People, the Bible doesn't tell us hardly anything about it. This is a challenge. What I want you to do is I want you to have your pen out today, or your highlighter, and please don't write in the pew Bibles, but I want you to note where we're going in this passage today. First word of 1 Chronicles, Adam. Circle it, highlight it, underline, whatever. This is the beginning of the genealogies. Notice in verse 3 that we have Noah. You might underline or highlight that. And then down at the last word of verse, sorry, verse 27, we have another key name, and you see where we're going, and that is Abraham. So as I read today, I want you to think about how the Bible is concerned to connect. We're not merely giving fictional stories out here, but these people are connected by lots of space and lots of time where God didn't give a lot of revelation, but God was working ordinarily and spiritually in the lives of people. And so we have some of those highlights. Before I read today, I want to remind you that some of these places will strike you as place names. And you need to think about, well, why are those places called by those what are in our minds place names? Usually it's because there was someone with that name that founded or established that place. And so, as we read through genealogies, we need to be aware that place names and people names are intimately related. And then one other thing I want to tell you is anytime that you see an IM on the end, or an ITES on the end, that means this group of people. So look, for example, at verse 11. Egypt fathered Ludim, that is the people of Lod. Okay, and that's a place we can identify. So the people who lived at Lod or Lud, that's a city. Anamim, those are the people who lived at Anam. Lahabim, they lived at Lahab. Naftuhim, and you can see already, I have my work cut out for me here in just a minute. But just remember, anytime you see I Am, these are the people of either that place or of that tribe. And then if you look at verse 13, for example, Canaan fathered Sidon, his firstborn, and Heth, and the Jebusites, who are the Ites of Jebus. Well, where's Jebus? Anybody know? This is the ancient name of the city of Jerusalem when it was still in Canaanite possession. So these are the Jerusalemites from really really long time ago. And the Amorites, these are the descendants of Amor. These were people who lived across on the west side of the Jordan, the Girgashites. And then now you see there's all these Ites. And so the Eames and the Ites, just remember that they are, there's a whole bunch of people that are covered by these names. And as we get on, we'll begin to see some of the numbers involved. This is not like, you know, all the people who are members of Topeka RP Church. all the people in the state of Kansas. These are like, you know, this is the kinds of numbers that we're talking about in terms of these genealogies. And the Bible wants us to see and remember the details. It's not simply the national ideology that is front and center. It is the nobility of the people, common people, people about whom sometimes we know nothing more than their name. And so we'll talk more about this, but I just wanted to kind of preface this today. We have nine chapters, nine chapters of uphill work. Number one, children, don't be bored if you don't understand these names and look for how are they grouped? What are the connections? I've already given you the main one today. We're going to start with Adam and we're going to end with Abraham. And we're going to see some of what's in between. Alright, so let's read 1 Chronicles 1, beginning at verse 1. Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The sons of Japheth, Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshach, and Teras. The sons of Gomer, Ashkenaz, Rithath, and Togarmah. The sons of Javan, Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Rodanim. The sons of Ham, Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan. The sons of Cush, Siba, Havilah, Sabta, Raamah, and Saptika. The sons of Raamah, Shiba, and Dedan. Cush fathered Nimrod. He was the first man on earth to be a mighty man. Egypt fathered Ludim, Anamim, Lahabim, Naphtuhim, Pathrusim, Qasluhim, from whom the Philistines came. Think about all the Philistines. And Caphtarim. Canaan fathered Sidon, his firstborn, and Heth. And the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, the Arkites, the Sinites, the Arvadites, the Zemurites, and the Hamathites. The sons of Shem, Elam, Ashur, this is where we get Assyria from, Ashur. Arpachshad, Lod, and Aram. And the sons of Aram, Uz, Hul, Gether, and Meshach. Arpachshad fathered Shelah, and Shelah fathered Eber. To Eber were born two sons. The name of the one was Peleg, for in his day the earth was divided. And his brother's name was Joktan. And Joktan fathered Almodad, Sheleth, Hazarmaveth, Zira, and Hadaram, Uzal, Dikla, Obal, Abimele, Sheba, Ofer, Havilah, and Jobab. All these were the sons of Joktan. Shem, Arpakshad, Shelah, Eber, Peleg, Ru, Sarug, Nahor, Terah, Abram. That is Abraham. And anybody remember what does the name Abraham mean? He used to be Abram or Abram and he's then given the name Abraham, the father of the nations. He descended from nations and he was the father of nations. Well today we want to crack open the book of Chronicles. We want to enter into what I will argue is the Bible's most comprehensive historical narrative. I want us to begin a new journey in an often neglected book of Scripture, mostly, I think, because of the first nine chapters. And so, as I said before, I really want to plead with you. Spend some time. Become familiar with the book of 1 Chronicles. That's our main purpose today, even as we do want to address the Chronicle of Adam. Many of the names that come in particularly the