Redeeming Our Past

God cares about families and generations. But what if we have skeletons in our closets that we think defy redemptive hope, that we feel cannot be cleaned up let alone redeemed?
 
There’s a great story in the Book of Esther about family redemption involving a guy named Mordecai, who had a very interesting lineage or heritage. Mordecai, as we know, was the cousin of Esther. He was likely an older relative who adopted Esther as his own kid after her parents departed the scene.
 
But who exactly was Mordecai? In Esther 2:5-6, we read: “Now there was in the citadel of Susa a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin, named Mordecai son of Jair, the son of Shimei, the son of Kish, who had been carried into exile from Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon.” In other words, Mordecai’s ancestry included a man named Shimei.
 
We may recall that Shimei was the guy who cursed and threw stones at King David during David’s “trail of tears,” when he was on the run from his son Absalom’s rebellion (2 Samuel 16). Shimei is identified in the above passage as a “son of Kish,” that is, King Saul’s daddy (1 Samuel 9:1-2). Shimei was likely a relative of King Saul, possibly a cousin and certainly a Benjamite—which likely explains why Shimei was upset with David.
 
Later, Shimei would die at the hands of King Solomon for breaking Solomon’s rule against Shimei ever leaving the confines of Jerusalem (1 Kings 2:46). All this to say that Shimei was not someone who acquitted himself well, whose motives and conduct likely soiled and dishonored his family’s name and reputation.
 
But redemption would come through Shimei’s descendant, Mordecai! We learn in the Book of Esther that Mordecai would assume a key leadership position in the government of King Xerxes I of Persia (the king to whom Esther was married). Through an incredible set of circumstances, Mordecai rose to be the second most powerful person in the Persian empire—likely as the prime minister or vizier to Xerxes, much like Joseph was prime minister to the Egyptian Pharaoh (Senusret I? Amenemhat III?)—where Mordecai would play a strategic role saving the lives of Jews marked for death by Haman the Agagite—Jews scattered throughout Xerxes’ empire spanning from India to Ethiopia.  
 
But that’s not all! The cool thing is this: In the Book of Zechariah, the prophet Zechariah gave a prophetic word in chapter 12, listing families that would mourn the death of the coming Christ at Calvary—a prophecy made five hundred years before Jesus came along! And one such family is none other than the “family of Shimei”:
 
“And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son. On that day the weeping in Jerusalem will be as great as the weeping of Hadad Rimmon in the plain of Megiddo. The land will mourn, each clan by itself, with their wives by themselves: the clan of the house of David and their wives, the clan of the house of Nathan and their wives, the clan of the house of Levi and their wives, the clan of Shimei and their wives, and all the rest of the clans and their wives” (Zechariah 12:10-14).
 
Now, why in the world would Zechariah feel led to mention Shimei’s family—after all, he was a relatively minor character—and moreover, identify the family of a guy who wasn’t very nice to David, as among those on the side of the coming Messiah, Jesus, the Son of David? By the time Mordecai showed up around 483-473 BC, it would have been approximately forty years after Zechariah’s prophecy.
 
Despite Shimei damaging his family’s reputation, God saw fit to redeem it not only through Mordecai’s actions five hundred years after Shimei’s time of infamy, but also to have Zechariah prophesy its coming redemption 4 decades earlier before Mordecai’s appearance.
 
The gist of it all is this: God redeems, period! And Shimei’s and Mordecai’s connected histories back that up. What’s your family background and history? Do you think God cares enough for you to redeem your family’s past—or indeed your own past? Yes, He does care and yes, He will redeem!
 
*All Bible quotations are from the New International Version (NIV)