Context For Kids

Episode 137: Talking about Angels in the Bible

Miss Tyler — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 10:21:15 +0000

The truth is that we know more about angels on TV and in Christian art than we do about angels in the Bible, and so before we dive into our first real encounter with angels in Genesis 19 we’re going to see what the Bible does and doesn’t say about Angels. And we’ll talk about the three most famous angels of all!

The Bible has a lot to say about angels, but it’s very mysterious and confusing. It’s not like there is a chapter totally devoted to angels just talking about them like a high school biology book. We have to filter through the entire Bible for clues—which means that unless someone knows the Bible really well, they probably have a lot of wrong ideas about angels. And to make things even worse, outside of the Bible there are even more beliefs about angels that have nothing at all to do with the Bible. Maybe you’ve heard that people become angels after they die, or that angels all have wings, or that there are angels who look like little babies who fly around in February, shooting people with mini-arrows and making them fall in love. When I was younger, but still a grownup, there were TV series like Touched by an Angel and Highway to Heaven, making it even more confusing. It’s hard to separate what the Bible says from what we see on TV, in movies, from legends, or in books. And that wouldn’t be such a big deal, but it makes what we see in the Bible confusing. And sometimes we picture things in our minds that have nothing to do with what the Bible says. Genesis 19 is the first time we see angels in the Bible actually called angels, and we see them as normal-looking men who have messenger jobs—which means that they are doing jobs for God here on earth, either delivering messages or checking things out. We will see angels doing other things too—like fighting battles and saving people. Really, an angel’s job is whatever God tells them to do. Sometimes angels are in disguise, and sometimes they aren’t—and when they aren’t, they are really scary-looking, and we have to be told not to be afraid. And when we look at some of the things people wrote about angels outside of the Bible, we can see some pretty wacky ideas that came from their time in exile in Babylon!

First of all, I want you to know that we aren’t going to talk about the Angel of the Lord because that’s different from ordinary angels—the Angel of the Lord is God somehow, but I really don’t understand it totally. Regular angels are heavenly beings, meaning they live where God is and they can see God and talk to Him and get orders from Him and all that jazz. We know from the Bible that angels were created to be angels by God. When people die, they don’t become angels. People who are dead are still people and when Jesus comes back and they come alive again, they will still be humans but with perfect bodies that can’t get sick and die anymore. Although Jesus said that we will be like angels when we die, because we won’t be getting married, being like something isn’t the same as being that thing. For example, I am like Taylor Swift because I am a woman, but that’s where it ends. So, we are like but not like angels. In fact, angels are superior to us—they live forever once God creates them unless God ends their lives and so they are smarter and wiser and know a whole lot more than we ever will. The word angel is really just a job description for these heavenly creatures. We get the word angel from the Greek word angelos, and the Hebrew word is malakim, but those words both mean the same thing—messenger. That’s where it can get confusing because angelos and malakim, messengers, can also be human beings, so we have to read what the Bible says to know when we are dealing with an angel from Heaven or a human being carrying a message as a messenger or a priest or a prophet. In the book of Revelation, at the end of the Bible, the writer is sending messages to the “angels” of seven churches in modern-day Turkey. Are those angels humans or from God? It doesn’t say but it could be both, although since they are seven letters, it sounds like they should be humans—not like angels need letters from humans, right? And angels deliver messages from God and not from people.

Depending on where we are in the Bible, there are different names given to God’s angelic messengers. Sometimes they are called ministers, or Daniel calls them watchers, or hosts and mighty ones when they are fighting angels, and mediators. But in the end, no matter what they are called, they all have the same job—which is to do whatever God tells them to do. But angels aren’t robots—they have what we call free will which means that they can decide to say no. And there are stories in the Bible about angels who said no and who even went to war against God and got chucked out of heaven. We’ll talk about that more later. Angels aren’t as much trouble as we are but they can still be rebellious and get themselves into trouble. Not so much like in the movies—those angels can be kinda hopeless and silly like in It’s a Wonderful Life. Angels have very important jobs other than carrying around messages—some are part of God’s heavenly council, and they listen to God make plans and even offer suggestions for what He can do. Sometimes, God even asks for volunteers for jobs—like when He needed someone to trick an evil king by telling his false prophets what the King wanted to hear instead of what His true prophet was saying—because the king wasn’t listening to him! Sometimes, God needs an army to protect His people from invading armies and He sends angels. And because human soldiers can’t kill angels, that’s a super bad deal for the human soldiers. If you ever saw the last movie of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, they had a ghost army in it that no one could fight because they were already dead, but angel soldiers aren’t dead. Which is good because that would be totally gross and scary if that could actually happen—which it can’t. Sometimes, though, we see angel armies fighting against the armies of Satan—mysterious creatures called demons. That makes the fighting very difficult—the angel in charge of God’s armies is named Michael. The angel who seems to be in charge of the super important messages is named Gabriel. And that’s another important thing because not all angels are the same—some seem to be bosses over the others.

Although angels don’t have human bodies, the Bible shows us times when they disguise themselves as human beings—like in Genesis 18 when the two angels were traveling with God, and they were all pretending to be human travelers. Lot’s not even going to notice that they aren’t human until things get really ugly and dangerous. And they are very fast—because the first thing we will notice about the angels in chapter 19 is that they traveled somewhere between eighteen and forty miles from Abraham’s camp in Hebron all the way down to Sodom in just a few hours. That’s super-fast.

Not everything we would call an angel is actually the same thing—we are mostly used to angels disguised as people in the Bible and sometimes they are wearing white robes when people see them in visions but there are also other created beings in heaven. Cherubim and Seraphim are created beings that we find around God’s throne and protecting Eden from invaders. And they are scary looking, lemme tell you. The Cherubim aren’t those chubby little baby angels with bows and arrows shooting cartoon characters in the butt to make them fall in love. Nope, you wouldn’t ever want to see one because you’d be scared to death. I mean, they are guarding God’s special places and so you wouldn’t want them to not be scary, right? They have two or four wings with hands under their wings and the sound they make when they are flapping their wings is just deafening and they also have cow hooves for feet. And they have eyeballs all over their bodies and four faces—a human face, an eagle face, a lion face and the face of an ox, which is like a bull (a male cow) but bigger and used for pulling plows and heavy farming stuff. You see one of these guys and you will definitely need to change your underwear. Ain’t nobody trying to get past them and especially when they have swords, okay? But I don’t think they actually need swords if they look like that. If you are brave enough to mess with those guys then a sword isn’t going to scare you either.

We don’t know nearly as much about the Seraphim, except that they have six wings and seem to maybe be on fire—but that’s debatable. They used two wings for flying, two for covering their faces (because God is so holy that they can’t look at Him), and two covering their feet but sometimes in the Bible when it talks about covering or uncovering your feet it means putting on or taking off whatever is covering your private parts. Covering your feet was a funny way of saying you were going to the bathroom! Because, otherwise, I have no idea why they would need to cover their actual feet with their wings unless they had super gnarly, dirty toenails. One thing that angels, cherubim, and seraphim all have in common is that they all praise God, a lot. They sing about how wonderful God is and they don’t seem to ever get tired of it and because their bodies aren’t like ours their throats probably don’t even get sore. Do you like to sing? I love to sing. Singing to God forever sounds like a great job to me. I bet that none of them are tone deaf or sing flat or sharp.

When we get to the Psalms and even in Deuteronomy, we find out that when God made all the different languages at the Tower of Babel to keep the people in Shinar from building that huge thing that was so small that God couldn’t see it without going down to look at it—which is just one of many hilarious jokes hidden all over the Bible—well, Moses and the people who wrote the Psalms said that God gave seventy angels the responsibility to guide and watch all of those new nations. They were supposed to watch over the people because God wanted to save them all but when the people started worshiping those angels as gods, the angels didn’t do anything to stop them. Which is, you know, really bad but that is just one of the ways where angels are like us—we can all decide to do the right thing or the wrong thing. And these guys were just not thinking straight. No way was this going to work out okay! Daniel talked about how the archangel Michael was busy trying to fight one of these angels just to get a message through to Daniel after he prayed! Daniel called that angel the Prince of the Kingdom of Persia. And it took Michael, the head of all God’s armies, three weeks to get through so you know this wasn’t a person who was a prince but a very powerful angel. You know, it’s hard to understand why anyone who was that close to God could do such a thing, right? But it is easy to want to be worshiped.

But as for normal angels, in addition to the jobs we have already talked about, we see that they also patrol the earth like policemen, looking for things to report back to God. And we might ask ourselves, “but doesn’t God know everything?” And although I think He does, He also likes to have others make themselves useful. I mean really, God doesn’t actually need us to do anything because He could just do everything Himself but He doesn’t. And we don’t know why. There isn’t anything that we can do or the angels can do that God can’t do Himself but part of how He likes to work seems to be involving others. God is very social, and He likes to do things as a community. I think that’s really cool that God, who is so powerful, likes for all of us to be useful and to feel needed. That makes us a lot different from the animals because we can do things that really matter, even though we can also choose to do things that are very terrible. God values what we do and that’s why He gives us specific gifts—and the same with angels. And there are probably types of angels that aren’t even mentioned in the Bible because humans don’t come in contact with them. The universe, after all, is a huge place—which brings me to how Jewish beliefs about angels changed over time and especially after the exile.

When we see angels in the Old Testament, they look like men and they work carrying messages, fighting God’s battles, praising Him, and all that. But after the Jewish people came back from their exile in Babylon, some of them began to write fiction—and fiction is stories that aren’t true but are entertaining and tell us what people were thinking at a certain time about different things. Many of these stories are about angels and they are really imaginative. It seems as though they took what the Bible says about angels and mixed it together with the beliefs of the Babylonians and the Persians and the Greeks—just everyone who was boss over their people for five hundred years. You see, whenever you are part of a culture—and that’s our context—ideas rub off on you. If you go into a Christian bookstore in most of America, you will see art and figurines of angels who are mostly white with long blonde hair and blue eyes—which is odd because why would angels have recessive genes? Hey, high schoolers, figure that one out for me please. And they have huge wings, and they are mostly women. That’s how our culture sees angels here in America and it is very different from what we see in the Bible where they all look like guys without wings, and I am betting they were all brown-skinned with brown hair and brown eyes so that they looked normal to the Bible people. Lemme tell you that blonde, white, blue-eyed angels walking around would have been super freaky. And yes, people were usually scared when angels appeared to them, but no one talks about how they looked so we have to assume that apart from being spectacular as angels, they would have been considered normal.

Ancient Israelites had some kinda wacky beliefs about God before the exile—which is why they worshiped other gods and goddesses too. Even though God told them not to they did it anyway. It seems like they figured God was the boss of all the gods and it was okay with him if they also worshiped the mother goddess Asherah, and Ba’al whom they thought was responsible for giving them rain, and Dagan who they figured gave them lots of wheat and barley to eat. Now, after they came back from Babylon, they never did that again and they knew there was only one God but some of them found another way to believe the almost exact same thing—and they wrote stories about how angels were doing all those jobs instead and because they were angels, they didn’t need to be worshipped and couldn’t be worshiped. And so, in these stories that were written in Greek and Aramaic, they came up with ideas about what they thought Heaven was like and what things looked like wherever God is at with the angels working behind the scenes. So, you have angels who are in charge of these warehouses where they store up the snow, the rain, and the wind. And they gave them fancy names like Uriel, Samlazaz, Araklba, Rameel, Kokablel, Tamlel, Ramlel, Danel, Ezeqeel, Baraqijal, Asael, Armaros, Batarel, Ananel, Zaqiel, Samsapeel, Satarel, Turel, Jomjael, Sariel, and many, many others. Of course, different people wrote the different stories at different times and in different places and so the list of names they gave to the angels never matched up with each other, or their jobs either. But it was okay because people understood they were writing “what if” stories.

But these make-believe stories were incredibly popular—like the Left Behind series of books when I was in my twenties, and so they influenced the way people saw things and thought about angels even when those stories didn’t line up with the Bible and usually didn’t. But they weren’t written to go into the Bible. It was a form of story-telling about things that were important to them, and nothing was more important to them than the Bible. All people from all times have come up with imaginative stories—not everything the Jews wrote about ended up in the Bible because they came up with fun stories just like everyone else does. I remember once I was talking to someone who believed these were stories that were inspired by God, and I had to tell them that they were meant to be fiction and that Jews sometimes wrote fiction and the person asked me, “why would they do that” and I answered, “why wouldn’t they write fiction? It’s what all humans enjoy!” The important thing was that they knew the difference between their stories and their Bible and didn’t confuse the two.

If you talked to Americans today about what angels are like, they would probably give answers based on what they see in books, movies, TV, and art. Because that’s our culture. If they are my age, they probably watched the TV shows Highway to Heaven and Touched by an Angel, and hopefully, they would know that there is a difference between the Bible and entertainment. But if they don’t, when they read the Bible, they might be adding things into what they see in their head that just aren’t there in the story. We’ve talked a lot about that sort of thing going on with stories about Nimrod and Melchizedek that have nothing to do with the Bible or with history! And the stories mostly disagree with one another anyway. Angels have always been incredibly popular in stories all over the world because we are all fascinated by the idea that there are invisible helpers all around us and sometimes things happen that we can’t explain without angels. Angels make us feel better, and safer, and especially when Jesus goes around telling the grownups that the angels who watch over little children are always very close to God!

And here’s where we get to something confusing. The Old Testament, the Hebrew part of the Bible, doesn’t talk about demons. But by the time of Jesus, they are getting talked about a lot. What are demons and where do they come from? Are they angels who went bad? And what about Satan? Is he really a fallen angel? There are as many stories out there about Satan and demons as angels—they just aren’t as popular in wall art for nurseries and bedtime stories. Like angels, we don’t have a whole lot of information and so just like everything else in the Bible from Nimrod to Melchizedek, when there isn’t a lot of information, people like to make things up for fun. So, we don’t know for sure if they were actually angels. But there is a very famous angel that we hear a lot about once Jesus starts to preach—and that is Satan. In fact, Jesus says that He was watching when Satan was cast down from heaven and that, as the devil, he is the father of lies because all lies come from him. The word Satan comes from the Hebrew word that means accuser—someone who is always a tattletale, only worse—and devil comes from the Greek word diabolos which means slanderer—someone who is always taking smack about other people and disrespecting them.

And so we have to think that Satan, the devil, was once one of the angels guarding the Garden in Eden and not really a snake at all. Which is why he could talk which makes much more sense. And he was in the Garden and that didn’t worry the man or the woman and so maybe he belonged there. The prophet Ezekiel (Chapter 28) talks about a guardian cherub who was in the Garden who became wicked and even violent so he was tossed out. That sounds like what Jesus was talking about, right? And, of course, He saw it because He has always been with God and part of God and God and all that theological stuff. But that’s good news for us because it means that Satan isn’t like God. Satan was just another created angel and so he can die just like any other angel. And he can also be beaten, which is what Jesus did when He died and went after him.

I love you. I am praying for you. Angels are super interesting but understanding them takes a lot of study and research and a lot of getting rid of the ideas in our heads from tv, movies, books, and the art down at the Christian bookstore!

Episode 136: The One When Abraham Tries to Save Sodom

Miss Tyler — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 14:57:58 +0000

Who is the first intercessor in the Bible? Abraham! He went to bat for the people of Sodom, appealing to and reasoning with God’s mercy over His sense of justice. This makes him very different from everyone who went before Him–especially Noah!

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.

Last time, we saw the beginning of the story of Abraham being a prophet because the Lord was sharing His plans with him. People have been crying out against the city of Sodom—and in the Bible, crying out is what you do when you are being oppressed, brutalized, and abused. God really hates those things and so at Mt Sinai, He warned the children of Israel to be kind to people who were weaker, poorer, strangers, widows, and orphans. God said that if they cried out to Him about being abused, that He would most certainly hear them and do something about it. God saved His people from being abused and so they weren’t allowed to do it to anyone else. Of course, that’s over five hundred years in the future! But God has always cared about big people picking on little people. He’s the biggest of all and if He isn’t a mean bully then we can’t be either. Now, God doesn’t say exactly what He plans to do to Sodom if the reports are true but Abraham seems to know anyway. Let’s read the rest of chapter 18, starting in verse 22:

The men (who we will find out are actually angels in chapter 19) turned from there and went toward Sodom while Abraham remained standing before the Lord. Abraham stepped forward and said, “Will you really get rid of the people who are doing what is right along with the wicked? What if there are fifty people in the city who do what is right? Will you really destroy the city instead of sparing the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people who are in it? You could not possibly kill people who are righteous along with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked the exact same way. You could not possibly do that! Won’t the Judge of the whole earth do what is just and fair?” The Lord said, “If I find fifty people doing what is right in the city of Sodom, I will not destroy the whole place for their sake.” Then Abraham answered, “Since I have dared to speak to my lord—even though I am nothing at all—suppose there are forty-five instead of fifty people doing what is right. Will you destroy the whole city just because of five more wicked people?” God replied, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.” Then Abraham spoke to God again, “What if only forty people are doing what is right?” God answered, “I will not do it if there are only forty.” Then Abraham said, “Please, Lord, don’t be angry at me; I am going to ask you another question. What if you find out that there are just thirty people doing what is right?” God answered, “I will not do it if I find thirty there.” Then he said, “Since I am already talking to you, suppose there are just twenty doing what is right?” God replied, “I will not destroy it if there are twenty.” Then he said, “Please Lord, don’t be angry at me, and I will say one more thing. Suppose there are only ten doing what is right?” God answered, “I will not destroy it if there are ten.” When the Lord was done speaking with Abraham, he left, and Abraham returned to his camp. (Gen 18:22-33)

That was a lot of verses, I know, and many of them are saying pretty much the same thing over and over again but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to learn this week. First of all, the two angels take off and leave God (disguised as a human) alone with Abraham. There doesn’t seem to be any conversation about it and so I assume that God is more than capable of talking to His angels without saying anything at all and somehow, they know His will or maybe they just knew it all before they ever arrived at Abraham’s camp. They arrive in Sodom at the beginning of chapter 19 without God with them and God Himself isn’t part of that chapter. The angels will find out what is going on and they seem to be in charge of what happens to Sodom. But for the rest of this chapter, they aren’t involved at all. And even though we don’t understand any of that, I suppose if it was important, then the Bible would tell us. What is important is Abraham’s conversation with God and so today we are going to learn a new fancy word called intercession.

Intercession is what we call it when someone needs help and another person steps in to make sure they have what they need. Think about if you needed a special kind of doctor for something but that doctor doesn’t take new patients—if your regular doctor was a friend of that doctor, they might make a call and see if you can get in anyway, as a personal favor. Your regular doctor would be interceding for you because he can talk to someone whom you can’t talk to. Or maybe a teacher who knows you can see that you would really do well in a certain teacher’s class next year and they pull some strings and get you into that class. Maybe you are really good at sports or music and someone else makes sure that you get the lessons you need to be even better. In the ancient world, the people who did this sort of thing were called patrons, but priests also did it. Patrons were powerful people who did favors for other people—they might get them seed for their fields or a new ox if they couldn’t afford it. Patrons were people with power and money who did favors for people who didn’t—but the gifts weren’t free. No, the person didn’t have to pay them for the ox but they were expected to give gifts in return and to tell everyone how amazing the patron was or they wouldn’t be welcome to ask for any more favors. If you think about the disciples of Jesus, they were given the power of the Holy Spirit for free but in return they were expected to spend their lives preaching about Him. No one in the ancient world thought that a free gift meant that you didn’t owe the giver anything in return. In fact, they would be ashamed not to do anything in return. Making sure that people have what they need is one type of intercession. And although it is very important for understanding the Bible, it isn’t the kind of intercession we need to understand for today’s lesson.

