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If you’ve tried reading it, you’ll have noticed that the Bible is littered with lists of names. Take a look at Matthew 1 for example:

'Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram, and Ram the father of Amminadab, and Amminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of David the king. And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah, and Solomon the father of Rehoboam, and Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph, and Asaph the father of Jehoshaphat, and Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzziah, and Uzziah the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Ahaz, and Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, and Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, and Manasseh the father of Amos, and Amos the father of Josiah, and Josiah the father of Jechoniah and his brothers, at the time of the deportation to Babylon...' and so it goes on...

I think that lists of names in the Bible can actually help us – here are just three ways:

Repetition

I’m not sure how it’s happened, but somehow our culture has started to tell us that getting bored with repetition is a sign of maturity. We can easily imagine a child begging, ‘again, again!’ until the grown-up becomes exhausted with repeating the same action. In this I think that God is not childish, but childlike. G.K. Chesterton summed this up amazingly well:

Grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony…It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.

Lists of names should remind us of God’s excitement at many individuals. We may look at the congregation on a Sunday morning and see a couple of hundred faces (or less, or more), but God sees each individual as themselves, and he loves each one of those individuals.

Genealogy

In our urban, multi-cultural society we don’t tend to find our identity in our family’s background. We’re far more interested in what someone’s achieved personally. But for the Jewish nation, an ability to demonstrate that you were directly descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob means that you can show beyond doubt that you are one of God’s chosen people. We cannot prove this through our ancestry, but we can make the same claim. Galatians 3:7 says that ‘it is those who are of faith who are the sons of Abraham’.

Lists of names should remind us of God’s adoptive grace, that he has called us into his family, and that we have become part of God’s chosen people.

Knowledge

If you watch a film in the cinema, what happens when the credits start to roll? The lights come on, and everyone stands up to leave. The only people who would really want to stay would be those who know people in the credits. You can imagine watching a film at the cinema with people who actually worked on the film: ‘Oh, I remember him!’ ‘We had a great night out with that team!’ ‘She is so funny!’

We tend not to know much, if anything at all, about the people in these lists of names, and as a result it can be quite boring. The simple truth is that God knows each one of the people in the list, and that’s exciting. There will be nothing boring about the Lamb opening the Book of Life (see Revelation 21) and reading the list of our names!

"The Way" from Kevin Pauley

The First Sin