Questions 2 - Are genealogies in the Bible important?

Greetings and welcome to the Faith Chapel Podcast. My name is Jason and I am

the pastor of Faith Chapel.

In the podcast right now, we are going through a sermon series from 2021 entitled Questions.

The congregation of Faith Chapel was asked to submit any questions they had

about Christianity or the Bible,

and the answer to those questions were given in the form of sermons.

Today, the question we answer is, are the genealogies in the Bible important?

Thanks for joining us today.

I am not what you would call an avid reader.

I really don't even like to read that much.

In fact, I usually hit a wall somewhere around three or four hours into a book

where I'm just like, I don't care. I'm going to give up on this.

For most of you, for you, I hope that you do like reading, that it comes naturally

to you because reading is so important.

It is vitally important to us. But there comes a point if you're like me,

where you just put the book down and walk away.

I'm reading a book to my kids called The Silver Turtle.

And it's book, it's action-packed, it's wall-to-wall.

Really, there's so much. After every chapter, I'm just like,

can't they just catch a break?

But even with an entertaining book like that, it's really hard to keep my attention.

It's really hard for me to keep on reading.

And when we come to a book like the Bible, there are a lot of brick walls that

we might face as we enter into reading it.

Some of them are because of the length of it.

I mean, it takes about 15 minutes a day for 365 days to get through this entire work of literature.

It really is an imposing, imposing book.

But beyond that, there are also some things in here that when you read them,

you're gonna be like, yeah, I'm definitely gonna leave that behind.

This is a brick wall for me, and I'm not going to engage with it anymore.

So I'm going to read a few of those passages to you.

The first one comes from the book of Leviticus.

If the animal, this is chapter 1, verse 3, if the animal you present as a burnt

Isaiah 1:3

offering is from the herd, it must be a male with no defects.

Bring it to the entrance of the tabernacle, so you may be accepted by the Lord.

Lay your hand on the animal's head, and the Lord will accept its death in your

place to purify you, making you right with him.

All right, how many of you want me to keep reading?

Yeah, it's such a strange passage. It's talking about the ritual laws of Israel,

and it's rather because Jesus brought in a new covenant to our age.

It seems to us antiquated, old-fashioned, and that's something that should be

left behind. mind this is a brick wall that people come to when they engage

with scripture they read it and they're like yeah i'm out.

But it's not the only brick wall. There's other walls as well.

And so I'm going to read to you from 1 Chronicles.

The descendants of Shem were Elam, Asher, Arphakshad, Lud, and Aram.

The descendants of Aram were Uz, Hul, Gether, and Mash.

Arphakshad was the father of Shelah. Shelah was the father of Eber.

Eber had two sons. the first was named Peleg, which means division,

for during his lifetime, the people of the world were divided into different language groups.

His brother's name was Jokten.

Jokten was the ancestor of Almadad, Shelef, Hazarmaveth, Jera.

Hadorim, Uzal, Dikla, Obol, Abimil, Sheba, and it goes on.

For nine chapters, it is mostly name after name after name after name.

And honestly, I struggle with these names. As you noticed, I don't know if I'm

saying any of them correct.

As they got translated from Hebrew into our English alphabet,

we can only make our best guesses.

And so they are names that we cannot pronounce. They are names of people that

lived 2,000, 3,000 years ago.

And so we ask ourselves, why are we reading this?

Again, this is a brick wall that people come to when we get to scripture.

And as we enter into our series about questions, this was a question that was

posed to me during a recent youth group time.

What is the deal with genealogies in the Bible? Do we need to pay attention to them?

Is there any value in them at all?

What's the deal with these genealogies?

And it's an excellent question. And this question was asked before we introduced

the series in the September newsletter and before I talked about it last week.

And so it just really prompted in me this idea of what other questions do we

have? What other questions regarding God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

What other questions regarding the Bible do we have?

Theology that we have. And so for the foreseeable future, I thank you for those

who submitted questions. We have at least two months worth of sermons to go

through on these questions.

If you have more, please, there is a poster board out there.

Just get a sticky note or just write on the poster board a question that you

have that you want answered.

Just like, what's the deal with these genealogies?

Because I fully believe that if we are engaging in spiritual growth towards

God, something we need to be allowing ourselves to do is to ask questions.

It's one of the best ways we learn.

And so before we engage in trying to decipher what the genealogies in the Bible

are about, I'd like to pray.

Lord God Almighty, we come before you today And we thank you for your word,

Even though there are some really difficult passages to get through Whether

it's the building of the tabernacle Whether it's the laws in Leviticus Or whether

it's the genealogies Name after name after name in Chronicles.

