We begin a new series of sermons this evening in 1 Chronicles chapter one. And tonight's scripture reading is awkward in more than one way. I'm going to be reading from verse one in chapter one to the end of verse two in chapter two. which kind of ends right in the middle of a paragraph in chapter two. I trust you'll understand why I've chosen that demarcation as we get into the sermon itself. So I'm not a Hebraist. So I ask your indulgence as I read these names. I will probably get maybe 20% of them correct, so bear with me. I'll do my best, however. Let's give our attention now to the reading of God's inerrant, infallible, and most holy word. Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalal, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The sons of Japheth, Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshach, and Tyrus. The sons of Gomer, Ashkenaz, Rifath, and Togar-Ma, the sons of Javen, Elisha, Tarshish, Kittim, and Rodanim. The sons of Ham, Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan. The sons of Cush, Seba, Havalah, Sabta, Rahama, and Sabtika. The sons of Rahama, Sheba, and Dedan. Cush fathered Nimrod. He was the first on earth to be a mighty man. Egypt fathered Ludim, Anamim, Leihabim, Naftuhim, Pathrusim, Kasluhim, from whom the Philistines came, and Kathurim. Canaan fathered Sidon, his firstborn, and Heth. And the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, the Archites, the Sinites, the Arvidites, the Zemurites, and the Hamathites, the sons of Shem, Elam, Asher, Arpachshad, Lud, and Aram, and the sons of Aram, Uz, Hul, Gether, and Meshach, Arpachshad, Arpakhshad fathered Shayla, and Shayla fathered Eber. To Eber were born two sons. The name of the one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided. And his brother's name was Joktan. Joktan fathered Almadad, Selph-Seleph, Hazra-Maveth, Jera, Hadaram, Azel, Dikla, Obel, Abimael, Sheba, Ofer, Havalah, and Jobab. All these were the sons of Joktan. Shem, Arpachshed, Shelah, Iber, Peleg, Ru, Serug, Nehor, Terah, Abram, that is Abraham. The sons of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael. These are their genealogies, the firstborn of Ishmael, Nabeoth and Keter, Adbeel, Mibsem, Mishma, Duma, Masa, Hadad, Tima, Jetur, Nafish, and Kedema. These are the sons of Ishmael. The sons of Keturah, Abraham's concubine. Shebor, Zimram, Jokshon, Midan, Midian, Ishbek, and Shua. the sons of Jekshon, Sheba, and Dedan, the sons of Midian, Ephah, Epher, Hanak, Abadah, and Eldahah. All these were the descendants of Keturah. Abraham fathered Isaac, the sons of Isaac, Esau, and Israel, the sons of Esau, Eliphaz, Rehu, Jeush, Jalam, and Korah, The sons of Eliphaz, Timon, Omar, Zepho, Gatham, Canaz, and Timnah. Amalek, the sons of Reu, Nahaf, Zerah, Shammah, and Mizah. The sons of Seir, Lotan, Shabal, Zibion, Anah, Dishan, Azer, and Dishan. The sons of Lotan, Hori and Himam, and Lotan's sister was Timna. The sons of Shebel, Elvin, Manahath, Ebel, Shefo, and Onam. The sons of Zibion, Ai, and Anah. The sons of Anah, Dishan, the sons of Dishan, Hemdan, Eshban, Ithran and Cheron, the sons of Ezer, Bilhah, Zavan, and Akan, the sons of Dishan, Uz, and Aran. These are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom before any king reigned over the people of Israel. Bela, the son of Beor, the name of his city being Dinhabah. Bela died, and Jobab, the son of Zarah, of Basrah, reigned in his place. Jobab died, and Hosham of the land of the Temanites reigned in his place. Hasham died, and Hadad, the son of Badad, who defeated Midian in the country of Moab, reigned in his place, the name of his city being Avith. Heydad died, and Samlah of Mashraqah reigned in his place. Samlah died, and Sheol of Rehoboth on the Euphrates reigned in his place. Sheol died, and Belhanan, the son of Akbor, reigned in his place. Belhanan died, and Heydad reigned in his place, the name of his city being Pi. And his wife's name was Mahah. Tabel, the daughter of Matrid, the daughter of Mezahab, and Hadad died. The chiefs of Edom were Chiefs Tinna, Alva, Jethath, Ohelabama, Ela, Penan, Canaz, Taman, Mibzar, Magdiel, and Dairam. These are the chiefs of Edom. These are the sons of Israel, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulon, Dan, Joseph, Benjamin, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. This is the reading of God's word. When you think of meticulous kind of reading, what do you think of? Perhaps you think of the first nine chapters of the book of First Chronicles. It is difficult, meticulous reading to give your attention to. Our culture, in which we find ourselves, despises repetition. We don't like the things that are sort of static and boring. We like dynamism and change. We like a good storyline, something that is exciting and dramatic. We get virtually none of that in the first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles. And so we may be somewhat tempted to sort of gloss over this book, or at least this section of this