Those Blessed Genealogies

This week I've been working on a genealogy poster that tracks everyone from Adam to Isa (Jesus). Eventually, we hope to give this genealogy poster as a gift to those interested in knowing more about Isa.

Now I must confess, I've never really been into genealogies. I'm pretty sure that my crazy campus minister, David Skeldon, used to read our campus ministry group genealogies occasionally (i.e. 1 Chronicles 1-9). At the time, I didn't have a passion for the good 'ole ancient family tree that was going on in the Old Testament, but to David's credit I have to say genealogies are pretty amazing. (Dave: I'm sorry I didn't appreciate those genealogy readings more - it only took three years for me to catch the vision).

Along with creating the genealogy poster, I'm trying to include messianic prophecies, too. "Camille, what's a messianic prophecy and why should I care," you say? Thanks for asking.

The Old Testament books in the Bible (all of them written between 1450 BC and 430 BC) contained hundreds of prophecies about an “anointed one” (“Messiah” in Hebrew) who would arrive in their future. The Messiah would “deliver” or “save” all the Jewish people, bringing them to paradise or heaven. These prophecies also stated that the Messiah would save all the other people in the world “through the Jews.” For this reason, people who are not Jewish need to learn about the Messiah, too.

This is a helpful website that my friend came across that lists some of the messianic prophecies and where you can find them in the Bible [the quote above was taken from this website]: http://www.clarifyingchristianity.com/m_prophecies.shtml

I hope you'll realize how cool genealogies and prophecies can be, especially when you start connecting the dots between texts written hundreds of years before Jesus actually walked the earth and the fulfillment of those texts.

The next step for me - translate all the genealogies into Urdu and Bengali :) This could take awhile...