Come, Follow Me - Jan 7, 2019

Come, Follow Me – Jan 7, 2019 to Jan 13, 2019

Matthew 1; Luke 1
Monday: 31 Dec 2018 - On Monday we read Moroni chapter 10, which concluded our most recent reading of the Book of Mormon. I explained a little bit about going into the new curriculum, how we would be studying a certain part of the New Testament at home during the week, and then talking about the same material during Church that coming Sunday.
Tuesday, 1 Jan 2019 – This lesson was a lot longer than most will probably be because we were driving when we were discussing it. I had briefly looked over the outline in the manual and read the first part of Matthew that discusses Jesus’ lineage. So the discussion went something like this:

When Adam ate the fruit, before he was put out of the Garden of Eden, Heavenly Father explained that because he had broken the rules, he couldn’t live with God anymore, but because Heavenly Father wanted Adam and all his family to come back and live with him again after they died, a Savior was created for them so that they could repent and be with God again. This is the gospel, and Adam worshipped the true and living God.

 

Some of Adam’s children accepted the gospel and were righteous and worshipped God, but most did not.

 

By the time of Noah, he was the only righteous person left on earth, so he was saved while the rest of the people were killed.

 

After Noah settled on the ground again after the flood, some of his children accepted the gospel, but most did not.

 

After several hundred or even thousands of years, the population was similar to how it is now, so large that most people didn’t have the opportunity to hear, understand and accept the gospel. At this point there were only a handful of righteous people left who worshipped the true and living God, Melchizedek and Abraham come to mind. 

 

Because Abraham was relatively alone in his belief in the true and living God, the Holy Ghost taught him about the gospel. Because he accepted the gospel, Jesus made covenants with him, some of them being that the children of Abraham would fill the earth and bless all the inhabitants thereof. 

 

Abraham had Isaac, Isaac had Jacob, and Jacob had Joseph who was sold into Egypt as a slave by his brothers. Because Joseph was righteous, even though he was a slave, he gained favor in the eyes of his captors and eventually became second in command to the Pharaoh, or the King of Egypt. 

 

While the assistant to the Pharaoh, Joseph learned from God about an upcoming famine, so he prepared the Egyptian people. When the famine hit, Joseph saved his brothers and his whole family moved out to be with him in Egypt. 

 

With all Joseph’s brothers living in Egypt now, they began having a lot of children and the population of Abraham’s descendents started to become a significant ethnic minority in Egypt, called Hebrews.

 

Sometime after the famine, the Egyptian government was overthrown and the new government was put into power, and the new government didn’t like how many Hebrews there were and were afraid that they would cause problems for them so they started passing laws that limited the freedom of the Hebrews, to the point where they became slaves. 

 

Because of the covenant that God had made with Abraham, and because the Hebrews were the only ones who had the gospel, after several hundred years of slavery, God sent Moses to free the Hebrews, then led them into the desert to give them His law and establish His righteous kingdom on the earth, the Kingdom of Israel.

 

Even though God gave the Hebrews His law and a bountiful land through many miracles, the Hebrew people spent the next several thousand years both accepting the rejecting God’s laws. 

 

When the people were righteous, they won their wars and were a free and powerful nation. But when the people were wicked, they were conquered and enslaved by other nations. In fact, when all Twelve tribes were beaten in battle and taken as slaves by the Assyrians, only two tribes returned to God’s promised land or Israel after they were released, the tribe of Judah and the tribe of Levi. 

 

With only two tribes returning after decades of exile, the people again tried to establish God’s kingdom on earth, but again, with mixed results. 

 

At the time of Christ, the Hebrew people, now called Jews, were again slaves to Roman because of their inability to accept God’s true law. 

 

If the Jews had been righteous, particularly the leadership, then Jesus would have been born into the only kingdom on earth that worshipped the true and living God and the people would have been ready to accept him as both their spiritual and political leader. 

 

Matthew includes Jesus’ lineage from Abraham to demonstrate that if the people of Israel had been righteous enough to maintain God’s kingdom on earth, Joseph would have been the King of Israel and Jesus would have been his heir. In Luke chapter 3, we the lineage of Mary, who would have been queen of Israel, not through marriage to Joseph, but through her father’s lineage. The lineage of both Mary and Joseph satisfied the requirements for Jesus to be crowned king, both in the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah. 

 

If Israel still had kings when Jesus was born, he wouldn’t have just been the “King of kings” spiritually but he would have been the “King of kings” politically as well. 

 

I started with this part of the narrative because it was overarching, and I started at the beginning because I thought that it was important to understand that Jesus wasn’t just some random guy that God chose to be his son. The Jews were actively looking for a political Messiah to show up in a blaze of glory and kick all the Roman stuff over, but what occurred to me while I was talking to my kids about this was that if they had been righteous, Rome never would have been able to occupy Israel. If we consider all the miraculous ways in which the Jews were able to take the land of Israel away from the wicked gentiles under the command of Joshua, and all the miraculous ways that God has defended his righteous people throughout history, we can suppose that whenever Israel triumphed in battle, it was due to their righteousness, and whenever they lost in battle, it was due to their unrighteousness. 

 

All this is to say that God had already established his political kingdom on the earth, through Abraham’s descendants, the twelve tribes of Israel. If God’s kingdom, the kingdom of Israel had remained until the time of Christ, then the Jews would have had exactly what they wanted, a militant Messiah that kept them free, because Rome wouldn’t have even been an issue. The fact that the kingdom of Israel had no king when Jesus was born, and in fact, hadn’t had a king or autonomy for hundreds of years previously, is due to the people’s outright rejection of the true gospel.

 

It’s kind of like with us, the Savior meets us where we are, he takes part in our lives to the level that we will allow him too. He will not, typically, come into our lives kicking stuff over and forcing us to be obedient or overwhelming us with information that we are not ready for, to force our hand at belief. Similarly, Jesus was born into his role as Israel’s king, but because there was no kingdom to rule, he became a carpenter, and tried to teach the people correct gospel principles. I fully believe that if Israel still had been a kingdom when Christ was born, he would have stepped into the role that was rightfully his, but he met the people where they were at. And because the wisdom of God is greater than the cunning of the devil, we know that the atonement had to go down exactly the way that it did in order for satisfy all the demands of justice. God knew this when he sent his Son to earth during a time when there was no political kingdom for him to take over. God knew this when he sent his Son to earth when the conditions were perfect for the atonement to take place. 

 

I started the lesson back at Adam because I wanted the kids to understand that Jesus being the literal king of the Jews wasn’t some title that didn’t mean anything, like “king of the hill.” I wanted the kids to understand that Jesus was meant to be the head of God’s kingdom on earth from the beginning and that God had been trying to give the people his kingdom, but it was through their wickedness and rejection of the gospel that made it so that Jesus wasn’t crowned king at that time. If people from the beginning with Adam had accepted the gospel or at least didn’t outright reject and try to destroy it, then everything would have been in place for Jesus to come to earth and take his rightful place as king of the world. But because most of the people did reject the gospel, they were responsible for the downfall of the kingdom of Israel, not God.