Abram wisely solved the problem of the family squabbles by allowing Lot to choose whatever land he wanted—which could have gone terribly wrong, but Abram trusted God that no matter what, his children would still inherit the Land of Canaan. Lot chose the very best of the Land for itself, but that is going to come with a high price tag.
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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 MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible modified a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context).
We are in Genesis chapter thirteen again with the answer to last week’s cliffhanger—Lot’s men and Abram’s men are fighting over land to the point where it is described like a courtroom battle. And Abram was much older and more respected than Lot, so he could have just told Lot to hit the road and go graze his flocks and park his tents somewhere else. But Abram trusts God with the promise of Land, even when He doesn’t trust Him about the other things in his life. Abram isn’t always a good example, but we should really learn from how He handled things in last week’s lesson. So, we are going to backtrack a bit to Abram’s solution to this terrible family problem, beginning in verse 8:
So, Abram said to Lot, “Please, we shouldn’t be fighting, and our shepherds and herdsmen shouldn’t be fighting either, since we are family. Have you looked at all the land that is around us? We need to split up and go in different directions so we won’t be so crowded: if you go to the left, I will go to the right; if you go to the right, I will go to the left.” Lot looked all around and saw that the entire area around the Jordan River as far as Zoar in the south was well watered everywhere like the Garden in Eden and the land of Egypt. (But this was before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.) So, Lot chose the entire plain of the Jordan for himself. Then Lot traveled to the east, and they and their tents and their critters and their slaves separated from each other. Abram lived in the land of Canaan, but Lot lived in the cities on the green Jordan plain and set up his tent near Sodom. (But the men of Sodom were evil, entirely wicked, sinning against the Lord in everything they did). (Gen 13:8-13)
There’s a LOT of geography in today’s lesson. Get it? A “Lot” of geography? If you look at a map of ancient Canaan—way before it was Israel, you will see four main things. One, to the west there was a huge coastline along the Mediterranean Sea and the land there was nice and level and great for traveling compared to (2) the foothills and mountains that make up the entire center of the Land from north to south, (3) the amazing farmland up and down both sides of the Jordan River to the east of the mountains, and (4) the freshwater Sea of Galilee in the north, the Jordan River flowing south from there, and ending in the Dead Sea to the very south. The Dead Sea is so filled with salt that nothing at all can live in it. It is ten times saltier than ocean water and if you have ever gotten a mouth full of that then you know how bad that tastes! And if you go in it, you will float and you won’t sink to the bottom! Isn’t that weird? So, folks just go there now and lay on their backs. And it is the lowest land point on Earth, 430 meters below sea level. That means that the surface of the ocean is way higher than the surface of the Dead Sea. Crazy, huh?
But the Jordan River, oh my! It was one of the best farming areas around and very green with plenty of grasses for Lot’s critters. During the time of Jesus, there were date palm groves (because they take a lot of water to grow!) all along the shores and so many other crops and trees as well. Lot looked with his eyes and saw all that green and flat land and knew his life would be a lot easier living there. I mean, think about it! That land was being compared to the Garden in Eden and Goshen in Egypt—but those are also places where bad things happened. It must have been amazing and beautiful, and so Lot moved to the other side of the Jordan River, outside of the Land of Canaan. Something we are learning about Lot now and will again in the future is that he makes decisions that make life easier and will make him richer, but the consequence is that he will live around other people with the same goals. It will get him into worse trouble than he can possibly imagine, not once but three times. Lot thinks that he is leaving nothing to chance by taking the absolute best of the land for himself. And he doesn’t seem to feel at all guilty about leaving his uncle with a far more difficult life—I mean, he’s like at least in his late seventies and will have to move around a lot more in search of good grazing for his critters and fresh water for his household. Does this sound at all familiar to you? A time where someone made someone else an offer and they saw something they wanted really bad because it looked really good and they thought it would be good for them and they didn’t ask any of the right questions before going for it?
