Part of something bigger

This morning I was reading Genesis 10, which is one of the long lists of names that occasionally makes reading the whole Bible seem like more of a chore than a devotion (not that chores can't be devotions, but that's another topic). It tells where the nations known to the Israelites came from, in the form of a giant family tree. If the Bible is supposed to be the inspired word of God, why have we got this stuff about Joktan being the father of Hazarmaveth?

In pre-literate societies, you needed to memorise your ancestors and your extended family. If there were disagreements about grazing rights or ownership of property, you needed to be able to say "I am a direct line descendant of the person who originally owned this land, while you're only a second cousin." So we have an idea of why family histories form part of the oral history of Israel (the early books of the Bible), but what do they have to do with spiritual matters?

The Bible is, in many ways, about identity. God makes us in His image, He tells a group of people that they are His, that they should be separate from the nations around them. In Jesus, we become the people we were created to be, because the God who made us is living in us through his Spirit. That's what the Old Testament genealogies do: they tell the people of Israel who they are, and spiritually, we are part of that same story. The Bible is the long and ongoing story of who we are.

When Christians say the Apostles' Creed, or the Nicene Creed, they say that they believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church. We believe in a church that is holy, in other words, one that is different and set apart from the world around it ("holy" doesn't mean "good", by the way). We believe in a church that is catholic: nothing to do with the Pope, this just means that it includes all believers. We believe in a church that is apostolic; we have a direct line of descent in teaching and belief from the first apostles who heard, saw and walked around with Jesus Christ. In other words, we know where we came from, we know who is in our family and we know that we're different from the rest of the world. Isn't that what those long and difficult lists of names do too?