The “Begats”

Okay. Show of hands. How many of you derive a secret pleasure from skipping over the “begats” in the Bible?

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You open your read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year plan and today’s assignment is five long chapters. As soon as you discover the first four contain nothing but genealogy, flip, flip, flip go the pages. Bingo! Presto! Your usual thirty minutes of reading only takes you ten.

I’ll confess, I do that most of the time as well. There are days, however, when I push myself to read every last biblical name in hopes of discovering a hidden treasure. After all, it was a tiny clip of Scripture buried under stacks of names that brought us that little gem called The Prayer of Jabez–a book that went viral before anyone knew what “viral” meant.

Tracking the “Begats”

Why did God make sure these genealogies survived in Scripture until now? I mean, why should we care anymore?

Maybe this inventory of names, so carefully preserved down through the ages, affixes something of a tracking number to God’s promise to the list’s originators. The promise’s fulfillment can be traced by following the names throughout history.

As soon as sin marred the Garden of Eden, God promised Adam and Eve a Seed who would come through them to redeem all the evil they had introduced to the world. A Son of theirs would deliver not only the two of them from death but everyone who proceeded from them. (Genesis 3:15)

Well, that got all the begetting started. Adam begat Cain and Abel. Then, after Cain killed Abel another son, Seth, appeared. Cain begat some “seeds,” but Seth produced the line that carried THE “Seed.”

Soon Seth begat Enosh who begat Canaan who begat some more until Noah showed up. He begat three seeds (Shem, Ham, and Japheth), but Shem carried the promised Seed forward to Abraham to Isaac to Jacob (who was known as Israel). From Israel to Judah to Jesse to David, the names drew a straight line from the “promis-ees” (Adam and Eve) to the Promised One–Jesus.

Then, all the begetting stops.

Or does it?

The “Begats” Change Direction

Jesus gave birth to no children in the natural. Yet Paul called him “the firstborn of many children.” (Romans 8:28) If his line was going to continue, the manner of begetting was going to have to change.

Instead of giving birth to seeds through a natural womb, Jesus delivers children for his Father through a spiritual portal. He reaches out his hand to us from his place in the heavenlies and invites us to join him. As our hearts touch him, he draws us out of our old life into a new one, begetting us into his bloodline and making us part of his genealogy. Our names may not appear in Scripture, but they’re recorded, nonetheless–in God’s Book of Life (Philippians 4:3).

Merging Bloodlines

It may feel odd to think of merging our bloodlines with his, blotted as ours are with ugly episodes of sin. But Jesus isn’t afraid of our foibles or the bobbles of morality filling our family history. He understands. His own human bloodline was filled with ancestors bent on murder, rape, incest, deceit, jealousy, rage, apostasy, and more.

He knows both the beautiful and the ugly in our genealogy. Still, he stands at the end of all our “begats” holding out his hand saying, “Come up higher. Be born into something new and wonderful. Let me take the seed that is you and combine it with the Seed I am.”

So run your fingers gently across those names next time you see a list of “begats.” Just as God lovingly traced these through time, he has tracked each of us to today. Our human origins may have come through great-grandparents and grandparents and parents. But our spiritual heritage runs through David who eventually produced Mary who begat Jesus who begat . . . us!

From Adam on down, God has followed each one of us, tracing our genealogies so we will one day meet the Seed. We are recorded. Remembered. Known.

All these names. All this remembering. All to fulfill a promise, to redeem what happened in the Garden, to see that all nations are blessed, and to bring many sons and daughters to glory.

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