Didn’t we just do this? If you’re reading the Bible through the year plan here at NHRC, you might be having a little bit of deja vu. We already read through these stories in Kings, didn’t we? And now we’re doing them all over again in Chronicles? And the genealogies, oh, the seemingly endless genealogies! We just had the genealogy of Saul in 1 Chronicles 8, then we get it again later in 1 Chronicles 9. If you read the Bible cover-to-cover, you’re definitely in the territory where we ask, “Didn’t we just do this?” I recently learned my iPhone can merge photos together if they look similar or appear to be duplicates. It puts them in a folder and asks me if I’d like to merge them. I don’t have an eye for photography, so to me those pictures all look the same, so why not merge them and free up some space? It’s efficient. But 1 & 2 Kings and 1 & 2 Chronicles, though we sometimes think they could be merged as one, aren’t meant to be efficient. They are a lesson in perspective. 1 & 2 Kings was written when the people of Israel and Judah were still in exile in Assyria and Babylon respectively. The narrative of 2 Kings ends in Babylon. The scribes of the day worked hard to preserve the people’s history and identity, much of which is tied to the genealogy tracing them back to their tribe. They are exiles in a foreign country, conquered and taken from their own homeland. They didn’t want to lose their understanding of where they came from, so they wrote down the narrative of the kings. It is history and also a confession of sin. If you were an Israelite parent in Babylon or Jerusalem and your child asked you, “Why do we live here if we’re the people of God, who were rescued and delivered from Egypt to the promised land?” the two books of Kings would answer that question: because we fell away. The Lord sent prophet after prophet to call us back and some kings responded to that call, but for the most part we went wayward until the promised day of judgment and justice was enacted upon us. 1 & 2 Chronicles is also history, and some of it is repeated from Kings. But you may have already noticed there are more details included and a different focus. 1 Chronicles 9:1 clues us into an important fact: these two books are written after the exile (roughly a century after Kings). There is a stronger focus on the temple and on worship and a greater emphasis on faithfulness. If Kings is confession, Chronicles is assurance: God isn’t done with us yet! We have a future. Our shame is no more, and though we cannot change the past we can learn from it by God’s grace. We can prevent ourselves from making the same mistakes over again. Just as the tomb wasn’t the end of the story for Jesus, the exile wasn’t the end of the story for the Israelites. Your own sins, errors, mistakes and shortcomings aren’t the end of the story for you either. We need the hopeful perspective of Chronicles and the gospel of Jesus to know that our Lord isn’t finished with us yet. And we may have a lot to learn, but our Savior and Messiah was also known by another title: Teacher. - Pastor Steven