Genealogies, why are they important?

Why Genealogies Matter for Biblical Chronology

Uh-oh. That's ominous. That is ominous. We are being recorded. Continue. Uh-oh, my cursor keeps disappearing. There we go. Does anybody know how to spell genealogies? Oh, we'll get there. It's one of those words I always...

G-E-N-E, so gene. Uh-huh. A-L-O-G-E-S. A-L-O-G-I-E-S. Okay, I just threw in an extra O. Or genealogies. Or geologies. That's how I know our geologies. Yeah, that would be the wrong way to spell it.

I couldn't say G-N-L. I was.

Calling it geologies, but we're recording, so I'll stay on point. Dan, this is a perfect time.

If you brought a joke with you. This would be the perfect time to share that joke. No,.

The only joke I have is my 49 years of life. There's a lot in there, but we don't have time for all that. I'm sorry. I'm just totally not funny today.

Okay, well, I hope that that doesn't predict your thing, because you promised us that this presentation would have some humor to it. Yes. We're praying that your funny bone turns on pretty quickly. All right.

Well, I'm Terry Camerizell here with Creation Fellowship Santee. We're a group of friends bound by our common agreement that the creation account, as told in Genesis, is a true depiction of how God created the universe and all life from nothing in just six days a few thousand years ago.

We've been meeting here on Zoom most Thursday nights since June of 2020. We've been blessed with presentations by pastors, teachers, doctors, cartoonists, scientists, apologists, and all around smarty pants people who love the Lord and have a message to share.

You can find most of our past videos by searching Creation Fellowship Santee, that's S-A-N-T-E-E, on YouTube. We've also recently started a channel or page on Rumble, and you can find that by looking for CFS 2020, the year that we started our online fellowship.

So CFS 2020. You can also follow our, like and follow our Creation Fellowship Santee Facebook page and also email creationfellowshipsantee at gmail .com so you can get on our speakers list so that we, you don't miss any of our upcoming speakers.

Tonight we're blessed to have back our friend Dan Kreft. He's the seven foot apologist, really he is seven foot tall, and he's a cross-generational teacher, itinerant speaker, and author of the three-volume book Jesus Is Not the Answer to Every Sunday School Question.

In addition to his own ministry, he also serves as an adjunct instructor for Mike Riddle's Creation Training Initiative and is on the board of directors for the Apologetics Forum of Snohomish County. Dan earned a BS in electrical engineering from Northwestern University, played professional basketball, of course he did, for three years, and has been developing websites professionally since 1995.

Dan's passion is to equip and encourage the body of Christ to confidently deliver biblical responses to skeptical assaults on our faith, with a particular emphasis on the sufficiency and authority of the scripture,.

Starting with the very first verse. I couldn't have said that better myself. All right, Dan, we are happy to turn the reins over to you, go ahead. Okay, yes, tonight's presentation is entitled Wherefore Art Thou Begat?

I'll never forget the first time I delivered this to a major audience. I had a friend of mine come up to me and he said, Dan, I don't understand the topic of your presentation, of the title, and I said, you know what, don't worry about it because I have translated it for you.

Hang on, I dropped my remote. One moment, please. Yeah, this doesn't happen in real life. Okay, well, maybe I'll just use the arrow key because I don't need a remote because I'm right next to the computer.

So why are the genealogies there? Wherefore Art Thou Begat translates roughly into why are the genealogies there? And for the younger kids in the audience who like to spend all their time texting, maybe this is a little too wordy for you, so I have a slide here for you, a translation for you.

Biblical Presuppositions and the Meaning of Exegesis

So before we get into this, into the meat of the matter, I want to lay down some presuppositions or the ground rules that we're going to be operating under. They are, number one, the Bible is the inspired word of God and is without error in the original manuscripts.

Number two, every jot and tittle has a purpose. If it's there in the scriptures, it's not an accident. God put it there for a reason. And if we don't understand what that reason is, it's our job to dig and to study and to figure out what that reason is.

