Dad

I have spent the last several months reading Chronicles and Kings.  These books and the era from which they come would never really make any ‘favorite’ list of mine, but in the various devotionals and in schooling the kids, these books keep (KEEP) coming up.  I actually added a read-the-Gospels-in-a-month program to my morning time just for something new.

In all that reading, though, I noticed something.  Each king of Israel or Judah is evaluated.  “He did good in the sight of the Lord.”  Often there is an attribution of influence.  Jeroboam was the first king not in David’s line who led Israel after the Kingdom split.  He led the people to worship other gods and many of the kings who followed him were said to have done evil, just as Jeroboam did.  The kingdom of Judah was lead by kings from the line of David.  There were some who followed God, and others who didn’t.  As they were assessed, they were deemed to have done good in the sight of the Lord or to have done evil. 

What is interesting to me is in the attribution.  Some kings ‘chose well,’ to borrow from Indiana Jones.  When they did, it is written that they followed a good king.  The converse is true when one did not choose well.  But the actual degrees of separation is not observed in these attributions.  One king may have had an evil father, but a good grandfather.  When that was the case, the Scripture says he did good, just as his father, (name), did.  Some even had David as father, which is clearly inaccurate.

This tells me that genealogy didn’t seem as important (and if we read the Word, we know how important it is), as something more—a moral or spiritual lineage. 

I realize this plays out in a grand way with Christ.  We are adopted into the family of God, through His unfailing grace.  We no longer are assessed so calculatingly, Praise be to Him!  Our Father is God in heaven, perfect and eternal.

Even so, in a human sense, this is pretty interesting to me.  I had a terrific grandpa.  His name was Stanley Muncy.  He loved the Lord, loved his wife, loved his four boys and all the grandbabies.  He recently passed away and it was a wonderful thing to see this broken family come together in a unity of love for this one man. 

My grandpa’s sons have made their own choices in life—some good, some bad.  There has been a lot of heartache because of that generation; and it has spilled to the next.  But I wonder if we have forgotten something very important.  We have choice, too.  We don’t need to carry the schisms caused by our dads.  We can choose good, like our dad, Stanley.