Daily Lesson for May 5, 2014

Today's Daily Lesson is from Matthew 1:

When you look at Jesus' family tree you find a lot of buried skeletons.

On the women's side was Tamar, who was the daughter-in-law of Judah (twice), and also the mother of two of his children.  There was Rahab, a prostitute.  And there was Bathsheba, who though married to Uriah the Hittite, was summoned to the bedchambers of David the King.

As for the men, there was David himself, who not only forced himself on Bathsheba, but then in turn had Uriah killed in the coverup.  There was Judah, who not only slept with his sons' wife (you read that right - two sons, one wife) but was also complicit in selling one of his brothers off into slavery.  There was Solomon, who though he was said to be the wisest man in the world at one time, later in life gave way to excess with the luxuries of the throne - including his 1,000 concubines.  Then there was his son, Rehoboam, who took his father's excessive ways to an even greater extreme, ultimately ending in the nation going into civil war and the 10 Northern tribes being lost.

That's a mess of a family history - adultery, prostitution, incest, human trafficking, murder, civil war.  It doesn't get any worse than that.

I tell you all that to say this: generations of dysfunction and chaos can be stopped.  We are not cursed with the fate of our fathers. We are our own people writing our own stories. We can break the cycle; it just takes one to do it.