And three, exegete don't eisegete. Okay, here we are about three, five minutes into the presentation. I'm already throwing out big words. The prefix ex means out of. So when you look at this, normally I would have you in a physical building, you look at the exits, you look at the doors and you see a sign over each door that says exit, E-X-I-T, which I jokingly say is, you know, get out of it.

To exit is to get out of it, to get out of the room. So when you exegete, you look at the text and you pull out of it that which is there. Eisegesis, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. It's taking ideas from your head and putting them into the text.

So exegete is taking out of and eisegesis is reading into. So to the extent possible, with the Lord's help, we are going to exegete and not eisegete the scriptures. We want to know what God's word is to us, not what our word is to him.

Put it another way, very succinctly, my pastor used to say, the best commentary on the Bible is the Bible. And if you want to know what it has to say, the best thing to do is to read it. Okay, so with that said, now we have our ground rules laid, we'll get right into the genealogies.

Luke 3 and Matthew 1: Jesus as the Perfect Man and Messiah King

We're going to look at the five major genealogies in the Bible laid out from the right of the book to the left of the book. So we're going to look at Luke 3, Matthew 1, 1 Chronicles 1 -9, where everybody spends their devotional time, Genesis 10, and Genesis 5 -11, I'm going to lump together into one genealogy for reasons that hopefully you will deem me quite brilliant by the time I get done with this presentation.

You're going to think, oh yeah, why didn't I think of that? It's kind of like sliced bread. It's a lot of fun. All right, ready? So we're going to start in Luke chapter 3. Luke chapter 3, starting in verse 23, says, when he began his ministry, Jesus himself was about 30 years of age, being as was supposed, the son of Joseph, the son of Eli, the son of Mattath, the son of Levi, the son of Malchi, the son of Jani, the son of Joseph, the son of Mattath, Matthias, the son of Amos, the son of Nahum, the son of Hesli, the son of Negei.

Then you get a big list of funny names, and we get down to verse 38, and it says, the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God. Now, a little word about me. I'm a software engineer, have been for a long time, and what I do when I'm trying to break down a big problem, trying to solve a big problem, is I try to break it down into smaller bite-sized chunks, and part of that breakdown involves trying to find patterns.

So when I look at a section of scripture and I see things that are repeated, I go, okay, wait a minute, there's a pattern here, and that pattern, remember, it's there for a reason. So the pattern we see here is the son of B, the son of C, the son of D, the son of E, and this goes throughout the whole chapter.

So now there's a comment, there's a refrain, there's a question I'm going to keep asking you throughout this presentation, and that is, wherefore art this begat? Why is this genealogy here? We know it's there for a reason.

Why is it there? Well, every gospel writer, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they all wrote with a particular view of Jesus in mind. When we look at the book of John, we see very easily that the book of John was written to demonstrate that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God.

Jesus is God. That's John's whole focus of his gospel. When we get here to the book of Luke, Luke gives us a hint right here in the third chapter of what his purpose is when he says the son of Adam. Luke's gospel is written to demonstrate that Jesus is the perfect man, and we see the hint of that right here when he traces his genealogy all the way back to Adam.

Okay, so wherefore art this begat? To demonstrate that Jesus is the perfect man. Then we go over to Matthew chapter 1, the first of the four gospels, and we see, starting in verse 1, it says the record of the genealogy of Jesus, the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Abraham was the father of Isaac. Isaac was the father of Jacob, and Jacob was the father of Judah and his brothers. Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar. Perez was the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram.

Ram was the father of Abinadab, and Abinadab the father of Nashon. Nashon the father of Salmon. Funny names, funny names, funny names. We go down to verse 16, and we see Jacob was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, by whom Jesus was born, who is called Messiah.

Okay, software engineering brain kicks in. I start looking for patterns. What is the pattern that we see here? We see A was the father of B, B was the father of C, C was the father of D. It was all the way through the section, throughout the genealogy.

So now you have to ask yourself the question, wherefore art this begat? Why is this genealogy here? What is Matthew trying to prove? We already know that John was written to prove that Jesus is God. We know that Luke was written so that to prove that Jesus is the perfect man.

