This week we will see our first altar mentioned in the whole Bible so we are going to talk about what they were used for and about what kinds of animals could go on an altar and about the whole burnt offering. We’re also going to talk about how God can like the smell of the offering being roasted when he has no nose. And we have a lot to share about how Noah was the beginning of God’s plan to save us all.
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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.
(Parents, all Scripture comes from the CSB this week, the Christian Standard Bible, and we will mostly be in Genesis 8)
Then Noah built an altar to the Lord. He took some of every kind of clean animal and every kind of clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. When the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, he said to himself, “I will never again curse the ground because of human beings, even though the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth onward. And I will never again strike down every living thing as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night will not cease.” (Gen 8:20-22)
So today we’re going to finish up Genesis 8 with a very important lesson. Understanding this lesson will help you to understand a whole lot of things that are going to happen later because this is the very first time that we are going to see quite a few things that are going to become very familiar as we keep studying. And the very first thing we should notice is that Noah immediately built an altar for the Lord. He would have built it out of stones, off the ground. In other places, the Bible tells us that God doesn’t like altars that are made out of stones that have been cut and carved—He likes an altar made from stones that have only been touched by Him—natural stones. That way, they are using stones God made and wood God made and an animal God made so that they can’t say that they are giving God anything that doesn’t already belong to Him. Altars are very important in the Bible. The Hebrew word for altar is kind of hard to say—the word is mizbeach (mizz-bee-ach). It’s one of those Hebrew words that you have to say in the back of your throat at the end. But we shouldn’t think of the altar as a place to just kill animals for no good reason. That’s not how the Bible talks about it and not what it meant to them.
What does your family do when someone special is coming over for dinner? Do you have special foods that you almost never get to eat at other times? Do you get to eat a big turkey or roast beef or something else very special? In the Bible, the altar is described as God’s table and just like you make a special kind of meal for special visitors, so that they know how special you think they are and how glad you are to have them visit, people in the Bible did the same thing when they wanted to meet with God and to share a special meal with Him. Or sometimes, like in this case, they won’t share the meat with Him at all because it says in this verse that Noah made olah (oh-lah) in God’s honor. Now what is an olah and how is it different from other kinds of offerings? Maybe you call them sacrifices.
In the Bible we are going to see offerings when people commit certain sins and need to make things right with God, and other offerings where they celebrate and God gets certain parts of the animal and the people eat the rest of it, but the most common type of offering is the olah. When someone offered an olah, all of the animal got burned on the altar, every single bit of it. So, in English, in your Bible, this kind of offering is called a whole burnt offering and that is a really great description because that is exactly what happened. The whole animal was burned up and it turned into ash and smoke. The ashes stayed on the altar but the smoke went to God. Remember how I told you that the Bible calls the altar God’s table? Well, that’s because whatever goes on it only belongs to God and no one else. It wasn’t like a barbeque where people could come up once the meat was all nice and roasted and take some of the meat for eating. No one would ever EVER do something like that.
Now, why on earth does God need this? Other parts of the Bible say that God doesn’t eat or drink because He doesn’t have a body that needs to be fed. Sometimes God had His people do things for Him that other people did for their gods but in ways that showed how different He is. Do you remember all the times we talked about the different gods who needed humans to actually feed them or else they would starve to death? Do you remember the Atrahasis Epic from the Babylonians? They said that their gods got so tired of all the noise that humans were making that they decided to kill them all. I think they should have just bought some earplugs, right? But after they killed all but just one family, they realized that they were in big trouble. Humans had been created as a slave race to grow food for the gods and without humans, they were starving to death. The gods of the ancient world really weren’t all that smart, for the most part. Any god that will die without humans is not much of a god at all.
