Through our studies of Genesis 1-3, we see that sin has come into the world and God has promised to deal with it. The Bible is a book all about the promises God keeps and their fulfillment—and in promising to deal with sin and death—well, that’s where Jesus comes in. So exactly who is Jesus, what did He do, and what is the Gospel of the Kingdom? What is it that we are called to believe in order to be saved?
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another 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.
No one in the history of the world has been talked about more than Jesus, and with good reason, but why is that? Why do people follow Him and why do we even need to? Can’t we just be good people and use common sense? I guess the problem with that is that, like with Adam and Eve, it doesn’t really work. At heart, we aren’t good people—we just like to think we are. At most, there are nice people. But, I want you to think of everyone in your life—chances are, if asked, they would tell you that they are good, that what they are doing is right, and that they are justified whenever they do something wrong. What does justified mean? It means that we always come up with a good reason why what we did had to be done or was the only choice we had. But there’s a problem. God tells us in the Book of Jeremiah that our hearts are terribly and hopelessly wicked and we lie to ourselves all the time. And that’s true.
Did you know that when the Hebrew part of the Bible was written, the front half of the book, that people didn’t think the brain really was good for anything? Because of how we feel our feelings—in our chest when our heart starts pounding, or in our tummy when we are nervous, or in how our chests can hurt really bad when we are sad—well, people thought that what we call our mind today was spread out all over. They thought that we think with our actual heart, and that our emotions come from our bowels. They saw how what we thought affected how we feel and decided that wherever they felt something was where it came from. Pretty clever—but wrong. I’ve told you in the past that the Bible wasn’t given to us to be a science book. God gave us the Bible to reveal Himself to us, not to teach us science. I am a chemist with a college degree on the wall—well, actually in a drawer somewhere. I know a ton of physics and math too—but what I know is like nothing compared to what God sees as absolute reality. There was no way He could tell the people who were hearing the Bible about so much of what we know today—and that wasn’t His goal. We are explorers and so He lets us explore His creation on our own time, but there is something we can only get from Him—and that is knowledge about Him and a relationship with Him. Compared to that, science is the least important thing in the universe. He wants us to know Him and He wants to know us. That is why He does everything He does. Science is important to us and so we like to see it everywhere, but trying to find it in the Scriptures is a terrible waste of what is written in the Bible. And it isn’t what it is for.
Jesus is a big part of what the Bible is for—in fact, He is the goal of the entire book from beginning to end. God came down to be with us in the form of His Creative Word, which we talked about in our very first episode on Genesis. In the Bible, God tells us that He is different from any other god worshipped by the nations. He alone is Creator and didn’t need help from other gods, and that He did everything by speaking His Word. That Word is so powerful that it is one with God, the same as God. I know—it’s confusing. The good thing is that we don’t need to understand. In fact, our brains aren’t big enough to understand. What is important is that it is true and proof of that truth is all around us. One of the most important things you can come to accept in your life is that you will never be smart enough to understand everything. You weren’t created to understand everything. You were created to know God and to put your absolute trust in Him, so you can become like Him in the world because the world needs more of God.
Adam and Eve were given the job of being with God and becoming more and more like Him so that they could share Him with the rest of the world—how good and perfect and generous and wonderful He is. But when they saw the chance to possibly become gods themselves, they took it. And we still do that. We still make that mistake all the time. And we always make that mistake when we aren’t content to listen to God instead of to ourselves and our friends and to our enemies. We really want to believe that we know the difference between good and evil and wrong and right—on our own. But that’s all part of the poison of eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Only God could eat the fruit of that tree and come out okay—the rest of us come out acting like fools. He warned them, but they thought that the only difference between them and Him was eating from that tree. They were wrong. We are created beings, not Creators. And so, when things went all wrong and sin entered the world and humans became contaminated, the only one who could fix us was the One who created us.
