God Lives in a Three-Story House

Excerpt From Newsletter

This Ezra went up from Babylon, and he was a scribe skilled in the law of Moses, which the Lord God of Israel had given; and the king granted him all he requested because the hand of the Lord his God {was} upon him.
(Ezra 7:6)

If you do not yet understand the meaning and significance of all the things that Moses wrote, you can hardly expect to understand why Ezra would write a history of Israel from his own unique perspective or why he would sit down and take dictation from a fool like Nehemiah. Neither would you be able to understand why he would conceal the fact that he was a Prophet by calling himself a scribe. But you can easily see a few of the things you need to know from just a brief survey of his work.

Ezra devotes the entirety of the first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles to genealogical information. His purpose in doing that is both to conceal and to reveal the purpose of his work. Since most people’s eyes glaze over before they get through a half-dozen “begots,” it is rather easy to hide crucial information from them by just listing a few dozen names. Yet anyone who knows that the Prophets employed various such techniques to hide the Truth should be able to easily spot that one. It is one of the more obvious. So let’s take a look at a few of the things that Ezra hid in, among, and behind all those names.

I have already shown you one of the reasons why genealogies are included in the Scriptures. They tell us what happened to the promise that God handed down to Adam and Eve right before He booted them out of the Garden: Adam handed down the promise to his son Seth, who handed it down to his son Enosh, who handed it down to his son Kenan, and so on, until it came to be in the possession of Noah.

“God Lives in a Three-Story House,” The Voice of Elijah^®, January 1998, p. 6

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