One of the most frustrating things about life is free will! We love having it but we hate the mistakes we make because of it. Couldn’t God just force us to do the right thing? And what is exile and what does it mean in the life of Adam, Eve, their kids and all of us today?
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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.
This week we are going to talk about a major theme of the Scriptures, one that pops up over and over again. What’s a theme? A theme is a subject, or topic, of a book or a conversation. I will give you some examples. If you read a book about a Christian Missionary, for example, you might see the themes of courage—which means being brave when times are tough, love, and sacrifice—sometimes missionaries suffer terribly in order to bring God’s love to people who do not know Him. If you have read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis or if you saw the movie, then you will understand that the themes of that book are loyalty, forgiveness, love, and the battle between good and evil. And the Bible has many themes, in fact, it has more themes than most books. We have already talked about the battle between good and evil, and now we are going to talk about exile because that’s what happened to Adam and Eve at the end of Genesis three and where they will be for the rest of their life.
Exile is what we call it when you have been forced out of your home and you cannot go back because someone or a lot of someone’s have the power to keep you away. Adam and Eve were in the Garden, God’s Garden, and they sinned so terribly that He forced them out and posted the very scary cherubim at the entrance so they couldn’t return. And those cherubim were really terrifying, with four wings and four faces and ox legs. And they had flaming swords. So, you know, ain’t nobody getting back in there. No matter how difficult life got on the outside, they lived the rest of their lives in exile. Their children and all of their descendants were born in exile. But this isn’t the only time in the Bible that we see the theme of exile. Hundreds of years after giving the Land of Israel to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God had to send them out of the Promised Land too. By this time, they had split into two different competing Kingdoms—the northern Kingdom of Israel and the southern Kingdom of Judah. But, like Adam and Eve, they rejected God and on top of that, they were abusing one another and began worshiping other gods—even in God’s very own Temple! Can you believe it? The northern Kingdom set up calves and directed the people to sacrifice to them (we’ll talk about sacrifices in a couple of weeks) and after many hundreds of years of being warned by God’s prophets, God allowed the Assyrians to attack and defeat them and they took all the survivors and forced them to live in other countries in 722 BCE—and they were never heard from again. The southern Kingdom of Judah was faithful to God for longer but, in the end, they did terrible things in God’s Temple and were wicked to one another and after hundreds of years of being warned by God’s prophets, God allowed the Babylonians to destroy the Temple, destroy Jerusalem’s walls and most of the city, and made all but the poorest people leave the Land over the course of the first half of the sixth century BCE.
Although the Jews were allowed to return seventy years later, they weren’t an independent nation anymore—which means that they didn’t have their own kings. They had to serve foreign kings like Cyrus and Darius, and they had to pay money in taxes to these kings. In the prayers of Ezra the priest and Nehemiah the Governor, we see that they still thought of themselves as slaves and in exile. They were home but it wasn’t their home anymore—it belonged to these foreign kings. In 70 CE, forty years after Jesus was killed and rose from the dead, the Temple was destroyed, and Jerusalem was sacked. The Jews who had lived there were exiled from Jerusalem and Judea—many were captured and sent away as slaves, but others escaped and fled to many other places to set up Jewish communities there or to join Jewish communities that were already set up.
In each case, people were warned. God said, “Do not eat the fruit of that tree or you will die.” Adam and Eve didn’t listen. God said to the northern and southern Kingdoms, through His prophets, “Stop worshiping other gods or the Land will spit you out!” By that he meant that they wouldn’t be able to live there anymore, they would be exiled and have to live in other places and not God’s good Land. John the Baptist and Jesus both warned the Jews to repent and return to God, but the people wanted a violent Messiah who would destroy the cruel Romans. They didn’t want a loving and peaceful Lamb who would die to save anyone who believed in Him—even the cruel Romans!