The other sort of intercession is what we see from priests and prophets. Priests in the ancient world were believed to have special access to the gods and people would go to them when they wanted something. Later, when the children of Israel are with Moses at Mt Sinai, we will see that God wants to make them a kingdom of priests where all of them can hear from God and they all have the responsibility to teach people about their God but they were so scared of His loud, thundering voice that they told Moses that they couldn’t bear to listen to God. So, God made priests out of Moses’s brother Aaron and all his sons, and grandsons forever. They had special jobs that no one else could do—they offered sacrifices at the altar at the Tabernacle, and kept the big lampstand, called the Menorah, lighted, and they offered incense on the golden altar near the Menorah, and baked bread for the special Table. When they offered sacrifices and incense, the Bible tells us that they were making intercession for the children of Israel. That means that they were bringing the people closer to God after they sinned, and God would smell the sacrifices and the incense (which is like a solid perfume) and he would be happy about it. There are many times in the Bible where priests had to act quickly to stop people from sinning so that terrible things wouldn’t happen or would stop happening. It was always their job to go to God and make things right with Him again and to tell the people what God wants. When they had good priests, things went pretty well but when they had bad priests, very bad things happened. One of the important things that happened when Jesus came and sent us the Holy Spirit is that God’s original plan went back into action. Everyone who says that Jesus is their king and follows Him and obeys Him gets filled with the Holy Spirit and becomes part of the Kingdom of priests that God wanted to make back at Mt Sinai, when the people were too scared to listen to His voice. So, that’s great because we don’t need to go to a priest so that he can talk to God for us—we can do it ourselves.

So, we can talk to God, pray to Him, listen to Him, and ask Him to help the people who don’t know Him and also the people who do know Him. God listens to us because His Son Jesus is our King. We are special and precious to God because even though Jesus was killed like a terrible criminal, we are saying that was wrong and that we believe He came back from being dead because He was innocent and perfect, and that now He is with God until He comes back to rule over the whole earth as our King—and we’ll be able to see Him and hear Him talk out loud just like His disciples did! That will be amazing—the best thing ever. And because we believe Jesus, we have a Covenant with God of forever promises and one of His promises is that when we talk to Him, He listens to us. That’s a super big deal, you know. God who created the Heavens and the Earth, the Universe and everything in it no matter how big or small, is paying attention to you. He cares about what you have to say, so make sure you don’t waste your time not talking to Him. You don’t have to go to a special place, like a Temple or a Church or a Synagogue for Him to hear you. You can even talk to Him just in your head and He will hear you—which is nice when you don’t want to be rude and wake other people up or when what you have to say is so private that you only want God to hear.

Abraham could talk with God too just like us, and listen, and obey Him because God had made a Covenant with Abraham all the way back in chapter 15, which was about thirteen years ago now that Abraham is ninety-nine years old. Abraham did a lot of things that priests would do later and that we take for granted now because we can do them ourselves or because without a Temple they aren’t done anymore. Because Abraham could talk with God, it meant that He had a say in what God was going to decide to do. That’s why God came to Abraham to tell him what His plans were for Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim. There are different times in the Bible where we see God discussing His plans with His angels and asking them what they think and asking how they can help. God is interested in what His people and His angels have to say about things. Isn’t that amazing?! That means that God cares about your opinion when you think that something is wrong or unfair. He might not agree with you because He knows more than we do, but He does care. So, let’s look at what Abraham and God are saying here and why.

The first thing Abraham says is, “Will you really get rid of the people who are doing what is right along with the wicked?” Abraham isn’t doing anything to deny the fact that the people of Sodom are incredibly wicked, but Abraham is worried about the people who live in those cities—through no fault of their own—who are doing what is right and good. Abraham counts on God to be the kind of god who cares about the people who are innocent and who haven’t done anything wrong. It isn’t like they can get into a car and go someplace else. Leaving a place was dangerous and especially if the people there don’t want them to leave. Abraham wants to know what kind of god he has followed into Canaan—is God like the pagan gods of the other nations who would just kill everyone for something as simple as being too noisy?.

What Abraham says next is the most important so we will have to pay close attention: “What if there are fifty people in the city who do what is right? Will you really destroy the city instead of sparing the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people who are in it? You could not possibly kill people who are righteous along with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked the exact same way. You could not possibly do that! Won’t the Judge of the whole earth do what is just and fair?” When you think of Sodom, I don’t want you to think of a huge city—it wouldn’t even qualify as a small town nowadays. Fifty doesn’t seem like a big number but maybe it was like five or ten percent of the population or even more. Any bigger than that and the four Kings wouldn’t have been able to carry them off as slaves because there would be too many. Abraham hasn’t ever dealt with something like this before but he knows that talking to God is a privilege that is also a big responsibility. If there are righteous people in Sodom, he has a responsibility to try to save them. We all still have that responsibility today—we shouldn’t ever be glad when innocent people are being hurt. But does God agree with Abraham? Is God willing to kill innocent people just because He wants to stop the wickedness going on in Sodom and the other cities?

What’s super interesting here is that Abraham seems to be just as concerned with God’s reputation—with Him doing what is good and right and fair—as he is with the lives of the innocent people living in Sodom. Two times, Abraham says that God couldn’t possibly do something so bad as to treat innocent people the same way He is going to treat guilty people. Abraham points out that God is the judge of the entire world, and so He has to be the perfect and good judge. No good judge would treat the innocent and the guilty the same way—no one could trust Him! Abraham is telling God that if He does that, then it’s just as bad as what Sodom is doing because they hurt innocent people too! How can the Creator and Judge of the whole earth be no different than the wicked people in Sodom who have been hurting people? That would make Him as bad as or worse than all the false gods of the Canaanites. In fact, in Hebrew, these phrases mean that God would be desecrating His own character and that He would have no integrity to judge anyone. But what does that even mean?

We talk about character a lot, because God calls us to be like Jesus and Jesus had perfect character. That means that Jesus always did what was right no matter the cost, He was honest and trustworthy—and He still is now too! Integrity means that we can be trusted to do what is right no matter what. Abraham was telling God that He had to do what is right or He won’t be able to be trusted! Abraham has been trusting in God’s character for a long time—even though he sometimes makes decisions that make it look like He doesn’t trust God at all. Abraham is so concerned with God doing the right thing that he thinks it will be a desecration of God’s character if He kills innocent people while getting rid of the guilty. Desecration is a very serious word in the Bible and in all of the world’s religions. Desecration is what happens when a Temple gets ruined, when something that is holy gets made unholy. Abraham is telling God that although He is perfect and trustworthy and everything good, that if He treats innocent people like guilty people, that He will be ruined and unholy. And it sounds kind of insulting but it isn’t. Abraham is very very upset and concerned and believes that He is protecting God’s reputation. All his life before meeting God, Abraham had worshiped gods and goddesses who were just as bad as humans and sometimes even worse. For twenty-four years now, Abraham has been learning that his God is better and different and just plain perfect and good but all his ideas of God will change and be crushed if God can’t be counted on to care for the people who are innocent. If I thought that God was okay with being unfair, then I would be really upset too and I would start complaining just like Abraham is doing. How will God react?

He said, “If I find fifty people doing what is right in the city of Sodom, I will not destroy the whole place for their sake.” Imagine how relieved Abraham was to hear that! Not only did God patiently listen to him, but he didn’t even get angry. And what’s more, He agreed with Abraham that He shouldn’t do that. And because Abraham got away with it—and that was pretty darned brave because no one in the ancient world got away with talking to their gods like that—he decides to go even lower. What if there are only forty-five people doing what is good and right? God agrees not to destroy the city if there are only forty-five. And then Abraham tries again with forty, thirty, twenty and ten and God promises Abraham that even if there are only ten, He won’t destroy Sodom. But then, God was done and He left Abraham. Abraham went back home to his camp—he didn’t send anyone off on a camel running to Sodom or anything. Abraham was satisfied that God is fair and good and that He cares more about protecting the people who are doing right than He cares about punishing the people who are evil. And I want to tell you why we should be really happy about that and what that tells us about God.

One, it tells us that when there is a big storm or something and a lot of people get killed, it isn’t because God is punishing wicked people. Too many innocent people get killed and we know from God’s talk with Abraham that He is more concerned with being merciful than with holding people responsible for the bad things they have done. Just think if God was more concerned with punishing people than with protecting them. Two, it means that God isn’t unpredictable or mean for no reason at all. It takes a lot to make God angry and He is patient for a long time and gives people many chances to do things right. God is way more concerned with saving people than punishing them. We will see that again in chapter 19 when God won’t destroy the city of Sodom until all the righteous people are out of it. Even in the worst of situations, God is trying to get people to do what is right and follow Him.

One of the things I wonder about is why Abraham didn’t just ask God to save his nephew Lot and Lot’s family? If Abraham was only concerned about Lot, then he could have asked God to save Lot and God would have done it because they are in covenant together. After all, it is Abraham’s fault that Lot is even in Canaan because he wasn’t supposed to bring him but did anyway. Everything Lot did after that is his own fault, of course—including moving to Sodom even when he knew it was an evil place and not leaving even after the four kings attacked it and took him as a slave. But Abraham didn’t ask God to save Lot—he just asked for right and fair people to be treated right by God. Maybe you remember what God said to Abraham last time we talked about them—“Abraham is going to become a great and powerful nation, and all the nations of the earth will be blessed through him. I have chosen him so that he will command his children and his whole household forever to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just.”

God said that Abraham was going to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth and we know that means Jesus. But, God also told him that He was expecting him and his children forever to do what is right and just. Which is just what Abraham was upset about with God—he wanted to make sure that God was just as right and just as He wanted Abraham to be. Abraham did that by acting exactly how God was expecting him to act—being right and just and looking out for any innocent people who might be living in Sodom. That was a great example of Abraham’s responsibility to be a blessing to the nations around him. He already blessed the people of all those cities when he set them free from the four kings and now he is looking out for them again by making sure that God won’t be killing anyone He shouldn’t kill. Abraham could have acted like it was none of his business. He could have said, “Good, those people are awful, kill them all!!! It’s their fault for living in that terrible place!” or he could have said, “Please get my nephew and his family out of there but nuke the rest of them. Show no mercy!” Maybe Abraham remembered all the times he has messed up—like when he sold his wife Sarah to the Pharaoh, the king of Egypt. Maybe Abraham realized that he was no one special and he would still be worshiping idols with his family if God hadn’t chosen to show mercy to him and choose him to start this miracle family. Maybe he knew that a God who won’t be merciful to people who aren’t guilty can’t be totally trusted.

Of course, we know God can be trusted because He did the most amazing thing of all. When Jesus died, it wasn’t just for His own relatives, the Jews, but for all the nations of the world and even for the people who killed Him. Because of Jesus, I know about God and so do you. My family from my mom and dad both came from Europe and we don’t have even a drop of Jewish blood. We’d be worshiping false gods and their idols. My husband would be worshiping the Viking gods. But God had mercy on our ancestors even though they were doing terrible things. He sent Jesus for us all. That’s a whole lot of mercy.

I love you. I am praying for you. Sometimes we get mad at people and want God to take revenge for us but we tend to forget that other people might want revenge against us too. We should be glad that God isn’t quick to kill the people who are doing bad things because none of us would probably even be born.

Episode 135: Esther and the Great Big Mess

Miss Tyler — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 13:29:47 +0000

Last year, we talked about the stories of Esther and Vashti but this year we are going to focus on irresponsible King Ahasuerus, Esther’s cousin Mordecai who didn’t follow his own wise advice, and the wicked Haman.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions.

This week is the Jewish Festival of Purim, when the Jewish people celebrate being saved from the schemes of the wicked villain Haman, who wanted every Jew in the world dead. But how did Haman even get the chance to kill every Jew in the Persian Empire? He wasn’t a king or anything, so it wasn’t like he could just wave his hand and make it happen. And why did he even want to do that in the first place? It’s a very complicated story and one of the only books on the Bible where God is never mentioned even though we can tell He is there because of how everything worked together to save His people from being totally destroyed. Although this isn’t one of the Feasts commanded by the Lord, the Jewish people still celebrate the great victory over evil in the Book of Esther by celebrating Purim as a tribute to God and so that they will always remember that God is working to save His people even when they can’t see Him.

But why did they need saving in the first place? Because of one foolish man who had a lot of power but was also easily manipulated and drank way too much wine, and one very proud wicked man who knew how to get exactly what he wanted, and a third man who took a terrible risk that almost got his people murdered. Last year we talked about the two brave Queens who had to deal with the consequences of what these three men were doing, even though they had no power, and this year we are going to talk about the other side of the situation—which will teach us a lot about how we should always make our decisions very carefully, choose our friends wisely, and make sure that we don’t get into situations where we are easy to trick.

The Book of Esther opens up with a huge party going on in the Fortress of Susa. And the Bible rarely describes how buildings look, and especially on the inside, but the description of this one is pretty amazing. The story begins at the end of a six-month-long party just for the rich and powerful, but then they added on a last week and opened the party to everyone. There were gold and silver couches and beautiful fabrics hanging from silver rods and the wine goblets were made out of gold! That’s not what my couches and water glasses are made out of! Even the floors were fancy. And by order of the new King, Ahasuerus, everyone at the party could drink as much as they wanted of whatever they wanted. For a whole week! They definitely weren’t drinking water, and the Bible is telling us this to let us know that the King and everyone with him were drunk from drinking way too much wine and they shouldn’t be making any decisions at all and especially not important ones. It’s always very foolish to be making decisions when a person is drunk. And that’s where all the problems started because after seven days of this, the king ordered his eunuchs to bring the Queen wearing her crown. Would you want to go to a place where everyone had been drinking too much for seven whole days? I sure wouldn’t. I would be scared, and angry, and really disappointed if my husband did that to me. A husband should protect his wife and not expose her to danger and shame—but King Ahaseurus was drunk and so he wasn’t thinking straight. We don’t know how he got the idea to show her off because the Bible doesn’t say, but we do know he was very drunk and so was everyone else at his party. In those days, that was no safe place for a woman to be. And it wouldn’t be safe now either. Vashti had been trained since she was a little girl to protect herself from shame. And so, she refused to go to the King. Nowadays, we would tell her she was really smart but then, her husband could have her killed and no one would even try to stop him. It was a very wicked world.

Because he was so drunk, he got really angry and took some bad advice and got rid of Queen Vashti right away without even thinking about the consequences, just because his advisors said that if he didn’t, women wouldn’t be scared enough of their husbands to obey them no matter what they told them to do. The King had her sent away and made it a law that she couldn’t ever see him again, because that’s what his advisors told him to do. But once he wasn’t drunk anymore, he remembered what had happened. His closest personal attendants launched a plan to get him a new queen which involved kidnapping beautiful girls from all over the Persian Empire and bringing them to the palace, where they would spend the rest of their lives. Instead of reconsidering his life choices, he took their advice because it sounded good to him. I mean, come on, there’s a good chance that the advice came from the same people who told him to get rid of Queen Vashti when he was too drunk to think clearly. As we are going to find out, the King is very foolish and surrounds himself with people who tell him to do terrible things (the things they want him to do for their own benefit) and he is way too trusting—either that or he maybe thinks that because he is king, no one would dare try to get him to do things he will regret later. Ahasuerus was the worst sort of King, because he had no wisdom and trusted the wrong people and didn’t spend much time doing his own thinking.

Out of all the girls who were taken from their homes, it was a Jewish girl named Hadassah who became queen. She was an orphan whose parents had died and her older cousin Mordecai adopted her as his own daughter. Mordecai knew what had happened to Vashti and told her to hide who she was, so that no one would find out she was a Jew. So, she went by the name of Esther instead. Mordecai was very wise to do this, because probably everyone knew that it was dangerous to get the King angry and if he got angry at Esther, he might turn around and hurt her family to get even. And no one could stop him. So Esther did what Mordecai told her to do and no one knew who she really was or who her people were. The King loved her best of all the young women and made her the Queen and threw a feast in her honor. Because she was hiding who she was, her family wasn’t at her own wedding banquet! But that didn’t stop Mordecai from doing everything he could to make sure she was okay. He even protected the King’s life from people who were plotting to kill him. Even though Mordecai couldn’t see Esther, he was still looking out for her like a good father should.

But Mordecai decided to do something, or not do something, that put his people in terrible danger. The King decided to make a man named Haman very important—in fact, he made Haman second in command of his whole empire, over all the other important officials. Haman had power like Joseph in Egypt, but Haman wasn’t anything like Joseph! But Haman was more than just some random guy that the King liked—Haman was an Agagite, which made him an ancient enemy of the Jews. He was an Amalekite, and we will talk about them more when we learn about Moses and the Exodus. The King commanded that everyone bow down to Haman as he went by but Mordecai decided not to. And the other people at the King’s gate (the place where business was done and decisions were made), warned him over and over again but Mordecai wouldn’t budge. Finally, all those people went and told Haman about Mordecai disrespecting him by not bowing down—and Haman was furious. Haman was even more furious because Mordecai had told them that he was a Jew, his ancient enemies.

Isn’t that strange? Mordecai told Esther not to make any trouble and not tell anyone who she was so that her people would be protected, and then Mordecai did the exact opposite! Mordecai was wise in what he told Esther to do but when the time came for him to do something much simpler, he refused to do it. Haman wouldn’t have ever noticed Mordecai if he had just bowed down like everyone else, and if Mordecai hadn’t told everyone he was a Jew, then maybe Haman would have just been angry at Mordecai and that would be that. But Mordecai did exactly what he told Esther not to do and because Haman was second-in-command of the entire Persian Empire, there was almost no limit to what he could do to get revenge. And so the wicked Haman decided to do the worst—not only to punish Mordecai or kill him, but to kill every single Jew in the world. The Persian Empire was made up of 127 provinces from Egypt to Greece and Turkey all the way east to the border of India. At that point, all the Jews in the entire world would have lived in that Empire and Haman decided to use his power to kill them all. Things couldn’t possibly be any worse. Haman did some of his pagan rituals and came up with a date but unfortunately for him the date was almost a year away.

But that didn’t seem to bother Haman, and he got right to work setting his evil plan into action. He went right over to the King and made up some really terrible stories about “a certain ethnic group” not obeying the laws of the kingdom (I mean, one guy not bowing down before Haman isn’t exactly the same thing as not obeying the laws—it was just one guy disobeying one law over and over again). Haman also said that they had their own laws, which was true but none of those laws would cause any problems for the King or their neighbors. Plus, he said, they were scattered throughout the Empire—which was also true but that was because they had been exiled all over the place from Egypt to Susa. The truth is that Haman was incredibly vague, on purpose. He didn’t say, “The Jews are a problem” because if he had then maybe the King would go out and fact check him. But we know now from experience that King Ahasuerus was a very irresponsible man who trusted the wrong people over and over again—getting himself and others into deep trouble. And just in case that wasn’t enough to convince the King, he offered him 375 tons of silver—that’s 750,000 lbs and would be worth 267 million dollars today. It looks like Haman has been getting rich serving the King and he is willing to just about anything to get his revenge. The King was even richer than that so he didn’t want the money but told Haman to do whatever he wanted to do and then he did something even more foolish—he took off his signet ring and just handed it to Haman.