That’s right, all the way back in Genesis three, the Serpent told Eve that the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil wouldn’t kill them, but it would make them wise and all-knowing like God and able to decide for themselves what is good and what is bad. She wasn’t thinking about what could go wrong—all she seemed to be thinking about that it would be a really good thing to be like God, but she made the mistake of thinking about herself and what she wanted, and she wasn’t thinking about God. God had given Adam and Eve everything from a beautiful planet to a garden all prepared for them to live in, to the companionship of each other and He wasn’t bothering them all the time or checking up on them or ordering them around and being a bully. God had proven that He wanted what was best for them by blessing them with everything they actually needed. Eve (and Adam who was right there with her while all that was happening) should have thought about what a blessing for God would be. If she had thought about that, and if Adam had thought of that, then they would have blessed God by trusting Him. That makes him super happy. If you have kids of your own someday, you will just love it when they trust you. I sure love it when my kids trust me, and I am sad when they don’t.
Lot had a choice too, to bless himself or to bless Abram, or to bless them both. He could have taken the south and Abram could have had the north. That way the both of them would be able to enjoy the fertile green land up and down the Jordan River. You want to know how long that river is? 223 miles long! Even if they split it, that would give each of them more than 110 miles worth of greenery for the critters to eat. Instead, Lot grabbed it all for himself and stuck Abram with the mountains. What Lot didn’t know, however, is that Abram had God with him and that land that Lot didn’t want was a land flowing with milk and honey. If Lot had blessed Abram, I think things would have gone a lot differently. When we bless people by sharing everything that is good, it’s just another way of trusting God to take care of us. When we are greedy, we aren’t being trustful at all. When we are greedy, we are deciding to do things on our own, without needing God.
But you know what’s really crazy? Well, two things. Of course, Abram gave Lot a choice where Lot could have easily taken all the land that was promised to Abram, but fortunately he didn’t. Abram was risking giving away the Land that God had promised to give to his children (which he didn’t have yet and once Lot was gone, he couldn’t even give it to Lot’s kids!) and so he must have really trusted that God would make it work out in the end. The other crazy thing is that Abram gave Lot a choice about where he would live but didn’t give Sarai a choice about telling a lie that put her life in danger. People are weird. Sometimes and in some things, we trust God totally and in other ways, we just fall apart and act like He isn’t even real. And this won’t be the last time that Abram does some really weird stuff. In so many ways, Abram is just a normal person like us—sometimes he wins and sometimes he loses; sometimes he succeeds and sometimes he is a dismal failure. But we should also remember that Abram hasn’t been following God for very long at this point and considering the world he grew up in, I think he’s doing really awesome—even when I am totally irritated with him! God is perfect. Abram?—not so much.
Going back to our Bible verses, after Lot looked around and saw how amazing the land around the Jordan River was, we get a little note telling us that “this was before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.” So, this is the first big heads up to us that this isn’t going to turn out very well for Lot and his people! In fact, we get told that he set up his tent near Sodom of all places, and then the Bible gives us another side note: the men of Sodom were evil, and they were committing a lot of sins against the Lord. Now, evil is a word that we haven’t heard in quite a while, since right after Noah and his family came out of the ark and God decided that the solution to the problem of evil wasn’t to destroy everyone and everything because it didn’t work. But what does it mean to sin against the Lord? Well, there are different kinds of sins but not all of them are particularly against God. There are some sins that he hates a lot more than others, for example, He hates it when the people who are worshiping Him worship anyone else. That’s a big one, it is called idolatry. But the one He seems to hate just as bad is oppression against people who can’t defend themselves, hurting people who can’t fight back. And that’s what Ezekiel the prophet said was wrong with the people of Sodom.
A thousand years later, when God’s people were doing terrible things Ezekiel said, “‘As I live—says the Lord God—your sister Sodom and her daughters (daughters meant the cities around Sodom) haven’t behaved anywhere near as bad as Jerusalem and the other cities of Judah. Now this was the terrible crime of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were very honored, had plenty of food, and they were comfortable and lived in safety, but didn’t support the poor and needy. They were prideful and did the most horrible things right in my face, so I got rid of them when I saw this.” (Ezekiel 16:48-50) But how were the things that God’s people were doing, worse than what Sodom was doing? Honestly the people of Sodom didn’t really know any better because they didn’t know God and had no rules to get them to do anything differently or better. They would hurt the visitors who came to their city in terrible ways because in ancient times, hurting and embarrassing other people and especially other men was how people gained the respect of others. No one wanted to mess with the people of Sodom because they were not only rich but also very dangerous. But here’s the thing—no one, no city or country or group of people just start out doing the absolute worst things they can think of. First, they have to decide to only care about themselves, and so the people of Sodom committed the terrible sin of just letting the poor and hungry suffer. They didn’t even try to help anyone. They didn’t care.
