… for books like 1 & 2 Chronicles. It starts with at least 10 chapters of Genealogies! I discovered that the hard way, when I decided to read through it for my daily reading last night. I’d only ever flipped through it for study, I’d never actually sat down and read it chapter by chapter.

So advising people to just have a go, read a chapter a day and think about what God is saying doesn’t always work. Teaching them some basic exegetical skills probably won’t help much either. At best, readers will skim read or skip those chapters and get to the good bits about the Warriors and fights and stuff. At worst, readers will be discouraged by 10 chapters/10 days of reading endless unpronounceable names, they’ll give up and go read something easier, never to return again.

But if our conviction and belief is that the whole Bible is God’s word, and we have the expectation that God speaks to us through the Bible, then I reckon we need to work out what a quiet time in these sorts of passages will look like.

I don’t have any answers yet!

But one thought occurred to me; if the Jews started off one of their major scrolls about the Kings by tracing the family line from Adam, through to Abraham and on to David, then it becomes really clear that Matthew’s intention in chapter 1 is to make a very rhetorically powerful statement to Jewish readers, about Jesus being the fulfilment of the promise to David, that one of his descendants would be king forever. So reading 1 & 2 Chronicles has illuminated Matthew’s gospel for me a bit. But from there, I’m stumped.

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