Today’s reading: Isaiah 60; Matthew 1
While Isaiah is looking forward to the day the nations would flood into God’s people en masse, God has always welcomed those willing to turn from their gods and align themselves with Him.
As we have been reading through this section of Isaiah, we have seen and talked about, a few times, how the inclusion of the nations into the people of God has been God’s plan all along. Israel was His chosen people as the instrument by which He would bring those nations to Himself, but the plan was always to have not just Israel, but all humanity, be called by His name again. The context for these oracles from Isaiah is after God’s Messiah has established His eternal righteous kingdom in Jerusalem, and gathered the nations to Himself there, but Matthew 1 reminds us that, from the beginning, anybody who has been willing to align themselves with Yahweh has been welcomed into His people.
As Matthew is laying out Jesus’ genealogy he breaks the standards of his day by including a few women in the record, rather than just the men down the line. There is more than can be said about these women, but one thing they all have in common is that none of them was an Israelite. These women, in the line of the Messiah Himself, are from other nations, including Rahab and Ruth from nations under God’s judgement.
We talked about these women as we came across them in our reading last year, but Rahab was a Canaanite from Jericho, part of the people who were to all be killed without any chance of being spared, and Ruth was a Moabite, a people God explicitly said were never to be allowed before the Lord, even down to the tenth generation, because of how they treated Israel in the wilderness. And yet, despite both of these women being from peoples explicitly judged and rejected by God, when they were willing to turn from their previous peoples and gods, and align themselves instead with Yahweh, they were not only welcomed in, but given the incredible privilege of bearing the line that ultimately brought forth the savior and redeemer of the world.
From the beginning, all people, no matter where they were coming from or what they my have done, if they were willing to assign their loyalty to Yahweh, trusting in Him rather than themselves, their people, or their gods, have been welcomed by the Lord with open arms into His family.
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