When we decide not to care about people, we just shrug and figure that they deserve to suffer. And when we decide that they deserve to be hungry and cold, it isn’t too long before we decide that it is okay to hurt them, but sooner or later people who hurt the poor and homeless start hurting anyone they can get away with hurting. That’s what happened in Sodom. They grew more and more sinful and violent, and the smaller cities all around did the same thing too. The big sins are the sins we work our way up to after getting away with committing the smaller ones. Most people start out stealing things like packs of gum before they steal cars or break into people’s houses. The thing is, Lot must have figured out pretty quick exactly what was going on and what they were doing but he still stayed right there and lived outside their city in a tent—but we find out later that he’s actually going to move into the city and live in a house there. Lot was better than the people of Sodom, for sure, and that’s why the apostle Peter called him a righteous man. Remember that when someone is called righteous, it doesn’t mean that they are perfect or even good—it just means that compared to the people of Sodom, Lot was right and they were wrong. That’s not really much of a compliment, right?
But you know what else the prophet Ezekiel told the people of Judah—the city of Jerusalem and the cities all around there? He said, “Didn’t you treat your sister Sodom as an object of scorn when you were proud, before your own wickedness was exposed?” (Ezekiel 16:56-57) That means that God’s people were always looking down on the people of Sodom and rolling their eyes and facepalming, and making fun of how awful they were—but they had no place to talk because they were doing evil things too and they knew better because they had God’s laws to guide them in how to love one another. Sodom didn’t have anything like that, and they worshiped wicked, nasty, cruel gods and goddesses who acted the same ways that they did. So, we have to be very careful about what we say about others, and not be so impressed with ourselves because we can be just as bad. It’s okay to notice that something is wrong and to talk about it, but when we think that we are so much better we can get into a whole lot of trouble. Lot’s a complicated guy too. He does very good things and really terrible things. I think the Bible tells us about all the bad things humans do so that we will only really look at God as our hero!
But Lot’s choice here and Lot’s future mistakes aren’t all of today’s story. Abram trusted God in a HUGE way and now he’s going to get another big promise: After Lot had moved to Sodom and separated from Abram, the Lord said to Abram, “Look all around you. Look north and south, east and west, because I will give you and your descendants (his children and his children’s children) all the land that you see around you forever. I will make your descendants like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust of the earth, then they could be counted. Get up and walk all around the land, from top to bottom and side to side, for I will give it to you.”So, Abram moved his tent and went to live near the oaks of Mamre at Hebron, where he built an altar to the Lord. (Gen 13:14-18)
Wow! This is the third time that God has promised Abram all the Land of Canaan, and the second time that He has promised Abram that he will have kids. Remember that Abram and Sarai are both very old and they still don’t have any children. God has only promised children to Abram at this point but not Sarai—and yet God single-handedly rescued Sarai from the Pharaoh of Egypt when he thought she was Abram’s unmarried sister! I am sure that Abram was very confused and very happy all at the same time. Do you know what we should do when God makes us promises about our future? Well, what we should do is work hard to become the kind of people who can handle doing something like that but what we should never do is try to make it happen when we want it to happen. That’s what’s going to happen in chapter sixteen but right now we are still just at the end of chapter 13. Next week, we start chapter fourteen and we will get into the very first war in the Bible. Lot will kind of show up in chapter fourteen but only because he is mentioned. We won’t actually hear anything from him until chapter eighteen!