Oh, notice that John doesn't have a genealogy because God doesn't have a genealogy, right? The Gospel of Mark, which we just skipped over, does not have a genealogy because Mark's purpose in writing his gospel was to demonstrate that Jesus was the perfect servant of God, and nobody cares about the genealogy of the servant, do they?

Servants are there to serve. When we get to Matthew, however, Matthew does have a genealogy. What's the purpose of his genealogy? He gives us a hint right here when he says he was called the Messiah. Messiah means anointed one or the Savior in Greek that's translated as the Christ.

So Jesus is the Messiah King. And what I didn't read, I don't have time to read, is right here in the middle of Matthew's genealogy. They're all the kings of Israel, starting with David and the kings that came after him, his descendants.

So if you're writing, if you wanted to demonstrate that somebody has the right to the throne, you have to do what? You have to show that he's related to the line of kings because kingdoms are passed down from father to son, okay?

So Jesus is the Messiah King. Jesus, the book of Matthew, and in Matthew's genealogy, we see that the whole point of the genealogy and the point of his gospel is to demonstrate that Jesus is the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy.

He's the rightful heir to the throne of Israel, okay? So Jesus is the Messiah King. Now we get to the really fun one. We go over to 1 Chronicles. Excuse me. 1 Chronicles 1 through 9. I'm not going to read all nine chapters, so fret not.

Let not your heart be troubled. Here we go. 1 Chronicles 1, starting in verse 1. Not even a verb, right? It's like the author of 1 Chronicles knew that he had nine whole chapters of genealogies to write, and he was not going to waste time making a whole bunch of noise about guys that everybody knew about.

So we have a list of names, and then he continues on. Skipping down a little bit, we got verse 10. And then later on, we have the sons of Abraham were Isaac and Ishmael. These were their genealogies. This is hard, folks.

Tema and a whole bunch of other funny names. Okay, so when you read all the way through 1 Chronicles 1 through 9, there is no one single pattern that weaves its way throughout the entire nine chapters of genealogies.

So we have actually several patterns that I've recognized, and a few of them are A, B, C, D, right? Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahaloel, Jared, which is a list of names with no frills. Then we have the sons of A were B, C, and D, and then we also have A became the father of B, etc., etc., etc.

So now we have to ask ourselves, what is the purpose? Wherefore art this begat? What is the purpose of the genealogy of 1 Chronicles 1 through 9? Well, you don't really get this picture until you read all the way through it and you kind of take it all in, but 1 Chronicles 1 through 9 is really the genealogy of the nation of Israel.

You want to know where Israel comes from, where all the tribes are, who's related to whom. This is where you go, 1 Chronicles 1 through 9. Okay? So now the next genealogy we go to, we're getting closer to our target, so stay with me.

Genesis 10: The Table of Nations and the Unity of the Human Family

Genesis chapter 10. We're going to start having fun here in a minute. Genesis chapter 10. Here we go. Starting in verse 2. The sons of Japheth were Gomer and Magog, and Madi and Javon, and Tubal, and Meshach, and Teres.

The sons of Gomer were Ashkenaz, and Riphthah, and Torgamah. The sons of Javon were Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. For these the coastlands of the nations were separated into their lands, every one according to his language, according to their families, into their nations.

The sons of Ham were Cush, Mizraim, Put, and Canaan. And then it goes on and on and on. So we ask ourselves, wherefore art this begat? What is the purpose of this genealogy? Why is it here? Well, the guys who like to give titles to sections of scripture call this the table of nations.

The patterns we see here are the sons of A were B, C, and D, and A became the father of B. Those are the two predominant patterns we see in Genesis chapter 10. And as I've mentioned, it's called the table of nations.

You want to find out where all the nations come from? You go to Genesis chapter 10, and also First Chronicles chapter 1, and you can get an idea that everybody traces their ancestry back to one man. So it kind of makes you, when you read this, and you consider it, and you think about it, it kind of makes the whole idea of racism rather silly, right?

