This week we will tackle one of the most important things in the Bible—God’s very first promise to Abraham! Up to now, the world has mostly been a mess but God is about to take matters into His own hands to create for himself a nation unlike any other on earth. We’ll be talking about the words bless and blessing and what they mean when they are referring to people. As a bonus, we’ll see exactly why no one in the Bible is perfect except for Jesus and why that’s okay.
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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 MTV, the Miss Tyler Version—which is the Christian Standard Bible revised and expanded a bit so it is easier to kids to understand).
Oh my gosh, we’re finally in Genesis 12 and the story is about to change a lot! Up to now, any Bible character pretty much appears and disappears pretty darned quick. Adam and Eve made it for three chapters but hardly showed up in the third. Noah’s story lasted for four chapters and we won’t be hearing about him anymore. But Abraham? We never stop hearing about Abraham because it is God’s promises to him that begin to change everything. His story begins at the end of chapter 11 and goes all the way to the beginning of chapter 25, when he dies. But that’s not all—Abraham/Abram is mentioned 287 times in the Bible, 170 in Genesis and 117 times in the other books of the Bible. He shows up in twenty-seven of the sixty-six books in the Bible, so that’s 40% of the books! That’s how important Abraham is. Only six other people get mentioned more often—Aaron, Saul, Jacob, Moses, David, and Jesus. Jesus actually wins that contest by a LOT. But Abraham is our very first “main character” whose life story we will be following. Funny thing is though—we never really have anything to do with him until he is in his seventies! Maybe you have grandparents in their seventies and so what happens to Abraham might surprise you if you are thinking about it happening to them. I am in my fifties and I am not thinking I could do what he did either!
Anyway, get comfortable talking about Abraham because we’ll be doing it for a very long time. Of course, right now he has a different name than the one we know him by. His name is Abram when we first meet him here, but in Hebrew we would actually call him Avram—a name that means exalted father. And the name must have been a difficult one to have because Abram is seventy-five years old when God speaks to Him and he still isn’t a father at all, even though he really wants to be!
The Lord said to Abram: Go from where you are living, your relatives, and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, I will bless you, I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who treat you well, I will curse anyone who treats you badly, and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you. (Gen 12:1-3)
That’s a really big promise, but what did it mean and why was it so important and why would it be scary and strange for Abram to hear? First of all, God was telling Abram to leave Haran. That’s where he was settled down and comfortable and safe. Sure, his father Terah had made plans to go to Canaan, but they had ended up north in Haran instead. And God isn’t even giving Abram a destination—He’s just saying, “Get up and leave and I will show you which way to go and when to stop.” I think that would make me really scared, but then it got a lot worse. God also says that Abram must leave his relatives—the people who kept him safe if there were bandits trying to take his sheep, goats and cows, or maybe kill him. Relatives, aka your clan, kept each other safe in those days. There were no police officers or 911 to call. At most, the kings had their guards, but they weren’t usually interested in guarding anyone except the king. Everyone else needed their extended family—everyone they were related to. But he could take his father’s household, right? His brother and his kids and all that? Surely, they would be old enough to help and there is safety in numbers! But no, Abram is told to leave everyone he knows behind, except the people who belong with him of course. God doesn’t tell people to leave their wives, and Abram had men who worked for him and unfortunately, he also had slaves as a lot of people did them. They depended on Abram to be their leader and to make sure they all had full bellies and protection from outsiders. It was a very different world from what we know now.
This was a lot to ask of anyone but especially of Abram, when he and his wife were getting old and had no children to care for them. Now, he was being told to go to some mystery place with no safety net—which is an idiom that means Abram wouldn’t have family to help him if he got into trouble. Abram was being told that he would only have God to trust. Not the gods of his family, but this God who was speaking to him about leaving everything and everyone he had ever depended on. He was being told to leave what was safe, comfortable and familiar for the unknown. That would be scary for anyone, and I don’t care who you are. What was God promising Abram in return? More than he could have ever dreamed of, that’s what.
