Before we start talking about Abraham next week, it’s really important to talk about “the prayer before the Lord’s prayer” which we find in Deuteronomy and begins with the Hebrew word shema, which isn’t an easy word to translate into English but it is a very important word that we need to understand. If that wasn’t confusing enough for us, we also have to figure out what the heck it means that God is “one” because people have been asking questions about that for a very long time.
If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.
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, most scripture this week will be from the Miss Tyler Version (the MTV) which is the Christian Standard Bible reworded and expanded a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the meaning.
Today we are going to talk about a very important prayer in the Bible—and when a prayer is in the Bible, that’s a good sign that we need to pay close attention to it. You know, just like how we did with the Lord’s Prayer in Episode 59. But the Lord’s Prayer goes all the way back to a prayer called the Shema, back in Deuteronomy 6. Here’s the Shema:
“Shema, Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one., Love the Lord your God with all your heart (mind), with all yourself, and with all your strength. These instructions that I am giving you today are to be in your heart (on your mind but they thought we did our thinking with our hearts). Repeat them to your children. Talk about all of these commandments when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up (like, all the time). Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them be a symbol on your forehead.Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your city gates.”
What? That doesn’t sound anything like a prayer, Miss Tyler. I know, right? It sounds like a corporate mission statement. One of those boring sayings that a company comes up with to tell people what they stand for and how they want to do business. Except, the Shema is serious and not at all boring. A lot of businesses just say those things so that people will trust them and think they are really honest and ethical. Honest, of course, means always telling the truth and ethical is a word that means doing the right thing. Both are important, and the reason that we pray the Shema is so that it will get stuck in our head and change the way we think about ourselves, our neighbors, our community, and most importantly, God. Prayers aren’t always about asking for stuff and they definitely shouldn’t always be asking for stuff. Prayer is always just talking to God and sometimes about God, like, to God so that we can remind ourselves how amazing and trustworthy and kind He is.
So, what does the word shema mean anyway? Sounds kinda weird to us, right? Shema is one of those Hebrew words that can’t be translated using any one English word. We have words in English for listening, hearing, paying attention, and all of that but we do not have a word that tells us to not only hear but also to do. So, we could translate it as hear and obey. I mean, when we are talking about hearing God then we really ought to be obeying Him too. Can you imagine God standing right in front of you and telling you to do something and you saying, “Yeah, no…I’ve got other things to do and to be honest, I just don’t want to do what you are asking me, like, ever.” That’s the challenge of believing in and listening to the voice of a God whom we can’t see and who is hard to hear. And He knows that, so He has given us the Holy Spirit to help us out. It’s not easy and we are gonna mess up, a lot, but we just never give up because it is totally worth it. Our God is wonderful, and we can trust Him that whatever He asks us to do is exactly what needs to happen so we can learn to hear and obey, and not just hear him and ignore what He said.
But, you know, we can’t just talk about what the verse says or what the words mean because we can get in trouble doing that. Do you remember what we need to check on? (1) We need to know who is talking, and when and where and why and (2) who are they talking to and why was it important for them to hear it? Whenever anyone tells me that everything in Scripture is for everyone, I remind them that in 2 Tim, Paul told Timothy to go to Troas and get his cloak and his parchments for writing on. That is definitely not a command to us. If we go to Troas, I can guarantee you we will not find any of that stuff there. And if we did, it would almost certainly be in a museum. And I am pretty sure that breaking into a museum and stealing a cloak would be against at least a few commandments!
