Today's text from the ESV Study Bible: 1 Chronicles 3-5.
Our chronological reading of the Bible has us again today in the book of 1st Chronicles. As I mentioned in the last post on this book, the Chronicler is determined to get the destroyed kingdom of Israel to understand her place in God's plan, and to give them the courage to move forward.
A common complaint was: "If David's kingdom was to live forever, why was Israel completely destroyed and exiled?"
The Chronicler desires to teach Israel about God's divine election, and that although there may only be a very small fragment of what was, there still exists God's sovereign thread.
What the Chronicler didn't know from his vantage point was that this genealogy would ultimately lead all the way to the Messiah, God's perfect King of Kings.
As I listened to this historical recounting, two things seemed to jump out to my understanding:
- there was Divine Election occurring throughout this whole process. God has determined before creation how this was to all play out. A complete mystery to our finite minds!
- When bad things happened to Israel, God did it. There was no happenstance. For example, "So the God of Israel stirred up the spirit of Pul king of Assyria". As a result of this stirring, the Northern Kingdom ceased to exist. It was God who destroyed Israel, not the imaginations of any mere mortal.
These realities are completely foreign to the post-modern mind. If I were to go on the evening news and proclaim that it was God who "stirred up the spirit of Hitler", I would likely be tarred and feathered. They would look at me as though I was deranged. Yet, I didn't make this stuff up. I am simply reading, and attempting to understand the words of this book.
The great problem is that a great percentage of the 90% of Americans who claim to believe in God have never read God's book. Therefore, they dream up their own "realities" of God, and have never greatly wrestled with the actual words delivered to the prophets of old.