But as for right now, Abram is in the foothills of Canaan (foothills are the small mountains before the big mountains—more like hills but they keep getting bigger until you are in the real mountains) and from there, he could probably see an awful lot (no pun intended). He was probably sad about having to say goodbye to his nephew but, at long last, he is exactly where God wants him to be. Where’s that? In a place where Abram’s only hope for a child to inherit all this land is for God to make it happen for him. No family except for Sarai—which is what God commanded him to do in the first place. No backup plan. Just God. And so, God encourages him, “Everything you see all around you, it’s yours even though you don’t own even an acre of it yet, even though all you can really do is move your tent around looking for food for your sheep, goats, and cows. And you know what I said back at your altar in Bethel about giving this land to your descendants? Well, you won’t just have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren—there will be so many that they will be like dust, so many that no one would ever be able to count them all!”
Abram had probably not even dreamed of more than one child and wasn’t even thinking about anything beyond that. He hadn’t thought about a thousand generations in the future and that his kids would still be out there and all over the world! How many children of Abraham have been born over the last four thousand years? No one could ever possibly know, except for God. And I think that when Abram heard that, he fell down on the ground in shock because the next thing that God tells him is, “Get up!” God tells him to walk all over the place because it is all his and his descendants. They would not only have a home, but it was a good home—perfect for everything they would need to survive and enjoy life. And Abram did get up. He packed up his tent and traveled and ended up in a place that would later be called Hebron, near the oaks of Mamre where I am sure it was nice and shady and protected from harsh weather. Hebron was south of where Jerusalem would later be, but in the days of Abram their campsite was known for Mamre, a man who would become a friend of Abram. And he built another altar for God—so now there are three in the Land of Canaan. In the north, in the middle and in the south.
Now, just like the other altars, nothing is said about Abram sacrificing any critters like Noah and Abel did. So, these altars seem like they might be landmarks, claiming the Land for God. It would be a way for Abraham to prove that He trusts God and as we have always seen—land is the one thing that Abram has no doubts about. Land wasn’t just a place to live. Land meant safety. Land meant food. Land meant wealth (money/critters). Land gave people an identity, it gave them a place to say they were from and a chance to build their own culture, traditions, and beliefs. God wasn’t offering them a farm; He was giving them everything that made a nation a nation. And God could do that because the Land of Canaan belonged to Himself and not to any people who were living there. The Land still belongs to God and always will. And we won’t see Abram build another altar until Genesis 22, and that one will be the last. It’s an important altar, but that’s another story.
I know Lot has messed up and he has been greedy, but I want you to know something important about God. God isn’t going to stop blessing Lot just because he was being a goober head. In fact, Lot is going to get into trouble, big trouble, twice in the future and God will make sure that he gets rescued both times. Not only that, but God is going to bless the two sons of Lot by giving them the lands of Ammon and Moab and God will tell the children of Israel that they aren’t allowed to go to war with them and take it away! God is going to bless Lot not because he is so awesome but because God has a relationship with Abram. Because Abram is faithful, Lot is going to be treated far better than he deserves. I guess we should all try to live in ways that will be a blessing to people around us so that they can see the goodness of God like Lot did. Even though it doesn’t seem to improve his behavior. God is more patient and loving than we could ever deserve, and He doesn’t give up on people very easily. Sometimes you might feel like God has given up on you, but I can tell you that it is almost impossible. So, you don’t ever listen to anyone who tells you that God hates you, okay? Jesus is a lot like Abram in that way, only a million times better. When we know Jesus and we trust Jesus and we follow Him in looking to God for everything, He promises to always hear our prayers. It doesn’t mean that He will give us absolutely anything we want—I still wear glasses—but it does mean that we always have access to Him. Access is a word that means we have a way in. Like at a concert, if you have a backstage pass it means that you get to see the show from up close and the band members will even walk right by you and you can talk to them and they will be able to hear you because you are so close. Well, Jesus has promised us the same thing, only with God in His throne room. When we talk to Him, He hears us. I love you. I am praying for you, and I want you to think about what it means to always be heard by God and to never have to worry that He isn’t interested in what you have to say, how you are feeling, what makes you sad or happy, angry, or confused or just whatever. You can trust Him with everything because He already knows it.