Chronicles starts out with a bang, doesn't it? Kidding :) It is tough going slogging through all those lists in the first 9 chapters of Chronicles (so it's nice that RGS spaces them out over several days). The genealogies is helpful because they give us a review and overview of the "big story" so far in the Bible - Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and all of his sons. There are also glimpses of the unusual twists and turns that the story has taken - sometimes the line takes a very untraditional twist. Whereas we would expect the line to continue after Jacob with Reuben, his firstborn, instead it goes through the fourth-born son, Judah. All 3 of Judah's son born by his wife die, so the line continues on through the child Judah has with his *daughter-in-law* Tamar. Again, we see that God does not insist upon a perfect, proper, pure genealogy; he accomplishes his work despite and even through the messiness of human behavior and relationships. At the beginning of Chronicles, the concern here is to trace the genealogical line from Adam to David. As Christians, this takes on added significance, because we will see the gospel writers using genealogies to show how that same line eventually leads to Jesus.
The story of David is told in two different places in the Old Testament. We began reading about it in Samuel, but now we are also reading it on a parallel track in Chronicles. Whereas Samuel gives that full picture of David I described earlier, Chronicles does not mention the sin, the brokenness, the mistakes in David's life. It is a more idealized picture of David as the Messianic king. It's therefore important to read both books in order to get a fuller portrait of David.
If you want to learn more about Chronicles, I just discovered that the introductions to each book of the Bible in the NIV study Bible are available online for free. Here is the one on 1 Chronicles.
(title of this blog post is a take on Andy Samberg's "Lazy Sunday" video on SNL.)
Love the SNL reference!
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