A Testament To God\'s Faithfulness and Sovereignty

A Testament to God’s Faithfulness and Sovereignty
1 Chronicles 1-9
“Adam, Seth, Enosh,… and Obadiah and Hanan. These were the sons of Azel.”

Much to the chagrin of the modern reader, the book of 1 Chronicles opens with eight chapters of genealogies. For the contemporary reader, the lineages remain a mystery. Why would God devote so much time to giving us a record of the genealogical lines of the tribes of Israel? We embark on reading through the first eight chapters, and we are immediately confronted with names we cannot pronounce and people that we have no idea who they were and why they are mentioned in scripture other than they were part of the genealogical line connected the key people (like David and Saul) to Abraham and even Adam. And so we quickly gloss over them in our search for passages that give us a little more practical insight into life.
However, the genealogies, written after the return of Israel after their exile, served to give the people of Israel a sense of history and legitimacy by reminding them of their roots. By connecting the present to their past lineage, God reminds them that they are a people of history whose life and faith connect back to the beginning of time.
The genealogies reveal to the Israelites (and the modern reader today) that the history of Israel was not only a profound story, but their story was about the God who controls and guides history. The genealogies testify that history is not cyclical but linear. History is not just a continual cycle of birth, life, and death repeated generation after generation without any meaning. The history of Israel is about God's sovereign control. Human history has a beginning point and a predetermined ending point established by God. However, it is the in-between period that we must connect with God. God is not distant and uninvolved in the affairs of humanity. Instead, he is engaged and is the unseen hand guiding human history to fulfill his purpose. Generation after generation, each person's birth, and death is part of a prescribed chain of lives from Adam to Abraham to David and ultimately to the arrival of the messianic king who would come. It is a story of how God established a redemptive plan before he even created the world and how he revealed that plan in seminal form in Genesis 3. That plan connected each generation until the arrival of Abraham, to whom God would make a profound covenant that through him would come a nation and a seed through which his redemption would come to the whole world. This would then begin to be played out in each passing generation until the arrival of David. With David, God would establish an eternal dynasty that would be fully revealed in the birth of Christ but is yet to be fully realized. This will come when Christ returns. From the beginning of time to the end of time, God’s grace oversees and is bestowed on each generation, and his hand guides every generation to fulfill his purpose.
Today we are still part of that plan. The link between every generation, which not only connects us to the past and the future but reveals the movement of God's sovereign grace in history, is still at work in us today. My father realized that grace and passed it on to me, and I will pass it on to my children for the next generation. The story of God’s sovereign grace working in history is still unfolding. Just as the events that happened in past generations were the product of God's sovereignty, so the events in our generation are the work of God’s hand. Such is the lesson of the genealogies.