The Shema prayer is in Deuteronomy 6 and it is important to know and remember that almost all of Deuteronomy is just one huge speech by Moses and we are supposed to listen to it all the way through. So, Moses is talking to the children of Israel forty years after they escaped from Egypt and they are about to finally cross over the Jordan River into the Promised Land! All of the people who had been grownups, except for Joshua and Caleb, had behaved so badly in the wilderness, instead of hearing and obeying God like they should have—well, they all died of old age and other stuff. And Moses is actually about to die too. Deuteronomy is the speech of Moses, reminding them of how they got into trouble, and why, and exactly what they need to do in order to stay forever in God’s Land. So that’s the who and to and why. Who said it? Who did they say it to? Why did they say it? We know all of that now. Let’s look at what Moses says right before this to make sure I am right:
“This what God expects you to do, your job—the instructions and how you need to be fair with one another—the Lord your God has commanded me to teach them to you, so that you can follow them in the land you are about to enter, to go into, and possess, to get for your own. Do these things so that you will show the Lord your God all the respect He deserves, all the days of your life by carefully following all His instructions that I am giving you, your children, and your grandchildren too, so that you may all have long lives. Shema (listen and obey) Israel, and be careful to do what He tells you, so that you will please God and there will always be a lot of you and more and more every year, because the Lord, the God of your ancestors, has promised you a land flowing with milk and honey.”
Does it sound like we got it right? Moses is talking to the children of Israel about how important it is to listen to God and to obey Him and how much better their lives will be if they do. God is giving them every advantage in the world. They were enslaved and abused but now they are free and rich and about to have land of their own to farm and raise animals on. Lemme tell you, in those days money was nothing. It meant almost nothing—if you had money, you used it to buy land and critters like cows and sheep and goats and donkeys and if you were really rich you got a camel. And, when they left Egypt, everyone was so scared of them on account of the plagues that they gave them a ton of jewelry and stuff. You see, when God frees people who are enslaved, He makes sure they get paid—a lot. It’s only right because they worked all their lives for free, right? Humans think they should just be set loose with nothing but that is pretty messed up. And so, God is gave them restitution—they had nothing and Pharaoh had everything. Now Pharaoh has nothing, and they are getting everything. So totally cool.
Moses is telling them that obeying God leads to life and disobeying God leads to misery (like Pharaoh). But how do we follow God and know what He wants? That’s tough because there is a lot of stuff in the Bible that I would never want to have happen to me! Or to you or to anyone! Let’s look at the Shema again before we start talking about how to know what He wants and doesn’t want from us:
“Listen carefully and obey, Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one., Love the Lord your God with all your mind to think, with all yourself to give, and with all your strength so you never give up. These instructions that I am giving you today are to be in your heart (on your mind). Tell them to your children over and over again. Talk to one another about all of these commandments when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up (so, like, all the time). Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them be a symbol on your forehead.Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your city gates.”
Even though we know the who, the to, and the why—some of this is still very confusing. We know what it means that the Lord is our God, right? But what does it mean that He is one? And what did Jesus have to say about it when a scribe asked Him which commandment was the most important? “Jesus answered, “The most important is Listen, Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.,, The second is, Love your neighbor as yourself., There is no other command greater than these.” Obviously, Jesus agreed! But He didn’t exactly explain what it means either. All He did was to combine the Shema prayer with the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves because we can’t love God unless we also love the people He created, right? So, He taught that if something is cruel or mean or spiteful, don’t do it. If it isn’t appropriate, then don’t do it. If it isn’t treating someone like the image of God, or like a sister or brother, then don’t do it. If you would hate it if you were them then don’t do it. But more than that, if they hate it then don’t do it. You might love roller coasters, but they terrify me. If someone loved you then they might take you for a ride on a roller coaster, but only someone who truly hates me would do that to me. Loving people doesn’t always mean treating them like they are exactly like us,
What does it mean that God is one? That’s a toughie. You know, there are things in the Bible that are confusing, and that we struggle and wrestle with because they don’t make sense to us, and we talk about it and some people even argue. God being “one” and the Hebrew word is “echad” is sort of a mystery, if we are really being honest about it. And mysteries are great. Truth is that most everything about God is a mystery and if the Bible explained everything about God in a way that would make sense to us, it would be a hundred times bigger, and actually, it still wouldn’t make sense to us. What God gave us in the Bible are ways to help us kinda understand Him. That’s why the Bible is full of metaphors. Metaphors are very important because they help us to relate to God so that we can begin to trust and love Him and not just be scared of Him. I mean, just think about it. The Bible says that God doesn’t have a form, which means a body, and that He is Spirit. What does that mean? The Bible tells us that God is unseen, which means invisible. The Bible tells us that God is not a man, even though He is called Father. God is also not a woman, even though He is described as a mother quite often too. The Bible even calls God “He” but that might just be because ancient Hebrew only had he and she but no word to describe someone who wasn’t a she or a he.