first couple of chapters of 1 Chronicles are names that are coming almost directly from Genesis. It appears that the Chronicler has additional information that we don't have access to from historical documents, but that it's the book of Genesis that is really the foundation of everything that the Chronicler is doing here. 1 Chronicles has 29 chapters, 2 Chronicles has 36 chapters. The first character presented in Chronicles is Adam, our first father created at the beginning. This book was written to help the nation of Israel as she returned from the discouragement and disillusionment of exile to rebuild a God-centered and a God-honoring nation. Do we need that today? Do we need to be a God-centered and God-honoring nation? Then let's employ the strategy that the Chronicler used. The people of Israel needed to know, number one, who they are as God's people. If you're going to really understand who you are, you need to understand something of where you came from. You need to understand that there is a legacy of faith, a legacy of faithfulness that has been passed on to you through your parents and from your grandparents and your great grandparents. We need to see that today. And secondly, I want us to note the book of Chronicles is striking in how it takes us to the issue of the worship of God. If we are going to be a God honoring and God centered nation, we need to be a worshiping people. And so there's an attentiveness in the course of this chronicle, number one, to the Levites who were entrusted and endued with the responsibility of teaching the people the Word of God and of the temple and the temple worship. So if books of 1 and 2 Chronicles cover many of the same historical facts as Samuel and Kings, But, here's what I think is unique, and you need to understand this today. Now I'm going to my notes. First and Second Chronicles are the last two books in the Hebrew Scriptures, that is, in what we call the Old Testament. Collectively, they present, in summary form, a historical narrative from the creation of the world, Adam, to 538 BC, when Cyrus the Persian decreed the return of the Jewish people to their homeland, 2 Chronicles 36.22. I want to plead with you, I want to instruct you to learn the discipline of Chronicles. Chronicles are a formal narrative. about a history. We need to understand that Chronicles involved discipline. They were disciplined, the writers needed to be disciplined, but also we as readers of Chronicles need to be disciplined. I'm gonna argue that one of the greatest blessings we have in the Bible, I know you won't believe this, but one of the greatest blessings we have in the Bible are the genealogies. Because the genealogies remind us That redemption happened in space and time, in generations. That the Bible is not an ideological book. The Bible is a narrative book. It's not just throwing things out there, the kinds of things that priests would dream about as they sit inside of their dark basements and write fake things. But that they're telling us. The grand narrative, it's not an exhaustive narrative. The genealogies are not exhaustive, but they are a blessing to the people of God. Above all, I want you to understand, and I'll talk about this in just a moment in more detail, but the placement of 1 Chronicles. You need to understand that in our English Bibles that the Old Testament follows the ordering of the Septuagint. So the words of the Old Testament are inspired, the titles are not inspired, they're not embedded in as part of the inspired text, and also the ordering of the books is not inspired. So there are traditions about how the books of the Bible are put together, what ordering, but that's not a matter of inspiration. And in fact, I believe that if we went back and talked particularly to Christ and to to the generations around Jesus, that probably the scrolls that would have been in the synagogue in Jesus' day would have been arranged according to the Hebrew ordering. And in the Hebrew ordering, 1st and 2nd Chronicles are the last books of the Old Testament. I was out in RPTS out in Pittsburgh just a few weeks ago, and sat in on one of C.J. Williams' introductions. And one of the points that he was making was that the more that we've learned about the history of the Masoretic Text, or the Hebrew Bible, the more that we understand how ancient that is. And so, again, it's not a matter of inspiration, but it is a good and right thing to think of the Old Testament as ending with 1 and 2 Chronicles. And so, these really aren't just kind of, oh, third in order, telling you things that have already been said. Chronicles is really summarizing, really, really reviewing all that God has done and all that God has said, including in Samuel and Kings. And it's laying those chronicles out in a way that has a trajectory, that's going somewhere. We'll talk about that in just a moment. So, point number one this morning, cracking the book of Chronicles. When we think of Chronicles, first of all, children, you need to remember there are two books of Chronicles in our Bible, 1 Chronicles and 2 Chronicles, right? And these are there because apparently, sometime, in the intertestamental period. As many Jewish people went to live in Egypt, this is the first place where we see this really long book, which remember if you have scrolls, and you're unrolling the scrolls, and you're writing column after column after column, there are a lot of words. There are, I forget the total number, but almost 60 chapters in Chronicles all together. And we need to see that that would have been a really big scroll, that you would have had to have like a front loader and a dump truck, except they didn't have those back then, to move the book of Chronicles. And so they said, okay, well, let's make this a little more manageable