Now, you have to know about signet rings, okay? How important they were and what you could do with one. In those days, people didn’t sign contracts or agreements with ink and a pen. In places like Babylon and Susa, if a king wanted to make an announcement or make a new law, the scribes would write it out and then the king would press his ring into each one like a signature. His ring was unique, so anyone who saw the imprint would know that it came directly from the King. That meant that whatever it said was like the King was saying it himself and you had better obey it or else. That also means that whoever has the signet ring can do whatever they want—and the King just handed his ring over to Haman. For all intents and purposes, Haman is the king now. The royal scribes made at least 127 copies telling the people that on the 13^th day of Adar, that the officials and soldiers had to kill every Jewish man, woman, and child and as an added bonus, they could steal everything they owned. Haman thought of everything—not only did the most powerful people have to obey the command to kill the Jews, they would become rich doing it. Pretty soon, even the regular neighbors of the Jews in the Persian Empire wanted to kill them and take all their stuff. Giving Haman the signet ring was like handing another person all your credit cards and telling them to buy whatever they want, no questions asked.

Haman wasn’t a nice guy, but neither was the King. He was willing to have an entire ethnic group slaughtered without asking even a single question about who they were and what they’d specifically done. It actually gives us a good idea of what the kings during Bible times were like and what kind of power they had. It’s really scary and I am glad we don’t live in that kind of world anymore. No one was going to stop Haman and no one could because the order had come from the ring of the King and the laws of ancient Persia were permanent. That means you couldn’t just take them back if you made a bad decision. In America, we have had all sorts of terribly wicked laws but we can also get rid of them if we want to. Slavery was legal once, as horrible as it was, and people even used the Bible to say it was okay. Brave men and women fought against slavery in a lot of different ways and now it is illegal—you can’t own someone and call it okay anymore. But when King Ahasuerus ruled over the entire Persian Empire, no one could stop his laws—not even him. That should have made him realize that giving the ring that could make laws to anyone else was unbelievably foolish, because it couldn’t be taken back. But for the third time in this story, the King listened to all the wrong people and made really bad decisions without really taking the time to think about it. Other people kept paying a terrible price for his bad decisions and bad advisors. Ahasuerus just kept on proving he was a really bad king.

When the law was published, all of the Jews were in a panic. What could they do? Where could they go? They were stuck and they were going to die in eleven months. They couldn’t even escape to Israel or Egypt because the Jews there were going to be killed by their neighbors too! Mordecai must have realized right away the terrible cost of his decision not to bow down before Haman. I wonder if he thought about the fact that he had done exactly what he told Esther not to do. As a man, Haman wore tassels on his clothes that told the world he was a Jew, and so whatever he did in the open reflected on every single Jew. He wanted Esther to hide her true identity, probably to protect her people from harm if the king got angry at her the way he did with Queen Vashti. Queen Vashti was probably raised as a princess and couldn’t be killed without starting a war but Esther was a nobody with no one to protect her. She had to be careful for her own sake and for the sake of every Jew. When Esther found out that Mordecai was dressed in rags and crying out and covered in ashes, she was very worried and sent people to him to find out what was wrong. As Queen, Esther was pretty much a prisoner in the Palace and couldn’t get any news that wasn’t brought to her. Because no one knew she was a Jew, probably no one even thought to tell her about the new law sentencing all Jews to death. Mordecai told Esther everything that had happened and told her that it was her job as Queen to save her people, even if it got her killed.

Esther wasn’t allowed to go and visit her husband, the King, and if she went without being invited he could have her killed on the spot. Just think about that for a minute and how messed up that is—a woman can’t see her husband unless it is his idea. Just because he is the king. Can you imagine like maybe your grandma going into the living room to see your grandpa and your grandpa getting angry and killing her right then and there. That is silly to think of now, of course, but it wasn’t silly for Esther—it was scary and she didn’t want to do it. But three days later, she went to see the King anyway, and he didn’t kill her. She invited the King and Haman to a great feast and of course, Haman was thrilled to go eat with the Queen. Most people never even got to see her. At the end of the feast, she asked them to come back the next day for another feast. Even though she had gotten away with coming to see him, she was being very careful.

Obviously, the wicked villain Haman was having the best day ever but when Mordecai still refused to bow down to him, he couldn’t stand to wait any longer. I mean, think about it, what reason did Mordecai have to bow down now? He literally had nothing to lose because no one could undo the law. Haman probably should have thought about that. It was ridiculous for him to still be angry. But he was angry enough to go home and complain about it to his family and friends, and they told him to have a gallows built so that Mordecai could be killed right away. Haman thought that was a great idea—he just had to get permission from the King first. I want you to think about how ridiculous Haman is—he is the second most powerful man in the world and he has gotten absolutely everything he wants, but he is so upset about one person refusing to bow to him that he wants to go wake up the King in the middle of the night.

But the King couldn’t sleep—I wonder if Esther fed him too much sweet rich foods. Maybe he was awake wondering what Esther wanted—she had promised to tell him tomorrow. And he came up with a really good idea, he wanted someone to read boring stuff to him. But what was read to him wasn’t boring at all, it was about Esther’s cousin Mordecai saving his life! And then the King figured out that no one had done anything to reward Mordecai so he needed to come up with some ideas. When he found out that Haman was in the palace, he told him that he wanted to honor someone. Haman was so proud that he assumed the King was talking about him! So, he like got out his bucket list of everything he could ever want complete with a parade and the King said, “Awesome, do all that for Mordecai—handle it yourself.”

Oh no. This was the WORST. Haman had to dress Mordecai in the King’s robes and put him on the King’s horse and give him a parade through the city telling everyone how awesome Mordecai is. It was the worst day ever. He barely got home in time to get back to Queen Esther’s feast. And then his day got even worse. Esther told her husband, the King, that she was a Jew and that Haman was going to kill her and her cousin Mordecai and everyone else. The King was so angry at Haman (I wonder if he realized it was mostly his own fault for giving him that ring and not asking any questions before agreeing to genocide—which is when you kill everyone in a group of people)–he was so angry that he stormed out and then Haman did something really, really dumb. He begged Queen Esther for mercy but when he did that, he fell on top of her and when the King came back, he assumed she was being attacked and ordered that Haman be killed right away. I guess if there was a story just about Haman we could call it Haman and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Haman went from being the second most powerful man in the whole world to being dead. All because he was so touchy about one guy in the entire Kingdom not bowing to him. Haman would have been better off just ignoring Mordecai.

Well, the King finally took his ring back from Haman and gave it to Mordecai instead, and gave Esther everything that belonged to Haman. I mean, it was a good move to give Mordecai the ring but he still doesn’t seem to have given it a lot of thought. He’s very impulsive, doing whatever makes sense in the moment. And we are definitely supposed to notice that, just like we are supposed to notice Haman’s wickedness and pride, and that Mordecai didn’t follow his own wise advice to Esther. Haman didn’t live long enough to learn his lesson, and the King seems to not be learning anything either, and Esther even had to go to him again and remind him that, yes, her people were still going to be slaughtered. Because it seems like he forgot. The King told them that he couldn’t undo the law but that they were free to make whatever new law they wanted. He still didn’t even want to check out what they were doing. I mean, what if they made a law to kill the king, right? Or to burn every tree in the Kingdom? People could do some messed up stuff with that ring. Fortunately, all Mordecai and Esther wanted to do was to save their people and so they wrote up a very simple law—the Jews were all allowed to fight back and kill whoever tried to kill them. Before this, they weren’t allowed to fight back.

By the time the twelfth month came along, Mordecai had become so powerful that many people joined the Jews in fighting back against the people who were still trying to kill them because the other law told them to. But the Jews won all their battles and were finally safe. And even though God is never mentioned in the entire story, how could any of this have turned out okay if He wasn’t behind the scenes making all the wrong things go right? Esther and Mordecai even created a holiday to celebrate and called it Purim. To this day, Jews celebrate how God worked to make sure His people survived. And if you ever celebrate it, remember that without Purim, there would be no Jesus because there would be no Jewish parents for him to be born to.

Episode 134: Abraham, the First Prophet

Miss Tyler — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 18:04:03 +0000

Do you know what a prophet is? There are many stories going around that make it look like prophets were fortune tellers, but nothing could be further from the truth. God is going to name Abraham a prophet in chapter 21, but in Genesis 18, he is already being treated like one. Understanding prophets and what they are and are not will help you understand much more of the Bible than if you think they are all about predicting the future. And what does all this have to do with Sodom and what God is telling Abraham He expects from his family?

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.

Do you know what a prophet is? A lot of grownups don’t even know. Sometimes, popular books make it seem like the job of a prophet is to go around predicting the future but that’s rarely what they did and what we almost never see is date setting—meaning they rarely told anyone a specific day that anything was ever going to happen and when they did set dates, it was for Pharaoh and the people of Ninevah, people who needed proof of our God’s power—and that date was often tomorrow! Prophets simply told the people what God wanted them to know. When we look through the Bible, we see prophets warning people to change their ways and comforting them by reminding them that if they do what is right, then everything between them and God will be good again. The false prophets we see in Scripture mostly just predict the kind of future that people want to have happen—like telling a wicked king that if he fights against his enemies, he will win because God will be fighting on his side. True prophets went around warning people that if they weren’t loyal to God, He would boot them out of the land and stop protecting them from their enemies but they didn’t give specific dates because the point of them talking in the first place was so disaster wouldn’t happen. True prophets told the people that if they weren’t going to follow God, then they would find out what it is like to be like the other nations that weren’t protected. Israel was special to God because God loved Abraham, who was a prophet. In fact, Abraham is the first person to be called a prophet by God in the Bible. There would be many more men and women after Abraham, speaking for God—people like Moses, Miriam, Samuel, Huldah (she was a woman), Jeremiah, and Anna—but Abraham is special because he was the first. And we will even come across strange prophets like Balaam who wasn’t an Israelite but did speak the words of God anyway, even though he was wicked and greedy. The Bible can be super confusing. It seems sometimes like there aren’t any rules for who can and can’t be a prophet if Balaam qualifies!

Prophets don’t only warn people, but also pray for people. We will see Abraham do that in chapter 21, but we will also see him doing that in two weeks, after my special lesson on the book of Esther next week. When God gets angry or is trying to decide what He wants to do, it is the job of the prophet to beg God for mercy. When there is suffering going on, it is the job of the prophet to ask God for help and even for him to bring the ones hurting other people to justice. Prophets do all of these things because they all bring the messages of God to our world. God wants us to know what He wants, and He also wants us to ask Him for help and He is generally very kind to us even when we are sinning. So, if you ever see anyone who says they are a prophet but is nothing but mean and curses people or only tries to predict the future, be very careful because God’s true prophets have a lot of different jobs. If they are saying the same thing over and over again, they are probably just angry about this or that and it’s their opinion and not God telling them to say it at all.

Another thing we see prophets doing is talking to God about His reputation and what behavior is expected of Him and needed from Him. When God is super angry about terrible things that are going on, it is the job of His prophets to remind Him of how good and just and merciful He is. A true prophet who has God’s heart for repentance reminds God to be gentle with people because we are a mess and sometimes, we don’t even know what we are doing is wrong. Prophets remind God to spare the innocent when He is punishing the wicked who are hurting them. Prophets can even tell God that if He isn’t merciful and patient that the other nations will think He isn’t so great after all, and they will make fun of Him and say that He wasn’t powerful enough to keep His people alive. Because God’s plan has always been to save all of the nations in the world, they remind Him to always balance the need for justice against the guilty with mercy. People need to know they are doing what is evil but even more, they need to understand that if they do what is right then God is always faithful to forgive them. Those are the most important jobs of prophets—telling us what we need to do in order to be on good terms with God, encouraging us that He will be happy if we stop sinning and do what is right and fair, warn us about what will happen if we don’t do what is right, and reminding God to be merciful to us and to make sure to deal with the people who are hurting the people who can’t help themselves.

I have been around a long time now and I have seen a lot of predictions from people who say they are prophets and not many of them ended up happening. But the people who do hear from God, they hear all kinds of things and they pray to God for people and not just against people. God’s prophets want people to do what is good and to know about God’s love and forgiveness and not to just be scared all the time. God hates sin, yes, but He loves it when we stop sinning. And we couldn’t ever stop sinning if He was going to just kill us all at the first sign of trouble. God is patient and so His prophets must be patient too. God’s true prophets are people who become more and more like Him, and not just people who are bossy and are trying to get everyone to listen to them. We’re going to see a really good example of what prophets are supposed to do in today’s lesson, so let’s look at those verses. Remember that God and two angels are visiting with Abraham disguised as normal men, but he didn’t know that for sure until they repeated the promise from God that Sarah would finally become a mom even though she was almost ninety!

The men got up from under the trees at Abraham’s camp and looked out over Sodom. Abraham was walking with them to see them off on their journey. Then the Lord said, “Should I hide what I am about to do from Abraham? Abraham is going to become a great and powerful nation, and all the nations of the earth will be blessed through him. I have chosen him so that he will command his children and his whole household forever to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just. This is how the Lord will keep all of His promises to Abraham. Then the Lord said, “So many people are crying out about Sodom and Gomorrah, and their sin is extremely serious. I will go down to see if what they have done justifies all of the crying that I am hearing. If not, I will find out.” The two men left and went toward Sodom while Abraham remained standing before the Lord. (Gen 18:16-22)

In the Bible, one of the things we see about prophets is that they stand before the Lord in one way or another and hear things. This is the very first time we see this in the Bible, but it will also happen to Moses, Isaiah, and others. God tells them exactly what to do and say and they do it—usually. Abraham walks with them as they head in the direction of Sodom, which is near the Dead Sea even if we don’t know exactly where—along with the four other cities there. If you remember from our lessons on chapter 14, these cities were very rich because of asphalt mining. Asphalt was used in the east as part of their temples and buildings because they only had clay bricks and not rocks like the Canaanites had to make their buildings out of. Asphalt is probably what your roads are made of. The Greeks named the Dead Sea Lake Asphaltitus because the asphalt would float to the top of the Dead Sea and people would go out in boats to harvest the sticky goo off of the surface. Pretty cool job, eh? They would push the goo with their boats to the shore. It has to be the weirdest lake in the world! At one time, they were able to get a ton of asphalt out of it but now there is only a little every once in a while. That’s what made the five cities around the Dead Sea very rich in the time of Abraham.

God ends up having a sort of meeting with Abraham and the two angels before they head off to Sodom. In fact, God is treating Abraham like a friend, or what we would call a confidant. A confidant isn’t just a friend but someone you trust with your secrets. Abraham wasn’t allowed to ask them why they were traveling or what they were doing because of hospitality rules but now God is going to tell him. This is a big deal. The last person God shared His plans with was Noah, telling him to build an ark because there was going to be a terrible flood so that He could clean up His creation to be like it was in the beginning again—without all the evil that was ruining it. Unlike the gods of the other nations, who were rumored to kill everyone just because they didn’t like the noise, God wants us to know that He is interested in justice, mercy, and love. Sometimes, terrible evil has to be dealt with—and that must have been more evil than we can possibly imagine. People were living so long that bad people weren’t dying off; instead, they just got worse and more powerful. Imagine a world where bad people live for almost a thousand years—they would probably spend that time killing all the good people and then they would fight against each other!

It was a big deal for God to tell His secret plans to Abraham. It was a great honor. The reason He gave for telling Abraham was because he had been chosen to be the beginning of all God’s plans to rescue and bless the world. Everything that God does with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and David and everyone else has to do with Jesus. Jesus is how God blesses all the nations of the world. Jesus is the biggest reason why Abraham has a great name—almost a third of the people in the world know Abraham because they know Jesus. But all in all, about fifty-five percent of the world sees Abraham as a prophet—that’s the Jews, Muslims, and Christians combined. Do you think that Abraham ever thought he would be that famous?? I doubt it. And there are a lot of people who aren’t any of those religions who still know about Abraham. He might be the most famous person who ever lived. Definitely in the top five. Abraham wasn’t perfect and we have seen how he messes up in some really big ways, but he was a man who was born an idol worshiper in far off Babylon and by following God and obeying and trusting Him, he became less like a Babylonian and more like Jesus even long before He was born.

God even shares what Abraham’s job is in the world and it is very simple—to teach his children and everyone in his household the ways of the Lord. God says that He chose Abraham to do this, but that word doesn’t just mean like eenie meanie mynie moe where He chose some dude at random. The word chose actually means that God knows Abraham—that means that God has made a covenant with him of forever promises to be with Abraham and to never give up on his family—not ever. God is going to bless the world through Abraham, no matter what. Abraham and his kids and his family all the way to Jesus has done wonderful and terrible things but God made promises and He keeps them. Good thing for us. Without Jesus my family would be worshiping idols for sure! But whenever Abraham’s children didn’t teach their kids what was right and just, things went from bad to worse every time and God had to get His plans back on track.

What does it mean that God wanted Abraham’s children and household to do what is “right and just?” Those are two very important words, not only in the Bible but in the languages of all of Israel’s neighbors. Right comes from the word tzedakah and it means to be on the right side of things—like when two people are having a problem and someone else comes in and listens to them and says to one, “You’re right,” and says to the other, “You are wrong.” Or we could say that the first person is righteous and the second person is unrighteous. It’s a word that people would use in a courtroom. Right or righteous doesn’t mean a person is always right but about that one thing they are. That’s why the Bible talks about the righteousness of Jesus because He was innocent and perfect even though they killed him like a violent criminal. When we tell the world that Jesus was innocent and right and that He is our King, we are right to do that. The most important job in the world for us is to tell people that Jesus is right.

That’s what Abraham’s children are supposed to do. When Jesus returns, God will prove that we are right, or righteous, to follow Him as our King—no matter how many other things we are wrong about.

The other word that describes the behavior of Abraham’s children is that they need to do what is just—which means that they need to be fair and to make sure that people who do terrible things are held responsible and that the people they hurt are helped. That word is mishpat—but that’s only half the story. When the two words are used together—right and just or maybe as righteousness and justice, it means something a lot bigger. Like, the word nice means something and warm means something but when you say “it’s nice and warm” it’s a way of saying that the temperature of something is just right and very, very pleasant. And so, when God is talking to Abraham, the word right means one thing and just means another but right and just meant to take care of the people who were usually treated badly by bullies in the ancient world. Kings were supposed to be right and just—they were supposed to make sure that people who were in jail but shouldn’t be were let free, and that the people who were hurting people who had no one else to protect them were punished.

When God told Abraham that his children were supposed to be right and just, he was telling Abraham that He expected him and his children and everyone who would ever be in his family that it was their responsibility to act like good kings and queens. When we call Jesus our King and make Him the boss of our lives forever, we become children of Abraham too. That’s why God changes us to be more and more like Jesus, so that we can become the kinds of people who can make sure that the world is more right and fair—just like the Kingdom of Heaven. And that’s why, right after God said that to Abraham, He told him about the problem with Sodom and how people were crying out because they had been hurt by the people who lived there. It was important to God to find out how bad things were because if what He was hearing was true, then their sins were just beyond terrible. The people of Sodom were just the kind of people who had the power to make other people’s lives miserable because they were very wealthy and they lived at a time where there were no police or anyone to take care of the people who weren’t. The problem wasn’t that the people in Sodom were rich and had a lot of privileges that other people didn’t have, but that did make it easier for them to do what was evil and to get away with it.

In the Bible, we see that being rich and privileged comes with responsibilities. Ezekiel has things to say about the sins that God was wanting to check out in the city of Sodom and the four other cities in the same area. All the same people living there that Abraham had rescued over twenty years earlier when stronger and richer kings came after them and took them as slaves and stole everything they had. When people have been saved, they should want to save others, right?

