The things that have happened to us and the things we have done, and the things our family and ancestors have done can be really hard to live with. We have all done terrible things that we wish we could undo, and especially when people know about them and make us miserable about it. It can seem like our life is over and so that’s why this week we are going to talk about our histories and why they aren’t the whole story about us and why we can be honest about it. We are going to look at Jesus’s family history and the things people did to embarrass Him! And the best thing of all? We’ll be talking about YOUR identity as part of God’s family.
(Parents, this is the third in a series designed to help kids deal with identity and gender confusion by showing them that no matter what they like or what they look like or what they are good at, they are still boys and girls. When we try to push kids into filling stereotypical roles, we’re often the ones creating the confusion that they are forced to find a way to live with. I do this without making any mention of sexuality whatsoever.)
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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 this week comes from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible—sometimes with words changed for clarity as the TDR Version, the Tyler Dawn Rosenquist Version.)
Let me tell you the crazy thing that the Bible does—it tells super embarrassing stories not only about God’s chosen people, the Israelites, but also about the big heroes of the Bible. In fact, the bigger the hero, it seems the worse the stories are. Let me give you a few examples (1) Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and instead of taking responsibility for his own actions, Adam straight up blamed Eve even though he knew he was wrong, and when they got kicked out of the Garden you can just imagine how awkward that was—at least Eve blamed the serpent; (2) Cain killed Abel in what amounts to an epic temper tantrum; (3) Noah drank too much wine and he passed out drunk and naked on the floor of his tent and it did not remain a secret; (4) Abraham was so scared of being killed that he told his wife to lie about being his wife, which got her kidnapped and married off to someone else—twice; (5) Isaac and Rebekah messed up their family by having favorite kids, and so did their son Jacob; (6) Joseph was such a spoiled brat that he told his brothers and parents that he had dreams about them all bowing down to him (just FYI, never tell people about those kinds of dreams, it doesn’t end well), and it got him sold into slavery and then thrown into jail; (7) Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery and then about half of them did some really, really bad things plus they had to watch while their father spent like twenty years crying over Joseph because they said he had been torn apart by wild animals—so not cool; (8) Moses killed a bully and ended up having to run out to the desert to hide for 40 years; (9) Aaron built a golden calf for the children of Israel to worship and party with, (10) Miriam was yelling at Moses because he married a black woman when they were brown-skinned, and she got leprosy for a while because of it—racism is not cool; (11) Moses shamed God by making it look like he was getting water out of a rock by himself, as though it was magic, just because he was ticked off; (12) Joshua made a covenant with people who had tricked him, and that caused a lot of problems, (13) Samson told a woman how to make him as weak as a baby just because she was nagging him (and he did a whole lot worse, too). And there are so many more examples! David, Solomon, Hezekiah, Jonah, James, John, and Peter, and again and again with those three and especially Peter. Unlike us though, no one will ever forget the stuff they did because it is written in the most popular book ever written.
It’s like imagine the worst thing you ever did, on a viral YouTube video and then they show it on the news, but unlike most of that stuff, people are still watching it thousands of years from now. None of us will ever have it that bad. I doubt that any of us will actually murder a brother or a sister, or try to be God, or pass out naked in front of a bunch of people, or get anyone kidnapped, or make people so angry that we get sold into slavery by our own families, or whatever. We’re mostly going to live normal lives and, at worst, someone might videotape something stupid we do and people might laugh at us for a while and that hurts, a lot, because it is super embarrassing—but it never lasts forever. It sometimes feels like our lives are over and we will never recover but once you get to be my age you will look back on all the things that you just wanted to die of embarrassment over, and they won’t hurt anymore and you might even laugh a bit at some of them. But it hurts really bad while it is happening, not gonna lie. And that’s a good reason to be merciful when someone else is getting laughed at because we shouldn’t want anyone to hurt that badly. We have to be careful with others the way we want them to be careful with us. We never see Jesus laughing at anyone who is in trouble—He helps them. But the people who hurt and killed Jesus? Oh yeah, they made fun of him and were just horrible, and He still forgave them.
