Every year on September 5, India celebrates “Teacher’s Day.” It is a day when students all over our country express their gratitude and respect for their teachers. This year there was a message circulating all over social media in India.

It said that “the teacher of the year” has actually been the Coronavirus pandemic. Even the people of the world are able to recognize that they have been taught many valuable lessons of life!

As believers, we can say that we have learned so much more. Many of us learned that this is not our best life yet. Many of us have had loved ones go into the “valley of the shadow of death” and yet learned that we have a living hope in the gospel that is greater than that valley.

Actually, the more severe the trial, the clearer our view becomes of what the gospel has promised to us in Christ.

Matthew chapter 1 may be very familiar for us and yet here too there are amazing gospel reminders for us to keep our gaze fixed upon Christ in these uncertain times. In chapter 1, we have the famous genealogy (1:1- 17) proving how Jesus the Messiah is connected to the Abrahamic covenant and to the Davidic covenant.

There is an account of Christ’s birth from Joseph’s perspective, and there are two names of Christ (1:18-25) that give us great assurance and confidence during these times.

When we think about the genealogy of the Messiah, we see God’s great covenant love and faithfulness that has relentlessly moved forward throughout the Old Testament.

So great has been His love that He has accepted even the vilest sinners and outcasts into His salvation blessings. Truly, we can say that “Christ came from a genealogy of sinners for sinners.” The genealogy gives us great hope that God is faithful and gracious beyond our imagination and that the only real qualification that we can bring to Him is our unworthiness.

We also see Matthew show that when it comes to us trying to keep God’s covenant in our strength, we have nothing but our failure to offer to God. The spiritual decline of the kings after David’s reign shows how weak we are in and of ourselves and how much we needed Jesus Christ to come for us.

Matthew himself was a greedy tax collector and social outcast, yet Christ saved him and used him to write a Gospel! Therefore, we can keep coming to Him who is gentle, lowly and a friend of sinners.

In Matthew 1, we also see a careful repetition that Jesus Christ was conceived of the Holy Spirit and not from an earthly father. In this we can see the amazing wisdom of God in bypassing Adam’s sinful nature by sending our Last Adam free from the pollution of original sin.

We can never get over the grace of God in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Fully God, Christ is the sustainer of the universe; fully man, he was being nourished and sustained by Mary’s body.

How wonderfully he came to identify with every stage of our lives. Children can look to Him; teenagers can look to Him; and adults can look to Him, for He has passed through every stage and can sympathize with us.

We see the amazing grace of God in the name mentioned in Chapter 1:21, too. Mary and Joseph would not have freedom to name the Messiah. God had already planned to give unto Him the blessed name, “Jesus.”

His name is not long and complicated. It is a name that a child can take and a dying saint can lisp. His name moves our mind directly to the sum and substance of the Bible.

His name reminds us that our greatest problem is our sinfulness, which has alienated us from God and brought us under the just eternal wrath of God. His name reminds us of the Good News that Jesus entered into our sin-cursed world and was born under the law to fulfill it on our behalf.

His name reminds us that Jesus is our deliverance through the redemption price that He paid. His name reminds us that Jesus, our greater Joshua, did battle for us and through His own propitiating blood has won for us an eternal inheritance.

We do not know what the future holds for us or how long the present crisis is going to last. But we can find great hope and strength that in Christ we are “already saved.” He is at work in us and using these trials in our “ongoing sanctification.” Even if He calls us home, we will be entering into the “fulness” of our salvation.

May the Lord help us to keep looking unto our Greater Joshua.