and let's break it into two parts. And that was a very common thing to do with large books such as these. There's a Hebrew title. And I won't go into the details of that here today, but there's a Greek title. But the Latin title I wanted to focus on today and remind you that it was in the Vulgate, in Jerome's Vulgate, which became the standard Latin Bible, that we first come across the word from which we get Chronicles. And there's this word chronicon in Latin that was used by Jerome to describe these and thus the tradition of translating the Hebrew word here in terms of the word chronicles. And the word chronicles, the Hebrew word is used many other places in the Bible to refer to formal histories. to authoritative official accounts of history. And so there are the chronicles of Samuel the seer, probably referring to what we know as 1 and 2 Samuel. There's the chronicles of the kings of Israel, probably referring to what we know as 1 and 2 Kings. There are also the chronicles of Nathan the seer. There are many other chronicles that are referenced probably, and some of those books we probably have, some of those chronicles have been lost to history. Thirdly, I want to make the point here that as much as it won't feel this way in the first nine chapters, Chronicles is actually a very down-to-earth book. One writer said it this way, the chronicler seeks to impress on God's people their immediate duty to live godly lives. If you're returning from the confusion, from the difficulties and the discrimination of the exile, you need to be reminded who you are and how to live. This writer says, the style is more of a pastor and less of a stylist. The reader of this history will note how extensively the chronicler quotes from prayers and sermons and how careful he is to record administrative details. If you're going to get a nation going again, there's going to be a lot of administration that's necessary. The Chronicler makes constant application of Israel's traditions and history to the daily life of God's people as they rebuild a shattered kingdom. The kingdom was in chaos and it needed to be rebuilt. And one of the roles, and again, I imagine this being some elderly person who says, I want to record what God the Lord has done in our history. I want to remind the children that they have a genealogy. I want to remind them of how, where this fairly small, unimpressive temple sits, there used to be a grand temple. And someday, the true temple will be built. This leads us to the second point this morning, and that is cracking the structure of chronicles. And here I'd ask you to take out your bulletin insert and just look with me for just a minute. I'm sorry this didn't, this printout didn't come out quite as clear as I'd hoped. But I do want you to know that there's a big version of this, and I'm happy to make more as we need them. They're out on the book table right outside the door. But this is originally an eight and a half by 14 size. And I have found this little poster right here to be tremendously helpful in helping me to grasp the structure of Chronicles. And so you have that on one side, and then on the other side is a little more of a kind of block thing, just helping you to see how the divisions of Chronicles have been summarized. Chronicles involves ancestry, but it also involves activity. It involves origins, but it also involves assignments. The place is Israel. The time that's reviewed, particularly in the first nine chapters, is thousands of years. You need to feel the weight of this, as the chronicler's going back thousands of years to tell you, if you really want to understand who you are and God's purpose for you, You need to go back thousands of years. Be a historian. Understand that out of the mists of the past, we have had preserved for us specific things, many times in the form of stories. And we have those in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. But I want you to see that what the author is doing is he has a big job ahead. And so he's really boiling it down to tell us just the names, probably so children could memorize the names of their ancestors. That's probably one of the reasons for the form that it's in. And then when we come then to the second portion, beginning in chapter 10 of 1 Chronicles, then we're covering a period of about 40 years. So thousands of years in the first nine chapters, and then we're zooming, zooming, zooming, zooming in to the reign of David. So I think those are some helpful things. I want you to also then look at the poster there. Again, you probably can't read all of these things, But I think that the way they summarize this in the poster version of this is very helpful. A story in search of an ending. And you need to know that the book of 2 Chronicles actually ends with an incomplete sentence. It says this, whoever there is among you of all his people, may the Lord his God be with him and let him go up, dot, dot, dot. Go up where? Now you can argue from the context, I think it's clear, but this is not a complete sentence. It doesn't have a place to which he is to go. And it's a reminder, again, if Chronicles is at the end of the Old Testament, and the Bible ends with a careful genealogy, what does the New Testament begin with? Matthew chapter 1. The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, what? the son of David, the son of Abraham. And then we have generations laid out there. Also in Luke chapter three, we have actually the most complete summary of genealogy in the New Testament, where it begins with Jesus. And in this case, it goes backwards. It goes back and back and back and back. The son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God. And so the New Testament also is very concerned with the genealogy, particularly of Christ. Now we need to be aware that there are some warnings in the New Testament about divisions and dissension over endless genealogies. So we're not interested in trying to do endless genealogies. We're not trying to prove things. But we do want to be aware that this is one of the ways the Bible communicates the historic nature of redemption. This brings us then to the third point, and that is cracking the doctrine of Christ in Chronicles. And I want to just show you one example of this here today. If you would, look at 1 Chronicles 17. 