Introduction

Gospel writers and the first Christians all saw the story of Jesus as the climax of the long story of Israel. And that story gets its shape and structure from the book of Genesis. So what I want to do is sort of do a little bit of Genesis, go to another spot in the creation account and then we'll jump back to the actual passage in Matthew. We're not going to like focus on any of this stuff, but we are going to be looking into the sufferings of Jesus because that's where the text would have us.