Articles

Rev Dr Gavin Perkins

I am yet to meet someone who has Chronicles as their favourite book in the Bible. If that’s you, come and say ‘hello’! In fact, many lifelong Christians have never read the book, and even fewer have heard a sermon series on Chronicles.

The book gets neglected for several reasons. The fact that it begins with 9 chapters of genealogy is not a great help. It also seems to repeat a lot of the events from Samuel and Kings but skips some of the most familiar moments. If you are reading straight through the Bible and you have just finished Kings, it takes a certain type of persistence to keep pressing on through Chronicles.

This term at St Jude’s we are reading and preaching on the book of Chronicles, and my simple goal in this article is to get you excited by that idea!

A key to understanding the book of Chronicles is to realise where it fits within the whole Hebrew Scriptures (our Old Testament). In our bibles you will find it squeezed in just after Samuel and Kings, before Ezra and Nehemiah. However, in the Hebrew Bible, Chronicles is the last book, and that is the key to seeing its significance. It is the last word of the Old Testament.

Chronicles was written very late in the story of Israel and Judah, with the version we have dating from about 350BC… almost 200 years after Judah had returned from exile in Babylon, and 550 years after the events of David’s life recorded here. It is written very deliberately to wrap up all the threads of the Old Testament and to prepare God’s people for what comes next. It beautifully lays out the expectation that God’s people will experience true blessing once again, but for that to happen they need to live as God’s people, in God’s place, under God’s rule.

The constant emphasis of Chronicles is that blessing is possible only when they are under the rule of a godly king in the line of David. The author of Chronicles ignores the historical David’s many flaws and failures, because he is more interested in the line of David than the person David.

The Chronicler also shows that blessing radiates out from the temple in Jerusalem. It is when the ministry of the temple is perfected and fulfilled that blessing will come again to God’s people. It is the place of blessing.

The book also holds out the promise that blessing will not just come to the small remnant of God’s historic people Judah, but will flow to ‘all Israel’ including even the nations.

God has not given up on his promise to bless the children of Abraham, and through them to bring blessing to all the nations.

All of this was exactly what the people of God needed to hear at this point of their history. They were no longer an independent kingdom. They were now a small out of the way province in the vast Persian Empire, were soon to be swallowed up by Alexander and the Greeks, and then eventually the Romans. They were a weary people  wondering if God still would keep his promises. Is there still a path to blessing again?

The picture presented in Chronicles, through carefully chosen flashbacks of their own history, is that God has not given up on his promise to bless the children of Abraham, and through them to bring blessing to all the nations.

As the final book of the Old Testament, Chronicles could not more perfectly and beautifully prepare God’s people for the fulfilment of all these hopes in great David’s greater Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who is himself the place of blessing, and the source of lasting hope for all God’s people.

Chronicles gave a renewed vision for God’s weary people, and we pray this book might have the same impact on us this term.

In Christian Fellowship

Rev Gavin Perkins

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