1 Chronicles 17. And we'll go into this later, but I just want to point out to you, and I have the verses listed here, as when David lived in his house, David said to Nathan, Behold, I dwell in a house of cedar, but the ark of the covenant of the Lord is under a tent. And Nathan said to David, Do all that is in your heart, for God is with you. That same night, the word of the Lord came to Nathan, go and tell my servant David, thus says the Lord, it is not you who will build me a house to dwell in. For I have not lived in a house since the day I brought you up Israel to this day. But instead, he tells David, you're not going to build me a house, I'm going to build you a house. And in fact, I'm going to raise up your offspring. Look at verse 11. When your days are fulfilled to walk with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, one of your own sons, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for me, and I will establish his throne, and then, circle this word, forever. I will establish his throne forever. Now, where are the exiles coming from? They're coming from Babylon, the Babylon that under Nebuchadnezzar had smashed the Davidic dynasty. And they're being reminded that these promises have not failed, but that in fact, God had promised that he would establish the throne of David's son forever. Look down in verse 14, I will confirm him in my house and in my kingdom forever, and his throne shall be established forever. That's the third, forever. Over in verse 22, you made your people Israel to be your people forever. And then twice down in verse 27, You have been pleased, David is speaking now, you have been pleased to bless the house of your servant that it may continue forever before you. For it is you, O Lord, who have blessed and it is blessed forever. What does this mean? It means exiles coming back. Look for the greater son of David. Be loyal to the promises of God and specifically to the promised dynasty of God which has now failed, but there is coming a greater Son. There's many other places, and as you read and meditate in 1 Chronicles, I want to challenge you, be looking for Christological passages. There are some that are just crystal clear, and you just are blown away when you see them. There's some that are more subtle, and we'll try to be pointing those out as we go along. But I wanted to give us this background. Now, flip back again to 1 Chronicles 1, and I want to simply point out today the Chronicle of Adam. We're going to see that these names are the framework in which we're going to be working over the next number of chapters. Oftentimes, children, we read the Bible and we miss the framework. Our Bibles don't always do a real good job of helping us to see the framework. And so one of the reasons that I love the Bible Project, I don't agree with everything they do, but the Bible Project is the one who has produced these kinds of posters for every book of the Bible, and you're able to just freely print them off of the Bible Project website. One of the reasons that I love this, and I want to challenge especially you children, to think about how do you put the book of 1 Chronicles in your mind? How do you remember it? A big part of it is, it's like you have to wrap your mind around it. You have to see the structure of it. So the book of Genesis is built around, these are the generations of... And 11 times in the book of Genesis we see, and these are the generations of this person. And then there will be a whole bunch of genealogies and a whole bunch of stories. And these are the generations of this person. And that's the way that Genesis is built. The book of 1 Chronicles does not use that phrase. Rather, it's expecting you to know your ancestors. It's expecting you to be able to pull out the structure of the chronicling that he's doing. And so in this first section, we need to see that the first four verses of 1 Chronicles come from Genesis 1 through 9. Verses 5 through 23, these names are lifted word for word from Genesis chapter 10. And then verse 24, this is now specifically the genealogy of Abraham. These are lifted word for word from Genesis 11. And so, again, 1 Chronicles is going to give us new information, but it's also summarizing all that has come before. And friends, I want to remind us, this is why covenant theology is so important. One of the goals the session will be sharing with you at our annual meeting is our goal that this would be a year when we would be thinking about, in various ways, the theme of covenant theology. That is to see that the whole Bible, in fact, has a structure. And that God has been showing His His grace and entering into the lives and transforming people. And that one of the ways that the Bible is structured and we can see this large structure of Abraham and Noah and Moses and David and Nehemiah and then the new covenant in Christ that now is being carried forth to the ends of the earth. And so First Chronicles is a very wonderful place to reflect upon covenant theology. That when you hear these names, Adam, I hope that there were several stories that came to your mind right away about Adam being created, about Adam eating the forbidden fruit, about Adam, by the sweat of his brow, working the ground. about the generations of