bible and theology on Ancestors

Long before we were born, God was overseeing our future as well. We didn’t choose our ancestors; God did. God designates our identity, as he did with Jesus, so that we might fit into his plan for the ...

Pastor: Both we and our ancestors have sinned; we have committed iniquity; we have done wickedness. In the trials of this past week, I have not praised you but have forgotten your wondrous works. Al...

You, Lord God, made the eternal fabric of the world appear, and you created the earth. You are always trustworthy, you judge fairly, excellent and marvelous in your power; wise in creating and careful...

O LORD, God of Israel, there is no God like you in heaven above or on earth beneath, keeping covenant and steadfast love for your servants who walk before you with all their heart. Blessed be the ...

New Testament Mountains Like the Old Testament, the New Testament has plenty of references to mountains.  There’s the Sermon on the Mount, obviously.  Jesus often went onto hills or mountains to pray...

Two-thirds of the story of redemption is known to Christians as the Old Testament. Yet in the decades that I have been teaching Bible, I have found that most Christians, if allowed to answer honestly,...

We find hope in the ancestry of Jesus that no matter what we’ve done or where we come from, we too can be included in Jesus’ family. Jesus does not look for people who are perfect and have never faile...

The biblical fondness for genealogical lists is not dull obscurantism, it is an insistence on the primacy and continuity of people. Each name is a burnished link connecting God’s promises to his fulfi...

The actress Brooke Shields has quite an impressive family mosaic. Hanging from her family tree are the likes of Charlemagne, El Cid, William the Conqueror, the royal houses of virtually every European...

The term patrilineal has to do with tracing ancestral descent (and therefore tribal affiliation and inheritance) through the male line. In Israel the possessions of a particular lineage were carefully...

Stories, after all, are one of the most basic modes of human life and are a characteristic expression of worldview. Human life is constituted by a series of stories, implicit and explicit, that makes ...

(Scripture quotations below are from ESV unless noted otherwise.) Liturgical Context On this Third Sunday of Easter, the Revised Common Lectionary texts harmonize with the epistle’s praise of Jesus...

Hebrews 1:1-2 Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom h...

Leader: Now therefore revere the Lord, and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness People: Put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord Leader: N...

For purposes of practicality and relatability, this series considers the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea “oceans.”  The point is to relate our present-day affinity for the ocean, seashore, and beach...

We’ve all seen and loved the movies about the young underdog becoming a star. I won’t claim to be 100 percent immune to it. In fact, I think there’s something natural about wanting to be famous, in te...

I have not the smallest doubt that, if we and our ancestors had, during the last three centuries, worked just as hard on the Sunday as on the week days, we should have been at this moment a poorer peo...

We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, bu...

Ancients married in order to have children, to cement alliances, and to gain strategic relationships.

Father of heirs and orphans, Salvation of saint and sinner, Draw near and forgive us. Forgive us for clinging to law more than grace. Forgive us for choosing slavery when you offer us adoption. Forgi...

In the world of ecology, the tallest trees in a forest form a canopy that is called the overstory. It provides shade for the understory—all the vegetation that grows beneath the uppermost layer of fol...

Man in offering sacrifices avowed that God was the first principle of the world’s creation and the last end to whom all must be related.

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.

The anthropologist Desmond Morris has written: ‘Human beings are animals. They are sometimes monsters, sometimes magnificent, but always animals.’ That statement is correct as far as it goes. We are c...

Contrast the creation of the first man according to Genesis 2 with the creation of the first human beings according to Mesopotamian tradition. Both start with dust or clay, but then the accounts vary....

Through Jesus’s family tree, God puts his grace on display. God is reminding us that he can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves: pick up broken pieces and put them together, take broken lives an...

So then you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and of the household of God, Being built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus ...

In Scripture, adoption meddles with genealogies, subverts oppressive empires, secures imperial inheritances, and opens new possibilities for who can be family.

We the people of this new generation highly resolve that those who sacrificed before us shall not have sacrificed in vain. Let justice roll on.

The sense that we will live forever somewhere has shaped every civilization in human history…the unifying testimony of the human heart through history is belief in life after death. Anthropological ev...