1 Chronicles 1-9: Hope Through Identity

Chapters

• 0:22 New Season And Theme
• 1:03 Recapping Kingdom And Exile
• 2:45 Why 1 Chronicles Matters
• 3:42 How To Read Genealogies
• 5:20 From Adam To Abraham
• 7:14 Judah’s Broken Line To David
• 10:52 Jabez’s Bold Prayer
• 12:33 Simeon’s Past And Place
• 14:17 War, Trust, And The Half Tribes
• 17:01 Levites, Worship, And Cities
• 18:27 Saul And Benjamin’s Line
• 19:23 Genealogy As Identity And Hope
• 20:35 Resettling Jerusalem And Final Takeaway

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:11

Hey, welcome back to the Outloud Bible Project Podcast. This is Mike. Today we not only start a new book, we not only start a new section of the Bible, but we're starting a whole new season here on the podcast. As we've been going through the Bible, if you've been with me for uh a good chunk of the last three years, you'll know that we're not necessarily going in any particular order. It's certainly not as they appear in the Bible. It's not alphabetically, it's not even really chronologically most of the time. Uh we're going through the Bible just kind of topically, taking sections of the Bible that all support a similar theme, in my opinion, that uh we can use to just kind of immerse ourselves in that mindset for a while as we do that. So we just came out of our season of building a kingdom, where we went through Matthew, where Jesus talked about God's kingdom, and we went through some of Paul's letters to his proteges, like Timothy and Titus and talking to Philemon and the book of Hebrews and Peter's letters, all talking about, hey, God wants to establish his kingdom on earth. Here's some examples of what to do, and here's some instructions about how to do it. And uh really good, really interesting season seeing those books of the New Testament together. And today we're gonna start going back to the Old Testament to start a new season called Homecoming. Now, if you remember, episodes 180 through 236 of the podcast was the season called Being God's People. We saw the establishment of God's people in the Promised Land and their progression to wanting a king, and then seeing how those kings proceeded to lead God's people astray, and it resulted in the kingdom being divided, and it resulted ultimately in their exile. The northern kingdom exiled to Assyria, the southern kingdom being exiled to Babylon, and that was their punishment for straying from being God's people. And we also then in the following season looked at the prophets, the Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, the major prophets with major messages to God's people predicting the exile. Sure enough, they didn't heed the warnings, they didn't change their ways, and the exile happened as God said it would. This season is going to mirror that, but it's not going to be exactly the same thing. We're going to be starting in 1 Chronicles, which is similar to 1 Kings, except 1 Chronicles focuses specifically on the kings of Judah or the Southern Kingdom. Another difference between 1 Kings and 1 Chronicles seems to be their purpose. 1 Kings seemed to be written to the Exiles during the exile as an explanation of how they got there. Saying, hey, look, this is what the kings led you through. This is what your kings did to the nation. 1 Chronicles was written a little bit later, and it seems like its purpose is to provide a new sense of hope and identity for the Israelite community post-exile, highlighting their history and the promises of a future messianic kingdom to look forward to. So the audience here is Jews returning from exile who need some encouragement, frankly, and a connection to their past. For this reason, 1 Chronicles does start with a lengthy genealogy, okay? And we've we've come across genealogies before, as we've been reading in the podcast. Some of them we read through because, hey, you know what? There's important figures along the way. But frankly, today in 1 Chronicles 1 through 9, there's just a lot of names. Most we've never heard of, most we don't know anything more about. And frankly, it doesn't make for very good reading, and certainly not for very good listening in your car or at work. So here's what we're gonna do. It would be fine if you want to go open it up and read it for yourself. As you find yourself reading genealogies, it's easy to kind of just skim over names and and lists of sons and who begat who, and just kind of zoom in on some of the times where the narrative kicks in to just explain a little bit of a story, or here's a fun fact about this person. And so I think that's a fine way to read these genealogies, and that's what I'm gonna do today. If you'll allow me, I'm gonna do the skimming for you. So we're going to cover the first nine chapters of First Chronicles in the New English translation, and I'll just do some summarizing for you if that's cool. And when we get to a part that is like, oh, here's an interesting fact or interesting story here, we'll zoom in, I'll read it, and we'll go through this together. So hopefully this spares you probably three episodes worth of a bunch of names and an occasional story to condense it into something that we actually can really get a good takeaway from, uh, which