John tells us that God’s Creative Word was with God in the beginning, and that Word created everything—and then John tells us that the Word became a human being. He became a human being so that all of God’s promises—to Eve and to Abraham and to Moses and to David and all the Prophets—would be fulfilled and what went wrong in the Garden would get fixed. After all, when a clock breaks, you send it to the clockmaker and he fixes it. Same with a computer or anything. When creation breaks, only the Creator can fix it because only He knows how. But you might ask, and it is a good question, “why couldn’t God just snap His fingers and fix the problem?” Why couldn’t He just make us like Adam and Eve again? Well, because that wouldn’t fix the problem—we’d all just do it again, maybe in a different way. No matter what, making humans and giving them rules, even one rule—well, it doesn’t solve the problems on our insides. Rules and laws make us safer people to be around, as long as we keep them, but people hate rules and they always seem to find ways to get around them. I bet you’ve done it. I bet your parents have told you to do X, Y, and Z and you knew exactly what they meant but you thought you would be clever and try to find a way out of it by maybe using their own words against them or pretending like you didn’t know what they meant when you really did. The Pharisees in Jesus’s time were amazing at coming up with ways so that they didn’t have to keep a commandment. They came up with rules so that they didn’t have to take care of poor people the way God wanted them to. They came up with ways to abandon their wives. They even came up with ways to make promises and break them without having to admit they had lied. People never really change. We want to do what we want to do.
There is a word for that—it’s called rebellion. Rebellion is a word that describes what people do when they want a new king or a new boss and especially when they want that boss to be themselves! Adam and Eve did that when they didn’t want God to be able to tell them what they could and couldn’t eat. They didn’t want God to decide what they could and couldn’t do and know and experience. That is what the Serpent brought into the world—the idea that someone besides God could be god. Before that, I imagine that Adam and Eve were very happy doing what God wanted, before they got the idea that there was another alternative. But people are always going to figure that out. And that’s when we all have to make a decision and we always make a bad one at some point. Even mighty King David and Moses and Abraham. A change had to be made, and God showed us a lot of things to prove to us that there was only one perfect solution.
He destroyed the world in a flood and started over again with one faithful man and his family. But bad things happened again. Then He started out with another man, Abraham, and things went wrong too. Then He started a nation from that man’s descendants, led by Moses, and He gave them laws at Mt Sinai that weren’t all that hard to stick to—but right away they built an idol and started worshiping it. The problem is that instructions aren’t enough if our hearts aren’t changed. Starting with Moses, the prophets spoke of a Messiah to come but people were very confused by all the Scriptures that said the Servant, another name for the Messiah, would suffer. They were looking for a mighty King who would save them from their earthly enemies—but God was promising them a Messiah who would save them from their real enemies. God’s Messiah was going to come and fix the problem of their hearts and destroy the powerful influence of Satan, that Serpent, over us. And it was all in the Scriptures but I need to tell you a secret. No one has ever been able to understand a prophecy about the Messiah before it happened. The Apostle Paul told us that if it had been obvious; if it could be worked out by the brilliant people studying Scriptures beforehand, then Satan would have figured it out too and the plan wouldn’t have worked. Prophecy in Scripture is pretty cool but it isn’t given to us to predict the future. It is given so that when it happens, we can look and say, “Oh my gosh! God said it would happen and it did!” He did that so that we would be able to trust Him, not so that we could figure it out for ourselves and not have to trust Him. Sometimes, we are scared of the future and try to use the Bible like a fortune-telling book, but God gave us His Word so that we wouldn’t have to figure out the future ourselves. All we have to do is use it to learn about Him, so that we can become more and more like He is—loving, merciful and kind. As for the future? We can trust God with that. Satan has been trying to fool people into being desperate for knowledge of the future since the beginning—and we see it in people consulting demons for omens, in psychics, and divination and astrology. You see, when we don’t know God well enough to trust Him, the future is very scary and we get desperate for answers. So we always have to be careful because sometime Satan tricks us into ignoring what the Bible says about God and we try to use it for fortune-telling instead.
Fear is one of the terrible things the enemy laid on humans in the Garden—I mean, they were even scared of being naked. Humans had to be fixed. Humans had to trust God again. And so, God sent His powerful Word to fix the humans He created because He loved them so much. And He did it in the most unimaginable way possible—no one could have ever seen it coming.
God’s Creative Word became a human being—a little baby. He wasn’t like any other baby because He didn’t have a human father. The Bible tells us in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke that His mother was engaged to be married to a good man and before the wedding could happen, the angel Gabriel came and told her that she was going to have a baby, but that baby wouldn’t be Joseph’s baby. He would be the Son of God Himself. Joseph was told to name Him Yeshua, because He would save His people from their sins. In English, we say Jesus and in Spanish we say Jesus, and in the Middle East they call Him Isa and in some places in Africa, they call Him Yesu. He is called many things in many languages but He is the same Son of God, because Mary became pregnant by the Holy Spirit so her baby was Holy.
