1 Chronicles 1-4

            What an unfortunate choice!  To start blogging again in the week that my Today’s Light reading has me running through the first four chapters of 1 Chronicles.  Now if you read the reading, or if you just remember Chronicles, you know that Chronicles 1-9 is almost completely lists of names—genealogies, and very detailed genealogies, at that.  To add insult to injury, the genealogies are not even strictly chronological.  From 2:3-3:24 you have the line of Judah through the kings of the southern kingdom.  Then, without warning, in 4:1 you’re back in Judah’s day with the rest of his clans.  What gives?

            Well, hard as it is to read, it strikes me that there is method in this madness.  I read in an online edition this morning, and the layout wasn’t helpful.  But tonight I’m looking at an NIV print edition, and the editors have titled the text helpfully.  What they have made clear is the Chronicler’s desire to highlight God’s faithfulness to His promises, especially as those promises flow through David.  So, we go from Adam to Noah—that’s easy enough.  Then, the sons of Shem come in for extended treatment, culminating in Abraham.  The Chronicler dispenses with Abraham’s ‘other’ sons briefly, and then gets to Isaac and his boys, Esau and Jacob.  Again, Esau is taken care of first (all the way to Edom, because Edom is a ‘frenemy’ of Israel—ask your teenager what a frenemy is), but the real story is Jacob and his boys, especially Judah, through whom the promise continues to David and to the exile.

            The point of the whole thing, then, is to remind the reader that God has been at work on His promise to restore humanity for a long time.  Given that Chronicles is written in the period after the exile (cf. 2 Chronicles 36:22-23), this was a welcome word for the recipients.  Their temple was a shadow of its former self; their nation was a mere puppet under foreign governance; shoot, until the time of Nehemiah (around 430 B.C.), their city didn’t even have a wall.  Surely, they were thinking (sarcastically), “This is some fine blessing!  Sure we’re the people of God.  Absolutely.  Anyone could see it.”  The Chronicler reminds them that God’s been faithfully working on this story for a long time.  Even if the recipients don’t know what God’s up to, they should rest assured that He knows what He’s up to.

            Not a bad pay off for us either:  We may not know what God’s up to, but we know what He’s done in Jesus, and we know where the stories headed (the final restoration).  We can take comfort in God’s faithfulness to His promises and we can take hope in that, too.