Adam, about how Adam and his wife gave birth to two sons, and then one son murdered the other son, and then they had a third son. All of these things are very important for us as we learn the discipline of reading the Chronicles. So the application today, just briefly in closing, I want to ask you to think with me over the weeks to come about the chronicles of your life. One of my observations is that when we read the Old Testament in particular without understanding the drama of what's going on, then the Bible is, we miss the dynamic, life-giving nature of the Word of God. I want you to see how Chronicles is reminding people of something they've forgotten. Who they are. what their life is about. I say there in the first bullet point, sweeping your smaller story into His bigger story. And friends, I believe this in its essence is what the worldwide proclamation of the Gospel is all about. God is writing this grand, glorious story of grace, and that grace comes to you sometimes in the most surprising of ways, and He changes you on the inside. He causes you to be born again to a living hope. What is a living hope? It's a hope that transcends human death, that transcends the physical world in which we live every day of our lives. We know that we know there's something more, and we have to strive for it. Jesus says it's through much tribulation that we enter into the kingdom of God. So friends, I want to call you to remember who you are. I don't have this yet for me or for the Johnston family, but I was very blessed quite a few years ago to receive this lovely book entitled Plow a Straight Row, Willisville Beginnings and Beyond. I went with Sue's grandfather shortly after we were married down to Willisville, an unincorporated town in Southern Indiana, named after the Willis family. And I heard as her grandfather, who's quite a historian, regaled me with story after story after story about how God had worked in the lives of the Willis family. What a blessing it was, and Sue and I were honored to receive a copy of this after it was completed. It's up through Marta. Marta's, I'm in here, Marta's in here, Nick, Peter, and Anna aren't. They're gonna have to update it at some point. But it's amazing to see and to think about where did your family come from? Where did your faith come from? What is the chronicle? What is the smaller story? Indeed, point number two, God is revealing your spiritual chronicle. It's the thing you go back to. It's the thing that defines you. It's the thing that you say in your mind and in your heart, I know who I am because I have a history, because I remember the things that are supposed to be remembered, friends, we need to remember. And then point number three, Chronicles is teaching you the importance of your origins and of your purpose. These are the two things that I want us to come back to again and again. One is origins. Where did we come from? God tells us where we came from. Chronicles tells us where we came from. We come from the line of God's people who have been created in His image, have fallen into sin, and that have been redeemed through the appointed means that God has ordained. And we have a purpose. That when we get up out of bed every day, we get out of bed with an assignment, with a job to do. And that's your particular job. You have a job that you go to. You have a job that you may stay at. Those jobs are really different and really diverse. But friends, have you learned the joy? of having a purpose. God has made us for a purpose. He is writing a chronicle now. We haven't seen that, but the Bible speaks of the watchers. The Bible speaks of books being written in heaven about what is happening here upon the earth. Those who were in heaven with Christ in the book of Revelation, they cry out, how long, O Lord, until you judge your enemies? And again, it doesn't say this, but I imagine God saying, just watch, just watch. There were 120 of them at Pentecost. How many of them are there now? And what is God going to do in the next 500 years? Friends, we need to see that God is a narrative-making God, that He tells stories, His stories are true, and His stories change and transform His creation. Let's close together in prayer. Lord, thank You for being a narrative-making God. Thank You, Lord, that You are writing the story of our own individual life. Lord, we live in a country that celebrates, rightly, individuals. And Lord, we pray that you would help us to understand the story of our own lives, the arc, the trajectory of where you're taking us. That, Lord, in times of discouragement, in times of pain and sorrow, that, Lord, we could go back and remember the ways that God broke in and spoke His Word deeply into our lives. Lord, that we could see ourselves walking in the sandals of the returning exiles. Lord, we have a lot of the history of that return in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. And Lord, for the people to come back with joy that they're returning to the land, but then to see the cities of Israel decimated. There was so much junk, they couldn't even live there. And they had to clear out the junk so they could begin to rebuild. Lord, help us to be junk-clearing people. But help us, Lord, to also patiently, steadily, line upon line, precept upon precept, to train people in the things of God. Lord, help us to be a people who receive many, even from non-traditional backgrounds, whose arms and hearts are open wide to receive all those who would call upon the Lord in truth. Lord, that then we could help one another and remind one another of our origins and our purpose. Lord, thank you for what you teach us in books like 1 Chronicles, and we ask that you would guide us and direct us in these things in the weeks to come. We give you thanks for it in Jesus' name. Amen.