book, and get to the so-called good stuff, where the drama and story is. After all, who wants to read a bunch of names, most of whom we do not know, if we know how to even pronounce them. We wanna get onto the action. The problem with these genealogies is that there's no action, there's no drama, there's no story here. But actually, in fact, that is wrong. Remember, what we have here, first of all, is scripture. It is God-breathed, Spirit-inspired, holy, inerrant, and infallible scripture. God put it there to give to us his people for a purpose, and it is not, he does not give it to us to bore us, but he put it there to reveal something to you and to me this evening that is very, very important. All these names are given for a purpose. It is indeed a collection of spiritual data that is put here for spiritual reasons. And while we may not be excited about these names, we need to approach these genealogies with the right mindset. That's what I hope to do in the sermon this evening. We're not going to get to anything particularly profound. I'm simply hoping to lay the groundwork for the rest of this series to set our minds aright on how to interpret and understand and to be built up in our faith by these lists of names. You see, while we today in America in the 21st century, as a culture might find stuff like this, writing like this boring, think with me about the Israelites of old. Those who lived in the second half of the first millennium of the before Christ period. They, the Israelites who lived in that time would not have been bored by this list of names. Quite on the contrary, they would have been quite excited, encouraged, and built up in their faith by these names. And my job this evening is to show you why. But we must put on a different mindset. if we are to approach this book. We must, as it were, step out from our cultural restrictions, step out of time, if you will, in our surroundings, and step into the time in which the Israelites lived when they first read this book. Because if we do so, we will find hidden therein great spiritual treasures. As we approach the text, it may be helpful to say a word about the author who wrote this. And in short, we do know that what we have here in both 1 Chronicles and 2 Chronicles is one book. 1 Chronicles and 2 Chronicles are not actually two different books. They are one book. In fact, most likely written by one author. We don't know who that author is. So I will simply refer to the writer of the Book of First Chronicles as the chronicler. But one thing that we do know about the chronicler is that he had a purpose. Under the inspiration of God, he had an agenda for writing these lists of names. So throughout the book, we must ask ourselves, why are these names here? Why is this information given? Why is other information not given? What is the author's purpose? What is his reason for writing what we have before us this evening? Now, again, by way of contrast, we modern day Americans tend to be somewhat ahistorical. That is to say, history. and tends to play a very minor role in our thinking. We are really good at looking where we are now and considering where we might be in the future, but we don't often think about where we have come from, what our background is, what our history is, our context that has come before us. That is to say, our identity seems more defined in terms of who we are and who we are becoming, not who we were. That is who we were in our society. Who were the people that we came from? What is the background of our lives as we find them today? We seem to care more about today than we do the past. The past seems irrelevant to us. But back in Israel's past, the people were more identified by where they came from rather than where they were going. Their identity was fed by their history and what their forefathers did before them. Now consider where Israel as a people, as God's people were in the 6th and 5th century BC. They are at the time in which they are returning from exile. You may remember the exile. You remember Daniel, right? Daniel was in exile. You remember what happened to the people of Israel because of their disobedience. They were taken out of their land and brought into a foreign land. But now, at the time in which this book is given to the people of Israel, they are returning to the land to rebuild everything that was destroyed. To rebuild their temple, to rebuild their land, their society, their culture, their everything. Dragged away as they were by the Babylonians and the Assyrians. They were dispersed among the nations. And their identity had become obscured. It had become confused. Who are we, after all? They were living as slaves. in a land not their own. Everything looks so very different to them in the foreign land. They spoke a different language among the people that they lived among. They lived among the people who had a very different worldview, a very different way of doing things, a very different way of seeing things. Israel in exile was kind of