Because we all trace our ancestry back to one man. So it's really rather ridiculous. Okay, now here's where we start having fun. Genesis chapter 5. We're going to start reading in verse 3. Okay, are you ready?

I am. When Adam had lived 130 years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth. Then the days of Adam, after he became the father of Seth, were 800 years, and he had other sons and daughters.

So all the days that Adam lived were 930 years, and he died. Seth lived 105 years, and became the father of Enosh. Then Seth lived 800 years, and 807 years, after he became the father of Enosh, and he had other sons and daughters.

So all the days of Seth were 912 years, and he died. Enosh lived 90 years, became the father of Kenan. Then Enosh lived 815 years, after he became the father of Kenan, and he had other sons and daughters.

So all the days of Enosh were 905 years and he died. Okay so here we go. The pattern here is very very simple. Even adults can get this. Check this out. The pattern we see here is A lived X years and he begat B.

A lived after he begat B Y years and he begat sons and daughters. And finally all the days of A were X plus Y years and he died. So over and over again and he died. And he died and he died and he died.

Genesis 11, Terah, and the Timing of Abram's Birth

Alright now head on over to Genesis chapter 11. Just a few pages to the right. We'll start reading in verse 10. These are the records of the generations of Shem. Shem was 100 years old and became the father of Arphaxad two years after the flood.

And Shem lived 500 years after he became the father of Arphaxad and he had other sons and daughters. Arphaxad lived 35 years and became the father of Shelah. And Arphaxad lived 403 years after he became the father of Shelah and had other sons and daughters.

Shelah lived 30 years and became the father of Eber. And Eber lived 403 years after he became the father of Eber and he had other sons and daughters. Okay we have enough to go to detect our pattern now.

So let's lay it out. First is A lived X years and he begat B. You might notice this sounding a little bit familiar. A lived after he begat B Y years and begat sons and daughters. And finally, and all the days of A were X plus Y years and he died.

Right? Some of you nodded your head. Some of you said yes. But unfortunately you are incorrect. I tripped you. Because there are no and he died in Genesis chapter 11. So wait a minute. How can there be no and he died?

Does that mean that everybody listed here in the book of Genesis chapter 11 is still alive today? Well obviously not. But here's what you need to know. I said when you see a pattern, you know, what's going on here?

What you need to ask yourself. I see a pattern. I see very, very, you know, it's very, very similar to Genesis chapter 5 but there's this glaring difference. There are no and he died in Genesis chapter 11.

What's with this? Why all the and he died back in Genesis chapter 5? Well the answer is I think is pretty simple. I didn't get a chance to read it but if you go back to Genesis chapter 5 there's one guy right in the middle of it all who didn't and he died.

Do you know who that is? It's Enoch. Enoch is the only one in Genesis chapter 5 who didn't and he died. So when you have all these and he died, and he died, and he died, and then suddenly you have this guy right in the middle and it says, and he was, he walked with God and then he was no more because God took him.

The pattern is completely broken. It's almost like God is shining a great big spotlight on Enoch saying, hey look at this. Look at my man Enoch. This guy's important. I want you to take notice of him.

I got this pattern before him and the pattern after him but he breaks the pattern. Now figure out why. We'll come back to this. I think you're gonna find it very interesting. So now that we've gone through the five major genealogies of the Bible, from the back to the front of the Bible, you should have an old song ringing in your head right about now.

And the song goes a little something like this. One of these things is not like the others. Which one is it? Do you know? One of these genealogies is not like the others. Which one is it? Do you know?

Well if you haven't figured it out yet, little things make a big difference and those little things are numbers. Genesis chapter 5 and Genesis chapter 11 are the only genealogies in the entirety of Scripture that mention the ages of each patriarch when his son was born.

The only ones that have numbers like this. Hmm. Is it an accident? No. Every jot and tittle has a purpose. Remember rule number two. Every jot and tittle has a purpose. This is not an accident. So I don't know about you, but when I look at something that has a bunch of numbers in it, I start looking at, okay, what's God trying to communicate to us with all these numbers?