Exile, in the Bible, is what happens when we repeatedly refuse to listen to God. Now there are also a lot of exiles in the world today who haven’t done anything wrong. War comes to their country and they are caught in the middle and they end up as refugees living in other countries. But when we see it in the Bible, exile is because people have rejected God and God decides He doesn’t want them living in His Land anymore until He is ready to lead them back. Not everyone in the world who is exiled, is exiled because of their own sins. Most are innocent. And it is never because God doesn’t love them. Even in the cases in the Bible, God never hated His people, He just has to give them a huge reality check so that they will know that He deserves our absolute allegiance. Imagine living in someone else’s house and doing everything you can to ignore them or disrespect them or steal from them or hurt them or whatever? When that happens, you get kicked out. Sometimes, parents even have to kick their grown kids out of the house—not because they don’t love them but because they are behaving so badly that they are hurting the entire family and need to know what life is like when things aren’t so easy.
Life was easy in the Garden. Life was also very good in the Land of Israel. But the Bible tells us that sometimes, when life is really good, that we stop behaving ourselves. Moses told the children that one day, when they were overfed and happy because the Land God was giving them was sooo good, that they would get all uppity and would refuse to listen to God. Moses told them that God would boot them from the land if they did that. But people stopped listening and God finally had to send them away. We have to be careful too because a lot of times, we only want God when we are scared or when someone is hurting us or when we need something. When we have everything we want, like Adam and Eve and the children of Israel, it’s easy to forget how much we need God. Heck, the food doesn’t even grow if we don’t take the seeds from what He created and plant it in the soil He made and water it with the water He made from scratch. Funny how we forget all that. We can’t do anything with anything and not even ourselves because He made us too.
But Adam and Eve decided that they would make better gods for themselves than God and so God is like, “Okay guys, let’s see you make a paradise out of this unhospitable ground outside the Garden!” But they were still working with stuff God created so they didn’t even have to start from scratch but still, they were going to struggle for their entire lives. They, like the ancient Israelites, had it made in the shade. But, they wanted more than everything—they wanted to be independent, to decide who to listen to and what to do and who to follow and trust. We do that too. And we usually do it for really dumb reasons! Adam and Eve lost life in the Garden. The Israelites lost their good lives in the Promised land. For dumb reasons. But that isn’t all they lost. Adam and Eve traded a life of tending a Garden and worshiping and obeying God for a hard life trying to survive. They traded Paradise for constant hardship and struggle. The Israelites traded having homes and lands given to them by God, in exchange for struggling as refugees in other people’s countries where they worshiped other gods. Although, they didn’t really care about that part because that’s why they got kicked out, for doing the exact same thing.
When they all disobeyed God and got kicked out of their homes He had given them, they also lost the presence of God in their lives. Adam and Eve used to walk with God in the Garden in the cool of the day. Can you just imagine what the Sabbaths were like? The Israelites lost access to God’s presence in the Temple in Jerusalem and even though the Temple was rebuilt when they returned to Israel, God’s presence was never there again, according to the Bible. God even told them to rebuild it through Haggai the Prophet, but His presence never lived in the Temple again. Exile always changed things, permanently, they could never go back to how good it was before. But is this all about Adam and Eve or the Israelites? Not at all. The one who suffered the most because of the Exile was actually God. And that might shock you but it has to do with why He created us and why He made the Garden and why He has done everything since then.
God didn’t create humans and plant a Garden to put them in so that humans could get to be with Him, or so that He could watch them like they were in a zoo. God created humans because He wanted to be with us. How do I know this? Because at the end of the Bible, we are all living with God again in a huge city—New Jerusalem! Why do you think God would do it if He doesn’t really, really want to be with us? As to why on earth God would want to be with us when we can act like such goober heads is quite beyond me, but God is love and love needs someone to love. It is God’s nature to love and to do good. Just look at the world all around us and how beautiful it is. Look at all the different types of foods. He could have just made one type of food and we would all eat it, and we would never notice how boring it is. It would be like breathing. Just another thing that we do. Did He have to make spices? Not at all. Did he have to make sugar and chocolate??? Nope. We wouldn’t have missed them if nothing was sweet and we never knew any better. But the first thing He gave people was sweet fruit. Have you ever considered how kind that was—not only to give us food but to give us so many wonderful tastes? A God like that, who is kind in the smallest of things, is the kind of God who really loves. In fact, He invented love. And He invented all the different ways to love us through His kindnesses. Think of your eyes and ears and everything that can be seen and heard. Think of your fingers and all the different things you can touch. Imagine how a cat’s fur feels, or the grass, or the warmth of the sun. Think of the smell of hot, buttered popcorn! Which never, I need to say right now, tastes as good as it smells. Think about hugs and how good hugs feel when you love someone or when you are sad.
