. (Though I should note that elsewhere the Bible also places Mary in the line of David, it's interesting that Matthew chose not to mention that when writing to a Jewish audience.)

[1:18-24]
Matthew skips over a lot of the story parts to get straight to the point of Jesus being the Messiah, but I like that here it shows Joseph as a pretty cool guy. Mary is pregnant via the Holy Spirit, and when Jospeh finds out, he decides to call of the marriage quietly instead of going all Much Ado About Nothing on her and slapping her during the wedding and all that.
But then an angel shows up and says "No, it's cool, the baby is God's and He's gonna save the world and all that, so you should still get married and name Him Jesus. You should also start capitalizing His pronouns, so tell the person making the "It's a Boy" banners."
Joseph's faith here is pretty remarkable. Granted and angel appeared to him and told him, so that definitely helps your belief a bit, but it's still impressive. There's been a really long "dead period" religiously here, since the Old Testament canon was finished several hundred years back and the Jews are now occupied by Rome. It's a safe bet that prophecy and miracles were pretty scarce the last couple of centuries, so for Joseph to go along with the miracle virgin pregnancy thing when it looks like a sin that would otherwise result in exile or stoning shows that this guy trusted in God pretty strongly. The baby would have been born anyway, but obviously, since Matthew starts with this story, Joseph being the father made it far easier for the Jews to accept Jesus as the Messiah. Fairly basic lesson here: Do what God says.