And the easiest thing you can do with numbers, other than perhaps sort them, is to add them up. Let's add them up and see what we get. In Genesis chapter 5, we learn that when Adam was 130 years old, he had a son named Seth.

When Seth was 105, he had Enosh. When Enosh was 90, he had a son named Kenan. When Kenan was 70 years old, he had a son named Mahalalel. When Mahalalel was 65 years old, he had a son named Jared. Jared was 162 when Enoch was born.

Enoch was 65 when Methuselah was born. Methuselah was 187 when his son Lamech was born. And Lamech was 182 when Noah was born. And when Noah was born, excuse me, and when Noah was 500 years old, he had Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

Now, if you take all these numbers and you add them up, what do you get? Okay, nobody's talking, so I'll just go ahead and tell you. It's 1 ,556 years. Now, normally I would ask people to memorize this number.

Maybe you want to jot it down, but you don't have to. Don't go scrambling for a piece of paper and a pencil. I'll tell you what, we'll just store it in my calculator here, and we'll bring it back later.

Okay, so 1 ,556. Take that in the calculator, and then we'll kind of push it up off the top of the desktop there, and then we'll move on to Genesis chapter 11, and we will lather, rinse, and repeat. In Genesis chapter 11, we see Shem was a hundred years old when Arphaxad was born.

Arphaxad was 35 years old when Sheolah was born. Sheolah was 30 years old when Eber was born. Eber was 34 years old when Peleg was born. Peleg was 30 years old, oh my goodness, when Rehu was born. Rehu was 32 years old when Sareg was born.

Sareg was 30 when Nahor was born. And Nahor, you know what? Nahor brought shame upon the family. He was 29 years old. Couldn't even wait till he was 30. Kids having kids. What is this world coming to?

Nahor, yep, you've earned it. You must wear the cone of shame. Nahor wears the cone of shame. We don't like to talk about Nahor, but we have to because he's in Scripture. Now, when we get down to Terah, something very interesting happens here.

And this is where my friend and one of our attendees here, I won't mention his name because I don't want to embarrass him, but I had a guy come up to me after my first big presentation of this, and he says, you know what?

I think you made a little boo-boo on the age of Terah when Abram was born. And I said, oh really? So I went home and I went and dug into it, and this is what I found. See, you can teach a seven-footer new tricks.

Check this out. So when you read Genesis 11, chapter 11, verse 26, it says, after Terah had lived 70 years, he became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Okay, so what I had done before is I said, okay, clearly, you know, we just, the answer is simple here.

All we have to do is take a line and drop it on my head. Why isn't this working? There we go. And you just drop it, drop a line, when Terah was 70, Abram was born, right? Seems pretty simple. We move along and the presentation proceeds as normal.

Well, that's not what really happens here. We need to, there's, there's a problem. Remember I talk about patterns, right? And when a pattern is broken, the pattern up to this point has been after X lived Y, you know, A lived X years, he became the father of B, etc., etc., right?

But now we have, he became the father of B, C, and D. There are three guys here. So the pattern is broken. So we should have alarm bells going off in your head, going, danger, danger, danger. There is something very different about Terah here in Genesis chapter 11.

And that difference is the two additional names. You got Nahor and Haran. So we have to be on our toes. And this is where my brother was, was, was just blessed me with the, you know, with open eyes. He kind of slapped me upside the head, you know, politely and said, you need to look into this a little more.

Like, all right, so here's what we found. When we continue reading in Genesis 11 verse 32, it says the days of Terah were 205 years and Terah died in Haran. Okay, so we know that Terah lived 205 years, so let's drop a line over here at 205 years and Terah, we know Terah died in Haran.

When we continue reading in Genesis chapter 12 verse 4, it says, now Abram was 75 years old when he departed from Haran. Okay, so let's take a line and drop it on Abram's timeline. When he was 75 years old, we know that Abram left Haran.

Looks pretty good so far. Everything seems to be, you know, copacetic. It looks like Abram, you know, left Haran when, when Terah was about, what, 145? And then some years later, you know, Terah died.

