God's Meticulous Bookkeeping Text: 1 Chronicles 7:13
Introduction: The Unskippable Verses
We come now in our journey through the Scriptures to a verse that many, if they are being honest, would be tempted to skate over. It is a list of four names, belonging to men who lived thousands of years ago, descended from a man who was the son of a concubine. Jahziel, Guni, Jezer, and Shallum. Not exactly household names. They are not David, or Moses, or Paul. And so the temptation for the modern Christian, who has been trained to look for the quick spiritual pick-me-up or the immediately applicable life-hack, is to let his eyes glaze over and move on to the more "interesting" parts of the Bible.
But this is a profound mistake. It is a form of functional unbelief. We confess that all Scripture is God-breathed and profitable, but we act as though some parts are more God-breathed than others. We treat the Bible like a buffet, taking a scoop of the Psalms, a slice of the Gospels, a helping of the Epistles, and leaving the genealogies and census lists to get cold and crusty in the pan. But God does not stutter. He does not ramble. He does not include filler material. To live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God means we must live by this word also. These names are here for a reason. They are part of the great story, and if we skip them, we miss something of the glory of the God who wrote it.
The book of Chronicles was written to a people who had just returned from exile. They were demoralized, displaced, and tempted to think that God had forgotten His promises. Their central question was, "Are we still the people of God?" And the Chronicler's answer, beginning with nine chapters of almost nothing but names, is a thunderous "Yes!" These genealogies are not just a dry accounting of who begat whom. They are a roll call of the covenant. They are God's family tree, meticulously preserved, tracing the lines of His people from Adam all the way down to the remnant that had returned to the land. This list of names was a sermon of profound hope. It was God saying, "I have not lost a single one. I know My people by name." And that includes the sons of Naphtali.
The Text
The sons of Naphtali were Jahziel, Guni, Jezer, and Shallum, the sons of Bilhah.
(1 Chronicles 7:13 LSB)
Forgotten Sons of a Forgotten Son
Let's look at the verse itself. It is stark in its simplicity. We are given the names of four men: Jahziel, Guni, Jezer, and Shallum. These are the sons of Naphtali. Now, who was Naphtali? He was the sixth son of Jacob, the second son born to him through Rachel's handmaiden, Bilhah. He was not the son of the beloved Rachel, nor of the fruitful Leah. He was the son of a surrogate, born out of a desperate, fleshly rivalry between two sisters. The name Naphtali itself means "my wrestling," for Rachel said, "With mighty wrestlings I have wrestled with my sister, and have prevailed" (Genesis 30:8).
His very existence was a testament to the messiness of Jacob's family. And yet, here he is, listed in the official record. His tribe is not forgotten. His sons are not erased. God's covenant grace is not limited to the prim and proper lines of descent. God writes straight with crooked lines. He takes the tangled, sinful, and often pathetic stories of men and weaves them into His glorious tapestry of redemption. This is good news for us, because our family histories are not much cleaner than Jacob's.
The text makes a point to add a crucial detail at the end: "the sons of Bilhah." This is fascinating. The Chronicler could have just said they were the sons of Naphtali and left it at that. But he reaches back a generation to remind us of the matriarch of this clan. Why? Because in the biblical mindset, you are who you came from. The story does not begin with you. You are a link in a chain, and the nature of that chain matters. Bilhah was Rachel's maid. In the economy of that world, she was a nobody. She was property. She was given to Jacob to bear children on behalf of her mistress. She had no standing of her own. And yet, God names her. He identifies this tribe as her sons. In the great record of God's people, the slave girl is remembered.
This is a direct assault on all worldly systems of value. The world honors the powerful, the beautiful, the well-born. God honors the humble. He lifts up the lowly. He remembers the forgotten. He includes in His covenant family those whom the world would cast aside. The bloodline of the Messiah Himself would run through women with complicated pasts: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba. And here, in the roll call of Israel, God makes sure that Bilhah's name is recorded for all time. He is the God who sees.