First, God promised Abram that He would make him into a “great nation.” What do you need to have a nation? Well, first you need kids—a lot of them. God didn’t tell Abram that he would become the king of a great nation. You don’t need kids for that. I mean, we didn’t hear anything about Nimrod having kids, just that he was a really tough dude. No, God said that He would make Abram into a great nation. Right now, there’s just Abram and his with Sarai and Sarai can’t have babies so this is a huge promise that would require an even bigger miracle. Was Sarai going to die and would Abram get a new wife who could have babies? Was Sarai going to have a baby? Not likely! And what’s the other thing you need to have a great nation? Um…lemme see. Oh, land! Duh. But he was leaving the land of Haran where all his family was living and heading to who the heck knows where. If there are two things Abram doesn’t have, it’s anything that will make him into a great nation. In fact, he was being told to leave everything behind that would get him one. This promise must have sounded pretty strange!
Then, God told Abram that He would bless him, and that he would be a blessing too—but what does it mean to be blessed and to be a blessing? People use that word a lot, but they almost never ask what those words really mean. In the Bible, the word blessing is always about someone having some kind of relationship with God. God knows that person, and loves that person, and won’t abandon that person. And as we read through the Bible, we’re going to see people who are blessed by God who aren’t always acting very righteous so it can be very confusing. Sometimes, people who are blessed have many children, sometimes they have a lot of money or stuff, and sometimes they are well-known—but not always. Sometimes, people who are blessed don’t have very much at all, and maybe only one child or none, and no one knows who they are. But what all blessed people have is that God knows them and loves them and won’t ever leave them, give up on them, or be unfair to them. God is like the opposite of people. Just because so many people can’t be trusted, and might hurt us and hate us, God isn’t like that. And that’s a relief because sometimes when people are being really awful to us, it feels like God must have cursed us but that isn’t true. People aren’t perfect and we even see people in the Bible who are big heroes and who trusted God but still did terrible things sometimes. Now, because God loved them, He didn’t let them get away with those things. Bad things happened to them not because God hated them but because it was the only way He could get them to stop and be good again. And that’s a blessing—how terrible would it be if God blessed certain people and just let them do whatever they wanted for the rest of their lives?
And that’s why the Bible talks about curses as well. God is very generous with us just by noticing us and taking care of us, but He is also being very good to us when He lets us know when we are on the wrong track. That’s why Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden and why life was harder for them because they couldn’t be as close to God anymore, but it is also why God gave them clothes and didn’t kill them. It’s why Cain had to leave his family and he couldn’t be a farmer anymore, but also why God made sure that no one killed him. When we aren’t doing what God wants, He still loves us and doesn’t abandon us, but we are walking away from Him and can’t be as close. And the farther away we are from Him, the harder life can be. Even very close to Him, life can be very difficult but at least we have Him there. We are still normal human beings and bad things will still happen to us no matter how many commandments we keep. When God blessed Joseph, for example, he was a slave and then in prison! I would much rather be blessed outside of prison and definitely while not being a slave. But just imagine how bad it would have been if he was a slave, and in prison, and God wasn’t blessing him! Yikes! Things can always be worse, even when they are very terrible.
So, what if a terrible person who hates God is famous and has a lot of money and a lot of kids and a huge house? Are they blessed? It might look like it but just because someone has a lot of stuff it doesn’t mean that God gave it to them—some people who have a lot got it by doing bad things to other people. What things look like from the outside doesn’t tell us anything about whether a person is blessed by God or not. And just because a person is poor, or doesn’t have any children, and people are mean to them doesn’t mean that they aren’t blessed. I want you to remember that as we keep reading through the Bible because it is very important. God’s people have just as much bad stuff happen to them as everyone else but because they trust God that He will win in the end, they have hope. Hope is that feeling of goodness inside because we know that things will get better even if we don’t know when. And we have that feeling because the Bible tells us that God is going to win and that all of our tears will be wiped away and that we will live forever in the world to come—with Jesus!