Sometimes, when there is something embarrassing like that, it seems like we will never feel good again. And for a while, we don’t. But I want you to know that it doesn’t last forever. There are people who are just mean and cruel, and they might never want you to forget it and there is nothing you can do about people like that. But I will tell you a secret, they have done embarrassing and bad things too and they don’t want anyone to know about it. Sometimes, they deal with their pain by trying to make other people look even worse. So, the people who are making you miserable? They have horrible, embarrassing secrets too—ones they would never want anyone to know about. I know this because I was bullied really badly from the time I was little until I graduated from high school, and after high school I found out a lot about the lives of the people who were hurting me. I wouldn’t trade places with most of them, my problems were bad enough. Even though I thought their lives were perfect, they absolutely weren’t. In fact, some of their stuff was so much more embarrassing than mine that I could hardly believe it! Everyone has their pain but we must not make other people hurt worse than they already do.
The story of our life including all those embarrassing things is called our history—everything that has happened in our past, not only our own stuff but also the stories of our families, and friends as well. Your history is everything that has ever happened to you, everything you have ever been a part of or experienced. And not only that, but you also have a family history, and that’s everything that ever happened to your ancestors (your grandparents and great-grandparents, etc. all the way back to the beginning of time). Family histories can be messy. You know people like to get those DNA tests done. I have never done it but my parents did. Evidently, that family legend on my mother’s side that we had a Crow Indian gggg-grandmother was total bupkis. But people go looking for interesting relatives, not the embarrassing ones! So, I know that my grandmother’s cousin, Honus Wagner, won the World Series for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1909. His baseball card is the most valuable sports card on the planet. It’s worth over 6 million dollars if it is in pristine condition. What I don’t know about is how many horrible people and scoundrels and criminals and all that are in my background because no one wants to talk about that. Honus is someone to be proud of and we want to forget everyone else. It’s kinda funny though because the bad ones are just as much a part of our history as the famous ones and I suppose that if we want to claim one of them we have to claim all of them!
But like the embarrassing things we have done and people make fun of us for, our history can also be very embarrassing. I don’t like that my ancestors might have owned slaves or might have sailed on slaving ships or might have kidnapped people from Africa or hurt them in other ways. I don’t like that, even if my ancestors didn’t own slaves, that they smoked tobacco and wore cotton harvested by people who were enslaved for life and had no freedom. Maybe my ancestors did terrible things to the Native Americans when we came over to this country. My father’s family has been here since before the Revolutionary War, and that is a whole lot of time to be able to do some really terrible things. And America isn’t the only place where terrible things were done to people and where bad things are still happening. I want to think of my ancestors as being perfect but I know they were probably every bit as awful as most were. Some were good and some were bad. That’s a fact of life—that’s our history. When we look at our history, we have to understand that we aren’t our ancestors. We get to make different choices, just like they had the ability to make different choices than their ancestors. Some had no choices at all but we usually have a lot more now. I didn’t actually do the terrible things my ancestors did, or the wonderful things either. They aren’t me. That’s why I don’t need to pretend like they were perfect. I can look at the bad things they did without making excuses or trying to lie to cover it up. I don’t need for them to be good in order to decide to live my life in a way that makes God happy now, and to help the people who are still suffering now because of what happened in the past.
And then I have friends whose ancestors were stolen from Africa and enslaved and beaten and worse. It’s hard thinking of your ancestors being hurt like that, and even killed, and having their loved ones, their children and husbands and wives and sisters and brothers, sold to someone else and never see them again. It would make you wonder why anyone thought they had that right, or how they could have hated people who look like you enough to be so cruel. And others had their whole tribes wiped out, and the life they lead now is not what they know they could have had if people had just left them alone or had seen them as fellow human beings, made in God’s image. When one group decides to hurt another group like that, not only do the survivors lose their relatives but they also lose their culture, the beautiful things that made them who they were. But it can happen in smaller ways too in normal life. I get embarrassed and angry about having been bullied and made fun of as a child. It makes me feel helpless and scared sometimes, just like I did then. But I have to tell you something, my history isn’t my whole story. And your history isn’t your whole story either. It’s a big part of your story, but not the biggest.
