What do all the genealogies in the Bible mean?

Ever wonder what all the genealogies in the Bible mean?

Names are extremely important to God, and have immense power over their owners' lives. God did not uselessly list names in the Bible to entertain us or to bore us; that is a common mis-perception perpetuated by our enemy and our flesh. He had a Purpose, as He always does. "Seek and you will find," Christ said. So seek I did, and armed with knowledge from Learn the Bible in 24 Hours by Chuck Missler and my free resources online, I discovered a surprising - but ultimately not unexpected - truth.

Since most of us who speak only one language well and another language pretty well - and those languages aren't Greek or Hebrew - and simply refuse to make time to research out the original Hebrew and Greek meanings of words, despite many free and wonderful resources, we often have trouble when we get to the "begets" of the Bible. Why?

Because we don't understand the power of names. We don't have meanings of names in parenthesis, and being in a hurry to get to things we actually understand and we can get a surface understanding of, we simply pass them over (or criticize their presence).

We shouldn't. God has layered messages in the pages of the Bible that so many people are missing in their hurried devotionals (and if it's hurried are you really getting anything out of it?).

1 Chronicles 1:1-9

 ¹So all Israel was recorded in genealogies, and these are written in the Book of the Kings of Israel. And Judah was taken into exile in Babylon because of their breach of faith. ²Now the first to dwell again in their possessions in their cities were Israel, the priests, the Levites, and the temple servants. ³And some of the people of Judah, Benjamin, Ephraim, and Manasseh lived in Jerusalem: ⁴Uthai the son of Ammihud, son of Omri, son of Imri, son of Bani, from the sons of Perez the son of Judah. ⁵And of the Shilonites: Asaiah the firstborn, and his sons. ⁶Of the sons of Zerah: Jeuel and their kinsmen, 690. ⁷Of the Benjaminites: Sallu the son of Meshullam, son of Hodaviah, son of Hassenuah, ⁸Ibneiah the son of Jeroham, Elah the son of Uzzi, son of Michri, and Meshullam the son of Shephatiah, son of Reuel, son of Ibnijah; ⁹and their kinsmen according to their generations, 956. All these were heads of fathers’ houses according to their fathers’ houses.

When the Israelites returned from exile, Jerusalem was decimated. In the rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, there were seven men who were leaders of their fathers' houses and involved (God's perfect number)  - There was: my inquity; made/prepared by Jehovah, God sweeps it away; [inquity] is weighed/balanced and tossed aside; Jehovah builds an oak tree; God delivers the ones who come after. 

This is a message of Christ, and we got it when we looked at the Hebrew meanings for a genaology of names. It took a little research, but this is what Christ did on the cross thousands of years later. Can you believe it? And if we had hurried on, we would have missed this important message. We are sinners, but God sweeps our inquities away and tosses them aside, and then builds us into an oak tree, which is a leader, a strong person, and we see God delivering us from all sin and inquity (inquity is the root of sins - why we commit them). On the pages of history, He wove the truth of the New Testament into an obscure passage in 1 Chronicles, a passage typically disregarded as meaningless, tough or boring. Again, the words of Christ echo in our hearts, "Seek, and you will find." Seek the deeper meanings (even down to a word study) of the Bible, and there you will find the message of Christ stamped on every page.

Praying you have faith, hope, and love always,

Rachel