Is it not striking that the gospel is often framed as a last will and testament? It takes effect after the death of the testator. The beneficiaries receive what is in the will—unless they reject it. The gospel, then, is the last will and testament of Jesus Christ. Do you want to be an heir? Then come and receive the promised kingdom!

Usually when reading the Bible, we simply skim the genealogies thinking there is not much devotional value there to make the effort. If, however, we remember that God’s word is living and active, and it is His means to reveal the good news to us, then we must become genealogically literate if we are going to receive the full benefit of God’s revelation. Genealogies represent some of the most compressed forms of instruction in the Bible, and it takes time to unpack the hidden gems that they contain.

Even asking why genealogies exist helps begin the journey of discovery. God made man in His image. We are not a copy, but an image—and images, by nature, are not exact replicas of the original. We know this instinctively when we look at a picture: it is not the same thing as the original. It is two-dimensional and cannot fully convey life, depth, or personality.

Accommodated Language

This distinction is an important guardrail when we discuss the nature of God’s revelation to us. God speaks to us according to our capacity to understand. Revelation, therefore, is accommodated language. When the Bible is said to be accommodated, someone might be tempted to say that therefore the Bible is not being truthful. Why cannot God just tell us plainly. Well, it is because the distance between God and man is infinite. We are creatures created by God. We cannot cross the creator creature boundary. Theologians speak of God as being incomprehensible—not that we cannot know something about God, but that we cannot fully comprehend Him. This is simply an acknowledgment of our creaturely limitation.

Univocal, Equivocal, and Analogical

When I listened years ago to a lecture by R.C. Sproul, he explained something I had never heard before: words change meaning based on their point of reference. He used the word good as an example. When someone says a dog is good, the word refers to obedience and behavior. When someone says a man is good, the word moves into a different register. The same word is used, but its meaning shifts according to what it is describing.

When we say that God is good, the shift is greater still. God’s goodness is not merely greater in degree but different in kind. It is an infinite goodness. Calling it “infinite” does not explain it. It is simply acknowledging that it is not finite.

What Sproul was teaching reflects a classical distinction articulated by Thomas Aquinas—the analogia entis. We cannot know God in His essence, but we can know Him truly—though not absolutely or exhaustively. This is the nature of analogical knowledge.

Univocal language would require words to mean exactly the same thing when applied to God and creatures. This would collapse the Creator–creature distinction, since we cannot understand goodness in the same way God does without being God.

Equivocal language, on the other hand, assigns completely unrelated meanings to the same words. This leads to skepticism, because language would no longer convey real knowledge of God at all. In twentieth-century theology, Karl Barth’s emphasis on God as “wholly other” has often been interpreted as moving in this direction. To be fair, Barth did not deny that God reveals Himself truly, but his approach leaves little room for stable analogical reasoning grounded in creation.

Analogical language avoids both extremes. It allows us to speak truthfully about God without presuming to comprehend His essence. We can speak about God truly but only in an accommodated way by means of analogy. It is not a one to one correspondence—univocal or a completely different meaning—equivocal. It is analogical. Knowing this distinction is a major help in understanding God’s revelation to us. It is a guardrail to keep us within Nicene and Chalcedonian Orthodoxy. If we read scripture univocally we will have an idolatrous view of God. Analogy keeps us from projecting creaturely modes of being into God’s essence.

Biblical Genealogies

Genealogies tell our story of origin. God does not have an origin—He simply is. When Scripture teaches that humanity is made in the image of God, it is not offering a complete correspondence.

When we consider the names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and their relations of origin as Begetter, Begotten, and Proceeding, we begin to see that God’s self-revelation is fundamentally relational. These verbs describe relations of origin, not motions within the divine being.

Likewise, in the creation account, God creates from the Father, through the Son, and in the Spirit. These prepositions describe relations of action, not ontological motions within the divine being. Such relations of action are often called missions, or the economic Trinity. Since God is one, His actions are inseparable, though distinguished by their modes of action.

We know God as He reveals Himself to us, not as He is in Himself. To attempt to comprehend the divine being in His inner essence exceeds our capacity—and more importantly, it exceeds Scripture’s purpose. Scripture does not aim to provide that kind of metaphysical disclosure.

Really, what does eternal begetting mean? I do not know. What does eternal procession mean? I do not know. And I will say this much: the moment one attempts to explain these terms beyond what Scripture itself gives, one risks choosing a heresy. The early church did not employ this language as speculative explanation, but as doctrinal boundary markers. We confess that the Father begets, the Son is begotten, and the Spirit proceeds—and we stop there. To say more than this is to go beyond what is written. I accept these distinctions as true of the immanent Trinity, but I do not presume to explain them.

Nominal Analogical Relations

Genealogies then are expressions of creaturely relations that have analogs to divine relations. The Divine Father and Son are analogically echoed in the relations of a human father and son. This scripture affirms when Paul says in Ephesians:

For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, ¹⁵ Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named,

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