Have you ever thought about how the words we have can make it hard to understand things that we don’t have any words for? That’s why we use words like “inexpressible” and “ineffable” when describing God. Those are big words that both mean the same thing—that God so is amazing and big and awesome and loving that our human languages don’t have any words that can describe Him without just being way to small. Even words like “good” aren’t good enough because we call food good when it is really only yummy. Or movies good when they are just fun to watch. Or sunshine good when rain is good too. That’s a big part of the reason why God sent His Son Jesus so we could at least see how God acts, and how God loves, and how God wants us to treat one another, and how God loves us so much that even when we killed Jesus because we are so violent and cruel, He forgave us. Could you forgive someone who did that to you? When the powerful people killed Jesus, any other god that the other nations of the world believed in would have just killed everyone and never would have forgiven them. Do we have a word for that kind of love? Not really. We say we love this, and we love that but really, we just like it and next week we might not even like it anymore. We don’t have the words that can tell us who God is or what God is, but we do have Jesus who showed all the ways that God wants us to be like Him.
The Bible tells us that Jesus is the exact expression of God’s nature—which is a fancy way of saying that Jesus doesn’t show us what God looks like but what God is like in His actions and feelings and love and exactly how much He is willing to do in order to rescue us from our sins. Jesus was born a human, even though He is the creative spoken Word of God who made the universe and everything in it, and so He had DNA even though God has no DNA because He doesn’t have a body—and so Jesus isn’t God’s identical twin or anything. We need DNA to have bodies. DNA is God’s blueprint stored in every cell of our bodies that decides if we are girls or boys, brunettes or blondes or redheads, what color our eyes will be and our skin (and because God loves variety, He loves how we all look—just think of how many different types of butterflies there are and flowers!). Because God has no DNA, He doesn’t get old, and His body doesn’t ever go haywire, and his joints don’t start making bad noises like Miss Tyler’s sometimes do and He doesn’t need glasses.
There are Bible verses that talk about God smelling the yummy barbecue smells from His altar, but He has no nose—that was just a way of saying that He was very happy in a way we would understand. There are other verses about what God sees and where God goes and what God says but does God need to open His eyes to see us? Does He need feet or wings or fins to get from here to there? Does He need a mouth to speak to us? Humans and animals need those things because we are very limited. Limited means that there are things we just can’t do. I can’t fly without an airplane or helicopter. I can’t go to the bottom of the ocean unless I bring oxygen with me to breathe. If I didn’t have a tongue, I couldn’t talk. God created everything in the Universe without having any of those things. But when He decided it was time to really let people know how wonderful He was, He sent His Logos, His spoken Word (remember how we talked about that back in Genesis 1?), born as a human being so that He could show us. And Jesus was so unlike every person who ever lived and who will ever live that many didn’t even realize how entirely like God He was because they had never imagined that God would be so loving, caring, forgiving, humble, meek and really not who they wanted Him to be. They wanted a God who would destroy the people who were hurting them—not a God who loved their enemies and wanted to save them too. Sometimes that’s hard, right? When someone is terrible to us and God loves them just like He loves us? But we’re not perfect either and because God loves them despite their sins, we can trust that He will still love us when we mess up too!