He grew up in a normal family, not in a palace. He had at least four brothers and two sisters. By the time he was a teenager, he was working hard as a builder. A lot of books will tell you that he was a carpenter, but the truth is that the word describing His profession, tekton, just means builder. He might have worked with wood, but there was a lot more work to be done in stonework and especially that close to Sepphoris, where Jesus and his father Joseph would have walked three miles every day as part of the effort to rebuild the city. His life was pretty normal—except, unlike other people, He never sinned against anyone. But that might have gone unnoticed. After all, there are lots of nice people in the world. Sure, he made mistakes in building things because everyone has to learn their trade from scratch. Joseph had to teach Jesus how to be a builder. But as far as character flaws go—all the things we struggle with—things like jealousy, envy, gossip, lying, stealing, violence, and making trouble—He never did any of that. If you want bigger lists of the evil things people think and then do, check out Mark chapter 7 and Galatians 5. All the evil thoughts we give in to—He never did. Unlike us, He always resisted temptation and never sinned. Everything He did was always right—even if it confuses us. A lot of times, we might do something like Jesus did and think we aren’t sinning because He did it, but our reasons behind doing those things generally aren’t the same as His. He was perfect and we aren’t.
But Jesus wasn’t only good, He was also wise and smart—which aren’t the same things at all. Smart is knowing a lot—like you can know the whole Bible just because you have a photographic memory or study a lot, but it doesn’t make you wise. You can be intelligent without being wise. You can solve complicated puzzles and still not have any wisdom. Wisdom is a gift from God. Because Jesus was God’s own Creative Word, He always had wisdom and He was always intelligent. Wisdom means that you are using the knowledge you have in a good way because God is guiding how you use it. In the Bible, it means that we don’t only listen to Scripture but we do what it says. Imagine knowing the commandments but saying “Nah, those are a really bad idea.” Then we would be the opposite of wise—we would be fools because we would be putting our own opinions over God’s instructions—like Adam and Eve. But Jesus never had that problem of being foolish. He always did what His Father in Heaven told Him to do, everything He saw God doing, He did.
When He turned twenty-nine or thirty years old, everything changed. He knew that it was time to preach the message of the Good News of the Kingdom of God. And you may think that thirty years is a long time, but it was just right. God always sends us out to do His work at the perfect time, so don’t you worry about having to figure it out for yourself and don’t jump the gun! He went to the Jordan River where His cousin John was announcing that the Kingdom of Heaven was coming and he was baptizing people after they repented of their sins. They were wanting the Messiah to come but they couldn’t imagine what kind of Messiah they would get!
The prophet Isaiah said that the Messiah would be the perfect representative of Israel, that he would be and do everything that God always wanted from His chosen people. Where the Israelites had failed, the Servant of God would succeed. Where they were faithless and untrustworthy, He would be faithful and trustworthy. Where they were disobedient, He would always obey—no matter what. God sent John the Baptist to prepare the way for Jesus. John was telling all Israelites to be baptized. That meant that Jesus had to be baptized too—so He could be like them in every way, except for being absolutely perfect. After His baptism, the Holy Spirit led Him into the wilderness where He didn’t eat anything for forty days. In the desert, He was tempted by the devil, just like the Israelites were tempted. Only, He never gave in. He kept saying no. He kept on being faithful to God even when He was weak and hungry and cold at night and hot during the day. When we got through being tempted, the first thing He did was get to work. He began casting demons out of people. He healed people. He even healed lepers and cured people who were blind—which no one in the Bible had ever done before! He made just a few loaves of barley bread and fishes into enough food to feed five thousand men, plus women and children, in one place, and four thousand in another place. He also raised up dead people so that they were alive again. He turned water into wine at a wedding. When a storm at sea threatened the life of His disciples, He told it to stop, and it did. He also walked on water, which the Bible said only God can do.
But all that? That wasn’t even why He came. He came to preach. He preached that God was finally going to step in and change things. In fact, He said that God was already working to change things. The normal people were thrilled. They were being healed of terrible sicknesses. Paralyzed people were walking around again. Blind people could see and deaf people could hear. They believed that soon, Jesus would lead an army to overcome their enemies—that was the kind of Messiah, or Savior, they were looking for. Even His own disciples wanted Him to be like that. But God’s plans weren’t to save Israel from their enemies–the Romans and the rest of the Gentiles. That was too small. God was determined to save the whole world from the evil forces behind the Roman armies. God was going to deal with Satan and his demons and sin and death—because those things were the reasons why the Gentiles were so cruel to God’s people. If God could destroy those, then the Gentiles would be free from them too. The whole world could be fixed—not just the Jewish people.
