People in the ancient world thought that gods and goddesses were responsible for every single part of nature but when God told the story of Creation to Moses, He made sure He did it in a way that people would know the truth. Nature and weather and the sun, moon, and stars are created–just like us!
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Transcript:
Hi, I am Miss Tyler and welcome back to Context for Kids where I teach you stuff that most adults don’t know, which is cool. Parents, if you have littler kids and you want a curriculum for them, my friend Sarah Hawkes Valente has written a really cool book called Lessons in Yeshua’s Torah that has short Bible lessons, coloring pages and fun craft ideas and all the stuff I am not good at doing. You can find that on Amazon.com and no, she didn’t pay me to talk about it. I also have books available for kids starting at age 7 and up on bigger topics than I can talk about in a half hour, also on Amazon, and I do get paid to talk about that but only if you buy one. You can find the links for those on my contextforkids.com website along with transcripts and recordings of all past broadcasts.
Two weeks ago, we talked about God’s creative word and how cool that is. Last week we talked about how God showed how different He is from all false gods by explaining that He created the earth not for Himself but for us. Today’s program is called “Nature is not God!” And we will be reviewing some stuff from last week but that’s how we learn best, by reminding ourselves of what we have already learned until it sticks permanently in our brains. Later on, in the Bible, this stuff will be super important to know. Understanding the world all around the Israelites and why they kept worshipping other gods will help us not to fall into similar kinds of sins and will also make us understand why they thought they way they did even when God told them not to. Otherwise, we will think they are silly or stupid and we won’t have compassion. Compassion is when we try to be understanding when people have done something wrong or when they are suffering because something bad has happened to them. It is very important to try and understand the world that the Bible was written in because when we don’t, we sometimes come to some very wrong conclusions. We need to understand why they thought they were doing right when they were actually doing wrong!
Fortunately, about a hundred and fifty years ago, archaeologists started finding ancient clay tablets in Israel, the land of the Bible, and in the countries all around it. Because it is very dry there and because the documents were baked hard as a rock, they survived for thousands of years. They are called cuneiform tablets (pronounced kyu-nee-eh-form) and I will post some cool videos and pages for you to look at when I put up the transcript for this. I will often do that, so be sure to subscribe to my blog. These tablets tell us all sorts of things about how people in Bible times thought and believed and lived. In fact, there are so many still just sitting around that haven’t been translated yet. Maybe you will learn to do that and make an important discovery! You know, there is still so much to see and learn and do and discover and invent and there are many ways to serve God!
Cuneiform tablets video
In the ancient world, they didn’t think about things scientifically. They didn’t understand why seeds grow into new plants. They had never seen one of those videos that shows how a seed grows underground and they didn’t have the science to understand why. They knew about seeds, of course, and knew that if you put one in the ground and if it rained on it, that a plant would grow but here’s where things get different where they thought entirely differently than we do. They didn’t know about the rain cycle that God perfectly designed to water the earth and they didn’t know that He genetically designed seeds with the blueprint for a new plant. In Canaan, the land later called Israel, they believed that Dagan, the grain god, made the seeds grow into plants and that Ba’al, the storm god, made it rain. We know this because of evidence found in cuneiform tablets. We didn’t know what kind of gods Ba’al and Dagan were until very recently. So, when you hear that Ba’al was a sun god and that Dagon was a fish god, those were stories made up hundreds of years later by people who were guessing and didn’t know any better. No one had worshipped these gods for so long that no one was alive who remembered what kinds of gods they were. Rashi and David Kimchi are responsible for people believing that Dagan was a fish god and it even made its way into a very famous epic called Paradise Lost written by John Milton. People just heard it so much that they assumed it was right and you can even find images in museums of mermen who were mislabeled as being Dagan! But now we know better. That’s why archaeology is so important to understanding the Bible and why what we think we know isn’t always right.
