When Jesus talked to His disciples on the road to Emmaus, He explained how everything in the Old Testament was fulfilled in Him. Matthew begins his Gospel with a genealogy that connects Jesus to Abraham and David as if to say that the story has always been leading here, culminating in this man. Jesus is the Word behind every word from Genesis to Malachi. He is the point.
Matthew also claims that a woman fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet Isaiah: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”). Jesus is the Son born to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, but Isaiah’s prophecy wasn’t fulfilled until His virgin mother conceived Him. If Mary is the matriarch of the New Testament, what does God do with the matriarchs of the Old Testament to shed light on her and her Son?
Starting tomorrow, I will publish one post per week on matriarchs in the Old Testament. I will publish half of them for anyone to read and half for paying subscribers. The structure of each post will go something like this:
Who is this mother from the Old Testament?
Who is her husband? Who is her child?
What does she have to do with Jesus?
Does she have any connection to Mary?
I’ve already written three posts on Eve because there is so much packed into the first few chapters of the Bible. If Matthew and Luke tell the story of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Genesis 1-5 tells the story of the Unholy Family of Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel. In studying Eve and Adam’s marriage, I think I saw Mary and Joseph in a new light.
Read tomorrow and find out about the two most important families in human history.