But our God is entirely different. He has no body so He doesn’t need to eat–no body, no stomach, right? And even if He did need to eat, He could whip up a big feast out of nothing at all. So, why did God want these sacrifices? Well, for a couple of reasons. First of all, throughout all of history, when you wanted to give honor to someone, you hold a feast for them. The bigger and more expensive, the more honor you were giving your visitor. So, when the people of Israel came to God with the best that they could afford, they were showing Him how much they love Him. And a poor person giving God two birds is just as impressive as a rich man giving God a whole bull as an offering. We do our best for God, whatever that is. We can’t do more than we can do, right? That’s why, when the poor widow put only two pennies in the offering box at the Temple, Jesus said she had given more than all the rich men putting in whole bags of gold. God is not more impressed with rich people than poor people and He certainly doesn’t love rich people more than poor people. God cares about what we do with what we have and not about what we have.
And all Noah had was a whole lot of critters and a whole lot of thankfulness for being off the ark! When someone in the Bible would return from a successful long journey or got better after being really sick or had promised God to give Him offerings if He kept them safe, they would often make whole burnt offerings as an act of thankfulness. That’s what Noah is doing here, he’s saying thank you. But also, a whole burnt offering was a way to draw closer to God. All of the offerings helped the people become closer with God because they gave Him something valuable just because He is who He is. That’s why the Hebrew word for an offering or sacrifice is korban—it means “to come closer.” Like, have you ever really done something awful that made a person not trust you anymore? Gifts can help tell a person how sorry we are and that we want them to trust us again. Apologies, which is saying we were wrong and we are sorry, maybe fixing or replacing what we broke, telling the truth, inviting them for dinner, doing something special for them, or giving them a gift are all ways to try and fix what we broke when we hurt them. Well, we need to do that with God too. When we do wrong, we have to try to fix it. Let’s go back to the Bible:
Then Noah built an altar to the Lord. He took some of every kind of clean animal and every kind of clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar.
We talked a while back about what it means for an animal to be clean and how there are different types of cleanness. We will just review very quickly. There are two different ways for an animal to be clean. The first way is about what makes an animal clean for an offering—and that would be cows, sheep, and goats as well as turtledoves and pigeons. Nothing else could be offered to God. Anything else wouldn’t be acceptable, or clean, to go on God’s altar. And that’s what clean means. It means okay or acceptable or suitable or allowed. It has nothing to do with taking baths. And then there are animals that God says are clean, or acceptable, as food for humans. And that is all the cows, goats, sheep, doves, and pigeons but also animals like giraffes, deer, elk, gazelles, chickens, moose, turkeys, and fish with scales and fins. Just because an animal is clean, or acceptable, for humans to eat does not mean it is clean for God’s altar but everything that can go on God’s altar is something that we can eat. God is way more special than we are and not everything that is good enough for us is good enough for Him.
And so, Noah took some of every kind of clean animal and every kind of clean bird and made whole burnt offerings out of them. And He could do that because, with these kinds of animals, he brought fourteen of each—seven males and seven females. Now, what would have happened if he did that with, say, a dog when there were only two of them? That, boys and girls, is called extinction–there are no more of them left. You need two dogs to get puppies and you can’t do that if you just barbequed one! Now, how did God respond to the barbeque of all these cows, sheep, goats, and birds?
When the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma…
Wait, the pleasing aroma? That means a wonderful smell. And you might say, “Now, Miss Tyler, I have heard you say a lot of times that the Bible says God doesn’t have a body so how can He smell anything at all without a nose???” And that is a very good question, thank you very much, you guys are so smart. And it is correct that God is Spirit and has no body but God also isn’t anything like us. God can see without eyes and feel without fingers and hear without ears and talk without a mouth and smell without a nose. And if we were smart enough then we could understand how but we just aren’t. God doesn’t need a brain to think with either. Goodness gracious, a lot of us have brains and we don’t do nearly as much thinking with them as we should. And we have ears but we don’t spend a lot of time listening. Maybe having all these things isn’t all it’s cracked up to be unless we put them to good use. But maybe instead of thinking about how God can see, smell, hear and think without the things that we need to do them with, maybe we can just think of it this way—God just knows everything no matter what it is. If He had eyes then He could only see what was in front of Him and He could only hear what was close enough and He could only smell so many things at once. Instead, because He doesn’t have those things, He can just experience everything all at once if He wants to. Amazing, eh? Aren’t you glad that He doesn’t have to hear your prayers with His ears in order to “hear” them? Aren’t you glad that He can see you clearly in the deepest and darkest place? Isn’t it wonderful that when we are sad but we say that we are okay that He knows the truth because He can see and hear what is going on in our insides? His way is definitely better.