we can talk about at the end here. So without any further ado, here is a summary of 1 Chronicles 1 through 9. Now it starts off with the very beginning of humanity. Adam, number one. Adam, Seth, Enosh. And that's where the names start to kind of drift off into names of like, oh wait, I forgot, I don't even know who that person is. Uh, but Enoch shows up, Methuselah, Lamech, there's Noah. And Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Now, Japheth, of course, had sons. Ham had sons. One of them was named Cush, and Cush had sons. One of Cush's sons was named Nimrod. It says in verse 10, Nimrod established himself as a mighty warrior on earth. And there are some scholars who believe that Nimrod was just a legendary, mythic, almost giant of a man who did not fight the Lord's battles. In fact, he wreaked havoc on the earth with his might and just established legendary myths surrounding some of his uh mighty warrior activities. Uh, some people believe, but that's the son of Cush, the son of Ham, the son of Noah. Uh but he goes on to talk about Shem's descendants, and then from Shem's line, that's where we see Nahor, Terah, and Abram, who God renamed to Abraham. And the sons of Abraham, of course, are Isaac and Ishmael. Now Ishmael had many descendants, like God promised, he was going to make a great nation out of Ishmael as well. Many of these names we're not familiar with, but they have gone on to become the Arab nation that we know today. Of course, millions and millions and millions of people. Isaac's descendants, on the other hand, were more familiar with in the biblical narrative. The sons of Isaac were Esau and Israel, or Jacob, who was named Israel. Esau had sons and had a whole family tree, and they became a lot of the warring neighbors to Israel as Israel's history developed. But in chapter two, we see Israel's descendants, and these are the twelve sons of Jacob, Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Dan, Joseph, and Benjamin, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. It's this family, this group of twelve sons of Jacob, that really began to flourish and where we really get to see Israel become a nation. Of course, the problem was they were in Egypt growing in numbers. You can see that happen in the last part of the book of Genesis through the story of Joseph, where we start to see that develop. And so they became a great nation, and of course, they become so great that the Pharaoh of Egypt enslaves them, and then thus begins the story of the Exodus, if you want to go back and read that. That is because these twelve sons of Jacob grew in number as they were living in Egypt at the time. But the blessings of the Lord were not because they were good sons with good families who acted righteously. In fact, Reuben, although he was the firstborn here, his descendants are not listed here, I think, because he slept with his father's concubine, and his father took away his firstborn birthright and gave it to Joseph. So there's that. And so the next in line then would be Judah. And Judah, I mean, there's a lot of great figures from Judah, and there's a lot of not great figures from the line of Judah. We don't have to get very far into it to recognize in verse 3 here, the sons of Judah were Ur, Onan, and Sheila. These three were born to him by Bathshua, a Canaanite woman. Ur, Judah's firstborn, displeased the Lord, so the Lord killed him. So there's that. Also his other son Onan is the story is not mentioned here, but it does mention in the book of Genesis that Onan was killed by the Lord for not fulfilling his obligation to help perpetuate the family line. Okay, so Judah's family tree is not off to a very good start. Verse 4, Tamar, Judah's daughter-in-law, bore to him Perez and Zerah. This family is not okay. A few generations down from that, we see Achan. And if you read the story of Joshua, you're familiar with Achan. He's the one who it says in verse 7 brought the disaster on Israel when he stole what was devoted to God. That's from Jericho. God said, No, everything in Jericho is mine. You need to give it all to me. And Achan was like, Yeah, but there's so much of it, maybe I want some. And he kept it, and he died. This is Judah. This is the line of Judah. Now, fortunately, we do have a good thread in the line of Judah. We have one of his descendants named Ram. Ram was the father of Aminadab. I'm reading in verse 10. Aminadab was the father of Nashan, the tribal chief of Judah. Nashan was the father of Salma, Salma was the father of Boaz, and that can ring a bell from the story of Ruth. Boaz married Ruth, who was not an Israelite, and grafted her into this really wonderful line of the line of Judah. Boaz, with his wife Ruth, was the father of Obed, and Obed was the father of Jesse, and Jesse had a number of sons, one of whom was named David. Yes, that David. In chapter 3 in 1 Chronicles, then it leads us through David's line of descendants. He had a number of sons. The most famous was, well, the one who ended up becoming king after him, Solomon. And Solomon had many descendants. I would imagine after having like 700 wives and 300 concubines, you would have quite the family tree. Elsewhere in the line of Judah, we do find