I Chronicles 1:1 Adam, Sheth, Enosh
More than ever before perhaps, people can accurately find out who their ancestors were because of technology and recent developments. I’ve talked to a number of people who have been shocked, delighted, or dismayed to find out from whom they have come. When you come to I Chronicles, it may seem like a long boring slog of genealogy, especially the first several chapters. But what is written here is obviously very important. The emphasis is David and then Judah. These genealogies would have been for the returning exiles who came back from captivity, and it reminds us that all of us are connected to everyone else. There is a context for our life whether we know it or not. A lot of people never stop to think about what the context is for their life. They don’t even know who their great-grandparents are, but what you do today, what you contribute, does not have to be remembered in order to matter.
There are a couple of reasons for this. First, because what you contribute today will grow. We add to other people every day whether we intend to or not. I Chronicles 1:1 says, “Adam, Sheth, Enosh.” Verse 4 says, “Noah.” Verse 27 says, “Abram.” So, you have Adam, Noah, and Abraham. What those three men contributed did grow. They contributed families and children. In Adam’s case, he is the father of all people in the sense that all of us are descendants of Adam.
You have Noah. In one sense God used Noah to save the world simply by saving his family. Did Noah save all the known world at the time? No. Did he help his three sons to do what was right? Yes, and because he saved his family, he did save the world. All of us are descendants of Noah.
Then you have Abraham, the father of faith. I’m not Jewish, but I am part of God’s family by faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of Abraham. So, what I am saying is that all three of these men are just single names in the list of hundreds because what they contributed did grow. Their children grew, their families grew, their tribes grew. You have a couple, a family, a tribe, a nation. So, what you contribute today will grow.
Second, what we contribute today does not have to be remembered in order to matter because what you contribute will become the real time point of reference for the world as it is or the world as it will be. Haven’t you ever asked yourself, “Hey, where did that come from?” Maybe it is a name, a place, or a thing. Where did it come from? Most of us never stop to wonder where the conveniences of life came from, but all of them came from somewhere. There is a long genealogy of science, the technology that came from that, and the ingenuity that came from certain technological advances. All that we have, whether it is an automobile, a house, or an ice cream cone, came from something, and what you contribute today will become the real time point of reference for the world as it is.
Yesterday a team of us were driving in Florida, and we drove through a place called Howey-In-The-Hills. Suffice it to say, that is a unique name and because we are curious about names, we looked up Howey-In-The-Hills. Apparently, there was a family named Howey, and there is more to it than that, of course, but the name came from a person.
In I Chronicles 1:12 you find a man’s name from whom came the Philistines that you read about throughout the Bible. I Chronicles 2:42 talks about a person named Hebron. In verse 50 you find a person name Kirjath-jearim. In verse 51 you find a person named Bethlehem. Whether it is the Philistines, Hebron, or Kirjath-jearim, all these were people whose names became real time points of reference in places named after them. So, what you do will matter whether it is remembered or not because you don’t have to remember what you see in real time, and what you see in real time comes from the contributions of people who are long gone and oftentimes forgotten.
Third, what you contribute today doesn’t have to be remembered in order to matter because what you contribute will reign in your stead. In I Chronicles 1:44 and following the Bible gives us the kings that reigned in the land of Edom before any kings reigned over the children of Israel. It just gives you a long list of all these names and usually at the end of man’s life it mentions that he begat a son and the son “reigned in his stead.”
Oftentimes in the book of Kings we find the names of mothers of these kings. Is that significant? It must be because it is in the Bible. Here are kings who ruled fortunes, families, and nations, and the reason was because they had parents who begat them, put them into the world, and they reigned. Think about Pharoah, Caesar, Nebuchadnezzar, or Napoleon. Who were Napoleon’s mother and father? What they contributed to this world brought great grief or great joy. Think about Newton, Freud, Marx, and Washington. Some of those names have become names of places and “fathers” of institutions and ideas that govern the world to this day either for ill or good.
Every day when I look at my news feed, I see a banner telling of what happened on that day in history. One day last month it said that on that day the Supreme Court assembled for the first time in New York City. There is a beginning to everything. The world you see began from a world that has been long forgotten but is still relevant today. So, what you do today does matter. It may be small or big, but it will grow and become the real time point of reference for the world as it is or as it will be, and it will reign in your stead.