I just pray, Father, that you will help I praise you for your word And I pray

that you will give us understanding That you will give us the ability to really

understand understand and know you better as a result of these names.

Jesus, we pray this in your name. Amen. So to answer the question,

we're first going to go to a New Testament letter.

That letter is the book of 2 Timothy.

It is written from the apostle Paul to a man by the name of Timothy,

who is a follower of Jesus, who is being trained under Paul's tutelage.

Timothy has developed into a very successful leader in the church.

And Paul in this letter is really

warning him about the dangers of false teachings and false teachers.

And so this comes right on the heels.

What we're going to read comes right on the heels of Paul really telling him,

you got to be careful about who teaches and what they're teaching.

Examine them, put them to the test and make sure they're teaching what is right.

And so we come to 1 Timothy 3 in that light.

We're going to start in verse 14.

Paul telling Timothy these words, but you, Timothy, must remain faithful to

the things you have been taught.

You know they are true, for you know you can trust those who taught You have

been taught the Holy Scriptures from childhood,

and they have given you the wisdom to receive the salvation that comes by trusting in Christ Jesus.

Okay, the first thing Paul is telling Timothy here is there is importance upon scripture.

Now, when Paul is talking to Timothy, the New Testament is being written like

this is a letter in our New Testament.

And so it hasn't been solidified. It hasn't been what we call canonized.

It hasn't been put into a leather bound and given to every one of the disciples of their day.

What he's mostly referring to here is the Old Testament, what we call the Old

Testament, from Genesis all the way to Malachi.

These are the books that Paul, that are a part of the Jewish canon,

that Paul is saying, these works.

And so when we get to Leviticus, when we get to the building of the tabernacle

in Exodus, when we get to the genealogies,

we need to understand that this is what God wants us to do to bring us, Paul says,

to salvation in Jesus Christ.

Every one of them is on purpose and with the intent to bring us to faith in Christ Jesus.

That is a huge statement about what scripture is for.

But Paul goes on and mentions other things that scripture is for.

When he says, All scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what

is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives.

It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right.

God uses it to prepare and equip his people to do every good work.

So he goes on to say that all scripture is inspired by God.

And the literal word that Paul uses here in the Greek is God breathed.

Now, we don't have any other example of this word in ancient Greek literature

or even up until Paul's day.

Like it had never been used before.

And so what Paul was doing was coining a term.

He was putting two Greek words together, God breathed to help us to know that

these came from the mouth of God.

But yes, they were dictated to people, but they are inspired,

they are given by God himself.

And so, yes, this relates to what we read in Leviticus.

Yes, this relates to the genealogies. This relates to what Paul calls,

what we call the Old Testament, what Paul calls scripture.

All of these come from the mouth of God.

And he goes on to say some more things that scripture is useful for.

It is to teach us what is true. It is to make us realize what is wrong in our lives.

It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right.

He gives it to us to prepare us for every good work.

Now you may be asking yourselves, all right, maybe you are a researcher of your genealogies.

Maybe you know your family history really, really well, but that may,

and you might be thinking, all right, how can this prepare me for every good work?

How can knowing my past prepare me for everything that God has in store for me in the future?

How can just knowing this list of names of people that have been long since

forgotten and gone, how can they really impact my life? And that's an excellent, excellent question.

And we find the answer in three different ways to reason out,

first of all, why these are in Scripture, why these genealogies,

why these lists of names are there.

And it all goes back to, like Paul said, to teach us what is good, to show us what is bad.

Like these are the criteria Paul sees in Scripture.

Every part of Scripture. And so, we're going to go through several different

Scripture passages and try to determine what aspect these have on the first readers,

on those in Paul's day.

Were these really correcting them? Were these really helping them to live a

righteous life in their day and age.

And we're gonna start with a category that I titled Land Rights.

You see, when God brought the Israelites into the promised land,

he separated them by tribe.

He didn't say, just go and find land that you want. He said,

no, tribe of Manasseh, this is your land. And they gave a physical description of it.

Tribe of Simeon, this is your lot of land.

Then you deal with it. You give it out as you are bestowed.

And this was supposed to be a perpetual land for that tribe.

But it was supposed to remain this way for generation after generation after generation.

Even if you became so poor that you had to sell your land, God put in provisions

in his law that every 50th year,

the land got transferred from its owner back to the descendants of the person

who originally had that land.

This is what God set down. It's called the year of Jubilee, and this is what it meant.

And in talking about the year of Jubilee, God says this, but if the original

owner cannot afford to buy back the land, it will remain with the new owner

until the next year of Jubilee.

In the Jubilee year, every 50th year, the land must be returned to the original

owner so they can return to their family land.

