A Glimpse of God
If you are like me, when we go to the movie theater, I like to get there early because I want to watch all the trailers. I know I won't really see all the movies in the world (that's a fair assumption, right?), so the trailers allow me to get the general idea of the movie's plotline and story.
If we can be sincere, the preview is enough because they are sometimes better than the entire movie, AND it saves you a ton of money!
The initial storyline to a movie or the book's opening pages can determine whether or not you finish it.
When you see a genealogy in Scripture, the easiest thing to do is to skip over it, but I challenge you to read through it. I remember early on in my pastoral ministry, I always wondered why genealogies were in the Bible.
Isaiah 55:11
"It is the same with my word. I send it out, and it always produces fruit. It will accomplish all I want it to, and it will prosper everywhere I send it."
So if the Word of God always produces fruit, what does that mean for genealogies? The entire Bible is without error and full of power…even the origins of the family we read in Scripture.
Many people have done ancestry.com or 23andMe DNA tests, and I am sure the results were not what you were expecting.
We can say this with the family tree that Jesus belonged to. It was a family tree of misfits. Rahab, the prostitute (Joshua 4), is actually in the lineage of Jesus.
The genealogy doesn't show us that through our studying of the Scriptures, we can come to know this story as redemptive and full of saving grace.
Although the genealogy may not seem important, it is essential to know this; each of those named in the genealogy is important to God. He knows their name, he knows their every thought, and He loves them.
So although a list of names, which by the way, are some of the hardest to pronounce in all the world, does not seem significant, yet each of them is significant to God. This is a great way to understand the heart of God towards us. He knows us, he hears us, and he understands what we struggle through daily.
May you remember the manger with the incarnate son of God laying there, perfect & innocent, who became willing to take on the form of a servant man that we might become children of God.
