"'Judah, your brothers shall praise you;
your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies;
your father’s sons shall bow down before you.
Judah is a lion’s cub;
from the prey, my son, you have gone up.
He stooped down; he crouched as a lion
and as a lioness; who dares rouse him?
The scepter shall not depart from Judah,
nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,
until tribute comes to him;
and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples." – Gen. 49:8-10

It’s Good to Be King

Every year at this time we read over this passage and rejoice in the fact that Jesus is born as “the Lion of the Tribe of Judah” and he is. He is the promised king from Judah’s line who will have an everlasting kingdom. And if you have studied the Old Testament you know that the kings were always supposed to come from the line of Judah. The above passage is the first place where we get to see this. This is where Jacob basically lines up all of his children and speaks blessings over them.

Fourth time’s the charm

Here’s an honest question: did you know that Judah wasn’t the firstborn son of Jacob? If you are anything like me, you just assumed Judah had to be the firstborn because he was supposed to be the line of the kings. I thought that for a long time. It just makes sense. However, he is actually the fourth born son of Jacob. So then, what happened to the other three? The short answer is that they disqualified themselves. And what’s crazy is that even in this “blessing” passage in chapter 49 Jacob tells us the reasons.

First is Reuben. He is the firstborn and should rightfully be the heir, but because he had an inappropriate relationship with one of his father’s wives he got crossed him off the list. Then we see Simeon and Levi, the next two in line. Their story is crazy, they slaughtered a whole nation of men because of how they had treated their sister. So then we are left with Judah.

Grace upon grace

Let’s look even closer into this. God had made promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that he would bless the whole world through them. As we look over this Old Testament history we can see the way that God both narrows and expands his promises and he is doing this according to his own will. It is not because of any good that anyone is doing, it is only by his grace. Judah did not do anything to be chosen by God to be the tribe of the kings, he is just the next in line. In the next section, we will even get to see that he wasn’t even doing anything to try and preserve his own line. This should get us to focus on the real main character in all of this, which is God. When we are looking at human history we can see that God is the one who is working out his perfect will through sinful human beings.

Reflection

What do we need to learn from this in our preparation to celebrate Christ’s birth? We need to realize that we cannot put God in a box. What I mean by that is that God does not work the way that we think he should. Isn’t it always supposed to be the firstborn son that inherits? In our human reasoning that makes sense, but that’s just not the way that God works and we can’t try to impose what we think should happen onto him. We probably would have just picked Ishmael, Esau, or Reuben to be the ones set to inherit, but God had other plans...

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