Genealogy

In the last few months I have been slowly but steadily reading through the Bible from Genesis to Revelations, for the first time in my life, to get "the big picture". I'm at the halfway point at the moment, in the early chapters of the psalms.

Anyone who's done this would have noticed fairly large swathes of Bible genealogy - who begat who.

That got me thinking - why is this in the canon? Why are these details so important that God wanted it on permanent record as part of His inspired Word?

I can come up with two important reasons, although I am sure there are more.

The first is to validate the account of creation. Yeah, God foresaw (not foreknew) Darwin's theories way back then. The genealogies trace the ancestry of Jesus Christ all the way back to Adam. These are carefully preserved historical records of real people who lived and died and reproduced. If they are true and accurate (and I believe they are), then the earth is not very old, and there is absolutely no time for the "millions and millions of years" required for evolution to take place.

The Biblical record of creation and the history of the earth that follows is actually a very plausible proposition. Just going back 500 years into the past already gives us an extremely murky picture of what life was like then. How can anyone then claim to know for sure that what the Bible claims happened 10,000 years ago in the mists of time is actually not true?

If you just take a look at the pace of technological change that is going on in just the last hundred years - if you extrapolate that backwards, it is far easier for me to believe that mankind has been around for a few thousand years than a few million years - because I would expect that we would be far more advanced than we already are right now. But I digress.

The second (and more important) reason is theological. The genealogy of Jesus Christ had to be laid out in detail because of the promises God made to His ancestors - to Eve and Abraham and David and finally Mary - that their seed would bruise the serpent's head, would be the blessing of the nations, would reign forever and be the Son of the Most High, and would save His people from their sins. It was important to show that Jesus was this promised seed, that He descended directly from all these to whom the promises were made. And of course, that's why Jesus had no physical children - because the promise had been fulfilled in Him, and there was no need to wait for a future seed any more to fulfill the promise.