The Bible told us that the false gods would be forgotten and would no longer be on anyone’s lips, which means that they wouldn’t be worshipped anymore, and the Bible is right. The Bible is so right that all we knew for a long time were their names and nothing else about them! They were forgotten for so long that now we can learn about them and not be at all tempted to worship them and even think they were silly. I mean, no one thinks that Dagan actually makes the crops grow anymore and no one thinks that Ba’al Hadad makes it rain. We know that God created everything so well that things run very smoothly. But we mustn’t ever make the mistake of thinking that it all runs without Him. Creation still needs God and answers to Him and we still need God and answer to Him. Some people think or maybe just act like He created everything and just went away. The Greek philosophers, some of them believed that. They thought that the gods weren’t interested in humans at all and didn’t care. Well, they were kinda right because when you don’t really exist, you can’t be interested in anyone, right? Without God, nothing that exists would exist anymore and nothing that works would work anymore. How could it? So, we don’t have to worry about Him ever leaving us or forsaking us. As long as we are here, it means that He is here too.
In Genesis, God was very specific about what He had Moses write down. The people of the ancient world, and even a great many people today, thought that everything in nature was run by individual gods. Today in places like remote locations in China, they practice a religion called animism. Now, I know that animism sounds like animal worship, but that isn’t quite right. Animism is when you believe that everything has a spirit inside it. In a way, they see rivers and rocks and mountains as alive and needing to be worshipped. I say “in a way” because what they believe is that there are spirits inside the rocks and rivers that can be happy or get angry and they need to be kept happy or bad things happen.
This is called appeasement. Don’t worry if you don’t understand right now. Appeasement is about making someone else happy by doing things for them or giving them what they want. They might sacrifice animals in order to bribe these spirits into protecting them or not cursing them and making them sick. You guys who have little brothers and sisters, you probably totally understand this. Like when you are in the store and a kid is behaving badly and the parents give him a chocolate bar to shut him up, that’s appeasement. And in the ancient world, people would appease their gods in order to keep them from getting angry and having temper tantrums and destroying their lives by making their crops die (which would make them and their animals starve) or not giving them children, or by not giving them any rain for their crops and trees (they didn’t have sprinklers), or not protecting them from their enemies when they get attacked. False gods were very, very mean when they didn’t get what they wanted. Or at least that’s what they thought about them. So, even if they were starving, they would sacrifice an animal to make that god happy because they thought their gods actually ate the meat (really, the priests ate the meat). Appeasement was about bribing the gods so that things would go well. It was a terribly stressful way to live and God was showing His people that He isn’t anything like that. He can’t be bribed because He doesn’t need anything.
And you may be wondering why I am even telling you all this. You see, all the things that they worshipped and appeased as gods in the ancient world? In Genesis one, Moses made sure to tell us that not only weren’t they gods, but they were just other created things and not only that, not only weren’t they gods but they were there to serve and be used by men and women, not to rule over them.
In ancient Egypt, for example, there was the sky goddess Nut and the earth god was Geb and then there was Shu, the air god. But what does God tell us about Himself and about the sky and the land and the air? God says that He created them. He didn’t give birth to them. God didn’t have babies who popped out as the sky and the land and the air. He created them out of nothing. He was telling His people, “You don’t have to serve these things because they are just things and they don’t even have personal names. They are things that I made for you. They will serve you. You don’t have to appease them.” That’s what the first three days told them.
Then, as He told Moses, He created all plant life. He said that He created the seeds so that they would make more of the same kind of plants. He didn’t tell them that to teach them science because they wouldn’t have understood it that way. He told them that so that they would know that gods like Dagan and Ninurta weren’t responsible for the crops. He was saying, “You don’t have to bribe these gods so that your plants will grow. I made them to grow without anyone else’s labor except your own. You will grow them to feed yourself and your animals, not as food for these pretend gods who can’t even manage to feed themselves.