This is what Ezekiel said about the sin of Sodom—let’s see how it matches up with the job of Abraham’s family to be right and just in the world. Let’s compare them with how Abraham treated the strangers who came to his camp: Now this was the terrible sin that the people of Sodom were committing on purpose, and Jerusalem is just like Sodom (like they are sisters from the same family): Sodom and the other cities close by were very proud, and had plenty of food, and were very comfortable and safe from harm, but they didn’t do a thing to help the people who were hurting and needed help. They thought they were better than everyone else and did horrifying things right in my face, so I got rid of them when I saw what they were doing. (Ez 16:49-50)

God was telling Abraham that He expected him to act one way and then confided in Abraham that He has heard that Sodom is behaving the opposite of how He wants Abraham’s family to be in the world. What God is hearing is serious enough that He is sending His angels to go and check out the stories firsthand. God is going to test the people of Sodom by sending strangers into town to see what happens to them, but those strangers won’t be in any real danger because they are actually two of God’s angels. You can tell a lot about people by how they treat strangers and especially when there are no laws to protect outsiders. What would people do if they weren’t afraid of being punished? What good things will people do when they know they won’t be rewarded for it? Everyone likes to call themselves “good people” but that doesn’t mean anything. God is going to find out the truth about Sodom and the only way to do that is to send two spies into the city. Would they be like Abraham and welcome the strangers in and take care of them, or would the angels be treated the way God was hearing cries about?

One thing we hear about a lot in the Bible is how much God cares about the people who are being hurt by others who are bigger, stronger, richer, more powerful, smarter, etc. When God gives us advantages and gifts, it is because He wants us to use those gifts to make the world a better place for the people who are hurting. When we take those gifts and use them to make people suffer, then we are insulting God. We’re being like the powerful people who killed Jesus who were both Jews and Romans. In Matthew 25, Jesus tells us that God chooses sides and favors the people who are hurting instead of the rich and powerful. God isn’t like us at all. He gives us power so that we can rule wisely and with mercy, but when we are greedy and cruel, we aren’t doing what is right and just. In Jesus’s time, there were people called the sons of the light, or the sons of righteousness, or the sons of Abraham but there were also sons of darkness, or sons of Belial who were very wicked. We show whose family we belong to by how we treat people. It’s easy to treat people nicely when they have money or power or are good looking or whatever—you know, the popular people—because we want them to do good things for us. We want to be more like them. But Jesus told us to be sons of God and to do what God told Abraham to do—to be right and just.

Right and just people don’t spend all their time thinking about themselves and so they don’t care if someone can do something for them, they only care about doing what is right—which doesn’t mean being right about everything. Now that God has told Abraham what He wants him to do and to be, the two angels will leave and God will find out how serious Abraham is about doing what is right and just. How will Abraham respond to what God is planning to do? We know from chapter 13 that Abraham knows exactly how terrible a place Sodom is, and that his nephew Lot is at least living somewhere outside the last time we heard about him. And in chapter 14, we learned that Abraham hates the king of Sodom because he is a wicked man—so wicked that Abraham doesn’t want to touch anything that belongs to him. Will Abraham be glad that God is planning to destroy the city if He finds out it is as bad as the rumors He is hearing? Is Abraham worried about his nephew Lot and Lot’s family? Will Abraham try to warn the people of Sodom? So many questions, and in two weeks we will find out exactly what Abraham decides to do. What will Abraham decide is the right and just thing to do? How will God respond to whatever it is that Abraham decides to do? And what will it all tell us about the kind of relationship that God wants to have with us as Abraham’s family through Jesus?

I love you. I am praying for you. Have you ever wondered what you would do if God came to you and said He was going to deal with someone who bullied you? Think about it very carefully and then in two weeks we will see what Abraham does. Next week, we’re going to talk about the great big mess in the book of Esther and ask, “Where is God while all this is happening??”

Episode 133: Sarah’s Mysterious Laughter

Miss Tyler — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 01:25:23 +0000

Most people look at Sarah’s laughter in Genesis 18 and think nothing of it. We think of what it looks like in the movies or in our picture books but what does the Bible tell us about Sarah laughing when she heard she was going to finally be a mom? Why are we so confused about what the Bible does and doesn’t say and what does it tell us about the story Moses was telling the children of Israel?

(**The thumbnail of the Dowager Countess of Rugen was provided by the Count Rugen Estate, which is committed to end-of-life studies and generously supported by the Royal Family of Florin.**)

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I love Bible movies, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes I forget that they are just interpretations of what the Bible says. What’s an interpretation? Every time you or I or anyone read something and decide what it says, we are interpreting it. We are deciding what it means. Sometimes, interpreting something means that we are taking one language and translating it to another. But some things we say in one language don’t mean the same thing in the new language. Remember back in episode #1 when we played the idiom game and I told you all the funny things that people say in different languages that sound like total nonsense in English? Like when someone in Japan says, “Stinky like fish” it means that they want you to come and visit them again soon. In English, it sounds like they are saying you smell bad and need to take a bath! And we have things we say in English that are absolutely ridiculous when we don’t know what they mean. Like, “Don’t let the cat out of the bag” and how it means we have to be sure to keep a secret and not tell anyone—like if you know about a surprise party, and if you tell everybody then you will spoil the surprise. But if someone doesn’t know that, they might think you have a cat inside a bag and that’s just mean. Except with my cat Bubba. If you put a garbage bag on the floor, he will crawl inside because he loves being taken from one room to another in it. I have never had another cat who did that. They would be scared, but not Bubba. He’s weird. Don’t put your cat in a bag, okay? God created us to care for animals.

But there are other ways to interpret things. Today we’re going to talk about Sarah laughing in Genesis 18, and if you have watched Bible movies, you might assume that however they made her laugh look, was what the Bible means but the truth is that we don’t know what her laugh sounded like. Was she rolling her eyes and shaking her head because it sounded stupid to her, or because too many people had made her the same promise too many times, or was she actually happy and hopeful but not certain it was true. We don’t know. The Bible doesn’t say. But that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it and learn a lot and play the “what if” game. We haven’t done that in a long time so this week is the perfect time to do it again.

As a quick review, three mysterious visitors came to the camp of Abraham and Sarah. Abraham went out to meet them and invited them to rest and eat. This is called hospitality, which was very important in the ancient world—it was a way to make friends out of enemies and gain honor by being generous. The guests weren’t allowed to ask for anything and the host wasn’t allowed to ask their guests any questions. So, up to now, they have just been eating the bread, milk, curds, and meat that Abraham had brought them. They had washed their feet with the water Abraham brought. And Abraham is taking care of them personally—unable to ask them anything about who they are and why they were there and where they were going. We know from verse one that God is there and from Genesis 19, next chapter, we know that the other two are angels. This is a theophany, an appearance of God—we talked about that last week. This man isn’t what God looks like because we know from other places in the Bible that no one has ever seen what He really looks like. But God can appear in a burning bush as the angel of the Lord and so He can certainly make Himself look like a man or anything else if He wants to. We still don’t know why God is here but we are about to find out. Let’s look at today’s verses, starting in Genesis 18 vs 9:

“Where is your wife, Sarah?” the three visitors asked him. “There, inside the tent,” Abraham answered. The Lord said, “I will come back to you in about a year from now, and your wife Sarah will have a son, I guarantee it!” Now Sarah was listening at the entrance of the tent behind the Lord. Abraham and Sarah were already old and getting even older. Sarah was way too old to have babies. So, she laughed to herself: “Now that I am old and worn out, and my husband is even older than I am, will I be a mom?” But the Lord asked Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, saying, ‘Can I really have a baby when I’m old?’ Is anything impossible for the Lord? I will come back to you exactly when I said I would, and in about a year Sarah will have a son.” Sarah was too scared now to admit that she had been laughing, so she lied to Him. “I didn’t laugh.” But he replied, “Oh yes you did laugh.”

Uh oh. Do you remember what happened in the last chapter? The exact same thing—Abraham heard God’s promise to give him a son with Sarah and he fell down and laughed too: Abraham fell on his face. Then he laughed and said to himself, “Can I have another son when I am a hundred years old? Can Sarah have a baby? She’s almost ninety years old!” So, I have questions because obviously Abraham knew that it was God Himself who had made that promise in the last chapter. So, this promise from the visitors is exactly the same so Abraham must know exactly who he is talking to now. But Sarah seems like she hasn’t ever heard any of this before. She is reacting like it is news to her—at least the way I am reading this. Didn’t Abraham tell her? Why wouldn’t he tell her? And why wouldn’t Sarah be dazzled and know right away that this was the Lord talking about her having a baby? So many questions. Let’s start at the beginning so we can try to unravel what is going on.

The first really strange thing here is that these strangers somehow know Sarah’s name. Not Sarai even, which she was still being called before God changed it just a few days before. No, they called her Sarah and that was news even to Abraham. Had he even told anyone about that? Had he started to call her Sarah like the Lord commanded him to do? I think that when Abraham heard them call her Sarah, that he knew it was the Lord but we don’t know if Sarah had caught how strange it was that they called her by that name. Sarah was in the tent right behind them listening, which makes perfect sense since it wasn’t right for her to be out with the men in that culture and remember that Abraham liked to keep her away from other men because she was so beautiful.

“Where is your wife Sarah” is a rather strange question from strangers in those days. You didn’t just go asking your host personal questions about the women in their household. It was a pretty sketchy thing to do. I think the only reason why Abraham even answered them is because he finally realized that these weren’t just normal guys out on a journey. Probably no one else knew about her new name at this point, apart from Abraham and maybe Sarah. God did command him to call her by that name but we don’t know if Abraham shared the reason why. After all, not being able to have a baby was something that had probably hurt Sarah for the last seventy years once they figured out there was a problem. How many times had people told her over the years that it would happen if she would just stop worrying about it? I know a lot of people told me that and after the first few years, it just made me hurt worse and worse. How many people had told her that she couldn’t have a baby because the gods were angry at her or she was cursed and if she would just do this or that, everything would be okay. And I am sure she did all those things and it just never helped. So, their suggestions would hurt her too. Everyone was telling her that it was all her fault. Today we know better but then they figured that having babies was the simplest thing on earth. Today we know it is one of the most complicated and it really is a miracle. So, it could be that Abraham just couldn’t get her hopes up again because Sarah didn’t ever really have any sort of a relationship with God. Only Abraham did at this point and not anyone else. It wasn’t like it is today when millions and millions of people do—men and women and girls and boys and old and young and speaking thousands of different languages. I don’t think Abraham told her anything about God’s promise and I don’t blame him for that.

And so when the strangers said Sarah would be a mom in another year, she probably believed that they were just responding to the hospitality. Do you remember the rules for people who became guests in someone else’s home? They were allowed to ask for anything they hadn’t been given, they couldn’t act like enemies and hurt their host or his city, and they had to give the host a blessing of life at the end. Sarah had probably spent all of her life hearing things like, “May the gods reward you with a hundred sons and may your wife be like a fruitful vine.” Because that was considered to be polite and the right thing to do. It was just normal. And so when these men said that to Abraham, I don’t think she got excited and heard it as a promise from God. I think she just rolled her eyes and thought to herself, “Same old, same old. If I had a piece of silver for every time I’ve heard that blessing!”

I have had so many people tell me that their prayers for me would guarantee me a baby but no matter how hard I believed, it never happened. Sarah understood that too. It wasn’t her fault and it wasn’t my fault. If Abraham told her, would she believe it? Even if he did tell her, why would a group of strangers saying it impress her? The Bible said that Sarah laughed to herself—I don’t know if that means so quietly that she didn’t think anyone would hear or if she just laughed on the inside. You know how sometimes we just laugh on the inside when we would get into trouble for laughing in a way that people can hear it? If you can’t do that yet, you will. It’s one of the way we learn to control ourselves as we get older. Sometimes, it’s a big part of kindness. It wouldn’t have been kind for Sarah to respond to what sounded like a blessing by laughing and making fun of the visitors for saying it. Sometimes when we have been angry and sad for a long time about something, like Sarah with not being able to have babies, we can say and think things that aren’t very nice.

Sarah’s response on the inside, what she said to herself is, “What? I am so old and my body is all worn out! My husband is even older and more worn out than I am! Am I supposed to finally be able to have a baby now?” That would be a sarcastic response—which isn’t serious but angry and mean. But what if Abraham did tell her and she is surprised to hear it again? Maybe then we could read it more like this, “Can this be true? But don’t they know how old I am and how worn out my body is? Too old for having babies! And my husband is even older than I am! Is it possible that I could finally have what I have wanted all my life?” How do we know which one is right? Well, we can’t entirely. When Moses first told the story to the children of Israel in the Wilderness, he knew the right way to say everything so that people would know for sure just through the sound of his voice. I mean, we can listen to people talking and hear if they are happy or angry or confused or whatever. But what did Sarah’s laugh sound like? Did it sound sarcastic like, “Oh sure, whatever…” or how about hilarious, “Oh my gosh, are they serious? Look at me and look at him—we’re supposed to have a baby??? That’s hilarious!” Or maybe just unable to really believe it even though she is hoping it is true, “What? Could something like that really happen to us when we are old?” Moses knew exactly how to say it. We can only guess. Once people started writing everything down, it got harder and harder to remember how to say it. That’s why hearing a story can be a lot better than reading a story. That’s how they used to do things before they built places where they could store things that were written down.

Was God surprised that Sarah laughed? Do you remember what God told Abraham after he laughed? God said that their baby would be called Isaac—and Isaac means “laughter.” Abraham laughed. Sarah laughed. And Sarah would later say that everyone who hears the story about it would laugh, too. God was about to make something unbelievable happen. We are even laughing today because it was just a crazy thing to happen to a ninety-year-old lady and a hundred-year-old guy.

But God seems to be maybe irritated with Sarah, but it is hard to know because we can’t hear the tone of His voice either. Maybe He is laughing at her laughing, or maybe He is unhappy because Abraham didn’t tell her and she seems to be totally taken by surprise. Or maybe Sarah’s laughter is angry and God needs her to understand that He is dealing with her now and she needs to understand that He can do anything He promises to do, so He is being firm and serious with her. I don’t think He is really angry because God would understand that Sarah has been disappointed all her life and gave up on having a baby a long time ago. One way or another, Sarah needs a reality check and she needs to begin to have faith again, like she probably did when she was still young. Remember that Sarah grew up as an idol worshiper just like Abraham and she is used to the gods letting her down. How should she know that Abraham’s god is any different? God needs Sarah to believe. And Sarah needs to know that she can trust God—God is going to prove to her that she can trust Him and that He can do anything He decides to do.

Sarah is being quiet and only talking to herself and so just imagine how shocking and scary it would be when one of the strangers says, “Why did Sarah laugh?” And then to make it worse, he read her mind and told Abraham all about it—well, most of it. God was very kind to Sarah and didn’t tell Abraham how old she thought he was. That would just be mean for no reason at all. I don’t know about you, but if someone heard me laugh to myself and then told me what I was thinking, I would be totally freaking out. I wouldn’t want anyone to know the person was right. I would be scared of what they would say next. One of the best things about our private thoughts is that they are private. No one knows them except for us and God. But in Sarah’s world of pagan gods and goddesses, they couldn’t read minds. They had no idea what people were thinking—only what they saw people do and heard them say. Sarah did what a lot of us might do when scared, she just up and lied. Remember that Sarah isn’t a Christian and she isn’t Jewish either. She’s chosen by God to be the mom of the universe’s first impossible baby. There will be seven in the entire Bible, but this one will be the first. That means she hasn’t ever even heard about anything like this happening before. The ancient world had a lot of what are called fertility gods and goddesses. That means they were in charge of making sure that crops grew—like fruit and vegetables and wheat—and that animals and people had lots of babies. Of course, they really couldn’t do anything of the sort. Plants and animals and people have babies because God created them to do that, and all those false gods could do was to take credit for what God had done. Each culture in the ancient world had a few, and they were all very different even though they had the same jobs. But our God, Yahweh, wanted everyone to know that He can do things that none of their fake gods could take credit for—He can make an old woman have a baby, one who has never had a baby! And everyone knew it because they had been with Sarah and Abraham for a very long time.

Sarah felt ashamed, sad, and probably even angry. It’s very hard to hope with all your heart for something like a baby while everyone around her was having babies from the time she was a teenager and newly married. But right now, I figure that Sarah is completely freaked out and confused and not sure what to think. I bet you that she had a long talk with Abraham later that day about what the heck was going on. “Abraham, who were those men and why would they talk to me like that—it’s one thing to give us a blessing because we took them in but that one man—he knew that I was laughing about what he said. And I didn’t make a peep. More than that, he told me exactly what I was thinking and how on earth did they know my name? I was here making bread the whole time and you never said a word about me. Abraham, I am scared. Were they sorcerers or magicians? How did they do that? And what’s all this about? They talked about your God—they used his name. No one else around here uses that name! What am I missing here?”

And maybe Abraham would have to tell her everything that had happened, and why he was calling her Sarah, and God’s promise to give her a son named Isaac and how he had fallen down laughing because of how old they were. And if all that happened, then I am very sure the first thing they thought of was what a mess they had made with Abraham’s son Ishmael. How much they had complicated everything by being impatient and not trusting God to give Abraham a son His own way. But, learning that God doesn’t need us to come up with plans to make His promises happen is hard for everyone. Let me tell you a story about something that happened about twenty years ago. I was at a church and the pastor there went to a conference. A man walked up to him and told him that God wanted him to hear a certain verse, which he shared with him. And then another guy comes up to him and says, “God has told me that your ministry will increase five times what it is right now.” Well, the pastor was very happy and he started making big plans. Without telling anyone, he bought the church a new piece of land and made plans to build a church five times the size of the one we were using. And he put up our church as collateral—which means that if the church couldn’t pay the bills on the land that the pastor had bought, that we would lose our church building. But he was wrong. The way he was interpreting God’s promise was entirely wrong—he was thinking that having a ministry get bigger was about more people and a bigger building but that wasn’t what God had in mind at all. God wanted the work of the church to get bigger and not the building. And the congregation lost the land and lost the church building too and the pastor moved somewhere else. If they would have just kept doing what they were doing, then God would have made His own promises come true. That’s always been the way of things with God. God said Abraham would have a son—but God never said how or when. It’s only when we trust God that we wait for Him to show us what His promises mean.

But now Abraham and Sarah have this promise—even if Sarah doesn’t quite know what to believe yet. After all, she hasn’t been visited by angels or had visions and they certainly didn’t have the land and they weren’t a great nation and Abraham didn’t even have a great name at this point. They had faced famine, and childlessness, and they were still wanderers with no home. They had a lot of stuff, which was great, but without a home and a son it must have seemed meaningless to Sarah. If Abraham died, there was nothing to save Sarah from being thrown out of the camp by Hagar and Ishmael—if that’s what Ishmael wanted. We haven’t had anything to do with Ishmael yet and so we don’t know how he felt about Sarah but it probably wasn’t very positive since she had been so mean to his mom and was still using her as a slave even though Ishmael was the second most important guy in the household. When we try to work things out ourselves, we just make a big mess for everyone. Ishmael the person wasn’t a mistake, but it was a mistake not to wait on God because Isaac was always His plan from the beginning.

I love you. I am praying for you. I hope you will try to remember, as you get older, that you don’t have to have things figured out. God doesn’t need you to figure out a way to make his plans work out. All you need to do is what is good and right and let Him make things happen in His own time and in His own ways.

Episode 132: Abraham and the Three Mysterious Visitors

Miss Tyler — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 11:23:31 +0000

This week we are beginning Torah portion Vayera, which covers the time from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah to the Akeida in chapter 22. Today we start out with a very mysterious appearance of three strangers soon after Abraham circumcised all the men in his household. From the very first line, we know that one of the strangers is God but why is He there and how will Abraham react?