And so, along with God telling Abram that he will have this special blessing relationship with him, He also tells Abram that his name will be great! What does that mean? Is God changing his name to “great?” No, that would be silly. What it means is that God is promising to do for Abram what the people at the Tower of Babel wanted—do you remember that they wanted make a name for themselves? They wanted to be famous and respected and honored so that everyone else would say, “Ooohhhh…they’re so awesome! Look at that tower they built! Those are definitely the cool people.” But they wanted to do it for themselves, and God said, “Um…dudes, no.” And here, hundreds of years later, God is telling Abram that He will give that great name to him! Wowzers! How would you like it if everyone knew your name and loved you? People have always wanted that. Personally, I want everyone to love me so that they won’t hurt me; but I don’t want everyone to know my name because I am super shy, and I would hate being famous more than just about anything.
The next thing God promises is that Abram will not only be blessed by God but that he himself will be a blessing to others. That means that whomever Abram has a relationship with will be blessed, which is going to explain later why good things happened to the people connected to Abram, even when they do messed up things. That’s something we should all want—for other people’s lives to be better, and not worse, because they know us. What else? God explains to Abram how that blessing to the world will work but it also has a downside: “I will bless those who treat you well, I will curse anyone who treats you badly, and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” Wow, so Abram isn’t just blessed by God, but so is everyone who treats him fairly and is good to him but, on the flip side, God is telling Abram that He is going to protect him by not having a relationship with or doing good to anyone who tries to hurt Abram. And that because of all this, someday all of the people groups on earth would be blessed through him—and we will talk about what that means later.
You have to admit that things have been a total mess so far in the Bible but now things are changing because God is taking action. The rest of the Bible is about God’s blessings going out to the whole world. Adam and Eve’s sin, Cain killing Abel, the Flood, the Tower of Babel—history up to this point in the story has been one big yuckiness after another. In fact, we’ve seen a lot of curses as people have gone their own way and made the planet pretty awful by being violent and murdering each other. But now God is promising more blessing than just people and critters being fruitful and multiplying. Now God is saying that He will make a new nation, in a new place, from childless Abram, and that He will be very famous in the whole world, and that God will always be with him, and that God won’t be with the people who hate him. Really, God is promising to be Abram’s family if Abram leaves his family. God is promising to give Abram land if he leaves his home. God is promising children to Abraham when he has no children and so needs his family to care for him when he is old if he leaves them. God is promising to make Abram’s name great if he goes to a place where no one knows who the heck he even is.
But guess what? Just like Noah, if he hadn’t wanted to build that ark, Abram won’t have any of those things if he stays where he is, with his family, in a place that he knows and is safe. What would you do if a God you didn’t know said this to you? Would you go to a psychiatrist to see if you were just maybe hearing things that weren’t there? What would your family say if you left? Would they just all freak out? Would they warn you that you are making a big mistake in leaving the gods of your family? Probably. But for some reason, Abram went anyway. But we’ll talk about that next week.
Abram’s promise from God is one of the most important things you will ever read in the Bible. The day that Abram heard God’s call and the day he obeyed were days that changed the world forever. There would be no Moses, no David, and no Jesus without Abram believing God and setting out for who the heck knows where. And so, it is Abraham, and not Noah or Adam or anyone else, who is called father by the Jewish people because he is their father, and Paul says that everyone who believes Jesus has Abraham as their father as well. Have you ever sang the song “Father Abraham?” It’s a great song with some silly movements but it tells us that we are Abraham’s children too—isn’t that funny? God gave Abram all those promises if he trusted God and followed Him, and now he has children all over the world; more than can be counted over the past four thousand years. We need to remember that we are one family and not many families. If Abraham is my father and your father, then we aren’t from different families. We are together forever—even if I annoy you and you beg not to have to listen to me.
What does the Bible tell us over and over again about why Abraham pleased God? Because God kept making these crazy promises and Abraham kept on believing Him! Instead of the word believing, we could say that Abraham trusted that God would keep His promises even though Abraham didn’t see most of them happen in his life. Now, He isn’t going to do things perfectly and sometimes we will see him not trusting God like he should but in doing that, we see that Abram is no different than you and me. Sometimes we trust God a lot and then sometimes we are like running for the hills or trying to make things happen in our own way, sooner than God wants and totally not the way He wants things to happen. Abram isn’t amazing because he isn’t anything like us—he’s amazing because he is totally messed up just like we are. Everyone is strong in some ways and weak in other ways, even in the same family everyone is different. Some of us are very brave when it comes to one thing—like Abram being willing to leave his family and everything but then too scared to be honest, which gets his wife kidnapped—twice! And he’s brave enough to go rescue his nephew Lot from a big old army but too impatient to wait for God to give him a baby. But God kept blessing him anyway, and Abraham finally learned that he could trust God in absolutely any situation. It took a heckuva long time though! Like seventy years! So, don’t be hard on yourself if somedays you trust God and other days you just don’t. Abraham didn’t either. Nobody does. But he sure did well enough that a lot of Hebrews Chapter 11 is written to tell us how much he did that was right!
