The Word of God taken verse by verse. The meanings of the words and verses are explained in context, and in many cases translation from the original written language for the words, phrases, and context are explained.
Context and Key Themes The chapter that follows the baptism is not triumph but testing. The Spirit who descended on Jesus at the Jordan now leads him into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. This sequence is deliberate — the Father has just declared this is my beloved Son, and the first thing…
Context and Key Themes After the silence of the infancy narrative — thirty years compressed into nothing between the return from Egypt and this chapter — the Gospel of Matthew resumes with a voice crying in the wilderness. John the Baptist is the hinge between the Old Testament and the New, the last of the…
Context and Key Themes Matthew 2 is the chapter of contrasts. The magi come from the east — Gentiles, outsiders, astronomers who read the sky rather than the Torah — and they arrive in Jerusalem asking where the king of the Jews has been born, because they have come to worship him. The chief priests…
Context and Key Themes Matthew opens the New Testament the way a bridge opens between two shores. The first word is “book” — or more precisely, “the book of the genealogy” — and the Greek behind it is biblos geneseos, the same phrase the Septuagint uses in Genesis 5:1 for “the book of the generations…