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Well, things are about to get really exciting really fast. Some of what we will read about today will be a review of last week because we are going to see a lot of the hospitality rules. In fact, I am not even going to do an intro today because I want to see how much you remember from our last lesson. How many of the rules will you recognize? Let’s find out as we read the first eight verses of Genesis 18:

The Lord appeared to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre while Abraham was sitting at the entrance of his tent during the hottest part of the day.

Hold it right there—the Lord did what?? You know, we’ve heard over and over again about all the visitations that Abraham has had but we don’t really have a lot of details. The Lord spoke to Abraham in Genesis 12:1, appeared and spoke to him in Genesis 12:6, spoke to him in 13:14, the word of the Lord came to him in a vision in 15:1 and then appeared to him as smoke and fire in 15:17, and the Lord appeared to him in 17:1. Up to now we have had absolutely no clue as to what that has looked like or even if it looked like anything we could understand. After all, the word “appeared” could mean “appeared” as just about anything. God appeared to Moses in the burning bush, but that doesn’t mean that is what God really looks like, right? God could appear as anything He wants to appear as. It seems to be the speaking which is the important thing and the appearance is more like a sign that “yes, this is really an out of this world” experience. But there isn’t anything ‘out of this world’ about the appearance in today’s story. In fact, it’s pretty darned ordinary compared to the burning bush. In fact, as we will see next week, Sarah certainly wasn’t alarmed and neither was anyone else who was in the camp.

I want to talk about a Greek word before we go to the rest of the story, and that word is theophany. It’s a fancy word that means an appearance of God. The ancient Greeks used it when they were talking about the times during the year when they would take a city idol out into the streets and parade it around. The people would look at it and, believing that the idol had their god’s presence in it, see that as an actual appearance of that god among them. They knew the statue wasn’t actually their god, but it was the closest thing possible. They didn’t actually want their gods and goddesses walking down the street because that likely would mean they were in huge trouble. Gods with time on their hands to walk down the street were gods who could be easily offended and cause big-time trouble.

But what that word meant to them was very useful to us because God isn’t a burning bush just like the Holy Spirit isn’t a dove even though the Spirit looked like a dove when it came down on Jesus after he was baptized. But God was in the bush speaking to Moses through the Angel of the Lord—don’t ask me how that works because my brain is too small and I am not gonna pretend to have it all figured out. I understand it happened but I don’t understand how it works. No one knows exactly how any of this works, and that’s okay. God can appear in and speak through a bush that is burning but that doesn’t make Him the bush. And today we are going to see that the Lord is visiting Abraham as one of three men—men who look like men. Does God look like this man? Of course not, God told Moses that no one has ever seen Him. God isn’t like us, with an actual body that He is stuck in. The Bible says that He is invisible and doesn’t have a body, and since you have to have chromosomes and DNA to be a human or a human who happens to be a man, and He had to create those things to make us and all the animals, He isn’t a human or a man. Jesus became a man so that He could live among us, save us, and become our King, but He didn’t start out as a human being. So, when we call this a theophany it means kinda the same thing that the Greeks meant when they saw an idol. Moses knew all about idols too, when he told these stories to the children of Israel in the wilderness, and so it made perfect sense to him and to all of them that God could become whatever He wanted to be so that He could appear to us sometimes. Except, when God takes on a form, it’s alive and not dead like the Greek and Canaanite gods. The Egyptians believed that some animals could be gods, but not people. Let’s get back to this week’s Bible reading.

Abraham looked up, and he suddenly saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the entrance of his tent to meet them. He respectfully bowed to the ground, and said, “My lord, if I have found favor with you, please do not keep on traveling past your servant. Let some water be brought, so you can wash your feet and rest under the tree. I will bring a bit of bread so that you can have enough energy to get where you are going. This is why you have come so close to my camp. Later, you can get up and keep traveling.” “Yes,” they replied, “do everything just as you said.” So, Abraham hurried into the tent and said to Sarah, “Quick! Prepare three measures of our finest flour and make bread.” Abraham ran to the herd and got a tender, choice calf that they had been fattening up for a special occasion. He gave it to a young man, who hurried to prepare it. Then Abraham took curds and milk, as well as the calf that he had prepared, and set them before the three men. He even served them as they ate in the shade under the tree.

Now, that we have all that exciting stuff taken care of, it’s time to get to the hospitality part of the story. If you were confused at all the details last week, I hope they are making more sense now. First of all, I am not sure that Abraham has a clue that this is God appearing to him. Otherwise, Abraham would have washed His feet personally instead of offering to have water brought so they could do it themselves. Would Abraham let God of his two mysterious companions wash their own feet? I mean, wouldn’t you want to wash God’s feet? I absolutely would! Sometimes, it’s confusing because in English, our Bibles say, “The Lord appeared to Abraham,” and later it says, “My lord, if I have found favor with you…” but those are two very different words. The first word is God’s actual name, Yahweh, which is why it always appears in all caps in the Bible. That’s what the narrator (the storyteller), probably Moses, is telling us—he knows all of what Abraham doesn’t know yet because God and two angels just up and appeared at Abraham’s camp. It’s kinda nice to just be reading about it because we get all the inside information that everyone is still clueless about. Although, there is another possibility—maybe Abraham did know exactly who it was and he was simply terrified to touch the feet of the Lord. I would be, even though I would also want to wash His feet anyway. At least I think so. You know, it’s impossible to know what we would or wouldn’t do or would and wouldn’t want to do in any situation until we are in that situation. I hope that I would want to and I would hope that I would get to.

You guys know me by now and I study a lot and so I read a lot of different opinions from very smart people who love God very much. Some are alive now and some have been dead for a long time, but they loved the Bible and had some very interesting thoughts. Way in the future, when Moses asks to see God near the end of Exodus—I mean, what He really looks like—God said that no one could really see Him and live. When the Angel of the Lord appeared to Samson’s parents in Judges 13, and they figured out whom they had actually been talking to, Samson’s father thought they were going to die but then his Samson’s mom said that if God was going to kill them then how could she have the baby God promised her! If Sarah had reminded Abraham of such things then he wouldn’t have been scared enough to give her away as a wife to other kings—twice! But now we have a gray area because if they believed those things then Abraham probably believed them too. Having the Angel of the Lord appearing to him and hearing God were probably scary and stressful enough but what do you do when God shows up on your doorstep? Do you even dare touch Him? So, this story could go either way. Either Abraham knew or he didn’t know—either way, he didn’t want to touch their feet, good host or not!

The second “lord” is in all small letters because it’s just a title of respect—adonai in Hebrew. That’s the title Abraham uses when he talks to the three men and invites them to lunch. And there were a lot of these titles that could mean entirely different things depending on how they were used in a sentence. Adonai can be God, absolutely, but in normal life it was more like saying, “sir” or “master.” The Greeks had a word just like it—kyrios. We translate it as lord today because that made sense when the Bible was first translated into English, where lords were rich landowners who had to be treated with respect, or else. But no one uses lord anymore, except over in England and rarely even there. When we hear the word lord in America, we immediately think of God but Adonai was a much more common word that could mean all sorts of things depending on who it was said to. Abraham is using “lord” not necessarily because he knows this really is THE Lord God but because he is speaking respectfully to the visitors and wants to offer them hospitality. Lots of people could be called lord, and not just God. There are actually quite a few Bible words like that—not just adonai but also elohim (which we translate into English as god) and ba’al (which means master or can even mean husband sometimes). All of those words could be and were used to describe our God as well as false gods and even powerful people. It all depends on the context, and as you hopefully remember, context is all the stuff we just know and don’t have to explain. If I say, for example, “I wound the bandage around the wound,” even though wound and wound are spelled exactly the same, when you read the sentence, you know exactly how to read it. If you try to say it the opposite way, it makes no sense at all. Or if you are an American, “Roasting dogs on the Fourth” means barbecuing hotdogs on the Fourth of July. If you don’t know our culture, you might think that we’re cooking up Dobermans and Cocker Spaniels. Just like that, when ancient Israelites used the words adonai, elohim, and ba’al, they knew from how the words were used in the sentence exactly what was meant. But God’s real name, Yahweh, always meant the same thing. We don’t use that word for anything or anyone else. God’s name is the most unique and special word there will ever be.

So anyway, God and two angels just appeared in the camp and Abraham immediately jumps up, even though he is 99 years old, and runs over to them. That’s our first clue that this is a hospitality situation. He was the only person in the camp who could invite people in—not even his thirteen-year-old son Ishmael could do that. Abraham knew that when strangers came close, they were not trying to be secretive or sneaky or trying to avoid dealing with people. They weren’t trying to avoid Abraham but wanted to meet him. So, Abraham behaved like a good host and ran out to them and invited them into his camp, placing them under his protection for as long as they stayed. Of course, out of everyone who ever visited Abraham his whole life, these were the ones who didn’t need to be protected, right? He offered them water to wash their own feet, a place to relax in the shade because it was hot, and some bread to give them energy for the rest of their trip. Because it is the middle of the day, he doesn’t offer them a place to stay for the night. No one was traveling in the middle of the day unless they needed to get somewhere before nightfall. Abraham even knew they probably wouldn’t say no because they had come close to his tent on purpose. They wanted to be noticed and they wanted to relax.

And so, they didn’t even pretend that they were not interested in staying like many travelers would have. Think about it—if they had said “No, we’ve got to get going,” they would be lying because meeting up with Abraham is exactly why they came. So, of course, they agreed right away.

They told Abraham to do everything he had offered to do. Abraham hurried back to his tent and told Sarah to get some of their finest wheat flour and make bread for their guests. Sarah was eighty-nine years old and so we don’t really know if she did it or maybe had Hagar or another slave make it for her. Already, we see that Abraham isn’t just bringing them “a bit” of bread but is making them the best bread they can offer. Compared to the bread they normally ate, this would be very soft and fancier—the kind of bread a king would eat. Abraham is already treating these three visitors with great kindness. And not only is he giving them the best bread possible, he told Sarah to make enough to last them for a very long time. In fact—if you go and look at a gallon sized milk jug, he was telling her to use six gallon jugs worth of flour, thirty-six pounds, which would make a ton of bread. Abraham isn’t just feeding them one meal but giving them enough bread to get them to wherever they are going. I love to make homemade bread because it is probably the yummiest thing on the planet and one gallon of flour makes about eight nice loaves of bread and she is making six times that much—so, like forty-eight loaves of bread which would be I don’t know how many flatbreads. I could probably eat all that in a day if, you know, I absolutely had to and I had a pound of butter—but that’s just me. Forget the fatted calf and just leave me alone with all that bread. And even more work because she isn’t making loaves but more like large, thick tortillas cooked directly over a hot fire—in the middle of the day!

But let’s back up a bit. How on earth did these visitors get all the way to Abraham’s tent without anyone noticing? We can look at the word “appeared” and decide that “poof” they were just there all of a sudden. I figure that’s probably what happened. Even if people were resting from the heat, it shouldn’t have been possible for someone to get that close without anyone noticing them and running to Abraham—but Abraham doesn’t seem alarmed or angry that no one told him. I can think of two answers to that question, maybe you can think of more. One, of course, was that he knew who it was. But on the other hand, we have to remember what happened at the end of chapter seventeen. All the men had been circumcised, which is pretty danged unpleasant when you are an adult and it takes a lot of time to heal up afterward. All the men might be in their tents except for the ones that absolutely had to be with all the critters. If Abraham knew that they were all in their tents recovering, then he wouldn’t be surprised that these men had gotten into camp unseen. That’s my guess, even though I think they just popped in.

Later in Genesis, we will see that a whole city full of men got attacked three days after being circumcised and they couldn’t even get up to defend themselves and they were all killed. If they couldn’t even get up and defend themselves, I guess it would be easy to walk through the camp and especially in the middle of the day when there were almost never any travelers. I need to tell you about something in the Book of Hebrews—Always love each other as brothers and sisters should. Don’t forget to show hospitality to strangers, because by doing this some people have welcomed angels as guests without even knowing it (Heb 13:2). Obviously, the author of Hebrews (and we have no clue who it is) is talking about Abraham and Lot.

I am going to tell you a story about something that happened when my twins were babies, and they will be 23 next month. I was driving through the tiny town I was living in, down in southern Idaho, and I saw a man who looked homeless. He was dressed in dirty clothes and had very long scraggly hair and was carrying a stick with a hook on the end of it—I didn’t know it at the time but those are for picking up cans to recycle. Back then, you could still get money for turning them in. And all of a sudden, I heard God speak to me, saying, “Go get him something to eat.” But then I started to argue. I knew it was God but I am generally scared to death of people as it is and this was just asking way too much. “No, Lord, you don’t understand. I have my babies in the car and this guy is twice my size (everyone is twice my size as I am very short and was very thin back then). And if you would care to look, he is carrying a STICK with a HOOK on the end.” And I argued and argued and God never replied, He just let me stew in it for a few minutes before saying, “Okay, I’ll do it.” And boy was I grumbling as I said it. God knows exactly how to get me to do stuff, you know. He says something once and then just is there and I can feel Him because He isn’t letting me forget what He asked me to do until I give in and do it. I drove over to the store and I went in and got a big deli sandwich and a soda. I almost got him a ham sandwich but then I thought to myself, “Hey, maybe he is Jewish, I had better get roast beef instead.” So, I bought him that and a cold soda. I drove back to where he had been and the dude was gone. Oh no. I had to drive and drive around our tiny town before I found him again and when I did, I pulled over and ran up to him with the bag and said “God loves you and He told me He wants you to have this.” He took the bag, looked me square in the eyes and said, “I love you too.”

I’d like to say we talked but I am going to be honest. When He looked at me and said that, I was terrified and just ran back to my car and drove away. I have never felt that way in my life no matter who looked at me and whatever they said. I have thought about it for many years and I believe that God was testing me and that it was an angel even though I can’t prove it. Some of my friends think it was Jesus but I just don’t know. All I know is that the sound of his voice just about knocked me out. I felt like how the Bible describes it when people hear angels talking to them and drop down to the ground and try to worship them but I wasn’t even that calm. I just bolted out of there. I still don’t know for sure but I am pretty sure about one thing—whether that was an angel or Jesus or simply a homeless man, that was God telling me He loves me.
So, you just never know. All you do know is that if God ever tells you to do something for someone, just do it. And when do we know it’s God and not our own imagination. Well, that’s hard. There are all sorts of people out there who say they hear from God but the things they hear are vicious and cruel and do a lot of damage to hurting people. I know that sometimes I think I should do something and then I just obsess over whether it is God or not but I can tell you one thing for sure. When it really is God, I don’t wonder. It’s like getting hit with a 2×4. It doesn’t hurt but you can feel the words hit you. When God really wants to be heard, He isn’t shy about it. As we get more and more used to hearing His voice, He speaks quieter and in many different ways but when it is really important, He makes sure we know it. It wasn’t until after that, that I first read Hebrews 13. Over the years, I have had strange things happen and when they did, I have always offered food and drink just in case. You guys have to be careful because you are kids and I don’t want you being too friendly with strangers, but you can always go to your mom and dad when you think that someone needs hospitality. Make sure you listen to them when you do and don’t go inviting people into your house without their permission. I want you guys to be safe while you are learning to hear what God has to say to you.

I want you to also know that if God tells you to do something and you get it wrong because you are confused or scared, it’s okay and God won’t stop loving you. He will give you other chances to get things right. We are just humans. He created us with the ability to mess up and He seems to expect us to mess up, a lot. But even when you get it wrong, He will help you get it right or at least more right in the future.

I love you. I am praying for you. And maybe you can talk with the people who love you about what it would be like if three strangers showed up on your front lawn and you gave them lunch and it was God!

Episode 131: Hospitality, Travel, and Family in the Bible

Miss Tyler — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 12:36:35 +0000

Well, I was planning on doing a teaching on patience but that isn’t going so well lately so I decided that this was the perfect time to do a lesson on hospitality because that’s mostly what Genesis 18 and 19 are about! Just like Honor and Shame and Covenants, once you understand the rules of ancient hospitality, you will know it when you see it and it makes the Bible a lot more interesting. So, until I get a lot more patient, we’re back to studying Genesis and beginning Torah Portion Vayera—which starts in chapter 18 and goes all the way to the end of chapter 22.

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What would you do in a world with no planes, trains or automobiles and no hotel chains and restaurants? How would you get from place to place while staying safe? Wild animals and bandits and the weather made traveling dangerous! This is going to be a huge theme in Genesis 18 and 19, which is why we are switching away from our Being like Jesus series for the next two chapters of Genesis. Last week, I talked about hospitality a little bit for our talk about kindness but hospitality—which is taking care of travelers who are away from home—is so much bigger than that. Parents, I will have a two-part teaching for you on my other radio show where we are going to really expand what I am teaching today so you can understand what parts of the Bible are and aren’t talking about hospitality and travel, and which parts are, along with the very strict rules about how families had to work in the ancient near eastern world. The kids you are teaching might have questions that I can’t answer here and so one of my most important jobs in teaching them is to make sure you are equipped too! So, look for those later this week and next week for older teens and grownups.

Traveling in the ancient world was actually considered to be really strange. Most people never did it. They weren’t taking vacations or anything like that. The people who were traveling would have been considered to be really strange too. And suspicious. And even dangerous! Unless you were a merchant, which is a person who travels from place to place buying and selling things, people just really weren’t sure whether or not they should trust people who were on the move. Merchants could be really exciting—bringing cloth and spices and pottery from far away—because there weren’t any supermarkets. Usually, people could only get the things that other people in the community made or what they made themselves. Communities that had access to clay would make their own local pottery and some were a lot better at it than others. One of the ways that archaeologists learn about ancient people is by looking at the pottery that they dig up in ancient ruins. That shows us who ancient people were in contact with and how far the products from one city would travel. The clay from one area is going to be an entirely different color than the clay from other countries. Baskets could be very different as well, and cloth too, depending on what they had to make it from. There are different kinds of sheep, goats, and plants that went into making cloth—and also the kinds of dyes used would be unique to an area. Purple and blue dyes, especially, and some reds, were very rare and difficult to make. Merchants are the main way those things would get from here to there or from nearby to hundreds of miles away.

But other kinds of travelers were very suspicious. In the spring, travelers could be spies who were scouting out your land before a king declared war on you. That was when the heavy rains finally stopped falling and the roads dried out and there was fresh barley and wheat for the soldiers to steal as they took over your country. If a large group with women and children and older people came through, it was probably a group that was migrating—which means moving their home from one place to another. Here in America, native groups (which means the people who were originally here) would travel around during different seasons of the year so that they could hunt and plant crops. That’s a very smart way to stay alive in a world where you have to live in different ways in different seasons to make the best life possible for your family. In Bible times, people would mostly migrate from one area to another because of famine, which we’ve talked about before. If you remember, famine is when the land stops making enough food to live in—maybe because of rain or locusts or more heat or cold than usual. Famine is why Abraham and Sarah went down to Egypt—where they rarely ever had famines. Sometimes, travelers were messengers for kings and other leaders. If one king wanted to talk to another king, it wasn’t like they could make a phone call or text them, right? They had to send someone with a message and so those messengers were very important and highly trusted. There were usually two of them just to make sure that the message got delivered correctly because if they got it wrong then there could be a terrible war!

