Genesis 10:2 – “The sons of Japheth…”
Genesis 10:6 – “The sons of Ham…”
Genesis 10:21 – “To Shem…”
In the first four chapters of Genesis, we meet Adam and Eve and their family and then Genesis 5 speeds up with a genealogy of over 1,600 years to get us from Adam to Noah. Chapters 6-9 focus in on Noah and his family before chapter 10 speeds up again with a long genealogy showing that all of humanity came from Noah’s three sons – Shem (through whom comes Jesus), Ham, and Japheth.
These people are fulfilling God’s call to Adam and Eve (Genesis 1:28) and Noah and his sons (Genesis 9:1) to “be fruitful and multiply” and it confirms Acts 17:26 which tells that all men came from Noah and that God “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place”. The incredible part of this is, though they seem like merely a long list of names to us, something like the Hebrew phone book, God knows each of these people by name and, as Luke 12:7 says, “…even the hairs of your head are all numbered…” If you like to study ancestry and genealogy, you might be interested to know that Genesis 10 is your history, as every person and nation descended from Noah’s three sons – Ham, Shem, and Japheth
Though God knows them all by name, some receive more note than others and show that nations can descend from people, like the evil Canaanites from Canaan, Noah’s grandson who he cursed, and that these people groups can carry generational patterns and curses unless someone changes the path of their family and gets saved. (Like Enoch in Genesis 5:22 who breaks up a long genealogical list and is noted as “walked with God”). Our lives are affected by the decisions those before us made and the decisions we’re making today can determine and affect our children, grandchildren, and generations, positively or negatively.
Ultimately, lists like this are similar to the list of names that Jesus has in the lamb’s Book of Life in His Kingdom, which is the most important list of all. This list of names on the guest list for Jesus’ Kingdom is mentioned throughout Revelation. This list is the determination of who will spend eternity with King Jesus and who will spend eternal torment with the Deceiver and is the list we all want to find our names on through having a relationship with Jesus Christ.
Have you continued the patterns of generations before you (good or bad) and how can you break generational curses to change the trajectory of your life and legacy of your family?
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