Genealogies

The long genealogies in the Bible are often belittled because of the seemingly endless lists of ancient, difficult to pronounce names, often separated only by one or two other words. One of these words is begat in the King James Version. The term begat can mean “was the father of,” but it can also be translated as “was the ancestor of,” the difference being that one’s father directly passes his characteristics and ideas to his children whereas an ancestor passes the same things on indirectly. Thus, when the Bible presents us with these long genealogies, it is presenting us with not just a list of who fathered whom, but an account of the type of family the people in question came from. We are given a glimpse into the way God has worked through a person’s family history.

In the case of the genealogy of Jesus, recorded for us in Matthew 1:1-17, we are witness to his ancestry for at least three different reasons. First, it proves beyond any doubt that Jesus is descended from Abraham and from David, of whom God promised to make a great nation. Secondly, it shows that Jesus was pleased to become one of us, being born of sinful man in order to do God’s work of redemption on earth. Lastly, it reveals to us how God has worked and, perhaps more importantly, through whom God has worked in order to save mankind.

Not all of the people in Jesus ancestry through whom God worked were “heroes of faith,” as my Life Application Study Bible puts it. There were plenty of heroes, but there were also plenty of individuals of questionable nature as well as many individuals of a very ordinary nature. The message we should receive from this list of individuals who begat our precious Lord Jesus—indeed which we should get from every genealogical list in the Bible—is that God works through all kinds of people to bring about His purpose of salvation. He will use anyone, regardless of their spiritual condition, to work His good work. He wants to use us, too, regardless of the fame or infamy of our ancestors, regardless of the united or broken families we come from, regardless of the pride or shame of our own actions and how they reflect on our ancestors and how they affect those that will come after us. He has chosen to save us and there is no reason for us not to receive Jesus Christ, descended from Heaven, born of sinful man, obedient to the point of death, resurrected and ascended into Heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father, as our savior.

The Way Our Prayers Should Sound

My daughter has learned the Lord’s Prayer well enough that sometimes I allow her to lead when we say our prayers before bed. Usually when we pray, I say a line of prayer and have her repeat what I say, but when she leads the Lord’s Prayer, our roles are reversed. The other night, when she stumbled over the words “…and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us…” I repeated the words as they should have sounded, but did not call attention to her mistake. I suddenly realized that what I had done for her was exactly what Jesus does for us when we pray.

How often do we sit down to pray and don’t know where to begin? How often do we become distracted as intrusive thoughts interrupt our prayers? How often do we wonder if we’re communicating ourselves well enough for God to understand? But we needn’t worry over these things. For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus… (1 Timothy 2:5) Through Christ, all that we are that is not in accordance to God’s will is made perfect and holy. That includes our prayers. When our praises lack polish and elegance, when we forget to be thankful for His faithful providence, when we ask more for ourselves than for those who are truly in need, when our words are jumbled or mumbled, we can rest knowing that through Christ everything we put into our prayers, no matter how imperfect, is glorified.

Great Reassurance

God is more concerned with our spiritual growth than our comfort. To one who loves comfort, this statement from the Sunday School curriculum I taught this year at my church might sound harsh. But it is actually greatly reassuring. It means that even if we are uncomfortable- because of physical or emotional suffering, social situations, etc. - we can rest assured that through our discomfort, God will help us to grow stronger spiritually. In fact, it means that we can be assured that the discomfort we experience is the will of God; we need not wonder if we suffer wrongly or if we are suffering for some transgression or if our suffering will eventually overwhelm us and obliterate us. We can feel confident knowing that the source of our suffering is not us but the holy will of God.

So, can we say that our discomfort is actually a good thing? We are inclined not to while we are experiencing discomfort, but how often do we look back at what we have suffered and realize that it was not so bad? When we know the outcome of our discomfort, what we have experienced doesn’t seem quite as harsh as it did while we were in the midst of it. But we don’t need “20/20 hindsight” to believe that there is a good purpose behind that which we suffer through. Instead, we have God’s promise in Jeremiah 32:40-41:

I will make an everlasting covenant with them, never to draw back from doing good to them; and I will put the fear of me in their hearts, so that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing good to them, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul.

We can say our discomfort is a good thing because we have God’s promise to always do good to us. We do not have to conclude that we suffer needlessly or wrongly if the reasons for our suffering elude us. All we need to understand is that our God does not delight in tearing us down or crushing us beyond repair, but in saving us.