like who we are as Christians in the church. as we find ourselves in the midst of a very dark world, a wicked and perverse generation. We find ourselves as strangers here on earth, don't we? As we converse and we interact with the people around us, they think very differently than we do. They live very differently than we do. That was Israel living in and among the pagans in the midst of exile. Can you imagine? their confusion, their confused mind of state or state of mind as they return back now to the promised land. They've been around these pagans for so long. And don't think for a moment that the pagan society in which they lived wasn't infringing itself upon their thinking and changing their thinking. But now they're coming back to the promised land. They're being taken out of the wicked and perverse generation. But the question is now, who are we supposed to be? We know what the Babylonians are like. We got to know them pretty well. Maybe we even became comfortable being among them. But what do we do now? What is the significance of this land? Why are we returning here? We set up shop in Babylon and Assyria. Who are we? Where did we come from? So we can summarize the purpose of the book of 1st and 2nd Chronicles in this way. The purpose for which 1st and 2nd Chronicles is given to the people of God is to direct them. in the work of restoration, in restoring the kingdom in the period of time after their exile. Now, the first step to doing that would be to help the people of Israel, give them some context. Where have they come from? What's their past? They have to rebuild the kingdom of Israel, but why? What is this kingdom? What is the temple? Why does it need to be rebuilt? And so the chronicler begins and gives the people of Israel a history lesson, a history lesson and identity formation through genealogies, in part through genealogies. If the people of Israel want to know where they came from, The chronicler is gonna tell them exactly where they came from, and he's gonna go all the way back to the beginning. Let's begin with the very first man that God made covenant with. If you look, Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, so forth and so on. And just these first couple of verses, all the way down to verse four, you realize that the chronicler has just covered the first nine chapters of the book of Genesis. It's like the book of Genesis, but condensed, entering in through the window of people's names. Notice the way that the book begins, with a name, a single name, Adam, or man. There's no introduction to the book of 1 Chronicles. There's no warm-up, if you will. There's no prologue. There's no preface. Get this, in these opening verses, there aren't even any verbs. There's no adjectives. There's not even an article, definite or indefinite. The book begins with a list of proper nouns. And in 13 words, verses one through four, the chronicler covers the history of humankind from creation all the way up to the flood. This is one efficient storyteller. Although to be sure, we are getting purposely, I might add, a very abridged edition of that history. You see, giving these names and giving them briefly like this is more than enough for making the essential leap which the author here is intending to make. For notice the way he leaps, he skips, he jumps through the history of redemption that is given in the law, in the Torah in this first chapter. He gives us all very bare bones information. He's clearly getting his information from the Torah, from the book of Genesis. But he leaves out all of the narrative. He leaves out all the dialogue. He leaves out all the amount of years that each of these people lived and any other information that might get in the way of attaining his goal in the first section of the book. But what's his goal? Now I want you to look at the end of the section that I read, verses one through two of chapter two. These are the sons of Israel. And then he names all 12. His goal is to clearly connect, in a very brief form, the people of Israel to the first man, Adam. And he hops, he skips, he jumps through the history of redemption. And as that story is contained in the book of Genesis, he finally brings them now up to this point. He leads them to the people of Israel, the chosen people, the people that God has chosen, not because there was anything choose worthy about them, but simply out of his sovereign grace. The author in verses 35 to 54 gives an account of Edom's history of well, that is, the people of Esau, who's Jacob's brother. Now Jacob, of course, was later renamed as Israel. So it's purposeful here, it's very important here for the chronicler to lay out here this relationship between Esau and Jacob. And these two peoples, the peoples of Israel and the people of Esau, Because the tensions between these two neighboring nations was very high as it was in the day when Jacob and Esau themselves lived. But the connection is clear. And the message to post-exilic Israel is clear. Why does he give all