But is that what happened? No. Because when we get over to Acts chapter 7 verse 4, we read, Abram settled in Haran. From there, after his father died, God had him move to Canaan. Uh-oh. Wait a minute.

The timeline we have here has Abram leaving Haran and going to Canaan way before Terah dies. So clearly, we have a misalignment in our timeline. So we have to take this and move it over a few years, 40 years to be exact, and now we see, in order for this to line up, we have to have Abram leaving Haran after, after his father Terah dies, and that can't happen unless Terah was 130 years old when Abram was born.

So Abram was clearly not the firstborn. Okay? Now, there is a simplifying assumption that I'm making here. I don't know exactly when or how long after Terah's death, Abram left Haran. We don't know that.

It could have been the day of, it could have been the week after, it could have been two years after, we don't know. So the best we can do here is to say that at earliest, Terah was 130. Terah was no younger than 130 when Abram was born.

All right? Everybody, everybody clear with that? Okay? No objections? We're gonna move on. And if there aren't objections, you can just rewind this later and you can go through it again a little more slowly.

So let's take this 130, and we'll take it back to our, our list of numbers here, and we'll plop it in here where the stop sign was. We know that Terah was 130 years old when Abram was born. Now, Abram, Abram's age, when he started having kids, is not important to our genealogy right now, because we can actually, we can stop here because both secular scholars and biblical scholars alike all agree that Abram lived around the late 1900s or early 2000s BC.

There doesn't seem to be much argument about when Abram lived. So we don't need to waste, we don't need to spend a whole lot of time on, on Abram's, on his, on his lifespan. So when you add all these ages up, what do you get?

You get 450 years. So let's take Genesis chapter 5 and Genesis chapter 11 and put it all together. What do we get? So you see here it says Adam Seth. That should be Shem. I have an older, slightly older copy of my presentation.

Oops. And believe it or not, I presented this for years, and it wasn't until I was in Denver just, uh, what, last week or two weeks ago that this was pointed out to me. So my, my bad, yo. So from Adam to Shem, we have what?

1 ,556 years. From Shem to Abram, we have 450 years. Now, math is hard, so let's do some math. 1 ,556 plus 450 equals 2 ,006, right? It's a little bit too late in the day to be doing math, so we'll let the calculator do it for us.

2 ,006, that's not a very round number, so we'll just round it down, call it an even 2 ,000. So we have approximately 2 ,000 years from Adam to Abram. Now, as I mentioned previously, Abram lived approximately 2 ,000 years BC.

2 ,000 BC. BC is before Christ, that's before Jesus, so clearly that puts around 2 ,000 years between Abram and Jesus. And of course, this is the year 2021, which puts us 2 ,021 years after Jesus. So again, math is hard.

We'll keep the numbers nice and round. We'll call it an even 2 ,000 years from Jesus to us. So when you add 2 ,000 plus 2 ,000 plus 2 ,000, even I can tell you that is about 6 ,000 years. So now here's the question.

Here's where I normally get interactive, but we won't take time to do that right now. Can you tell the age of the earth based upon what we've studied so far? Oh, time's up, sorry. Actually, no, you cannot.

What? No. So in order to tell the age of the earth, you need to have the genealogies, but we don't have enough information yet because the genealogies concern themselves with people. We have studied people, and the only question we can answer at this point is, how long has man been on the planet?

Now, knowing what we have here in Genesis chapter 5 and Genesis chapter 11 is necessary for determining the age of the earth, but it is not sufficient. You need more information. You need to go back to Genesis chapter 1, because even if you seal up this area right here and you say, okay, fine, man has been on the planet for 6 ,000 years, it doesn't keep you—it still allows the old earthers to come in and say, okay, what about the gap theory, and what about the day-age theory, right?

They can still try to put all kinds of long epochs in Genesis chapter 1. So you need to take Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis chapter 5 and Genesis chapter 11 and put them all together, but we're not doing Genesis chapter 1 today, so we can't answer the question, how old is the earth?