The last reason for travel, which wasn’t considered to be strange at all, was pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is when people from the same religion all travel to a place so that they can celebrate a festival together. In the ancient world, this usually happened whenever there was new food to be celebrated with. In the spring, the children of Israel celebrated the Passover at the time of the barley harvest, and the Babylonians celebrated the Akitu festival (Akitu literally means “barley cutting”). Then they celebrated Shavuot/Pentecost after the wheat was harvested, and in the fall they had the biggest party of all, called Sukkot or the Festival of Tabernacles, and they celebrated by feasting on the fruit and nuts and meat and all the things they had harvested throughout the summer months. The closer the people came to where the Tabernacle was (or later, the Temple in Jerusalem), the larger the groups traveling got and they would sing special Psalms together as they got closer and closer. That was always the best reason of all to travel!

During the time of Jesus and afterward, His disciples would travel from place to place to teach people about Jesus and how He had finally come to rule over the world as the King of kings and Lord of lords. When they traveled, they depended on something called hospitality—which is what we call it when strangers are taken in and cared for in someone’s home. Of course, during the time of Jesus, the rules about hospitality had changed a lot in some ways and not in others. For example, women were allowed to be hosts in New Testament times but not when Abraham was alive. We know this not only because of the Bible but also because of what we read about from other cultures who lived at the same time. Scholars who study the world of the Bible sometimes say that they were all drinking the same cultural water, which means that they did a lot of things the exact same way no matter what gods they worshiped or what they called themselves. We will see that a lot. Everyone who lived at the same time as Abraham performed animal sacrifices to make their gods happy. Men had absolute power over their own families and that was considered normal. Not even men, really, but the oldest man in the family. You could be seventy years old but if your dad told you to do something, you had to do it because he was in charge of everyone! We see a lot of things change throughout the Bible as God brings them closer and closer to the time of Jesus. But when Abraham was alive, we need to remember that his family had come out of Babylon and worshipped idols. God had a long way to go to get them ready for the Messiah! He had to teach them new ways to live and how to love one another.

We will talk some other time about how hospitality worked in the days of Jesus but right now, we are going to talk about hospitality in the days of Abraham and Lot. For the grownup teachings, we will also be talking about Rahab, Jael, and Abigail and how those situations were very different from the ancient phenomenon of hospitality. Some of what we know actually comes from Bedoiun communities here in the modern world and how they have done things for thousands of years.

Hospitality was sort of an insurance policy in the ancient world. It was actually kind of a religion where everyone knew the rules and followed them no matter who or what they were. You didn’t want to get stuck somewhere, far from home, with no place to spend the night and no food and so even people who didn’t travel all followed the rules of taking strangers into their homes for a set amount of time. Even if they weren’t going to travel, their friends and families might and so taking care of strangers was part of what people did to keep their world from becoming too unpredictable. What we’re going to learn today are the rules for hospitality and what people could and couldn’t do and say.

Now, just imagine you are outside your tent or house four thousand years ago. You look into the distance and see some people walking toward you. Or maybe they are leading a donkey or riding on a camel. What do you do? Well, if you were a woman, it all depended on whether you were married or widowed or whatever. No woman living alone was going to invite strange men into her tent or house because that was something we call a taboo. A taboo is something that people just aren’t allowed to do and wouldn’t even imagine doing. You wouldn’t ever think of marrying a member of your family, right? That’s a very serious taboo in the modern world no matter where you are, pretty much. People get grossed out just thinking about it. That’s how people in the time of Abraham would have thought about a respectable woman opening her tent and letting strangers inside, okay? It was unthinkable. A married woman would go get her husband and a young woman would get her father or uncle or grandfather. If the woman was at a well or another place that belonged to the whole community, she didn’t have to go anywhere because there was nothing wrong about meeting someone at the well because everyone needed to drink, right?

But the men of a community had obligations when there were strangers coming into their living space—their community. And this is where it gets complicated because not all hospitality was about just being nice to strangers—offering hospitality was often a way to find out whether someone was a friend or an enemy, or to make sure they became your friend. But even that wasn’t very easy because there were rules about what you could and couldn’t say and could and couldn’t ask. And if you get confused, don’t worry because as we go through Genesis 18 and 19 starting next week, you will get the hang of it because we are going to see this stuff over and over again. The details will sometimes be a bit different, but they will always fall within most of the rules that everyone in the ancient world agreed on.

Let’s pretend I am a guy, okay? And not only a man but the head of my own household. That means I probably have a wife and sons and daughters and tents or a stone house and critters and whoever else that works for me as a hired helper or anyone I would own as a slave. Which, you know, we hate but this is how things were back then and sadly they didn’t seem to understand that you can’t love other people if you own them! God had to deal with all this nonsense a little bit at a time or they would have totally freaked out. Same with us and our nonsense, right!? Right! So, I am responsible for a certain amount of area around my home and my community but outside that, I can let people alone. But today, I see some people in the distance and I am wondering if they will come close enough to worry about. Are they messengers traveling from one place to another? Are they spies who want to report back to their king that I would be a good target for killing and stealing away all my stuff? Are they foreigners looking for a new place to live after a war or escaping famine? Do they have animals or not? Are they part of a caravan of merchants who might have things to sell that I need? No way to know for sure but I do know one thing—I want them to be my friends and not my enemies.

Because I am a man in this ancient world, it means that I have a lot of rights as well as responsibilities. I have the right, for example, to go out to meet them and make them temporary members of the community by providing hospitality. If they accept salted food and a place to rest from me, then they aren’t going to be allowed to attack me and my family and my community. It went against the rules that everyone in the ancient world agreed to live by if they attacked their host. They believed that the gods would be furious and society would fall apart. In a world with very few laws, and especially out in the wilderness far away from cities and kings, they had to depend on everyone following certain rules about what was and was not okay. I am sure you have the same kinds of agreements with other kids about what is and isn’t okay to do and say. You may not think about them, but you obey those rules without thinking about them. Most people, for example, won’t cut in line in front of another person because it makes everyone else in line angry. It isn’t against the law to cut in line, we just don’t do it—so it doesn’t have to be a law. No one likes a line-cutter! Or if you are at a potluck, no one is going to take all of one of the dishes of food, they are going to take some and leave the rest for everyone else. It isn’t against the law to just take a whole pie and go sit down with it, but it is against our unwritten rules. Everyone just knows it and does what is right. Hospitality in the world of the Bible was like that.

So, I go out to meet them and say hello and I am super polite and I ask them to stay a while at my home while I bring them some water, and a bit of bread, and let them sit in the shade. Sometimes, people would agree right away but usually they would say something like, “No, I really have to get to where I am going and don’t have time to rest.” They did that so that they didn’t look desperate or like they needed help. That was how they protected their honor, their good reputation—they didn’t want anyone to think they were weak or in trouble—even if they were. It was all part of a game they were playing, and these were the rules for everyone to come out of it looking and feeling good about themselves. At this point, after they said no, I would have to insist that they take a rest from their travels, eat, drink and maybe even stay the night depending on what time of day it was. Now, because I insisted, they can’t say no to me without disrespecting my offer. So, to protect my honor, they have to come join me for food.

Now, all I promised was a bit of bread and water and a bit of rest, right? That’s all I have to give them but I get even more honor with them if I give them much more than that. So, instead of a bit of bread, I serve them fresh unleavened bread made up on the spot, and give them fermented milk and maybe even some wine to drink. If I am really an epic host, I will give them meat, curds (which was like yogurt), or whatever else I have available. I have made the travelers temporary citizens of my community or my camp and they can’t attack me and I can’t attack them. Now, here’s the deal, I don’t know why they are traveling but I am not allowed to ask them either. We can talk but I can’t pry into their personal business. They can bring it up if they want to, but I can’t ask. But, one of the best things about offering hospitality to travelers was receiving news about what was going on out in the world. A traveller can tell you about wars in other places, and famines, and when kings have died and new kings take their place, and all sorts of things. There were no newspapers, phones, radio, or televisions so without visitors, there wasn’t any sort of entertainment from the outside world. Almost no one could read either, and books would have been written on thick clay tablets that were too big and fragile to carry around. Storytelling was how people learned about the world around them and that was an exciting reason why people would be anxious to have travelers visit their homes.

As soon as I invite them into my space and they accept, I have to protect them even if it costs me my own life. And because I am a man in those days, I have absolute power over all the women and children in my family, as well as over my slaves. They have to do whatever I say and I can even kill them if I want to. And this was how things operated in the pagan world for a very long time. God even gave laws that forbade men to act this way because before then, they could pretty much do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted as long as it was in their own house. The Romans called this paterfamilias. The paterfamilias was the oldest man in a household and he ruled over everyone in his extended family. No matter how old they were! When Jesus was scolding his disciples about how the Gentiles like to be bossy over everyone, this is part of what he was talking about. He was telling His disciples that the people in charge in His Kingdom are the people who serve everyone and not the people who are demanding to be served and especially not the people who hurt others. Jesus gave us the best example because even though He is God, He died for us when He had the ability to kill us. Jesus is our Paterfamilias, our King, Lord, Master, and Savior. Jesus showed everyone a different way of being head of the household and a lot of people didn’t like it at all. Some people like having that kind of power over other people—they did then and they still do now. That’s another reason why Jesus said that we have to come to Him like little children. We have to be different than the world around us. Just because the world tells us that we can do certain things, doesn’t make them right. Jesus told us to never do anything to anyone that we would hate to have done to us. In the ancient world, everyone wanted to be the paterfamilias with all that power but it wasn’t any fun to not be the paterfamilias. That would be super stressful. That’s how the false gods of the nations around Israel acted—whoever was the top god got to do whatever he wanted to the others. And so they strongest gods were often warring against each other even though they were supposed to be family. They all wanted that top spot so that everyone else would have to do whatever they wanted. That’s why Jesus was so strange to the pagans who heard about Him.

And speaking of Jesus, another part of hospitality was either washing the feet of your visitors or having a slave do it or at least giving them water so they could do it themselves. Feet were considered to be the grossest part of the body. Not surprising since they mostly wore sandals and animals would go to the bathroom wherever they happened to be. Feet were the most important part of you to be clean when you went into your tent or home, they were only slightly less gross than your sandals which at least protected your feet from the worst of what you were walking in. At the Tabernacle or Temple, the priests had to have their whole bodies washed but especially their feet because they went barefoot when they were serving God there. That was considered to be God’s house, and so they made sure that they treated it that way. Clean bodies, clean feet, and they gave God the best of everything. The Tabernacle or Temple was considered to be the place where heaven and earth met, and it was like God was visiting that space with His presence. In some ways, God was the host but in other ways, the priests acted like hosts. They were responsible for keeping the fire going on the altar, which was sort of like a huge barbecue grill. And they made offerings every day, like good hosts, to show respect to God. They kept it clean and treated it with respect. They even asked Him questions there.

What about the people who received hospitality? What was their job? Remember that whenever there are social rules that everyone agrees to, everyone has their own part to play. Not only could guests not attack their host or his community, but they also weren’t allowed to ask for anything. The host could give them whatever he wanted, but the guests couldn’t ask for anything or they would be treating the host with disrespect. They were also required to do something nice for the host—giving them some sort of gift of life. Usually, that was a blessing or a prayer that the host and his household would be very prosperous—meaning lots of critters, children, peace, money, or whatever they needed. It was how they said thank you in the ancient world. Sometimes in the Bible, we will see that people can be unhospitable and even dangerous to peaceful visitors and that was considered to be a very terrible crime all throughout Bible times. Jesus even tells His disciples that if a town is inhospitable to them, then they don’t have to bless it when they leave but that they should bless and honor everyone who is good to them, no matter how much or how little they had to offer to them as guests.

I love you. I am praying for you. As we go through the Bible, we need to look for signs of hospitality. Do you remember when Melchizedek came outside his city with bread and wine for Abraham and his men? That’s just the beginning.

Episode 130: Being like Jesus–Kindness

Miss Tyler — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 19:20:47 +0000

Kindness is complicated. It’s a lot different than just being nice because Jesus wasn’t always nice but He was always kind. Being nice is just being pleasant to people, but kindness is treating people better than we think they deserve to be treated. And that isn’t easy when we are angry, sad, in pain, or just plain frustrated. Kindness is going to be really important to understand when we get back to Genesis 18 and 19!

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Of all the ways to be like Jesus, being kind seems like it would be the easiest when actually it can be the most complicated. I suppose the best way to describe it is how people treat us better than we have treated them, or when one person treats us better than everyone else does. There are a lot of ways to be kind, and some of them are very simple, but the truth is that kindness can be very hard when we are angry or hurting or confused. When we were learning about how Sarah and Abraham treated Hagar, neither of them were kind and they wouldn’t even call her by her name—but God called her by her name and made her promises even when everyone else was being hateful to her. We see that a lot in the Bible, where God is kind when others are cruel. Or when God is patient with someone when others want to just get rid of them.

In fact, when we get to Genesis 19 and talk about Sodom and Gomorrah, we will see a lot of kindness and unkindness. Even starting in chapter 18, when Abraham sees three men traveling and who end up in his camp, he is kind to them and gives them a feast and even takes care of them personally. It is in the middle of the afternoon in ancient Israel with no air conditioning and they have been traveling so they would have to be very thirsty and hot and he made sure that they had shade, and milk, and the best food he can provide. He didn’t know who they were until later, but showed them kindness anyway when he could have treated them like unwelcome strangers. That’s a great example of kindness. In the next chapter, two of the men who are actually angels go to the city of Sodom to find out if all the people who are crying out to God because of the unkindness and cruelty of the men of the city are telling the truth. Abraham’s nephew Lot goes out to them and convinces them to stay with him for the night because he knows how cruel and evil the men are and wants to protect them. That’s another great example of kindness. But when the evil men of Sodom try to beat his door down to get at the strangers, Lot puts his own daughters in danger instead of the strangers or himself. That wasn’t kind at all. He was kind and righteous compared to the people of Sodom, but that wasn’t saying much.

But we will see in both situations that God is kind even when we aren’t. God rewards Abraham with a son through his wife Sarah, who hasn’t ever been able to have babies. And God treats Lot with kindness by saving his life and the lives of his daughters even though he was willing to hurt them terribly in order to look like a good host. Even when God destroyed those cities, it wasn’t to be cruel but to put an end to the evil those cities were doing to everyone else. Sometimes, kindness to one person means that another person needs to have consequences. Many years had gone by since God had helped Abraham save the people of Sodom from the four kings who had taken them all as slaves. We would hope that they would have changed their ways but instead they got worse and were hurting everyone who visited the town.

The people in the Bible are very much like us—sometimes we are kind and sometimes we are cruel but God is always kinder than we deserve. Sometimes—a lot actually—when you read through the Bible you will say, “Oh my gosh, God, don’t be kind to that person!!! What are you even thinking about?? Don’t you see the terrible things they have done???” But He doesn’t listen to us, and He is really kind anyway.

But how are we supposed to know when to be kind and how kind to be? That’s super hard. In fact, that’s why this is part of the fruit of the Spirit—because we don’t know on our own and God has to teach us as we become more and more like Jesus. The way we start out, most of us really don’t want to be very kind when we aren’t happy or even when we just have a headache. It’s hard to be kind when we are only thinking about ourselves but that’s how we all start out—only able to think about ourselves. We think about our pain and our sadness and our anger and our feelings without really understanding that everyone else has all of these feelings inside them too. We forget how nice it is when we are feeling mean and someone is kind to us even though we said something nasty to them. And we realize that what we really needed was for someone to not be mean back to us and what a relief it is when they are nice to us instead. I think that’s why we as kids are so mean to our parents sometimes when we are feeling bad, because we know that our parents aren’t going to punch us out when we are mean to them.

Sometimes, being kind gets confused with being nice. A nice person is a person who is pleasant and agreeable but that isn’t always the right thing to be. If one person is bullying a smaller person and you are nice, you aren’t going to deal with the fact that the bigger person is doing something very wrong. Instead, a nice person will try to make everyone feel better so that they can be friends with everyone. A nice person doesn’t want to make enemies and so they will just try to smooth everything over instead of dealing with what is going on. A mean person might come in and beat the snot out of the bully. But what does a kind person do? A kind person makes sure that the bully stops what they are doing in such a way that the bully knows they are wrong, but the kind person also treats the bully better than they are treating the smaller person.

In the Book of I Samuel, chapter 25, we meet a bully named Nabal, a kind woman named Abigail, and a guy named David who is all over the place on how he treats people—sometimes wisely, sometimes as a selfish bully, and you never quite know what he is going to do. David is a man after God’s own heart, which means he was God’s choice for king of Israel, but that doesn’t mean that David has a heart like God’s. David loves God but that doesn’t mean he is like God—sometimes we forget that. But in this story, David has been on the run for years from King Saul—who wants him dead. David makes his living by killing the enemies of Israel and taking their stuff and wherever he is hiding out, he protects the people who own that land and the shepherds who are staying there with their flocks of sheep and goats. That’s what David and the people with him have been doing for Nabal. But when a festival day comes, David sends people to Nabal to ask for some sheep to roast for a party since they have been protecting his three thousand sheep and a thousand goats. At least, I hope he was asking—he did send ten of his fighting men and sometimes it is hard to know for sure.

But the Bible tells us that Nabal was a harsh and evil man—and that Nabal means fool. By the way, that’s generally a clue in the Bible that we are not dealing with a person’s real name because no one would actually name their kid that. The Bible does that a lot when someone is too shameful to be named—like the five kings in Genesis 14 who had the funny names pretty much calling them all evil. Like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. No one would name their kid Sneezy or Dopey—that’s just rude. Those were nicknames. But Nabal was a rich bully and very foolish and he wasn’t the slightest bit grateful to David and his men or even scared of them. He said some nasty things about David and sent the young men back to him. You see, not only wasn’t Nabal kind but he didn’t even qualify as nice! And neither was David because when he found out he told all of the men with him that they were going to slaughter every man in Nabal’s household by morning and he even swore an oath—which was every bit as foolish as what Nabal was doing. Although David had treated the shepherds well in the past, now he was willing to be even more of a bully than Nabal. Nabal was just insulting David, but David was willing to kill innocent people in revenge. Hey! That sounds just like Lamech in Genesis 4, remember?

But God wanted to teach David a lesson in kindness, so He sent Nabal’s wife Abigail to David with a ton of the best food they had to offer—two hundred loaves of bread, two huge jars of wine, five sheep all ready to be roasted, a hundred clusters of raisins still on the vines, and two hundred sweet pressed fig cakes for dessert. Wow! That was obviously what she had been planning to feed her entire household for the feast day but she gave it to David instead. Nabal, her husband, had been unkind to David and his men and David was about to be even more than unkind back but the Bible tells us that Abigail was intelligent so what she did was kindness to both sides—here is what she did:

When Abigail saw David, she quickly got off the donkey and knelt down with her face to the ground and honored David. She knelt at his feet and said, “I am so sorry, my lord, but please let your servant speak to you directly. Please listen to what I have to say. My lord, you should pay no attention to this worthless fool Nabal, because really he lives up to his name: His name means ‘stupid,’ and stupidity is all he knows how to do.I didn’t see the young men whom you sent. Now my lord, as surely as the Lord lives and as you yourself live—it is the Lord who kept you from murder and taking revenge—may your enemies and anyone who wants to hurt you be like Nabal, who is nothing but a fool. Please let this gift I have brought you be given to the young men who follow you. Please forgive everything we have done to offend you, because the Lord is certain to make a lasting dynasty for you because you fight the Lord’s battles. For as long as you live, do not do what is evil. King Saul is hunting you and wants to kill you. But your life is tucked safely away in the place where the Lord your God protects the living, but he is getting rid of your enemies by flinging away their lives like stones from a sling. When the Lord does for you all the good he promised you and appoints you ruler over Israel, you don’t want to feel guilty for taking revenge against all these men for what Nabal did when you know that God will take care of the problem for you. And when the Lord does good things for you, please remember me and do good things for me.” (I Sam 25:23-31)

Wow! And this is why Abigail is one of the wisest people in the whole Bible. Her parents in choosing Nabal as her husband? Not so much! But when she found out the trouble that Nabal’s unkindness had caused, she fought back with so much kindness that David didn’t even know what had hit him. She gave him more than he had asked for and she even apologized for not being there to greet his men even though it wasn’t her fault. But even though she was kind to David, she still talked sense into him by reminding him that he is God’s choice for king of Israel and so he doesn’t have to fight against people like Saul and Nabal—that God will fight those battles for him. Abigail tells David that murdering Nabal and all the men in her household isn’t right or even reasonable and that he will regret it if he does it. She was very smart with how she said it, and very kind and wise about how she handled the situation. If she had just walked up and yelled at him for being prideful and a murderer, probably he would have been angry enough to kill her too but she was kind and so her words worked their way into his heart and he turned around and even though he had sworn an oath to kill all the men in her household, he didn’t do it. In fact, David even thanked her for stopping him from killing everyone. Kindness is one of God’s secret weapons against evil. What would Abigail have done if she was just nice?