these names? He gives all these names to explain to these returning exiles, you are God's people. From the beginning, God had you in mind. Do you see the way in which God's providence has unfolded through the history of redemption to bring you from Adam to now this point in this place? From Adam to Jacob, God unfolded a history. He unfolded it providentially in order to bring you about. You are not like the other nations. You are the special people of God. That's the agenda. And you can imagine how important that is to a nation which has somewhat become perhaps assimilated into the pagan cultures of the exile. And now there's a reorientation that's going on. You're not the pagan nations. You are the people of God. He unfolded this history from Adam to Noah, to Abraham, to Isaac, eventually to the people of Jacob. Now surely the stories of some of these great men of faith such as Noah and Abraham would have been recalled in the minds of Israel. Surely they did not forget in exile completely who these people were. And what the chronicler here is doing is reminding them who they are simply by mentioning their names. And when they mention these names, he reminds them, as he connects them all together to the people of Israel, that you are the children of Noah. You are the offspring of Abraham. You are Israel, God's chosen people. You can imagine how this may be an encouragement to the restoring generation that returned to the land. There are rebuilding people, a people who were once dispersed, but now have returned to their homelands and are seeking to restore for themselves something of the previous glory. Our author is telling them, in effect, be of good courage, be of good cheer. You are God's special people. You are a peculiar nation. You are a holy priesthood. He, God, built you once before and he will build you again. What an encouragement to the people of God that the Lord has not forsaken them. Now, What's that got to do with us who are here this evening? They had a very clear historical and genealogical connection to Israel and to Abraham and to Isaac and all the rest, but how does that help us, any? How can that be a help to you? How can that be a help to me, we, the church? After all, we don't share this genealogy. We're not Jews, generally speaking, we're Gentiles. We're more likely blood descendants of Noah's wicked son, Ham, than we are descendants of Noah. You see, and this is what the New Testament teaches us, that believers in the Lord Jesus Christ by nature are not a people. According to the flesh, we have no inheritance. We have no promises from God. In the flesh, we are far off from God. We are children of darkness. We have no real meaningful identity with the God of the covenant. But you see, things have drastically changed. For the ultimate and the perfect Israelite has come. The great and awesome restoration of the kingdom has already occurred. For the king of that kingdom has arrived. He has restored his people. You see, in Jesus Christ, all the nations have come into his body, into his identity as the true Israel. Those who were once not a people, by the Spirit of the living God working faith in the hearts of sinners, have become the people of God. Those who were once sinners of the Gentiles have now been justified by faith in Jesus Christ. For once you were far off, but now, although you were once sons of Ham, you have now been made to draw near by the blood of Jesus. You see, in Christ, you have been transferred from the line of Ham to the line of Shem, Abraham, Isaac, and Israel. By faith in the true Israelite, you have become an Israelite. You have been made the people of God. And what is really cool is that this genealogy is now your genealogy. This history is now your history. The identity of these people is now your identity. You share it with them in and through Jesus Christ. And now you can say with all the saints that have gone before you, Abraham is my father, not by blood. but by blood bought sovereign grace. You can now say, Isaac is my father. You can say, Joseph is my father. And thus 5th century BC, Israel's encouragement becomes your encouragement. God has laid out a whole history for you. He has built his kingdom one generation at a time. He has not forsaken his kingdom. He is ever faithful and he will never forsake his kingdom. He will always be faithful to you, his church. He will never turn from his promises. He will never leave you orphans, but he will work through you and he will work in you. He will work grace upon grace for you are his peculiar people. You are unto him a holy nation. You are unto him a royal priesthood. And that is why we can stand assured on the promises of God that he will build his church. And he will build his church and use human means to do so. Even humans like us. we are called then in response to be faithful. We need to pray for his grace that he would make us faithful, that we would glorify him in us and through us as we stand assured that we are the people of God. Amen.