And so they had to keep track of who your descendants were, about what land they had.

They had to keep track about this to obey the law of God.

This was training them up in righteousness so that they could obey what God wanted them to do.

We find this elsewhere throughout scripture in the book of Ruth.

Ruth and Naomi, mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law, they come back to the land

of Israel and they come back and they are complete, they are without land,

they are without property, they are so,

impoverished that they don't know what to do.

They find somebody who is a part of their family and this is what Boaz tells to Ruth.

But while it is true that I am one of your family redeemers,

there is another man who is more closely related to you than I am.

Stay here tonight and in the morning I will talk to him.

If he is willing to redeem you very well, let him marry you.

But if he is not willing, then as surely as the Lord lives, I will redeem you myself.

And so he's like, yeah, I not only know who you are and you're who your family

are, but I know how far out I am.

Whether I'm the second cousin to your dead husband or whether I am the person

who has the first rights to redeem this property for and to take care of you

and to raise up children for your dead husband.

This is what they knew. It was ingrained in their society and they kept really

detailed records because of it.

It was critically important to them in obeying God.

And really following after what he handed down to them.

And so these genealogies are a list to help us to understand that they took

these commandments of God very seriously.

The land rights issue was critically important.

And there's one more, it's in Jeremiah chapter 32.

Jeremiah 32 · chapter mention

This is when Jerusalem is about ready to fall into the hands of the Babylonians.

God tells this to Jeremiah, your cousin Hanamel, son of Shalom,

will come and say to you, buy my field at Anathoth.

By law, you have right to buy it before it is offered to anyone else.

Jeremiah was in prison at this time, and yet they were following the customs of their day.

They were following what God had handed down to them that in the year of Jubilee,

it goes back to the ancestors' descendants.

It goes back to them. And so they had to keep track of these lists.

One other reason they had to keep track of these lists is because in order to

obey God about the priesthood,

they really had to know who descended from Aaron and they had to keep really

detailed lists about that.

Priests were somebody who ministered in the temple. They were the people who burned the incense.

They are the people who made the sacrifices of the animals.

This was a ritual done, but it had to be done by a descendant of Aaron.

And we find this in Exodus 40, 15, when God tells to Moses, anoint them as you did their father.

So Aaron is the father and the four sons of Aaron are the ones that are them here.

So they, Aaron's four sons, may also serve me as priests.

With their anointing, Aaron's descendants are set apart for the priesthood forever,

from generation to generation.

So in order to be a priest, in order to work in a church, you had to prove your ancestry.

You had to prove whether or not you were from the tribe of Levi or whether or

not you were from specifically the line of Aaron.

If you were going to be a priest, you had to prove this.

Because after the exile, when they came back to Jerusalem, and Ezra the priest

was leading the Israelites at this time, this is what Ezra reports.

Three families of priests, Hobeiah, Hakuz, and Barzillai, also returned.

They searched for their names in the genealogical records, but they were not found.

So they were disqualified from serving as priests.

Again, this was to train them up, to help them to know this is what we are supposed

to do, to live the way that God has told us to live.

We got to keep track of our ancestry in order to follow after God.

Train me up in righteousness and send me out and do what God wants to do.

And these are the reasons these lists of genealogies are in there.

They were critically, critically important to help Israel function the way God

intended and instructed them to be.

But there's still one question we need to answer.

Why in the world would you and I care about these names that we can't pronounce?

Why in the world would we read through nine chapters in 1 Chronicles of just

name after name after name?

And I think it's what Paul says to Timothy as the first reason that he needs to obey Scripture.

When Paul says to him, they have given you the wisdom, Scripture has given you

the wisdom to receive the salvation that comes by trusting in Christ Jesus.

Because as important as the land was to the Israelites and as important as the

priests and to keep them from the line of Aaron, there was one more thing that

was so important to the Israelites.

And that is what we call the Davidic covenant.

And it's found in 2 Samuel chapter 7.

2 Samuel 7 · chapter mention

And this is God talking to Nathan the prophet. And Nathan is supposed to relay this to King David.

But my favor will not be taken from him, David, as I took it from Saul,

the first king of Israel, whom I removed from your sight.

Your house and your kingdom will continue before me for all time,

and your throne will be secure forever.

You see, God made David a promise.

And this promise is that a descendant of David would rule and reign on the throne forever.

And we find fulfillment of this in the New Testament, in Jesus Christ.

But this isn't the only place in the Old Testament we find it.

You see, all of the prophets, they really relied heavily upon this promise, this covenant of God.

