1 Chronicles starts out with a long genealogy. This genealogy is tough to follow; names that jump around and people I don't know. The list is mostly names, but sometimes there are comments. For example:
Stories we already know:
Now Er, Judah's firstborn, was evil in the sight of the Lord, and he put him to death. - 1 Chrn 2:3b (ESV)
The son of Carmi: Achan, the troubler of Israel, who broke faith in the matter of the devoted thing - 1 Chrn 2:7 (ESV)
Stories where we don't have much information:
And Segub fathered Jair, who had twenty-three cities in the land of Gilead. But Geshur and Aram took from them Havvoth-jair, Kenath, and its villages, sixty towns. All these were descendants of Machir, the father of Gilead. After the death of Hezron, Caleb went in to Ephrathah, the wife of Hezron his father, and she bore him Ashhur, the father of Tekoa. - 1 Chrn 2:22-24 (ESV)
The question is - would you want an annotation next to your name? While many of us may think 'yes', I may be a bit more hesitant. Most of the notes in the genealogy are reminders of foul deeds or circumstances that are far from normal. So what would be important in a genealogy if it isn't individual notoriety? Being in the right one. How can we change our ancestry? Through Christ, we are Abraham's children; through Christ, we are grafted into this tree; through Christ, we are born again; through Christ, we are in the right genealogy. Jesus makes the genealogy ours, even if our mitochondrial DNA says otherwise.
