17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them,…
People massage their lineage by scrubbing some from the family tree (don’t mention great-grandfather that was the village idiot or other unsavory characters. Matthew, however, when listing the family tree of Jesus, doesn’t scrub clean or try to hide anything from the line. So, he begins with Abraham and recounts generation to generation of real…