One of my favorite things about the Bible is that there is only one perfect person in it—and that’s Jesus. Everyone else messes up in big and small ways. None of them are perfect examples. All their stories should make us ask questions about what they did and why and what we think about those things. That’s why the Bible isn’t always going to say, “And Abraham did that and it was super messed up.” Instead, we are told what happened and we get to talk about it and that’s how the Bible is supposed to work. The Bible makes us wise by forcing us to think about stuff and not always giving us the answers. Cool, eh? If we weren’t supposed to think, it would just give us all the answers.
It’s good that the Bible doesn’t make us think that these guys are perfect because God wouldn’t want us to think that at all. God gave us the Bible so that we could learn about Him and about how patient and trustworthy He is no matter how badly we mess up. By watching all these Bible heroes do bad things from time to time, He was getting us ready to notice how entirely different Jesus is from everyone else. Jesus is greater than Adam and Eve because when He was tempted by Satan to disobey God, three times, He said no every single time. Adam and Eve gave in on the very first try. Oops. And we are going to see that Jesus is greater than Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Samson, Samuel, David, Solomon, and everyone else too. Because we get a chance to see how people behave, when Jesus showed up, we’re supposed to say, “Wow, nobody else in the whole world has ever been like Him! I can see now why Jesus said that if we have seen Him, we know exactly what God is like.” And especially compared to His disciples, who were always doing things that were totally clueless.
And after Jesus was resurrected and went back to the Father, we still don’t see any perfect people. Peter made a terrible decision in Galatia that really hurt people. Paul wasn’t winning any awards for being easy to understand. And in your life, no one you will ever know will be perfect. Not you, not me, not your parents or grandparents or sisters or brothers or friends. We are going to hurt each other. We’re going to make mistakes. We will trust people we shouldn’t trust and won’t believe people we should believe. God is going to tell us what to do and sometimes we won’t do it. Or He will promise us something and we won’t wait for it to happen—we’ll try to make it happen ourselves at the wrong time and in the wrong way! Or we will decide that we know what we need better than God knows! Believe me, if God was easy to get angry, we’d all be dead. But He isn’t easy to make angry. Let me tell you what God told Moses when Moses wanted to see God. God told Moses that there was no way he could deal with seeing God like, full on with all His glory. That’s why God’s glory had to hide inside Jesus just so that we could deal with being with Him. But God agreed to put Moses in a crack in a rock and that he would just see a bit of God’s back as He passed by the rock. And after He did that, He said something amazing that I want you to always remember:
“The Lord—the Lord is a compassionate and gracious God (meaning He really cares for you and about you), slow to anger and abounding in faithful love and truth (which means that you can trust Him because He is patient and it is hard to get Him angry and you can know that He won’t try to trick you), never giving up on loving people even for a thousand generations, forgiving you when you give in and do something you shouldn’t, when you rebel against Him, and when you accidentally do something wrong.”
That means that it would take much more than just making mistakes to ever get God to leave you or get really angry with you. Does that mean that we should do bad things because He is hard to make angry? Nope, that would be a terrible thing to do. No one should ever try to hurt anyone who doesn’t hurt them back. Just think of the people in your life, if you loved them and loved them and they hurt you anyway no matter how many wonderful things you did for them? That’s what it is like when we act that way toward God. I love you.
I am praying for you. And I pray that you think this week about how you treat the people who are good to you or weaker than you are. Just because it seems like we get away with doing bad things to them, doesn’t mean that God will let us get away with it forever.