That's a different presentation. You'll have to bring me back for that one. Okay, so now that we've done all this number juggling, all this number crunching, there's invariably going to be a naysayer in the crowd, and the naysayers, as they do, they like to do the nay-nay.

The naysayers, they do the nay-nay. They say, no, no, no, you see, Dan, this is all great, but father and son can mean ancestor or descendant, so really what you're doing here sounds great, but you're ignoring the fact that, you know, the Hebrews reckon the word son differently than we do.

Okay, let's take a look at a few examples. Let's take blind Bartimaeus, for example. When Bartimaeus heard that Jesus was passing by, in Luke chapter 18, verse 38, he exclaimed at the top of his voice, Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me!

Okay, so now wait a minute. David lived, as best I can remember, about 1 ,000 BC. Does Bartimaeus really think that Jesus' daddy is David? No, clearly not. He's blind Bartimaeus, not dumb Bartimaeus. The Jews reckon the word father or son differently, so just because somebody says father, it doesn't mean daddy, right?

So we see a clear example of that. Abram was called the father of Jacob in Genesis chapter 28, verse 13, but he wasn't the father as we reckon the word. He was the grandfather of Jacob. He was the forefather, if you will.

Laban likewise was also called the son of Nahor, but he wasn't the son. He was the grandson of Nahor in Genesis 29, verse 5. So the point of this is, the can mean does not mean always means, and the way we find out whether it is or it isn't, meaning daddy or ancestor, is we have to look at context.

We have to use scripture to compare, to use scripture to interpret scripture. Okay, with that objection covered, we move on to our second objection. The naysayers naynay some more, and they say the biblical genealogies are routinely telescoped, like an old-school telescope, right, like the pirates used to use.

They purposely omit names, therefore genealogies cannot be used as chronologies. Okay, let me take a step back just a little bit. The word genealogy comes from two Greek words, genea meaning race or generation, and logos meaning the study of.

Okay, so when you put it together, a genea logos or a genealogy is the study of races or genealogies. Likewise, a chronology, if you've ever had a Timex watch, like I did when I was, you know, when I was a younger man, I had a Timex watch.

On the bottom of the watch it said chronograph, and I'm like, man, that's a big fancy word. What is a, what is a chronograph? Well, that comes from two Greek words, chronos meaning time, and logos meaning the study of.

So chronology is the study of time. So really, if you have a watch that says chronograph on it, it's just a fancy way of saying watch, right? It's just marketing. Oh man, I got a chronograph on my hand.

Wow. All right, so we have genealogies, which are basically counting heads or counting noses, and then you have chronologies, which are counting the passage of time, right? So genealogies count noses, chronologies count time.

So yes, are they routinely telescoped? They are. I'm gonna take you through a few of them, but I need to warn you, you need to mind the gap, because some of these gaps are substantial. When we get to First Chronicles 3, 11, and 12, here's what we see.

We see Jehoram, Ahaziah, Joash, Amaziah, Azariah, or Uzziah, as somebody called, as some people called him, and his close friends just called him Uzi. When we get over to Matthew 1, 8, we see Jehoram, Thealer, and then finally Uzziah shows up.

Okay, so we have three people missing in Matthew's genealogy. Now, remember the question that I kept repeating at the beginning of this presentation. Wherefore art this begat? What is the purpose of Matthew's genealogy?

Well, if you remember, the purpose of Matthew's gospel is to demonstrate that Jesus is the rightful heir to the throne of Israel. He is the promised Messiah. There are more Old Testament quotations in the book of Matthew than there are in the other three Gospels.

So what's Matthew's point? He wants to show you that Jesus Christ is the rightful heir to the throne of Israel, and to do that, does he need to connect all the kings together in a row, or can he just hit some of the higher players and say, yeah, y 'all know that Jehoram was the great-great grandfather of Uzziah, so I don't need to mention the three guys in the middle.

Right? It's kind of like, you know, like connect the dots. So it's not a problem here. Matthew's purpose is still served. I mean, ultimately, it's the Holy Spirit's purpose, right? The Holy Spirit's purpose is still served through Matthew, even though Matthew eliminated some of the generations.