“…he said to himself, “I will never again curse the ground because of human beings, even though the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth onward. And I will never again strike down every living thing as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night will not cease.”
Do you talk to yourself? Well, God does too. God talked to Himself before the flood too, when He noticed that people had become so dangerous that there was nothing good left in the world. He had to clean everything up and begin all over again or who knows what would have happened. But this time He says something entirely different. You see, God knows that we’re kinda hopeless. You know, people. The animals and birds and fish and plants and the sun and the moon and all the rest, they do exactly what they were created to do. We humans have free will and sinning and being mean is easier than doing what is right. Because we have the ability to choose what we want to do, we humans will always be doing what is wrong. Some people do a little bit wrong and others do a lot that is wrong. And so, God looked at Noah and his family and said to Himself, “these people aren’t perfect and their children and grandchildren won’t be perfect either. They are born wanting to do more wrong than right. In fact, it is easier to let them do wrong than to teach them what is right! And I can’t keep flooding the earth because that won’t change their hearts. So, I am going to leave the earth and the animals and plants and trees and birds alone. Destroying all of that isn’t a cure to what is wrong with people. So, I am going to make a promise to this world I have created, that I will never destroy everything ever again. Until the end of time, the earth will be the way it is supposed to be and people will be able to plant crops and harvest them and it will be hot in the summer and cold in the winter and the sun will always rise in the morning and set at night. That’s the way I created things to work and I will never interfere with that again.”
And that’s definitely good news for us but it also meant that God had to put into action another plan, one that He told Adam and Eve about in Genesis 3:14-16, “So the Lord God said to the serpent: Because you have done this, you are cursed more than any livestock and more than any wild animal.
You will move on your belly and eat dust all the days of your life.I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.” God had to deal with the sin that the Serpent convinced Adam and Eve to commit. They rebelled against God and then they weren’t even very honest with Him. And they never said they were sorry or tried to make things right either. But God wasn’t just going to give up and let the Serpent win and to let people just go on sinning forever and getting worse and worse. Nope, He promised that someday a child would be born who would grow up and end the power of evil to rule over us. And this moment right here is when the plan started to go into action. God was going to start out with a newly cleaned-up earth, and a man named Noah. And then He would choose Noah’s son Shem, and one of Shem’s descendants named Abraham. Abraham had many sons, but God would only choose Sarah’s son Isaac to go forward with His amazing plan. Isaac had two sons and God chose Jacob, the youngest. And God kept choosing until He came to an amazing young woman named Mary. When Mary was a teenager, an angel came to her and told her that she was going to have that special baby who would save everyone just like God told Adam and Eve.
Everyone had waited for a long, long time and they never stopped believing that a Messiah would come who would save them once and for all and crush the head of that serpent. So Mary had a baby who we call Jesus, although in Hebrew she called Him Yeshua, and when He grew up He did amazing things because He was made in the perfect image of God and because He never sinned, He was able to do what nobody else ever could. He destroyed the ability of evil to tell us what to do forever. Now, we have a choice to be good on the outside and on the inside as God changes us. But it all started here with Noah and God’s decision to never wipe out people again—instead, God decided to be patient and loving with us and to fix the problem instead. Isn’t that just amazing? God has put up with our sins for so long and He has never gone back on His promise to keep trying to fix us, and finally, when Jesus died for our sins and when we give Him our loyalty as our King, God has finally finished the great work He started on all the way back in the beginning. I don’t know about you, but I would have just killed us all a long time ago. Or maybe I would have made all people into puppets or computer programs where I could just make them do what I want.
