Why do we need such extensive genealogies that occupy the first NINE chapters of 1 Chronicles? By Fr Tadros Malaty (Part 4/4)

17. The form of the genealogies in general reveals the plan of God and His work with us, whether on the level of the church as a congregation, or the people of God or the believer as a member. The genealogies pass through three stages:

· The first stage: The choice: God chose Adam, and created him according to His image; chose Abraham to become a father of a multitude of nations; and chose the people to become a leaven to sanctify the world by the Messiah the Son of David. Every believer, therefore exults to hear the Lord Christ, say: “You did not choose Me, but I chose you” (John 15: 16); and to hear the apostle say: “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1: 4). By saying: “He chose us in Him”? He means that that happened by faith in Him; namely in Christ, who ordained that for us by a plan before we were born, and even before the foundation of the world. How beautiful is this word “foundation”, as though the world has fallen down from a very huge altitude. Yes, the exaltation of God is extensively high in a way beyond description – not location-wise, but concerning the possibility of nature to talk about.

· The second stage: The continuity: If God is the beginning, having chosen us, His work would not stop at choosing us; but our Christ, the Way along whom we set forth from the start until the finish with security.

· The third stage: The reform: In the continuity we are exposed to faults and weaknesses; the way Israel and Judah were. God, in His longsuffering endured them, But through their persistence on doing wrong, they were corrupted and have fallen into captivity. However, God did not forsake them but brought them back from captivity, to become a people prepared for the kingdom of Christ the King of kings.

· These three stages are the broad lines of the life of man from Adam till the return from captivity. It is as though the genealogies open before us the door of hope, whether at the start of the way, in its middle, or even close to its end.

18. If the genealogies disregarded the Northern kingdom, on account of that it set a kind of worship according to the human thought (mixing between paganism and the worship of God); and not according to the divine law; Yet, the return of the godly men among them to the Southern kingdom, and the joining together of all of them in their return from captivity, confirm that the Southern kingdom has not set a wall to exclude the other tribes; but by the wall it sets a holy building, with the hope that all the tribes would eventually come within the circle of the godly life, and the obedience of the law. The genealogies, therefore, would provoke us to have the width of heart and of love, even toward the non-believers; so that humanity would find its happiness in the gospel of Christ, and the enjoyment of the work of the Holy Trinity in it.

19. These genealogies came to correct certain faulty concepts of some, concerning the origin of peoples and nations. For the ‘Arcadians’ believed that they existed before the moon; The people of ‘Thessaly’ believed that they were created from stones; And the Athenians believed that they grew from the earth.