Do you think that a God who would create such spectacular experiences doesn’t want to share them with us? Do you think He really wants to be far away and not enjoy watching us enjoy His good creation? God planted the Garden so that he could share in all those things with humans. So, how much do you think it hurt God to have to send Adam and Eve out of the Garden? And do you think He just abandoned them once they were outside?
To answer those questions, we have to keep reading, all the way to the end. Can a God who sent people out of the Garden be trusted? Yes, He can because as we will see in Genesis 4 and throughout the rest of the Bible, exile doesn’t mean “abandoned”! We’re going to see God talking to Cain and Cain wasn’t treating their conversation like it was a strange thing. He talks right back to God as though this happened quite often. If Cain was talking to God, we can be sure that Adam and Eve and Abel talked with Him as well. And, when Cain finds himself exiled away from his family later on in the chapter, we see that it is Cain’s choice to stop talking with God, not God’s decision.
God has promised in His Word to never truly leave or forsake us. In the Bible, we are going to see Him talking to murderers, liars, and to people who commit all terrible kinds of sins. As you go through your own lives, you will hear amazing stories about God talking to all sorts of different people—maybe even people you don’t think He should talk to. But God is loving and forgiving and never gives up on us, not until our dying breath. He’s not like us. Sometimes, when we face the consequences for the bad things we do, we get angry at everyone except ourselves. A lot of times, we get angry with God. Maybe Adam and Eve got mad at God, I don’t know. And you might ask, “Why did God allow Adam and Eve the free will to make the choice to do the wrong thing if they were going to end up exiled from God’s garden?”
That’s a tough question and grownups have been talking about that forever. Free will is hard to understand. Sometimes it doesn’t seem fair that God gave us free will, which means the ability to choose to obey or disobey God (or our parents), to do good or to do bad, to make our own choices. Why didn’t He just create more animals, who had to obey Him because they aren’t smart enough to figure out there was an alternative–another option?! But then we have to ask ourselves, “Do we really want to be puppets?” Imagine going through life with no control over your arms and legs and where they take you and what they do. Imagine being nothing but a brain that you can’t even control—a robot! You couldn’t think your own thoughts or make your own decisions. It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to eat tofu pizza with sardines and pineapple with mustard tonight for dinner because you can’t stop yourself from eating it. Bon Appetit!
And maybe that sounds a bit extreme. Maybe you just think that it would be nice if we weren’t able to make bad decisions, that maybe God would hit a switch and make us want to do good all the time. Maybe, and this is a lot more likely, you just want God to control the people who are mean to you. I think we have all wanted that! And I think we all have times where we feel badly about having done something awful and we might pray, “God, why didn’t you stop me from doing that?” But if He had tried, would we have listened? A lot of times, the answer is no. We wanted to do what we did and we weren’t in the listening mood. If, all of a sudden, we found ourselves pushed to the side, in our own brains, and listened to our mouths saying things we don’t want to say and watching as our bodies did things we don’t want to do, how would we feel about that? I can tell you right away that no matter how much you will regret doing the wrong thing later, you would hate that even more! It would be totally creepy. We’d be angry at God. We would feel betrayed. We’d feel like robots or toys and not like humans at all. What good does it do, when we do the right thing, if we didn’t have any choice? We’d be very angry. We’d start hating God really quick. Our lives would consist of doing absolutely everything God wants us to do and so the world would be a more peaceful place, of course, as long as He did it to everyone and not just us—so that would be nice, but it would be like we were on a couch watching a movie about someone else’s life and that would be incredibly boring.
