People

He Knows Your Name

Coming up this Sunday on richesofheaven.com we will be posting another Bible summary as we begin reading the book of 1 Chronicles.  In prior readings of this book my inclination has been to speed through these lists of names, barely catching who they were and the families to which they were related. Some of the well-known Bible characters can be identified quickly, but the others seem to be relatively insignificant. As far as we know, most of these people did not make great contributions to the history of God’s People, and, with some notable exceptions, very little is known about them.

Reading the Bible can sometimes be a bit tedious when we come to the parts where there are lists of people’s names, as we see in 1 Chronicles. Except when we remind ourselves that all of these people were so important to God that He would have them included in His Book. Think of your own family’s history. If you’ve ever read all the names in your family’s history, you know that every one of them is important to you because they are in some way connected to you. When we read the names of people in our history, even distant relatives, we stop and think about them. What kind of person they might have been? Could we have become good friends with them? And there may be some we sincerely wish we could have known, maybe even the unsavory ones.

All these people whose names are listed in 1 Chronicles are known to their Creator. And they are in the Bible because God Himself gave those names (2 Timothy 3:16) to someone who was keeping records so that they would be preserved for us to read thousands of years later here in the twenty-first century, A.D.

Names are important to Almighty God. He directed Adam to give names to all the newly-created animals; He directed Mary to name His Son, Jesus; He named each of the billions of stars in the universe. (Psalm 147:4, Isaiah 40:26)

Your name may not be in the Bible, but He knows you. He made you, created you to be born on the exact day of your birth. And if you have committed your life to Him, He has written your name in His personal diary: the Lambs Book of Life. (Rev 21:27)