And He created the sun, moon and stars but although I am calling them that—He doesn’t call them anything but greater and lesser lights. Did you ever notice that? Why didn’t He call them shemesh and yareach, their Hebrew names? He didn’t give them names because other nations gave them proper names (instead of descriptive names) and worshipped them as gods. They worshipped them as the sun gods Ra and Shapash and Utu and the moon gods Sin and Yarikh and Ba’al Hammon. “No,” says God, “they are just things—they aren’t alive. There is no living spirit in them as there is in animals and humans. They are things that I made so that you can have days and years and moedim, meeting times to celebrate holy days with me. No matter how beautiful they are, don’t mistake them for gods. I made them for you.” Today, when we say “sun and moon” those are just descriptions. We know that our sun is not the only sun in the universe and that most of the other planets in our solar system have moons. Those are descriptive names, not proper names as though we think they are living beings.
Then He created birds and fish and told them to be fruitful and multiply. It was up to the fish and birds and flying insects to multiply, not up to any gods who lived in the ocean or in the air. God blessed them—remember that was His first blessing He ever spoke—and so they got their ability to have babies from Him. I actually have no idea what gods were involved with fish. I haven’t ever studied that and I am too lazy to look it up but I know about Sobek and Khnum, the gods of the Nile in Egypt—but they weren’t responsible for fish. Oh well, I am sure someone was. They had gods and goddesses for everything and wouldn’t have left out fish. So, what would He say here through Moses? “When you want food, you pray to me. You don’t have to make any other gods happy in order to eat fish. I created them for you, after all, so don’t give anyone else credit for having any control over it.”
Animals were next. He created creeping things like lizards and bugs, and wild animals like horses and pigs and lions and camels (some of which could be tamed and domesticated), and livestock (cows, sheep and goats). Boy howdy were there a lot of gods linked to livestock. Tammuz is probably the most famous. Although people have called him a sun god, when they found all of those cuneiform tablets we found out that he was actually a shepherd god and an agricultural god. I did a ton of research on him about five years ago. Oh, also, another famous god supposedly responsible for livestock was Mithra—he was the protector of cattle in ancient Persia. But God also made the livestock to be fruitful and to multiply. So, again, God is saying, “Pray to me for your cows and sheep and goats to have lots of babies because I created them. Tammuz cannot help you. He’s not even real.”
And then God created people. And He created people to rule over and have the use of everything He had created. Oh, except for one thing. He never gave people any command or blessing to rule over other people. I hope I mentioned that last week.
So, that’s so important. In pagan religions, nature has to be served by people because nature is over and above people and is controlled by a kabillion different gods and spirits. In God’s Creation, man rules over nature wisely. If man rules over nature unwisely, then nature dies and we die too. Remember when Noah brought all those animals on the ark and he brought two of each kind except for the clean livestock animals? He brought seven of each of those. Imagine what would have happened if he had eaten one of the unclean animals when there were only two of each. Oops. So much for that species, it’s gonna be extinct pretty darned fast as soon as the other one dies. No, Noah had to be wise. God gave Noah animals for eating and animals that were supposed to go out and populate the earth again. But even with fourteen each of sheep, goats, and cows, and other clean animals like camels (which are too useful to eat) and giraffes they still couldn’t eat a lot of meat or else they wouldn’t have many of those left either. They had to be wise in how they ruled over God’s creation. The horses probably ran away because we don’t see them being ridden by anyone in the Bible until we run into the Egyptians. So, the horses ran down to Egypt and the donkeys stayed close by. Of course, the Bible doesn’t say any of this and I am making this part up. I am just playing what if. I mean, the part about the seven pairs of clean animals and the one pair of the unclean is in the Bible. The rest is just me thinking thoughts and we can do that and it is okay but we have to make sure that we don’t mistake that for being in the Bible. Sometimes people say some crazy things and we hear them often enough that we do think they are in the Bible when they aren’t. When we talk about the Tower of Babel we will hear about a lot of things that people think the Bible says, but the Bible doesn’t say it. I always think that’s a lot of fun.