And in Isaiah chapter 11, it says this, Out of the stump of David's family will

Isaiah 11 · chapter mention

grow a shoot, yes, a new branch bearing fruit from the old root.

And the spirit of the Lord will rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding,

the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

He will delight in obeying the Lord.

He will not judge by appearance nor make a decision based on hearsay.

He will give justice to the poor and make fair decisions for the exploited.

The earth will shake at the force of his word and one breath from his mouth

will destroy the wicked.

And we could do several other examples of the prophets saying from the branch,

from the stump of the tree of David, from David's line, God will fulfill this covenant promise.

The first words of our New Testament are these.

This is the genealogy of Jesus, the Messiah or Christ, son of Abraham, the son of David.

Matthew chapter one, verse one, is telling us, guys, if you wanna know if this

guy's the real deal, just look at his genealogy and remember what's happened in the old covenant.

And so how I think this helps us today really understand and know who Jesus

Christ is, is it starts back with the first human being, with Adam.

And in the garden of Eden, And after Adam and Eve had taken of the fruit of

the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they had consumed it and they had

hid in the bushes because they were afraid.

God set down a few sentences, a few judgments.

And he said these words to Eve, the first woman.

Your descendant, someone coming from your line will stamp the head of the serpent,

which is the physical representation of evil in the first chapters of Genesis.

It will stamp out evil, God tells you.

But the serpent will have a mortal wound, will inflict a mortal wound upon the

heel of your descendant.

Someone from Eve is going to come and is going to take care of evil for us forever.

When we get to Genesis chapter four, the next chapter, there's the story of

Cain killing his brother Abel and Adam and Eve's descendants,

going the righteous line from Adam and Eve, Abel being wiped off the earth.

But at the end of chapter four, it says that Adam knew his wife and Eve gave

birth to a son and she named him Seth.

And the righteous line comes from her.

It's very particular that it says descendant, a seed, if you use a different

translation. the seed that is promised in Genesis 3 to stamp out evil is found in Seth.

You follow Seth and his line, you get to a guy by the name of Abraham.

And God made three promises to Abraham. One is that his descendant will be a

blessing for the whole entire world.

You go from Abraham and you get to a guy by the name of Judah.

Judah's father prophecies over

him that the scepter, the king's royal rule will not depart from Judah.

You follow Judah and you go all the way to David.

We've already talked about what God told to David, the second king of Israel.

You follow David's line and you finally get to Jesus.

And if you want to know, if you want evidence for the salvation of Jesus Christ,

that he offers us, that he gives to us, it is found in the genealogies and the promises of God.

And this is why it's important. And this is why it's in what we call our sacred

texts, our scriptures, the Holy Bible, because it all points to Jesus.

Yes, there are names in here that you cannot understand. And yes,

if you have salvation in Jesus's name and you don't need this proof for yourself,

it does seem a little mundane to spend 45 minutes reading name after name,

after name, after name, after name.

I'm going to leave it up to you whether or not you should read it.

I really want you to know that it's in there for a purpose. And that purpose

is exactly what Paul said to Timothy.

You have been taught these holy scriptures from childhood, and they have given

you the wisdom to receive the salvation that comes by trusting in Jesus Christ.

They are not throwaway names, but they are names that are meant to lead us to Jesus Christ.

They are names that are meant to help us to say, wow, they took these seriously.

They took these promises of God seriously and they traced them all the way to Jesus.

They're there for purpose and intent. And again, if you have salvation in Jesus's

name, if you know him and if you really authentically follow him,

I'm not telling you you have to read them,

but I am telling you that they're there on purpose so that you can know that

Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.

And ultimately, all of Scripture points to that.

All of Scripture helps us to understand that Jesus is the one we need to submit

to, we need to surrender.

Jesus' death on the cross is the most important event in human history,

and His resurrection from the dead is very, very close as the second.

And everything we do needs to revolve around that. Let's pray.

Lord God Almighty, we thank you for even the most complex issues that you bring before us today.

Ultimately, Father, we praise you for your son, Jesus Christ,

and how scripture points to him and helps us to understand how he fits into

salvation history by helping us trace his lineage back through David,

back through Abraham, back through Judah.

God, we praise you and we thank you.

Please help us to know the salvation that you offer through the death and burial of Jesus,

and the hope that you offer by his resurrection from the dead.

Jesus, we lay this at your feet. Amen.

Thank you again for joining us in our discussion of the importance of the genealogies in the Bible.

The hope of these episodes is to promote questions in and amongst followers of Jesus.

It is good to ask questions. Questions show you want to learn.

Be curious and always ask questions.

In our next episode, we will look at what it means to pray in Jesus' name.

Have a great week. Amen.