But not everyone was supporting Jesus in His mission. The normal, everyday Jewish people loved Him—but not the leadership. The Herodians were Jews who loved Rome and not God. They loved the power and the violence and the money. The Sadducees were Jews who didn’t think there would be any final judgment or world to come after death. Because they didn’t believe in the resurrection, they didn’t think there was any harm in doing bad things to their fellow Jews. Unfortunately, they were in charge of the High Priesthood and controlled the Temple. The Pharisees were a combination of good and bad but they also wanted Jesus dead because He wasn’t agreeing with what they thought was right. They were being evil to their wives and they were finding ways to not listen to God and they were teaching others to act like they acted. But these were the people who had all the power and some of them thought they were the experts on God. But they couldn’t even see that God’s Creative Word, His one unique Son, was right there in front of them doing the works of God—healing, feeding, raising and saving people. They wanted a Messiah who was like them and would do what they wanted. But it isn’t our place to demand that God be what we want. God is what God is and we need to become like Him. Not the other way around.
And Jesus always showed us God’s loving and merciful character every time He showed compassion to the hungry, the sick, the dying, the demon possessed, the disabled—and even the dead. He showed us what it looks like to have self-control, to have the power to hurt people and to be good instead. He commanded us to bless our enemies and to pray for the people who hurt us. He taught us to be loyal to God no matter what and to be good to other people even when we have nothing to gain. That we need to be honest. He taught so much that I can’t even begin to teach it all here right now. But the leaders didn’t like that image of God. They wanted a violent warrior who would take revenge on their enemies—but God wanted to save their enemies instead. God wants to save our enemies too, even though sometimes we don’t want Him to.
And so, on the Passover, in Jerusalem, the leaders decided to shut Him up and shut Him down. They got one of Jesus’s disciples, one of His closest followers, to betray Him. They arrested Jesus and they accused Him of things He wasn’t guilty of, and He was quiet just like Isaiah said He would be. And they couldn’t get enough evidence to convict Him—but when Jesus admitted to being the Divine Son of God, they convicted Him of blasphemy. And it would have been blasphemy if you or I claimed it. But for Jesus, it was true. They handed Him over to the brutal Romans because they didn’t have the power to kill criminals anymore, and the Romans beat Him, and whipped Him with scourges all over His body, and then they crucified Him. It was the worst death penalty they had. And as He was dying, He asked God to forgive the people who did that to Him. He died, and some good Pharisees buried Him in a new burial cave, and three days later, when the women who had followed Jesus came back to take care of His Body, they found that the stone covering the tomb had been rolled away and Jesus was gone. They thought that someone had stolen His body and they cried. But an angel appeared to them and told them that Jesus was alive, that God had declared Him innocent and had raised Him from the dead. Because He had never sinned, death wasn’t strong enough to keep Him dead! Jesus had defeated sin by never sinning. He defeated death because death can’t kill the source of all life. He defeated Satan and all his demons and they have been dying ever since. Now they only have the power that people give them.
But the most important thing—the thing you need to know—is that God has made Jesus king over all Creation. When Adam and Eve obeyed the Serpent in the Garden, they made a choice to follow Satan instead of God and it gave Satan power over them and all their children. Jesus broke that power. Now people from every nation on earth no matter who they are or what language they speak, no matter if they are rich or poor, men or women—it doesn’t matter. When they believe what Jesus said, and they agree that He was God’s Creative Word come to live with us, that He shows us God’s true character and is the example that God wants us to follow—when we make Him our King and give Him all of our loyalty, we can also be overcomers. It means that we will live again after we die, and more than that, that God will send us His Holy Spirit to live inside us and His Spirit will change us to be more and more like Jesus. It’s not magic, it’s a miracle. I wish you knew what kind of person I was before I accepted Jesus as my King. If you knew, and you could know me now, your jaws would hit the floor. I am living proof that God’s love and forgiveness change everyone who give Him their allegiance, their loyalty, by putting their trust in God’s Messiah, His one unique Son, His one and only chosen King, Jesus. And if you trust Him and accept Him as your King, He will do the most amazing things in your life. He will change you to be more and more like Him. And there’s nothing better in the universe than becoming like Jesus.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope you have a wonderful week studying the Bible with the people who love you.