We can’t change anything that happened in the past, not to us and not to our ancestors. We can’t make it so that the bad things didn’t happen, and we can’t even take back the things we have said and done. We do have the power to try and make things right, but only now and in the future. If we have hurt someone, we can go to them and admit what we did, and admit that we were wrong, and find out how we can fix some of what we messed up. When we do that, we aren’t changing our history but we are making a better future. And we can’t help who we are related to, it just is what it is, right? There are a lot of terrible people in this world who have done a lot of terrible things, and when they have kids, those kids are just stuck with that family history. But there are wonderful stories of what God can do so that we can be different, and we can use what was bad to make things better. I want to tell you a favorite verse of mine, Jeremiah 29:11-12, “For I know the plans I have for you”—this is the Lord’s declaration—“plans for your well-being, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. You will call to me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.” God said this to people who were suffering for the sins of their ancestors because their ancestors had been just awful. But even with all the terrible things they and their ancestors had done, God still had wonderful plans for them. God wasn’t going to remember their past forever, God wanted to give them a future, and hope.
What does that mean? It means that no matter what your history is, or the history of your family, God has plans for good. All you have to do is stick close to Him, learn to follow Him and He will take care of the rest. When you become a part of God’s family, you still have your own family history but you also gain the history of the family of Abraham. I told you some of the messed up, terrible things they did that got written in the Bible, but sometimes we forget that all of those terrible things—that is Jesus’s family history! His relatives did all that nonsense! And they read about it in the synagogues every week, all the terrible things that their ancestors did. And when John the Baptist was baptizing people in the wilderness for repentance, they were repenting of the sins of their ancestors that were responsible for them being oppressed by the Romans. The Romans were only there in the first place because their leaders had been so corrupt, Jews killing other Jews over the silliest things. It must have been terribly embarrassing to think of what their ancestors had done to bring such terrible consequences into their lives. And not just once but over and over again! To them, reading the Bible was personal. Even their greatest heroes could be real goats.
Really, it was a wonderful gift to them from God. We should have a balanced look at our ancestors. We can’t afford to pride ourselves in being related to them to the point where we have this need to pretend like they couldn’t be total skunks. But that’s what a lot of people do and actually, that’s what some Jewish scholars began to do during Medieval times—they started coming up with excuses for why the horrible things Bible heroes did were actually okay! And especially King David. And that’s a big problem. We have to accept the past as it was, even when it makes us unhappy or uncomfortable. And we can learn to do that when we realize that when we became a part of God’s family, that we inherited the family history of the Bible—all that mess! Now it is our family history is all written down for everyone to see! We don’t have to be Jewish for Abraham’s family to be our family. What did the Apostle Paul say? “And if you belong to Jesus, then you are Abraham’s children, heirs according to the promise.” (Gal 3:29 TDR Version) In fact, Paul said that everyone who believes is adopted into the family of God. He also calls that being “grafted in” like when a branch from one tree becomes part of another tree.
Did you know that my twin sons are adopted? My husband Mark and I grafted them into our family because we wanted them to be our sons more than anything in the world. They are grownups now but adopting them was the happiest day of my life. When I held them on the day they were born, I felt like my heart was going to explode with love and I have devoted every day since then to loving them and looking out for them and when Mark and I die, they will be our heirs, which means that they will get everything that we have. Paul says that the same is true with God and us. We are His adopted children, and that means that He wanted us. We weren’t unplanned, or a mistake, or an accident, and most especially we weren’t unwanted. Jesus said that when God wants us, He draws us to Himself. Like when I open a can of wet food or shake the treat box and my cats come running. I want to give them good things because I love them and care for them and they know what the good stuff is. God is the good stuff, and He wants us to know it and experience how wonderful He is. That doesn’t mean that bad things won’t happen because people can do really bad things, but it means that when bad stuff happens, we are not alone. God doesn’t control us because He loves us too much to make us into robots, and so sometimes we do bad things too, but because we are not alone it means that He is helping us even when we don’t know it or think we can feel it. Isn’t that amazing? God loves you so much that even though He wants us to do what is right, He doesn’t take us over and force us. Instead, He teaches us and comforts us and guides us, just like a parent.