Well, maybe she would have gone to her husband Nabal and said, “Oh honey, do you really think it was a good idea to make those soldiers angry? Couldn’t we give them something to eat? I am not saying you were wrong or anything, just that we have a lot of food to spare and they are probably pretty hungry…” and while she was trying to be nice to her husband, David would have marched up and killed everyone. No, with a man like Nabal, being nice doesn’t solve anything. In the Proverbs, it tells us that we have to know when someone who is foolish should be spoken to and when they should be left alone entirely. In Nabal’s case, Abigail knew that it would be foolish to even talk to him about it and that kindness to her household meant going behind his back and taking care of the problem herself.

What if she had just been nice to David and hadn’t told him that murdering a whole household of men just because he got insulted by one guy is really, really evil? Well, David might not have killed her family but he wouldn’t have learned the lesson that God sent her to teach him and the next time it happened he would have just killed someone else instead. God sent Abigail to David to teach him a lesson about trusting Him and not taking matters into his own hands and especially not when he is feeling too emotional to think straight. This wasn’t a war where David was protecting farmers and ranchers from the Philistines or anything, this was just David being ticked off because he got disrespected. David wouldn’t ever be a good king if he didn’t learn from Abigail how to be kind and merciful to the people who weren’t being kind and merciful to him. And we see later that there were a lot of times when David could have lopped off the head of someone who was being nasty to him but he didn’t because of the lesson God taught him through Abigail—who became his wife when her husband died. She was right about everything—God took care of Nabal just like she said He would. David would have murdered all those people for no reason at all. Abigail turned David to kindness on that day, so that he and his men weren’t guilty of murdering innocent people.

What about Jesus? What did Jesus tell us about being kind and how was He kind? Jesus was always kind, even though He wasn’t always nice. Abigail called her husband names when she was talking to David because she knew it was true but also knew that it would help calm David down, but calling her husband a fool to his face wouldn’t have accomplished anything at all. Sometimes, Jesus was harsh with people who were hurting others because they had the power to do a lot of damage and Jesus wanted them to stop. Jesus is different from us because He knows what is actually in people’s hearts and on their minds but we can only guess and usually we get it wrong and call people names just because we are angry and impatient and offended like David. But Jesus proved His kindness through the things He did to help the people who were hurting and by confronting the people who were hurting them. He healed people without blaming them for being sick or injured. He cast demons out of people without telling them it was their fault. He fed people without blaming them for being poor. Jesus did good things for people without embarrassing them for needing help—and we all need help sometimes. It’s hard to get help when people make us feel bad for needing it or when they only help us so that they can look good for doing it. Jesus helped people because they needed help and because that’s what God’s love looks like. Sometimes, He even told them not to tell anyone!

Jesus told His followers that if they were kind then they would care for the sick, get clothes for the people who need them, visit people who are in prison, and take care of the people who have no one to care for them. He said that being kind to those people was the same thing as being kind to Him and not being kind to those people was the same thing as not being kind to Him. But He went even further than that by telling us to pray for the people who do bad things to us and to be kind to them. He told us to be kind by forgiving people. Kindness is always an action word—kind people do kind things. They don’t just think kind thoughts. Kindness means doing whatever is needed for someone who has a need. In the ancient world, kindness meant hospitality. Like when Abraham and Lot took care of the angelic visitors who came to them even though they just seemed like strangers. They treated them like important people and not just like random strangers. That’s what kindness does—it treats people better than they deserve to be treated just because they are made in the image of God.

That’s what Jesus did when He ate meals with the people whom no one else would eat with, or when He touched the people whom no one else would touch, and spoke to the people whom no one else would talk to. Even when Jesus was angry, He was still kind and wanted to turn people around. When He died, it was for everyone He was ever frustrated with or angry at and everyone who ever insulted Him or hurt Him or even killed Him. Without the kindness of Jesus, absolutely everyone who wasn’t a Jew would still be worshipping idols. Jesus changed everything with His kindness, which is His Father’s kindness toward us. Jesus could have just saved the Jewish people—His family—but that wasn’t enough because He is too kind and loving to stop there. Jesus died so that everyone could be saved, no matter who they are and what they have done. No matter who you are and what you have done too. And not just to save us but to change us and heal us and help us in every way.

Jesus takes gang leaders and drug dealers and makes them into preachers and teachers and missionaries. Jesus takes murderers and makes them into the gentlest of people. Jesus can change anyone into anything because there is nothing that His Holy Spirit can’t do in the heart of someone who is willing to change. And God is really persuasive when He wants to change us into someone entirely different. The Bible is full of people who did great things only because of the kindness of God or who are alive only because of the kindness of God. God has been proving His kindness since the beginning when He didn’t kill the man and the woman in the Garden on the spot but just kept them away from the Tree of Life, and even gave them clothing as a gift. God was kind when He didn’t kill Cain, but protected him instead. God was very kind when He saved the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt along with everyone else who listened to the warnings of Moses and did what he told them to do. Our God is a god of kindness, even when He has to hold us responsible for the bad things we sometimes do—that’s what He told Moses when Moses asked to see Him. Because He is kind, He gives us a lot of chances to get our act together—way more than we wish He would when it is someone else doing the bad stuff. But because we can trust Him to be kind to our enemies, it means that we can also trust Him to be kind to us. If God was as mean as a lot of people make Him out to be then none of us would still be here and the human race would have been gone a long time ago because we are really annoying.

Kindness is one of God’s secret weapons. And a lot of people are scared that if they are kind that people will just walk all over them and hurt them—because we don’t trust that God knows what He is talking about. We have to always treat people better than they deserve to be treated—the way we would want to be treated. Kindness can look like a lot of things. Kindness can mean sending a murderer to jail so that they can’t hurt anyone else but making sure that they are treated fairly while they are there. Kindness can mean forgiving someone who is starving for stealing a loaf of bread and making sure that they get the help they need so that they can stop stealing. Kindness means getting people the help they need when we can. Kindness is standing up to bullies without becoming bullies ourselves. Kindness means winning over people with God’s love instead of getting revenge. Kindness is always about showing people how different God is from everyone else.

There are many people out there who want to get their own way and do whatever they want to do however they want to do it no matter who gets hurt, and sometimes they do that while saying that they are really serving God. But God never acts that way even though He can and there isn’t anything we can do about it. Really knowing and serving God is about becoming kinder and not meaner. Meaner means that we are heading in the wrong direction and we need to turn around. It means that we are following the wrong sort of god because our God fights evil through being kind.

It’s easy to be kind to people who are kind to us, right? But what about people who are just plain nasty? Jesus said that anyone can be kind to the people who are kind to them—even the worst of sinners can manage that. And so we can’t go patting ourselves on the back when we are kind to the people who aren’t giving us any reason not to be. It’s easy to pray for the people we love, and hard to pray for people we hate. And not those nasty prayers we want to pray, “Oh Lord, make that dude suffer, please.” That isn’t praying for someone—it’s praying against them. It’s perfectly alright to pray that they stop hurting people—in fact, that’s a great prayer because God doesn’t want them hurting people any more than you do. But an even better prayer is that our enemies come to know and love Jesus so that He can change them from people who do things that are terrible into people who do things that are wonderful. That’s what Jesus was talking about when He told us to bless our enemies and not curse them—to make sure they are always in our prayers and so if we ever get a chance to hurt them, we won’t do it. And when they need help, we will be willing to do that instead. Just like Jesus does for us.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to know that being kind isn’t easy, but God will always teach kindness to the people who want to learn it.

Episode 129: Being like Jesus—Goodness and the Holy Spirit

Miss Tyler — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 11:18:27 +0000

Well, whenever someone says goodness is how to be like Jesus, it makes me want to say, “Well, duh…” but what does goodness even mean? It means so many different things in English that it makes your head spin. This week we will talk about what “goodness” means in the Bible and how the Holy Spirit works in us to get us closer and closer to being good.

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Goodness is a confusing word in English—I mean, what exactly does it mean? Is it the opposite of badness? How can we be good when Jesus said that only God is good? And how is it different from the other ways that we are supposed to be like Jesus? Is self-control goodness? How about gentleness and faithfulness and kindness? Goodness seems so vague that we aren’t really sure what to make of it. Adults tell kids to “be good” or “on your best behavior” when relatives come to visit or at the store or school or whatever. But what does all that have to do with Jesus? How was Jesus good as opposed to being somehow bad? What did the word mean when Paul used it and how would the Galatians have understood it? What did it mean to the Jews whom Jesus was preaching to when He said that no one is good except God? What does good mean to us now? Out of all of the fruit of the Spirit, goodness is definitely the most confusing.

Good grades. Good hair. Good dog. Good Morning. Good news. Good enough. Good grief. Good is a word that can mean so many different things in English. But when we are told that the Holy Spirit will teach us and change us to make us “good” it’s sort of like hearing that we’re expecting good weather during a drought. Does that mean sunshine or rain? Which one is good? Does good simply mean nice enough to go out and have a picnic at the park or does good mean that rain will fall and the plants won’t die? And what does it mean if we are being good? Does it mean that we are just behaving ourselves or that we are doing things that are actually good and helping others? Paul was talking to a bunch of grownups when he said this, and so we have to take that into account too. In fact, Paul was talking to a group of people who weren’t being allowed to sit and eat at the same table with other people. There was an in-group and an out-group and these people were on the outside and not allowed to sit with the in-crowd because they weren’t considered to be good enough. Unless they did a certain thing, they weren’t considered to really be fully a part of God’s family. Paul was telling them that the thing they were being asked to do wasn’t really a sign of belonging to God’s family at all. Let me tell you a story of something that happened to me this week that made me very sad.

I know someone whom I like very much. Recently, he changed denominations—which means he is going to a new church now, which is fine. He was asking me some questions and at one point he told me that unless I also go to his church, that I am not fully a member of the family of God with him. I was very surprised. That’s the same exact problem that Paul was dealing with, when one group wouldn’t have anything to do with another group unless they did a certain thing. And it wasn’t like that thing was believing Jesus or worshiping God. But, do we get to decide who belongs in the family of God and who doesn’t just because they aren’t doing a certain thing that is important to us? Paul said no—he said that the Holy Spirit would make the people who belong in the family of God to be more and more like Jesus. That’s how we know. We look at who people were before they believed and we watch God change them for good. If only God is good, like Jesus said, then as we keep following and believing Him, we will never be entirely perfect but we will get closer and closer to being good and further and further away from being bad. And that’s because the word that Paul used that we call good actually meant excellent.

To be excellent is much different than simply being “good” and behaving ourselves. To be excellent means that whatever we are doing, we do the very best we can. That doesn’t mean that everyone is going to get straight A’s in school because sometimes, a person’s best is B’s or C’s. Just like not everyone is going to get an A in Gym class or get chosen for the choir or to have a role in the dance recital. Goodness, or excellence, means that we are determined to be the best we can be in those things that God has given us to do. It means that we aren’t out there setting a bad example by being lazy or treating people badly when we know very well how to treat them well. Imagine if Jesus had only made enough bread and fishes for half the people who were listening to Him preach—that would be so mean! There would have been a riot when the people who didn’t get fed found out about it. Jesus could make enough bread for them all so He did. Imagine if that poor man with all the demons only got half of them chucked out of him! So he still had to live in the graveyard hurting himself and others! What would be the point of getting rid of any of the demons at all? What if Jesus only healed one of the legs of the paralyzed man?

Of course, Jesus could do it all and so He did. Jesus was always excellent. He preached the best sermons anyone had ever heard. He prayed the best prayers. He gave the best answers and asked the best questions. Of course, let’s be honest; He had a huge advantage over us, right? But that doesn’t mean that Jesus couldn’t have decided to just do a little bit for us when He could do a lot. Jesus was often very sad when He saw how much people were suffering, and so He helped the people who were in front of Him when they came to Him. Jesus was very generous with His power to heal and feed and teach. That’s another definition of goodness—to be generous. Being generous means that you share what you have with others and don’t keep it all to yourself. God made me to be really smart with books but a terrible dancer—you just have no idea how bad. He made it so that I love history and the Bible. And then about ten years ago, He gave me the gift to teach people. And then He told me to teach you. But what if I just read my books and enjoyed learning but didn’t share that with anyone? What if I just used what I know to make people feel bad? I’d be showing the opposite of goodness, that’s for sure. All of that is what God gave me and so I give that away to you. It doesn’t mean that I know everything or that I am the best teacher in the world—not by a long shot. But I work hard and study because I want to be excellent in this. I can’t be an excellent dancer and I can’t play musical instruments or read sheet music, and I am so bad at sports that it’s just sad. Even trying would be a waste of my time. But I can become more and more excellent, or good, at what God created me to do. The Holy Spirit helps me with that.

Have you ever wondered how the Holy Spirit works to make us less bad and more good? The Bible says that we are God’s images. All of us. Every human being in the world is created as God’s image. Not animals—just people. All people. In the ancient world of Abraham and even later with Jesus, an image was usually an idol. Someone would make a carving or a mold of something that made them think of their gods and goddesses and then they would perform a ceremony with a knife (I don’t know why they used a knife) and they would touch it to the mouth of the idol and they believed that the spirit of the god would go into the idol—which would turn the idol into a real representative for that god. Because before that, they knew it was just a worthless chunk of clay, rock, wood, or metal. That’s what an image of a fake god or goddess is—something dead that they believed had part of the god or goddess living inside it that they could talk to, worship, feed, take to the bathroom, dress up in fancy clothes, and put to bed at night.

When Moses taught the children of Israel in the wilderness about how our God is different, he used the same exact words to describe how we are the real images of God. That He made us like Him in how we think and in a lot of what we can do. We aren’t God, but we are living, breathing reminders of God throughout the whole world. That’s why Genesis 2 says that God made man out of clay and breathed into him—because that was something they could all understand. They understood that unlike the gods and goddesses of the other nations who were just rocks and wood and clay and metal who couldn’t think, talk, hear, or walk because there was no life at all in them, that we are different. We are made by God and He did put part of Himself in us. Not so that we can be worshiped but so that we could show the world how wise and wonderful He is. He did it so that we could be excellent and rule over all of the things He has created like He would if He were us. That’s how it should have worked but the whole Bible reminds us that it never did. We are always being bad, and sometimes as bad as possible, instead of allowing God to make us excellent in ways that tell creation the truth about who He is and what He is like.

Now, even better than being created as His images is what happens when we believe that Jesus is Lord and we give ourselves over to Him forever. That’s when we receive a special gift—the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit moves in, bad stuff has to start moving out so that goodness can take over more and more. Of course, the bad stuff doesn’t just leave right away because with some of us there would be nothing left. The Holy Spirit works inside us to teach us and to help us want to get rid of the bad and to become better and better so we can be filled with more and more goodness. Somedays, I feel so surly that I am surprised the Holy Spirit doesn’t just move right out but as God is patient and gentle, so is the Spirit. The Spirit can’t be anything that God isn’t, which means that we don’t have to worry about the Spirit hurting us or changing us in ways that will hurt us. Sometimes the Spirit asks us to give up things that are very difficult to give up—like if we hate someone or don’t want to forgive someone we are really angry at. You know, sometimes hating people can make us feel like we are safe from them hurting us ever again but all it really does is make us miserable. But I can promise you that every change the Holy Spirit wants to make in you is a change that will make your life a whole lot better.

I guess we can say that the Holy Spirit is sort of like a balloon that gets bigger and bigger. Inside the balloon is goodness and as we learn to trust God more and more, the balloon gets bigger. That’s going to leave less and less room for the bad stuff that God wants to get rid of. I probably shouldn’t tell you this but before I knew Jesus, I was swearing and cussing all the time. The really, really bad words, even. Then two weeks after I gave my life to Jesus, someone at work noticed that I had stopped swearing. I hadn’t even noticed! That’s what we call a wonder—proof that God is real and working in our lives even if we can’t see Him. There was no reason why I would have ever stopped swearing because I didn’t think anything was wrong with it. I never even tried—just all of a sudden I stopped because I had a Holy Spirit balloon beginning to grow in me and that’s the first thing God wanted gone, I suppose. But it was only the first. I have been a Christian for twenty-five years now and the Holy Spirit has pushed out so much bad stuff that I can’t even hardly remember what I used to be like. That’s probably a good thing. I wasn’t totally bad or anything, but God wants me to be good and so He keeps working on me to make me better even if I never will be totally perfect.

The idols of all the fake gods couldn’t hear, see, smell, taste, talk, breathe or walk—but we can. Of course, their gods couldn’t hear, see, smell, taste, talk, breathe or walk either so I guess stone and metal and wood and clay did a pretty good job of representing them! But our God is real and created everything—if something is going to represent Him it needs to be able hear Him and talk about Him. Only humans can do that, and it’s why He made us different from the animals. Only humans can teach others about God and show them what He is like. Of course, there is one perfect image of God and that’s Jesus. Not only can Jesus teach about God but He can do it perfectly. Not like me because I get stuff wrong. I haven’t been with God forever. I didn’t create the world with Him. I can’t hear God whenever I want to and I haven’t ever seen Him. But Jesus has. The Bible tells us that Jesus is the one and only perfect image of God, who we can’t see. But Jesus could be seen and when He did things, people were seeing what God would do and what was important to God and how loving, and kind and amazing He is. When He talked, it was God talking. Wouldn’t it be great if we could be like that too and we wouldn’t ever be mean or wrong?

Jesus told a story once about God’s goodness—how generous and kind He is and how angry that can make people:

The way things are in God’s Kingdom is like a landowner who went out very early one morning to hire people to work in his vineyard where his grapes were ready to be harvested. He told the men standing around that he would give them a denarius (which was a fair wage for a day’s work), and he sent them to work picking grapes for the day. He went back three hours later and found some people just standing around with nothing to do and so he told them that he would hire them too and pay them fair wages. He went again at lunchtime and late in the afternoon and gave jobs to everyone he found standing around. When it was almost quitting time, he found even more people and asked them why they weren’t doing anything and they said it was because no one had given them any work to do. So he gave them jobs too.