You might say, “Well can’t He just control the people who I don’t like? The people who are mean to me?” How can He control them without controlling everyone? Would it be okay if it was someone else had no choices to make about their own life? Would the things they do mean anything if they had no choice? Let me ask you this. Would you feel good about yourself if God made everyone your friend? Would you feel like you were loved if no one had a choice? If they were all nice to you but you had no idea what they were really feeling on the inside? How about your parents? Do you want robots for parents who don’t actually love you? They are just being forced to take care of you? It wouldn’t take long before you figured out that life wasn’t very real if no one had any choices.
Instead, I want you to think about all the wonderful things people have done for you. Because God gives us choices, people did those things for you because they wanted to. They did them because they love you. They think you’re worth doing nice things for. They had choices to make about what they wanted to do with their day and chose to do them with you and you can know this for sure because they are not robots being controlled from a computer somewhere. In fact, let me tell you something. I am a chemist. I could go work in a lab and make a bunch of money. But God gave me a choice. He wanted me to teach the Bible instead, but I have always had the power to say no to Him. He won’t stop me. He would talk to me and tell me that this isn’t what He wants for my life, that He created me to be a Bible teacher and specifically to teach you kids—that’s why He taught me how to teach adults first. I could say no. I could even just teach grownups and not go to all the extra work to teach you. That’s my choice to make. But I love God and me doing this makes Him happy. And you learning about the Bible and learning about Jesus is important to me, so I used my free will and I said no to being a chemist and I am teaching you instead. So, you can know that I love you and that spending time studying and writing up scripts for broadcasts and spending money on books and websites—that’s how I am using my free will because you are all worth it. Even if there was just you. You would be worth all this. But…if God was just forcing me to do it, I would probably be pretty unhappy about it. And then God wouldn’t be happy because, on the inside, I would be thinking terrible thoughts about Him controlling my life. But you should know, that I wasn’t always the kind of person who would want to make this choice. He had to change me little by little. So, I don’t want you to worry about not being perfect or about the things you think sometimes. Trust God. Trust in Jesus. Be confident that He can change the things you don’t like about yourself so that you can choose to make decisions you will be proud of, on your own, without God treating you like a puppet.
Last week, I taught you who Jesus is. I shared the Gospel message with you. How about Jesus? Do you think He had the free will to make His own choices? I can prove to you that He had the choice to say no but chose to say yes instead. I can prove it in two places—when He was tempted and on the night of His arrest.
I am going to tell you something that might sound strange at first. When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness, it wasn’t like it was the first time they had ever met. I mean, think about it, Jesus is God’s creative and powerful Word. Everything that was created was created by Him. Satan knew who Jesus was and he wouldn’t have wasted time trying to tempt Him if He knew that Jesus was just some sort of puppet controlled by His Father. I mean, why waste the time? Jesus could have chosen to be prideful and make rocks into loaves of bread in order to prove that He was the Son of God but He didn’t. Jesus could have jumped down from the top of the Temple sanctuary on Yom Kippur with everyone looking and proved that He was the Messiah and everyone would have believed Him then and He wouldn’t have to preach and be rejected and go through all that hassle! But He didn’t. And He could have taken the easy way out and just worshiped Satan and become the King over all the earth without following the plan that would lead Him to be betrayed, tortured and then crucified. But as we learned last week, that’s what had to happen in order to save the whole world from Satan and sin and death. Jesus had a choice to make—take the easy way out and be a king the way that humans become kings, or to be a King God’s way. He chose to follow the plan of God and not Satan. Satan will always give us something that looks like a better alternative but never is.
What about in the Garden in Gethsemane? Jesus cried out to God, His Father, because the plan was going to be terribly hurtful. It was going to be humiliating and it was going to hurt worse than anything we can imagine. No one would want to suffer like that. Jesus wasn’t a robot. He would feel all that sadness and the hatred people felt for Him, and he would feel all the pain. Jesus said, “Is there any other way? If there is, can we do it another way?” But there was no other way, and so He made the choice to love us completely, with all His heart, mind, soul and strength. And He died for us. He died instead of us. And that’s why we can trust Him absolutely and love Him with all our heart, mind, soul and strength.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope you have a wonderful week studying God’s Word with the people who love you.