God is the ultimate parent! Another word we could use instead of adopted or grafted in is “converted” or “saved.” When we follow Jesus, we get a new identity. We aren’t just us anymore, we are part of the family of God all over the world and Jesus’s history becomes our history. His Father becomes our father and if you ever want to know what God is like, just look at the things Jesus did to love and help and save people! Our history is still there; everything we have ever done or was done to us still happened—and it matters. But our identity is who we are now in God’s Kingdom. Before you know Jesus, you may be a hockey player or a violinist or a painter or a comic book collector and that’s what people may think of when they talk about you, and those things are fine, but they aren’t the most important things about you. You are adopted into God’s family. You are His child. You are a follower of His Messiah, Jesus. You are a child of light. You are a member of a royal priesthood of believers because wherever you go, you are bringing God into the world. No matter how famous you become, or how quietly you live, your identity is all about God’s family. The rest is on the side because it talks about what you do, not who you are. Imagine being the child of the President or a sports star or an actor—you’d want everyone to know and you’d probably be pretty proud of it because people would think it was cool. But having the Creator of the whole universe is way cooler. It means you were chosen by the best of the best, the King of kings and the Lord of lords. When you think of yourself, I want you to understand that God didn’t have to choose you but He did. No matter what your history is, God wanted you. Your history is not your whole story.
A good example of this is Paul. When Jesus blinded him and spoke to him, Paul didn’t stop being Jewish, or a Pharisee, or a Roman citizen, or a tent maker, or the guy who had hunted down Jesus’s followers and put them in jail. But he became a new person on the inside and his identity changed. Now he was a follower of Jesus and he wouldn’t ever hunt down anyone again and he spent the rest of his life making a difference and telling everyone he met about Jesus. Who he had been could never change, he only had control over who he became. He was still Jewish but he was a Jew who was totally devoted to Jesus. He was a Pharisee but he was a Pharisee who listened to and obeyed the teachings of Jesus first. He was still a Roman citizen but he used his citizenship in order to preach the Gospel because he knew that the Roman Empire wasn’t his home, that his real citizenship is in Heaven. Everything that was important to Paul became less important than Jesus. And Paul knew that his new identity in Jesus wasn’t worth anything unless he lived it out in real life. After all, I can think of myself as a ballerina but until I get my ballet shoes and a tutu and take lessons to learn how to dance, it isn’t real. We are what we actually do and not just what we think about.
Paul taught more about our new identity than anyone else in the Bible because he changed more than just about anyone else. Moses talked a lot about it too, when the Israelites came out of Egypt, they stopped being Pharaoh’s slaves and became a kingdom of priests, all serving God. It doesn’t mean they were all literally priests working in the Tabernacle, but it does mean that they had the responsibility to serve God. What does the Bible say about our identity? It says that there are no hierarchies—which means people who are elite, on the top of the heap, and others who are at the bottom. It means that I am not better than you and you are not better than I am. I hope you grow up to love God more than I do and obey Him better, but we are still equally loved by God and equally made in His image. Paul says that there is no male or female in Jesus. That means that even though in the world people might act like men are better or smarter or more capable of doing things than women, that in the Kingdom of Heaven it isn’t like that. It doesn’t mean that we stop being girls and boys! It just means that our identity in Jesus is bigger than that. Paul also told us that there was no Jew nor Gentile in Jesus. Does that mean that there are no Jews who believe in Jesus? Of course not, but it does mean that the Jewish believers in Jesus aren’t more important in the Kingdom than the non-Jews. God doesn’t make any second-class citizens. And Gentiles aren’t better than Jews either. We are all His image bearers, showing the world who He is by being exactly who we are, and showing the world what Jesus is like in what we do and how we live. And while we are at it, Paul says there is no slave or free person either. Did that mean they stopped having slaves right then? Unfortunately, no, and in fact it wasn’t until the 18th century that people started seeing that slavery is wrong. Paul was telling us that it is wrong to treat people like they are less worthy or less human because of their race (Jew or gentile), their gender (whether they are men or women), or what family they were born into. We are all equal in Jesus, even though we aren’t the same.
And you and I are the same, even though we are different. In God’s Kingdom, it won’t matter who you were here and so I don’t think it should matter now either. God created you to be someone who can serve others and His Kingdom in a very special and unique way, no matter what your history is, or what you have done, or what has been done to you. Your history isn’t your whole story, not by a long shot. God has plans to give you a future and a hope—good plans. You have a new identity and so I want you to live like you believe you are important to God, because you are, but you also have to allow everyone else to be important too, because they were also created in His image. That’s why in Revelation, we have God’s Name on our foreheads, because we belong to Him. You belong to Him.
I am praying for you. I pray you have a wonderful week not just reading the Bible, but also thinking about how the history of your life doesn’t tell the whole story about who you are and who you will be.