another interesting story here in 1 Chronicles 4, verse 9. Right here in the middle of a genealogy, it says Jabez was more respected than his brothers. His mother had named him Jabez, for she said, I experienced pain when I gave birth to him. Jabez called out to the God of Israel, If only you would greatly bless me and expand my territory, may your hand be with me, keep me from harm so that I might not endure pain. And God answered his prayer. And then it goes on with more genealogy. Caleb, the brother of Shunah, was the father of Mahir, blah blah blah blah blah. Isn't that a fascinating story? It's so fascinating that in fact a book was written about it uh decades ago at this point, The Prayer of Jabez. And that can go into more detail in that story, but what a great example of a man just with faith praying to God that God would bless him. Now, look, we don't get to just pray, hey God, would you make me rich and famous and give me lots of land and a big home and then and keep me from harm and may I never experience pain or disease or anything and and just have God bless you. Like that's not that's not the point. But recognizing that all of those things are blessings that do come from God, and being bold enough to ask God for those things, hey, that's not a bad start. And that's the example of Jabez. So hey, I'm sure there's more discussion to be had there. But that's where this story of Jabez comes in. You you blink, you miss it, and we're moving on through uh the rest of 1 Chronicles chapter 4, where we see the rest of Judah's descendants. Simeon, remember, we're going through ultimately the the twelve tribes genealogies. So when we finish one son, one tribe, we go back to picket the next son and go through his tribe and his genealogy. So uh with Simeon, there's a story here that said that uh their extended families increased greatly in numbers, and they went to the entrance of Ghedor to the east of the valley, looking for pasture for their sheep. They found fertile and rich pasture. The land was very broad, undisturbed, and peaceful. Indeed, some Hamites had been living there before that. The men whose names are listed came during the time of King Hezekiah of Judah and attacked the Hamite settlements, as well as the Munites they discovered there, and they wiped them out, as can be seen to this very day. They dispossessed them, for they found pasture for their sheep there. Five hundred men of Simeon, led by Palatea, Neriah, Raphael, and Uzael, the sons of Ishi, went to the hill country of Sair and defeated the rest of the Amalekite refugees. They live there to this very day. Now remember, this was written to the exiles who are coming back to their home and want to find some sort of identity, some sort of connection to their past. So for the sons of Simeon, who are of this family line, they're like, oh, that is why we have this land. Oh man, one of my relatives was one of the heroes who took over this land for us and got rid of the pagan nations around him. Oh, that's really cool. These sort of stories connected them to their past and gave them a sense of identity and hope for the future. In chapter 5, we see Reuben's descendants. And in case you were wondering why he's listed here and not at the beginning, it actually says in verse 1 and 2, uh, now he was the firstborn of Jacob, that is, but when he defiled his father's bed, his rights as firstborn were given to the sons of Joseph, Israel's son. So Reuben's not listed as firstborn in the genealogical records. Though Judah was the strongest among his brothers and a leader descended from him, the right of the firstborn belonged to Joseph. Okay, so if you're a biblical genealogy nut, there's some great information for you there. Gad comes next, known for their expertise in battle, says in verse 18 the Reubenites, Gadites, and the half tribe of Manasseh had 44,760 men in their combined armies, warriors who carried shields and swords, were equipped with bows, and were trained for war. They attacked the Hagrites, Jetur, Napish, and Nodab, and they received divine help in fighting them, and the Hagrites and all their allies were handed over to them. They cried out to God during the battle, and he responded to their prayers because they trusted in him. They seized the Hagrites' animals, including five hundred thousand camels, two hundred and fifty thousand sheep, and two thousand donkeys. They also took captive one hundred thousand people. Because God fought for them, they killed many of the enemy. They dispossessed the Hagrites and lived in their land until the exile. Again, can you imagine being up the tribe of Dan, being like, oh man, they cried out to God, and he responded to their prayer because they trusted in him. We can trust in him too. It's a little bit of a testimony right here in the genealogies of First Chronicles, isn't that cool? Here's the half tribe of Manasseh next. Why is it a half tribe? Because Manasseh was not a son of Jacob. Manasseh was a son of Joseph. Joseph had two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. And so because Jacob gave Joseph the rites of the firstborn, that's a double portion. Joseph had two sons, so great. They each get a portion of Jacob's blessing. They