not of Jesus, but "of Jesus Christ." Have you ever thought of the meaning of that word "Christ"? It is not a proper name so much as an official title. Jesus is the real name of our Lord, the name given him by his parents. But "Christ" like the word "Messiah " means "the anointed one." When Victoria was crowned queen of England there was a splendid assembly gathered in Westminster Abbey. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest ecclesiastic of the kingdom, acting as the representative of the established religion, poured upon the head of the young girl, who was so soon to assume the burdens of the scepter, a few drops of oil from a golden flask, and with this anointing offered solemn prayer. What was the meaning of this ceremony? It was a public recognition of the fact that the queen in the discharge of her great duties must be endowed with special grace from God. Oil is everywhere in Scripture the symbol of the Holy Spirit. When oil was poured upon the head of the queen at her coronation, it was the sign of the pouring out of God's Holy Spirit upon her to qualify her for her office. Just so in the Old Testament times, Samuel carried a horn of oil to Bethlehem and there anointed David to be king over Israel. And not only kings, but prophets and priests were in like manner anointed before they entered upon their work, in token of their entire dependence upon God for his grace and the abundant communication of God's Spirit to them, to fit them to speak in his name and to serve him in his sanctuary. When the coming of the Saviour was predicted, therefore, it was said that God would put his Spirit upon him. He was called the Messiah, or the

Christ, or the Anointed One, because he was to hold all these offices of prophet, priest, and king, and because, in order to qualify him for them, God should give his Spirit without measure unto him. Observe now how Matthew, who presents Jesus as the Saviour promised in Old Testament Scripture, begins his Gospel with the words "the book of the generation of Jesus Christ "—joining the human name of Jesus with the official title of the promised Saviour, a conjunction never attempted in the lifetime of Jesus. What does he mean but this, that Jesus of the seed of David, though he is descended from all these human ancestors, is notwithstanding much more than a human Saviour; he is nothing less than the Messiah on whom the fulness of God's Spirit was to rest, the promised prophet, priest, and king of Israel, the completion of the Old Testament Economy, the personage in whom all God's historic purposes are consummated and fulfilled. Thus the first page of the New Testament proclaims on its very front that the new dispensation is no sudden afterthought of God, but is the goal and fulfilment toward which the whole history of the race has been tending. The genealogy of Jesus, in other words, points out the connection of the New Testament with the Old.

Let me recapitulate now the four essential characteristics of this genealogy. First, it is a family record. Secondly, it is a record transcribed from public registers. Thirdly, it is a record of the royal succession. Fourthly, it is the ancestral record of One to whom these ancient generations point, and in whom the old dispensation finds its fulfilment and its end. But there are practical lessons to be drawn from this long list of

T

names, which will take it out from the rank of matters interesting only to a curious mind and will put it side by side with other scriptures that touch and move our hearts.

We see in the barren record the proof of God's faithfulness. Many a long year had passed since Abraham had received the promise that in his seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed. He kept on waiting and watching while he lived, but death darkened his eyes twenty centuries before the promise was fulfilled. Now and then through those twenty centuries, some time of unusual prosperity gave hope to God's people that the day of the promised blessing was near at hand; but then sin had broken in like a flood, and the times of prosperity were followed by the severest judgments and the deepest humiliations. The whole nation at length was carried away captive to Babylon. The kingdom was destroyed, the heirs to the throne were consigned to private life; when Jesus came, not a single one of the royal line had sat upon a throne for six hundred years. The lineal descendants of King David became poorer and obscurer, indeed, as they approached Christ; Joseph, of the house of David, is a poor carpenter of Nazareth, and Mary, his wife, is so pressed with poverty that she must bring forth her first-born son in a stable and lay him in a manger, and afterward offer for her cleansing not the lamb that served for the sacrifice of the rich, but the two turtle-doves that were accepted as the offering of the poor. It might have seemed to human eyes. that God had utterly forgotten his promise and that none could ever rise from David's posterity to sit upon

his throne. But look at the genealogy. The list that begins with Abraham and the kings of Israel, but dwindles down at length into successors so obscure that we know nothing of them but their names, suddenly bursts out into the name of Jesus Christ, King of Israel and Saviour of the world. Out of the fallen trunk of David's house there springs a new branch, and in Jesus all the promises to David and to Abraham are fulfilled. Let the impatient and unbelieving heart, that frets and despairs because prayer is not yet answered, and God delays his coming, and wickedness seems to prevail and the promise seems to slumber, let that heart remember that "one day is with the Lord as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day," that "man's extremity is God's opportunity," and that though our faith fail, yet " God abideth faithful,” and will surely show his faithfulness at last by fulfilling to each of us every true desire and petition of our hearts, and to his church, that glorious promise that "the kingdom and dominion and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom and all dominions shall serve and obey him."

Observe too, in this genealogy, the evidences of God's power. It is a noticeable fact that while the list. embraces many patriarchs and heroes of the faith, it contains also the names of wicked kings, like Ahaz and Manasseh, one of whom reached the climax of depravity and idolatry by burning his own son in dreadful sacrifice to heathen gods, and the other of whom set up graven images in the very house of God and

seduced the whole nation into sin. Not simply in the line of heirship to the throne, but among the natural ancestors of Jesus, from whom his human blood descended, we have the names of women to which the blackest stains of sin attached. Not only do we read, "Boaz begat Obed of Ruth," a Gentile by birth, but also, "Judas begat Pharez and Zara of Thamar,” “ Salmon begat Boaz of Rahab" and "David begat Solomon the king of her that had been the wife of Uriah." Here are Tamar and Rahab, who played the harlot, and Bathsheba, the partner of David's sin, among the list of ancestors of Jesus. This list needed only to express the names of his male ancestors, in order to make it complete and correct. Why is it that these specimens of human depravity are dragged from their hiding-places in the long-forgotten past and made to take their place among the lineal ancestors of Jesus? Was it not for this that the glory of the line should not seem to be the line itself but the great personage in whom it ends? Was it not to show that Jesus owed nothing of his sublime elevation above common humanity to his mere natural birth? A royal and sacred pedigree did not confer personal holiness or prevent even Abraham's descendants from becoming fearfully corrupt. Look at this genealogy with the marks of human wickedness scored all along its course, and then tell me if it did not require the new-creating power of God and the fulness of the Holy Ghost to bring from this tainted human nature one who was "holy, guileless, undefiled, separated from sinners!" See the names that figure there, Thamar, Rahab, Bathsheba, Ahaz, Manasseh, and then, last of all, the name of