When the sun was beginning to go down, very late in the day, he told the man who managed his fields to bring to workers to him—starting with the people he hired when it was almost time to go home for the night. Everyone was surprised when the landowner gave them pay for an entire day’s work! The landowner was a very generous man, paying them that much money when they had hardly worked at all. And the people who had been hired very early in the morning, when they heard about it—boy oh boy did they get excited. “If that is what he gave those slackers who hardly did anything, just think of how much money we’re going to get!” they said to one another. But when they came to the landowner, he paid them exactly the same amount as the people who had only worked an hour. And boy were they angry about it and started complaining!

“What the heck is going on here? We worked our butts off all day long in the hot sun and we’re getting the same amount as those guys who only worked an hour? This isn’t fair!” But the landowner was very kind and replied, “My friend, I haven’t hurt you. I paid you exactly the amount I said I would and you agreed it was fair at the time. Take your pay and go home. I really wanted to give these other guys the same amount of money as you got—and the money is mine so shouldn’t I be able to do with it whatever I want to? Are you jealous of them because I was kind and generous to them?”

That’s a really good story that shows us how good God is. If that had happened in real life, those men wouldn’t have had enough money to feed their families that day if they had only gotten paid for an hours’ worth of work. We don’t know why they hadn’t been hired or what they were doing all day and all the landowner cared about was making sure they got paid what they needed to survive. And that’s what God’s goodness is like. He is just as concerned with the person who became a Christian today as He is with the person who has been a Christian for fifty years. And they will both get the same reward when they die—they will live forever. When Jesus was talking to the thief on the cross beside him, and that thief asked Jesus to remember him when He became King, Jesus told the man—even though he was a criminal—that he would be with him forever in paradise. Some people don’t like that—it’s the bad inside us that wants to be jealous and mean. But goodness wants for everyone to be saved and to be changed to be more like Jesus. Just think of what would happen if everyone in the world who does bad just keeps doing bad and no one ever changes? I suppose the world would be like it was before the flood when everyone was just evil all the time and no one was safe. But that isn’t a good world—that’s a terrible world. We shouldn’t ever want Satan to win, and that’s what happens when people who do terrible things never change. Just think of how angry it makes Satan when one of his favorite bad guys totally changes into a good guy! Yikes! It’s like someone came into his house and robbed him! We can imagine a world where Hitler changed before so many people were killed. Wouldn’t that have been better? Satan really won big time with Hitler. I hope they enjoy each other’s company.

Goodness is always a challenge that never ends—whether it means being generous, or being excellent in what we are doing to serve God, or in being less and less bad all the time. Jesus was once called, “Good teacher,” and He said, “Why are you calling me good? No one is good except for God!” Does that mean that Jesus was disagreeing with the man, that he wasn’t really good? Not at all. Jesus knew that the man was about to ask Him a question that went something like this, “What do I have to do to be good enough to have eternal life?” Jesus knew that “good enough” is not what we should ever be aiming for in our lives because when we reach “good enough” we don’t have to continue to be better anymore. Jesus wasn’t saying that we can never be good enough to make God happy, but that there is no such thing as good enough except for God. If God is changing us, we will always be getting better. Good enough for that thief next to Jesus on the Cross meant seeing that Jesus really was the King of the Jews and God’s unique Messiah. He was dying and so he wasn’t ever going to be any better than he was. If he had lived longer, then he would have become even better than that. He would have developed more goodness as his Holy Spirit balloon got bigger and bigger inside him.

God never stops changing us, not ever. Sometimes, there are a lot of changes. Over the last two months, God has majorly changed me three times. I mean, like, dang. I have more goodness in me and less badness but that badness surprised me when I finally saw it! Yikes! And then sometimes a lot of time goes by and things seem to stay the same but probably God is letting me rest and get used to my new normal before He starts finding new badness to get rid of. And sometimes my badness fights back and doesn’t want to go and I get all stressed out and start playing video games all day. That’s how I always know that God is trying to fix something—I get really irritated and start avoiding Him. Aren’t people just funny like that? It’s like I can tell He wants to fix something but I have no idea what it is and not knowing is the worst thing about it so I just go and hide. Maybe you think that Bible teachers aren’t just like regular people and that we don’t do silly, ridiculous things when God wants to change us but I can tell you for sure that we aren’t any more reasonable than anyone else is. We’re all pretty much the same. So you don’t have to be perfect—you just have to let God make you more good than you are right now.

I love you. I am praying for you. Goodness isn’t something we will ever get right but we can get a whole lot better. Better is what God wants. He wants it for us and He wants it for everyone around us too.

Episode 128: Being like Jesus—Faithfulness

Miss Tyler — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 21:05:37 +0000

What faithfulness means to us today and what the Greek word pistis meant to Paul are sort of the same but also very different. Fortunately, what Paul meant will teach us how much we can trust Jesus and how we want to become people who can be trusted by Jesus.

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If I am telling you that Jesus is faithful—what does that even mean? In modern society, faithfulness means that if you have a husband or a wife or a serious girlfriend or boyfriend—that you can’t have another. That’s what being faithful means to us and that is a good word and a great thing to do. But is that what the apostle Paul was telling us? In ancient times, what we call being faithful in your marriage was actually part of self-control instead. That was one of the main definitions, and some types of philosophers preached it as being very important—while others didn’t care nearly as much. Philosophers were men who thought deep thoughts about the world and how it works in ways we can and can’t see, and how people should behave and treat one another, and what does and doesn’t make sense. And they usually taught rich kids how to think about the world, but they would also speak in public to big crowds. There was no television and most people couldn’t read and there were no bookstores anyway, so they were very interesting to listen to. They would debate each other in public to show how smart and wise they were. But they weren’t generally very nice about it!

Paul used a word, pistis, that we translate as faithfulness in English Bibles because there is no English word that means exactly the same thing. I want you to think about a big army with privates, sergeants, colonels and generals. That army needs generals who know how to win their battles, okay? So that they can win the war they are fighting. But the truth is that they can do all the planning in the world, but it won’t mean anything unless they can trust the colonels to honestly give the right orders to the sergeants, and to be able to answer any questions the sergeants have. And that colonel has to trust the sergeant to tell the privates what they need to do. And the sergeant has to be able to trust the privates to follow orders. But that isn’t all. The privates have to trust the sergeants, colonels, and generals to know what they are doing so that they can obey orders. A good army has a bunch of people who trust and who can be trusted. A bad army is one where no one trusts anyone. Pistis means that kind of trust and also being trustworthy. And we have no word for that in English—it took me an entire paragraph to explain.

And so, when Paul was telling the people in Galatia about how the Holy Spirit trains us to be more like Jesus, that’s the word he used. Faithfulness, which we see in our bibles, is a kind of pistis and a part of pistis, but it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what pistis means. Translation from one language to another can be very difficult that way. If you only have one word, faithfulness is probably the best because a faithful person is very trustworthy but that isn’t enough because trusting God is the most important thing the Spirit teaches us. We can have self-control and be gentle like Jesus even if we don’t trust God, but it makes it really hard to obey Him when He asks us to do something difficult. We have to learn that He is worthy of being trusted—that isn’t just something we can decide to believe. So, if you don’t always trust God, that’s okay. You aren’t evil or malfunctioning. You are a normal human who has to figure out through experience that God isn’t out to get you but wants to save you. That comes in time. He really does understand.

Our best bet in learning to trust God is by being so familiar with who Jesus is and what He does and doesn’t do that we begin to see that Jesus showed us exactly what God is and isn’t like. Everyone else in the Bible was less than Jesus—way less than. Abraham didn’t trust God to save his life—twice—and so he lied and put his wife Sarah into terrible danger. Moses didn’t trust God enough to go to Pharaoh and so God had to send his brother Aaron to do the talking for him. And they aren’t the only ones—the Bible is full of people who didn’t trust God enough to do what was right and it is the same today. People still want to lie instead of trusting God. But I am going to tell you a secret. God works best when we are honest and there are only a few times when lying is a good idea. If you have ever watched movies about the Underground Railroad here in America or about Nazi Germany, then you have seen people who lied in order to protect people who were innocent from slavery and from dying. The Bible commandment about lying tells us not to lie against others in such a way that would hurt them. But when Rahab lied to protect the spies from being killed, she was rewarded because she trusted God and she was even one of the grandmothers of David and Jesus!

So, one of the most important things we can do is to learn all about Jesus because only Jesus can truly teach us about God the Father. Anyone else you listen to, including me, is going to get some things wrong. And let me tell you that Jesus loved and trusted His Father absolutely, but that doesn’t mean it was always easy to obey. In fact, on the night of the Passover, Jesus was having a hard time getting Himself ready to do what needed to be done to save us. Does that surprise you? A lot of times, we forget that Jesus laughed and cried and had all of our emotions—He just didn’t do terrible things when He had them like we do sometimes. But that night, He was so anxious and terrified that he was begging God to find another way to save us. Even though it was their plan, together, Jesus was the one who had to be arrested, humiliated, beaten, whipped, and crucified to death. If Jesus hadn’t been upset, then He wouldn’t have been human—and even though Jesus is also God, He was still totally human. That means He felt all the things we feel, and it means that when we are worried or scared or sad, that we aren’t alone.

Have you ever had something really sad happen to you? Did people try to comfort you and make you feel better? In some ways and for some things, we can feel better but with others there is just nothing to do but be sad and angry and to accept that those emotions are huge—too big for us to handle. And what’s worse is that no one else can really understand because even if they can hug us on the outside, we still have so much going on inside that no one can see or make any better. That’s one of the reasons that Jesus came here to be with us, live with us, live like us as one of us, and to feel everything we feel—so that when we don’t have anyone in the world who can understand because they can’t see or hear what we are thinking—He can. When we can’t describe how we are feeling to other people, He already knows. So we are never really all alone even when the people around us don’t understand. And when someone understands everything that is going on inside us and still loves us, we know that we can absolutely trust them. Jesus is the only person who can do that—and Jesus trusted God absolutely and so we can too.

Jesus had been telling His disciples for weeks that He was going to be turned over to the Romans to be killed like a criminal, even though He was innocent. But they just weren’t really understanding Him. Maybe it was because He taught them so many times in parables and riddles, and they were too embarrassed to ask questions. Maybe they didn’t want to know that He was serious. After all, they had been trusting Him all this time—following Him everywhere, even leaving their families and their jobs. They believed that He was going to be the next King of the Jews—like King David but only better because they wanted rescued from the Romans who were very cruel and greedy. They believed it because of everything that He could do and they knew that the only way Jesus could do those things was if God was with Him, just like He was with the greatest prophets of the Bible like Elijah and Elisha. They knew that big things were ahead and they trusted Jesus—usually. When they got scared, sometimes they stopped trusting Him. You know, just like we do. But Jesus kept proving to them that He was trustworthy. He didn’t hurt people and He didn’t steal from them like the powerful people did. He healed them and gave them food to eat. He kicked demons to the curb and worked so many miracles that when they saw Moses and Elijah come to prepare Jesus for His death, that they probably thought he was being anointed as King of the Jews at last, and they would be His councilors and generals—big, powerful people in the Kingdom of Heaven. When He told them things like, “The chief priests are going to turn me over to the Romans and they are going to kill me,” that just didn’t make any sense to them. It just wasn’t possible. That would put them in danger, and they wouldn’t get to be mighty men in the new Kingdom. They were confused, but they also knew that Jesus was the real deal—working miracles and doing battle against demons and winning every time. They hadn’t learned yet that it is okay to be confused, but that God is still trustworthy. God is like that general I told you about at the beginning of this lesson—the one everyone has to learn to trust and believe that He knows exactly what He is doing even when everything looks wrong. People mess up but God never does.

So, in the middle of the night, after their Passover meal, Jesus and His followers went to a place at Gethsemane where there was an olive orchard and a cave that they sometimes stayed the night in when it wasn’t olive harvesting season. They were all very sleepy because they had been eating meat and drinking wine—which wasn’t what they usually had to eat. And they hadn’t gone to sleep yet. They were probably about to drop. While the others wrapped themselves in their cloaks and went into the cave (it can get really cold outside at night during the Passover season), Jesus asked Peter, James and John to stay up and pray with Him. Jesus knew what was about to happen and He didn’t want to go through all of that, and especially not alone. He went a short distance away from them and began praying to God and asking Him to find another way. Jesus knew that it was going to be a terrible thing, and incredibly painful and humiliating. He knew that all of the young men following Him would run away and leave Him to deal with it alone. Only God would be with Him, and some of the women who also were His disciples. His mom would be there but I bet He didn’t really want her to see what was about to happen. Jesus trusted that this had to happen but He asked if there was another way to do this. It was just too terrible. Jesus knew that it would work, and that we would all be saved from our sins and that we wouldn’t stay dead forever, but it was a horrible thing to have to go through. He wanted to save us, but no one would ever want to be crucified.

Three times, Jesus prayed and begged His Father to find another way, but finally He said, “if this is the only way it can be done, then I trust you and I will do it.” That’s a lot of trust. Even though God will never ask us to save everyone in the world, we do know that when He does ask us to do something that it is needed and necessary. And it can be scary. The overwhelming majority of things God will ask us to do aren’t even remotely dangerous—they just scare us. And that feeling of being scared never entirely goes away because we still have our emotions and we are very often scared that God isn’t actually asking us to do it at all! That can be really hard, learning to hear God’s voice while still knowing that we aren’t always right about what we think He is saying. Many people in the world have done terrible things and believed God told them to do it. That’s why it is so important to know Jesus and what He would and wouldn’t do. If you see someone treating people badly or hurting them, then you can look and see that Jesus healed people and fed them and taught them and showed them mercy. He never turned into a rage monster—He had total self-control. That’s why we learn about what it takes to be like Jesus so we can spot the people who want to fool us into thinking that being cruel is okay.

When Paul wrote the list of how you can tell if a person is following Jesus or not, He was speaking from experience. He knew exactly what it was like to be so sure that He was right that He was willing to hurt the people who followed Jesus. He believed that He trusted God, but he didn’t really know Him as well as he thought. He believed that God wanted him going all over the land of Israel and even outside of Israel to places like Damascus, to arrest the people who believed that Jesus is the Messiah and God’s one unique Son. He even found Himself part of an angry mob that killed a man named Stephen, just because he said he had a vision of Jesus sitting at the right hand of God. That made them so furious that they killed him and they believed with all their hearts that they were obeying God. But what they were doing was based on anger and not on love. When Paul later became a believer, he called himself a murderer because he knew he had been wrong even though he was sure that he was right at the time.

When we trust God, we know that if He really wants us to do something that He will let us know and if we still aren’t sure then He will help us. But we have to know what He does and doesn’t expect from us. That’s the thing that is hardest. Paul knew that better than anyone, and when God changed His heart, He had to become a different kind of person even though He was still worshiping the same God. Paul wasn’t wrong about everything and He didn’t have to get himself a different religion, but He did have to learn that the hatred and anger he had grown up with as part of a persecuted minority in the Roman Empire, wasn’t going to work in God’s Kingdom. Paul had been an important man. He was a genius—incredibly smart and determined and hard working. He knew the Bible backward and forwards and he had one of the greatest teachers in all of Israel. He had huge parts of the Bible memorized because there was no way to carry one with him. He probably knew it in Hebrew and in Greek and in Aramaic. Of course, all he had was what Christians call the Old Testament because nothing about Jesus was written down yet. And the Bible was originally in Hebrew but it was translated to Greek about two hundred years before Paul was born and they also had Aramaic versions in the synagogues because most people in Israel understood that better.

Isn’t it crazy that Paul was a Bible expert but didn’t see anything wrong with what He was doing? And that He thought trusting God meant going and hunting people down? And how much can we trust God knowing that although He could have killed Paul, He loved him and changed his mind about Jesus instead. Knowing the Bible isn’t enough. We have to know God, know Jesus, and know what they are really like or we can make the Bible mean whatever we want it to mean. Which lets us do whatever terrible things we want to do. The Bible is a rescue story, and when we don’t understand that, we will do things that make it harder for God to rescue people. But Jesus knew all of that—it was their plan from the very beginning to rescue us. So, if we are doing anything that makes people want to run away from God, then we aren’t being like Jesus at all. Paul believed that He was serving God and that He was doing everything right. And I’ve done things like that too. Nobody ended up dead, but I know I have made it hard for people to trust God when I am not trustworthy and when I make God look like someone who couldn’t ever love them.

Jesus even told one of His stories, a parable, about a father being able to trust his children near the end of Matthew 21 when the chief priests (the guys who ran the Temple) were demanding to know why He was doing what He was doing and saying what He was saying.

Tell me what you think! A man had two sons. He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go work in the yard today.’ And the son answered, ‘I don’t want to, I am beta testing the new Call of Duty game and we’ve got a huge boss battle that will take all day’ but later he felt sorry and changed his mind and did the yardwork. Then the man went to his other son and said the same thing. ‘Yep, I’ll go do that right now, sir,’ he answered, but he got busy playing video games and didn’t go. Which of the two was trustworthy and did what their father wanted?” They said, “The first one.” Jesus said to them, “You know, all the people you look down on because of how they are living now will be part of the Kingdom of God before you will. When John the Baptist came and told everyone that they had to clean up their act, all those people you look down on were waiting in line to be baptized and believed him—while all of you didn’t.”

Jesus was telling the highest of the priests that they weren’t trustworthy because they were telling God that they would serve Him and be faithful but they really weren’t. But all the people whom they looked down on as the worst of sinners and traitors and rebels because they weren’t living right?–When they heard John, they began to be different because they believed God. But Jesus? He is way greater than John, and the chief priests didn’t believe either one of them, or the miracles, or anything that was happening. They lived at a time when there hadn’t been a real king of God’s choice in a long time, and so the priests were running most of the country and getting very rich doing it. They had to keep the Romans happy and so when they had a choice between obeying God and obeying the Romans—they did whatever the Romans wanted them to do. They knew they could be replaced, and so they were doing whatever they had to do so they could stay in power and keep making money off of the people who came to visit the Temple. They were trying to serve two masters—God and the Roman Government. They went through the motions pretending to serve God by running the Temple and making sure the ceremonies happened like they were supposed to, but in their hearts what they wanted was the power and money and for that, they had to do what Rome wanted them to do. They were more afraid of the Roman Emperor and Pontius Pilate and Herod Antipas than they were of God. And so, they could do all the sacrifices and ceremonies all they wanted but Jesus was telling them that God didn’t trust them at all because they weren’t doing what they said they were doing, and what they were doing, they were doing for the Romans and not for God. They weren’t faithful.

It’s strange isn’t it? What we are saying we are doing isn’t always what we are really doing, and the people who say they are going to do something don’t always do it while some people who seem like they will never do the right thing end up doing it after all. So, we can’t ever trust people based on what they say about themselves. Mostly, the people who go around telling other people how awesome they are, are fooling themselves. People who are really awesome don’t need to go around telling it to everyone. People do figure out who they can depend on after a while. Who says they will help and then helps? Who says they will help and then just never shows up when they are needed? One thing for sure about Jesus—if He said He was going to do something then He did it. He didn’t go around making empty promises that He didn’t keep. He said what He meant and meant what He said. He isn’t waiting across the street watching us through binoculars waiting for us to screw things up. We can trust Him. We can trust Him when we are doing things right and we can also trust Him when we are on the wrong track. The Bible is full of people doing things wrong who could still trust God to keep His promises. Just because they weren’t trustworthy and faithful, doesn’t mean that God acted the same way.

And it isn’t until we understand how much we can trust God that we can really start to be trustworthy in what He asks us to do. The chief priests went out and did their jobs in the Temple everyday but that didn’t mean anything. God wanted more from them. He wanted them to love people the way He loves people—the way He loves me and the way He loves you.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to begin to learn more and more about Jesus so you can see what God is like and how much you can trust Him to keep every promise.