But that wouldn’t be loving, and it wouldn’t mean anything. If a person has no choice but to do good, then doing good doesn’t mean anything at all. But if we can choose to do wrong, and we decide to be strong and loving and faithful and do right instead—well, that’s the best thing in the world! That’s hard! Sometimes, we want God to control the people who are mean to us but we almost never want Him to control us. Nope, we want to do what we want to do, and guess what? The people who are mean to us probably wish that God would control us but let them do what they want to do. Human beings are pretty ridiculous sometimes and we want God to do things to other people that we do not want Him to do to us. But everyone deserves the chance to do what is right on their own, for the right reasons. And the first step in the right direction is to trust in Jesus and to believe that what He did has the power to change us to be more like God and less like that nasty Serpent who seems to have nothing better to do than to wreck everyone’s lives.
That’s what makes all of you so incredibly important to God’s plans. You have choices and no one else can make them for you. You make choices every day whether or not you are going to make the world a better or a worse place to live in. You get to choose whether to be a blessing who makes other people’s lives better, or a curse who makes other people’s lives horrible. That’s what the commandment means, to love God and each other. To love people as we want to be loved and to never do anything to anyone that we would hate to have done to us. We can’t love God if we are being hateful to others because God hates that. When we make other people’s lives harder, that’s the opposite of what God wants. God wants us to help and love each other and to not just think about ourselves and what we want. God wants people to be happy to see us because they know that they can trust us. And the good news is that by following Jesus every single person on earth can become that kind of person who other people don’t have to worry about when they see them coming. No matter how bad we might be now, God changes our hearts and our behavior as we follow Jesus more and more. It may be hard to believe now, but we can become people who hate being mean and who love being kind and gentle.
And I am going to be really honest with you. Sometimes I want to be mean and I decide not to care about being kind. It happens to all of us, so I don’t want you to give up on yourself or to believe you or anyone else is hopeless or a lost cause. The important thing is that when we realize that we are acting like goober heads, we stop and make things right again. And I wish that all people who say that they love God and follow Jesus would do that too, but I know they don’t. When I was growing up, I knew someone who said they loved Jesus, but they were so mean to people. It was hard to be around them because nothing I did ever seemed to be good enough and they would laugh at me and weren’t patient or kind and that went on for so many years that I lost count but one day, they changed, and the way they acted started matching up with what they always said they believed. And believe me, it was a big relief to everyone.
But that kind of person makes it hard to believe that Jesus is real and that what He did matters. I know it does. For so many years I didn’t want anything to do with God because a lot of folks make Him look like a phony and I figured He must be just like the really mean people who claimed to be talking about Him. But, once I got to know Him for myself, I realized that not everyone who talks about Jesus has been changed by Jesus. Some aren’t changed because they don’t really believe in Him, and Jesus isn’t really their King and Savior even though maybe they go to church and read the Bible. Others are just still so angry that God hasn’t been able to change them yet—you see, we have to work with God and cooperate with Him. People don’t just change magically, we have to be willing. God never forces us to become like Him. Then we’d just be puppets, and no one would want to become like us then. That would be hecka creepy.
And maybe you don’t really know Jesus yet, but if you keep looking for Him, you will find Him. Don’t worry. In the meantime, just try to be the kind of person who makes the world a better place, who makes people’s lives better and not worse, who fixes things instead of breaking them, who doesn’t brag or cheat or steal or hurt others in order to get what you want. I believe in you and I know that you can make great choices. I know that you won’t always make great choices, but I know that you can be the kind of person who makes the world a better place for yourself and for everyone else.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you have a wonderful time studying the Bible with the people who love you.