God's Covenant Bookkeeping
Think for a moment about the very existence of this verse. For hundreds, even thousands of years, through wars, famines, apostasy, and exile, these names were preserved. Scribes painstakingly copied them from one scroll to the next. Why? Because God is a covenant-keeping God, and a covenant-keeping God keeps meticulous records. He knows His people. He has counted the hairs on their heads, and He has certainly recorded their names in His book.
This is not some abstract theological point. This was a lifeline for the returning exiles. Imagine a man named Shallum, living in the rubble of Jerusalem after the return. He hears this list read aloud and realizes that his family, his clan, his tribe, has a place in the story. He is not an accident. He is not a random survivor. He is a son of the covenant, a descendant of Naphtali, a son of Bilhah, a child of Jacob, an heir to the promise given to Abraham. This list gives him an identity. It anchors him in history. It assures him of his place in God's purposes.
We live in an age of radical individualism and historical amnesia. People believe they can invent their own identities out of thin air. They have no sense of belonging to anything larger than themselves, and the result is a profound and crippling anxiety. The Bible's answer to this is to root us in a story, a family, a covenant that began long before we were born and will continue long after we are gone. This is what these genealogies do. They declare that we are not our own; we belong to a people, and that people belongs to God.
This meticulous record-keeping points us forward to the Lamb's Book of Life. The reason God keeps such careful track of the family of the old covenant is that it is the pattern for the family of the new covenant. "But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven" (Hebrews 12:22-23). To be "enrolled in heaven" is to have your name written down in the registry of God's eternal city. God's accounting is perfect. Not one of His true children will be lost. Jahziel, Guni, Jezer, and Shallum were important enough for God to record in His book then, and your name, if you are in Christ, is important enough for Him to have written in His book before the foundation of the world.
Every Name Points to The Name
Ultimately, every genealogy in the Bible, every list of names, is a pointer. It is a series of signposts along the road leading to the one essential Name. The entire purpose of tracking these lineages with such care was to identify the promised Seed of the woman who would come to crush the serpent's head. The Old Testament is the story of God building a family, a nation, from which the Messiah would be born.
The tribe of Naphtali, these very descendants, would later inhabit the region of Galilee. And it was in that very region, "the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, by the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles," that the prophet Isaiah said a great light would dawn (Isaiah 9:1-2). Matthew tells us that this prophecy was fulfilled when Jesus began His ministry there (Matthew 4:13-16). The sons of Naphtali, the descendants of Jahziel, Guni, Jezer, and Shallum, were among the first to see the light of the world, the Son of God Himself, walking and teaching in their towns and villages.
This is how God's Word works. A seemingly dry and obscure list of names in Chronicles becomes the geographical backdrop for the dawning of redemption in the Gospels. God laid the foundation for Christ's coming with painstaking detail over millennia. Every name in these lists is a brick in the road that leads to Bethlehem's manger and Golgotha's cross.
Conclusion: Your Place in the Story
So what are we to do with a verse like this? We are to thank God for it. We are to thank Him for His faithfulness to His people, even the messy and obscure ones. We are to thank Him that He is a God of historical detail, not vague spiritual sentimentality. Our faith is grounded in real people, real places, and real events that God orchestrated for His glory.
And we are to find our own place in the story. Through faith in Jesus Christ, we who were once Gentiles, not a people, have been grafted into this very family tree. We are now sons of Abraham by faith. Our names have been added to the covenant roll call. God knows you by name. He has recorded your lineage not in the archives of Jerusalem, but in the blood of His own Son.
Therefore, do not despise the "boring" parts of Scripture. In them, you find the very character of God on display. You find His meticulous care, His covenant loyalty, His grace to the lowly, and His grand, overarching plan of redemption that culminates in Jesus Christ. This one verse, this list of four forgotten names, is a testament to the fact that God's eye is on the sparrow, and His memory is infinite. He has not forgotten you, and He never will.