become tribes just like Jacob's sons. Manasseh was not small, though, being a half tribe. They were still a large tribe with a great number of people, and they had a number of leaders in the family. It lists them in 24, chapter 5, verse 24. Ephra, Eshi, Eliel, Azrael, Jeremiah, not that Jeremiah, Hodiah, and Jadiel. They were skilled warriors, men of reputation, and leaders of their families, but they were unfaithful to the god of their ancestors, and worshipped instead the gods of the native peoples whom God had destroyed before them. So the god of Israel stirred up King Pul of Assyria, that is King Tiglath Pelazer of Assyria, and he carried away the Reubenites, Gadites, and the half tribe of Manasseh, and took them to Halah, Habor, Hara, and the river of Gozan, where they remain to this very day, to which one of the original readers would have been like, Oh, that's us. We better not be unfaithful to the God of our ancestors. Chapter six takes a look at the descendants of Levi. They ended up being the priests for Israel, and they were also a number of musicians that David put in charge of the music in the Lord's sanctuary, it says in verse 31, after the ark was placed there. They performed music before the sanctuary of the meeting tent until Solomon built the Lord's temple in Jerusalem. So the Levites were a nation of priests and musicians and worship leaders and those who served the Lord in the temple, and they did not have a land as their territory. They lived in cities that were spread out throughout the region. Chapter 6 of 1 Chronicles is actually a very long chapter. It's got 81 verses in it, because it delineates all of the different territories and the cities and the regions where the Levites would be able to live and do their work. Chapter 7 starts a new line of descendants from Issachar, and then it talks about Benjamin's descendants and Naphtali's descendants and Manasseh's descendants and Ephraim's descendants. Chapter 8 goes deeper into the line of Benjamin, where we find one familiar name. Down the line, Nur was the father of Kish, and Kish was the father of Saul. Saul, of course, was the first king of Israel, and he was from this tribe of Benjamin. Saul was the father of Jonathan, that's David's best friend, Amalkeshua, Benadab, and Eshbal, and it goes on from there. Chapter 9 starts with a quick note that says genealogical records were kept for all Israel. They're recorded in the scroll of the kings of Israel. Genealogy is very important for Israel. It's not just like 23 and me. It's like, ooh, let's find something interesting. Maybe my great-great-great-grandfather knew Abraham Lincoln. Nope, it looks like he just had heart disease. No, like this is this is uniquely tied to their identity as God's people. And when they had spent so long not frankly caring what God thought or what his ways were, and they spent so long in exile as punishment for that, when they're trying to find their place in their relationship with God, they look to the genealogy and see what? God's faithfulness. That identity to people in the past, where we see God being faithful even when his people were being unfaithful, builds a sense of hope and identity for the future. Chapter 9 then continues on talking about the exiles who resettled in Jerusalem after the lengthy time in exile was over. People started coming back to Jerusalem. And these are the people who start to see themselves in these numbers. And they're like, yep, this is it. It's a new chapter, it's a new season now. When everything has changed, when everything seems new, when it seems like the past is such a broken road of regret. How do you continue to move forward in hope connecting with your identity? Now, the world today wants to tell you any number of things about who you are and what your identity is and what your identity should be based on your heart or how you feel or what your emotions are or what your past is or your trauma is. No, no, no, that's not your identity. Your identity is rooted in God's faithfulness in the past. Next episode, the story in First Chronicles will pick up with some more narrative and we'll pick it up, it'll be great. But before we get into that, let's just pause to reflect. When you feel lost, when you feel disconnected, when you're struggling to even know who you are and how you fit into the big picture, don't let culture tell you who you are and what to do. Go back to the Bible. Now your name or your descendants may not be listed here in First Chronicles, but what you do find when you read the Bible is you find God's lineage of faithfulness. And you find that God has extended an invitation to you to join his family. Your identity is that of a son of God. Jesus is the firstborn in your family, and you get to follow in his footsteps. With him, you have a purpose. With him you have identity. With him you have hope for the future. With him, your past does not need to define you. That is hope through identity. And that is the thinking out loud thought for the day. Thanks for sticking with me and letting me summarize the first chunk of First Chronicles for you. Join me next time as we continue with the other stories that unfold in the rest of the book. We'll see you then.