So, we are very special. God tells us in Genesis that He made us to be more special than nature. That means that we are more special than the rarest flower on earth. We are more special than the strongest lion or the fastest horse or the smartest dog or the cutest cat. God was telling us that nature was created for us, by Him, because He wants us to be taken care of. We weren’t created to take care of God. We were created to worship God, obey His commandments, and have a relationship with Him as His people. Some people today think that nature is more special than human beings but they are very wrong. Nature is precious and must be protected, but that’s an entirely different thing. As part of ruling over nature, we must be responsible about how we treat it. We shouldn’t just kill things for no reason. Some animals have gone extinct or almost went extinct just because people wanted a certain kind of feather in their hat or a certain type of fur hat or coat. But that’s not responsible and it isn’t respecting God’s creativity and His work. Imagine if you created something and your younger brother or sister broke it. Maybe you don’t have to imagine. I can tell you a story about what my baby brother Adam did to my Rubik’s Cube but I won’t. Maybe you have made models or lego towers or something and then someone came along and destroyed it. Maybe you worked really hard and were very creative about how you did it. When someone destroys our good work, we feel sad and unloved, right? So we must be very sure not to destroy God’s good work either. We can use it but we must not destroy it. So, we can eat cows and sheep and goats and chickens but if we eat them all then we have not been very good stewards of what He has provided. Stewards are people that are put in charge of other people’s things. Like, if I had a collection of antique cars, and I hired a steward to take care of them, he would have to make sure they didn’t get all dirty and dented and he would have to make sure that they don’t break down. After all, if I come down to the garage and all my cars were messed up, he would be in big trouble, right? Well, one day Jesus, God’s powerful and creative Word, is coming back. We ought to show our respect and thankfulness for all His creation by making sure it is still good like He left it to us. Next week we will be talking more about our job as God’s image-bearers and our responsibilities.
But God doesn’t just show us in Genesis that nature is only a created thing. He shows us all through the Bible. In the mythologies of other nations, like we talked about last week, the gods were usually fighting with each other and they often had to fight with nature. Like Tiamat, the huge sea creature or Apophis the huge serpent in the underworld that tried to eat the sun god Ra every single stinkin’ night. It’s like, “Dude, give it up, you never win. Don’t you get tired of having your butt kicked every night? Have some dignity, man. Go to the gym, work out for a few months, drink some protein shakes and then come back and maybe you can win.”
In Exodus, we will see God showing the Egyptians that all Creation is just waiting to obey His commands and only His commands. That will be exciting to read. But what about Jesus? Did Jesus command nature the way God does in the Bible? He absolutely did! In the Gospel of Mark, when there was a storm on the Sea of Galilee and His disciples were afraid they would drown, He woke up from where He had been sleeping in their boat and told the sea to be muzzled and everything was calm. Another time, He walked on the water. One time, He wanted some figs and He went to a fig tree and didn’t find any, He cursed the tree so that no one would ever eat from it again. When He and His disciples came back later, the tree had withered and died. And I am not even mentioning all the people He healed and all the demons He kicked to the curb. Everything in the world is created by God and therefore everything has to obey Him—except us because He made us special, with the free will to decide to disobey Him. That’s sad when we do that but He wants people to choose Him. Animals can’t choose Him, they have to obey. But we are different and we will talk about just how different next time.
Parents, if you want to get a head start on next week’s lesson, check out my book Context for Kids: Image-bearing, Idolatry, and the New Creation available at Amazon.com. I won’t be covering the entire book, obviously, just a few parts. If you have missed previous episodes, check out contextforkids.podbean.com to download the program, or contextforkids.com to read the transcripts and see what cool links I have come up with for you to learn from.
Until next week, just remember that I love you, I am praying for you, and I hope you have a great week studying the Bible with the people who love you.