Two years ago, I got an Ancestry DNA kit for Christmas. It wasn’t something I had asked for, but I’d seen the Ancestry DNA commercials and was interested in it. I’ve always been intrigued by genealogy and genetics. I’ve wanted to learn about my family tree, who my ancestors were, and where they were from for a long time, but I had never had the time nor the resources to research it. After filling a little vial with my saliva and sending it back to the lab, I discovered that I am 53% English/Northwestern European. It turns out I’m also 16% Irish, 16% Scottish, 8% Swedish, and 7% Welsh. While I still have a lot to learn about my family tree, these results gave me a small glimpse of who I am and where I’m from.

There are lots of family trees or genealogies written in the Bible, but we often skip past them, believing these lists of names to be kind of boring and not that important to the story line. But whenever we come across a genealogy in our Bible reading, we should slow down, pay attention, and read carefully because these family trees teach us a lot more than we think they do. One of the most important genealogies in Scripture is Jesus’ genealogy in Matthew 1, and while it may seem like just another list of names, it actually contains a deeper meaning about who Jesus is.