Matthew 1:2

Verse by verse sometimes seems a hard goal. God, however, knows the reason He included every single verse in His self-revelation. I believe that every verse in my Bible has something to teach me about the God I love. (I love Him a little, and I pray that He will use His word to teach me to love Him more.)

Sometimes I use my Webster's New World College Dictionary, along with the different versions of the Bible, to shine light on the text. The Amplified Bible says, “Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers.” What does it mean to be the father of someone? One definition says “the male parent of a plant or animal,” but I think that a father is much more than that. A father is a protector. He is deserving of respect and reverence. He is a leader. He is the one responsible for teaching his sons. Exodus 13:8 instructs fathers. “You shall explain to your son on that day, This is done because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt. Deuteronomy 6:6-9 also commands fathers to be the communicators of God's word: “you shall whet and sharpen them so as to make them penetrate, and teach and impress them diligently upon the [minds and] hearts of your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up.” It is a father's duty to find truth and to communicate it from generation to generation. Many fathers these days seem to be leaving this responsibility to the woman of the house, and we women often feel like we could do a much more adequate job of this. It is not our responsibility though. The man of the family is an important creature. I believe that my society's inversion of God's authority structure is the reason for school shootings and many kinds of chaos in our society. Do you remember a movie called, “The Neverending Story?” In that movie, it was a child's job to hold back “The Nothing.” More and more these days, it seems like we are giving children weights that are too heavy for them to bear. God has made fathers responsible for holding back “The Nothing” so that children can be . . . can perhaps learn to be children once again. How do fathers hold back “The Nothing?” By studying God's word and then impressing God's word with all diligence upon the minds and hearts of their children. I read a book once by Frank E. Peretti called “Piercing the Darkness.” In this book, there was a character named Sally Beth Roe who longed to know where the boundary was between wrong and right. Even if this boundary showed her to be in the wrong, she craved the knowledge that there was a truth that was not relative, a truth that was not based on her perspective. This young woman longed for what we all crave, a father, someone to make the universe make sense, someone to hold the world down. God is our heavenly Father, of course, but we understand and accept Him better if we grow up with earthly fathers who accustom us to authority. So what do “The Neverending Story” and “Piercing the Darkness” show us about Matthew 1:2? “Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers.” When God set out to build a nation that would birth His Son into this world of sin, He started with a man called Abraham. He kept Abraham's wife Sarah from having children for many, many years. When Abraham and Sarah had children, I believe He wanted them to really treasure the gift of their son Isaac. The opportunity to teach a child is the opportunity to invest your life, to make all the years of your life mean something, to leave something of yourself behind when you die. I believe that Abraham was a FATHER, in the fullest sense of the word, to Isaac. God is my Father, as Abraham was a father to his beloved son.  And that is such a good reason to praise and thank Him for the rest of my days.