But we still haven’t come up with a good answer to how God is “one” right? Let’s look at that word in Hebrew, the language that the Shema was originally given to us in. That word is echad and if you say it right, you won’t spit all over the dog when you say it. That “ch” sound is in the back of your throat, not in your mouth. And we see it 946 times in the Bible! What? That’s a lot! And it can mean quite a few different things—but that doesn’t mean that we can just choose any meaning that we want! We have to study the whole Bible so that we will be responsible with what it most likely would have meant to them because it was spoken to them! They knew a lot of stuff that we don’t know just like we know a lot of stuff that they don’t know. And no one is exactly sure but we have some guesses based on what God has told us about Himself and what He wanted them (and us) to believe. And it might actually mean a whole bunch of things all rolled up into one. God is too amazing to just be described by one word that means just one thing. So, let’s think about it.
It could mean He was telling them to believe that He was the only one responsible for leading them out of Egypt and freeing them from slavery to the Pharaoh, their king who thought he was a god, and surrounded by gods who were responsible for the Nile River, the sun in the sky, the moon, the cows having a lot of babies, everyone having a lot of babies, actually. We will talk about this when we get to Exodus, but when Yahweh made everything in Egypt go wrong, He was showing everyone (the children of Israel and the Egyptians) that He alone was all powerful and that His people didn’t need hundreds of gods to run the universe because He created it so perfectly that it works all by itself. Just imagine a machine that never broke down or needed to be replaced! That would be a miracle. That’s what God did when He created everything that we can see and everything that we can’t see. Egypt’s gods and Babylon’s gods, and the Canaanite gods were really pretty pathetic—they even needed humans to feed them so they wouldn’t starve to death. Pretty lame gods. Our God alone didn’t need anyone to feed Him. Our God alone didn’t need help from all these puny fakers. He didn’t need to say, “Oh hey, Ba’al Hadad, would you please make it rain? I am just too busy trying to keep everything else working.” Um, so not happening.
Could He have been saying that He was the only god that they were allowed to worship? That could be, and He kept telling them that in a lot of different ways, including when He told them in the Ten Commandments that they were not allowed to have idols or to, like, get in His face by giving credit for the wonderful things He has done to anyone else. Some people think that echad means unique, not like anyone or anything else, and that is certainly true and He proved it by totally making all the gods of Egypt look like a preschool football team playing against the Pittsburgh Steelers. Others believe that it means that God is unified. Unified is a word that means He is nothing like us—He isn’t doing one thing one day and deciding to do something entirely different the next. He doesn’t love us one day and then decide to hate us and give up on us. From the very beginning of the Bible, God has had one goal and only one goal—He wants to bring us back to like things were in the Garden before everything got messed up. He created the Garden and put people in it because that makes Him happy. I honestly have no idea why but it is true. Put me in a big old library and as long as I have food, a cot to sleep on, and a bathroom, I am happy. But God isn’t like that; He created us to be with Him.
There is one way to look at it that I really like—even though I believe that all of the explanations that I have given you so far are true. Maybe the Lord being echad simply means that He is perfect, complete, the only one we will ever need, totally trustworthy, and He and Jesus and His Holy Spirit never disagree about the plan to save us from our sins and from dying. God is so echad that He does whatever it takes. God is so echad with Jesus that whatever we see Jesus doing, is exactly what God does. The words that Jesus said are exactly what He heard God saying. Jesus said that He is echad with God in the Gospel of John:
“Don’t be so worried. Believe in God; believe in me too. In my Father’s house (God’s house) there are so many rooms. If there weren’t, would I have even bothered to tell you that I am going to make things ready for you? And if I am going away to make things ready for you, that means I will come again and take you to be with me, so that wherever I am, that’s where you will be too. You know the way to where I am going.” “Lord,” Thomas said, “we don’t even know where you’re going. How can we know the way there?” Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father (God) unless they go through me. And if you know me, you will also know my Father. From now on you do know him and have even seen him.” “Lord,” said Philip, “show us the Father, and that’s enough for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been here with you all this time and you do not know me, Philip? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words I am saying to you aren’t anything I just made up myself. The Father who lives in me does his works through what I do. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. If you still can’t believe that, then you can believe because of the things you have seen me do.“ (John 14:1-11)
I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to know that you can trust God because you can trust Jesus, and you can trust Jesus because you can trust God. He will never give up on you.