The Rest of the Story
| “A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the Son of David, …Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David.” |
| —Matthew 1:1, 5-6 |
Anyone who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s knows the name of the late radio announcer Paul Harvey. You could hear his daily syndicated broadcasts on many radio stations at noon. Typically, one of his stories shared at the end of a regular newscast would begin like this one:
When you’re a little boy and Dad calls you “good-for-nothing,” it’s just got to hurt! That’s just what Guiseppe’s Papa called him.1
Harvey goes on to relate the story of an immigrant family from Sicily who worked in the fishing industry after coming to America. Guiseppe became ill each time he helped out on the boat. The “rest of the story” began after Guiseppe decided to leave fishing and began working at other odd jobs before finally stumbling on the thing that most interested him. He entered the world of sports and turned that world upside down.
Paul Harvey dramatically ended the story with these words:
For if that young man hadn’t been too seasick to join the family business, he would have left a vacancy in baseball’s Hall of Fame too great to fill… Guiseppe… Joe… DiMaggio. And, that’s the rest of the story.2
One of the reasons I like the Old Testament stories so very much comes from the fact that the people in those stories didn’t possess our knowledge of how the story would end. They got caught up in tragedy, or intrigue, or adventures they didn’t understand. And, at that moment in time, God alone knew the rest of their stories.
I think of two women, Rahab and Ruth. Rahab, a former prostitute, simply allowed Hebrew spies safe haven in her Jericho home because she had heard the reports about the Hebrew God who did miracles for His people. You can read the beginning of the story in Joshua 2, but the rest of it comes centuries later in Matthew 1.
Ruth, the poor immigrant Moabitess, who followed her mother-in-law and her monther-in-law’s God back to Bethlehem to scrape together a living, had no idea, even when she married and had a baby boy, that he would also become part of the lineage of David and Jesus, the Christ. The beginning of her story happens in the Book of Ruth and also concludes in the first chapter of Matthew.
I reckon that all of us play a role in stories of which we don’t know the ending. The Sovereign God of the nations, of time, and of a plan which He hasn’t fully made known to us, works through our seemingly mundane experiences, many of which we might be tempted to call “coincidences,” in order to complete the rest of our stories.
We need to ask God to show us His fingerprints in our lives, as He leads us through circumstances and experiences we don’t understand. Perhaps, in His time, He will reveal His plan so that we can more fully trust Him and take encouragement. Perhaps we will not know the end of the story until we see Him in the next life.
Whichever way God chooses to work out our stories, we can be sure that we will praise and exalt His sovereign and loving plan for us, when we at last come to know the rest of the story!
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| 1 Aurandt, Paul. Paul Harvey’s the Rest of the Story. New York: Bantam Books, 1977, pp. 62-64. |
| 2 Ibid |
