What dull reading! Those names are impossible to follow, aren’t they? But each one represents a soul treasured by God. One day our names will be as meaningless to anyone who might read about us; but we will not be forgotten by the One who treasures each of us!
The books of I and II Chronicles were written in a time far distant from the beginning of the kingdom of Israel about which we are currently reading. They were written after the end of that kingdom, after Israel was destroyed as a nation and its people punished with exile. The Chronicles were written on the return of the exiles to their homeland.
The purpose of repeating these genealogies at the beginning of Chronicles was to establish and record the lineage of the families of God’s chosen people returning from exile. This would have been important to establish things like who should serve the nation as priests and Levites, as High Priest. They would also have been interested in who the rightful king should be, if they were ever fortunate enough to be an autonomous kingdom again. Where should that record start? Obviously, at the very beginning!
Imagine what happened to the records of the nation whose capital city was burned to the ground: its records would have been destroyed. That has important consequences for the One who has made a promise the fulfillment of which those records could prove, if they had only been preserved. We may not enjoy these genealogies, but they are reminders of God’s faithfulness to Adam and Eve and all their descendants to raise up a son of Eve to crush Satan’s head as He promised. They are reminders of God’s faithfulness to fulfill His promise to Abraham that through him all nations of the earth would be blessed. They are reminders of God’s faithfulness to His promise that David’s throne would be established forever. To a nation returning from exile following God’s punishment, uncertain whether there existed any longer a covenant relationship between them and God, these genealogies were precious. We will see them yet one more time in Scripture – in the New Testament, where they will remind us of all of these promises and God’s faithfulness to them. So even though we don’t enjoy them, we can rejoice in the reality they represent!
These genealogies are pretty quick reading for me.