Today we are going to talk about the most exciting fifty days in the history of all the world! And also about why the strangest day on the entire Biblical calendar turned out to be the most important of all. If you have never heard of the counting of the omer, hold on to your hats because that’s what we will be learning about today.
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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).
Did you celebrate Passover last week? Did you celebrate Jesus’s resurrection from the dead last weekend? We sure did! We’ll learn more about Passover next year and also when we are learning about Exodus, but right now I want to tell you about the fifty most exciting days in the history of the entire world so far! More exciting than when the children of Israel were freed from slavery in Egypt! More exciting than when Noah and his family got out of the ark! More exciting than when Joseph told his brothers and his father who he was after many years away from home! More exciting than coming into the Promised Land and more exciting than when the walls of Jericho fell! In fact, nothing like this had ever happened before and nothing has happened like it ever since. In fact, the only thing more amazing than those fifty days will be when Jesus comes back to be King over all the earth. So, what fifty days am I talking about? The fifty days that God commanded His people to count the omer from the day after the Passover Sabbath until the Festival of Pentecost. What? That really doesn’t sound very exciting at all—counting days? What the heck? Can’t we just program it into our smart phones or watches or put it on the calendar? Why would God tell His people to count up a bunch of days? Well, that is what we are going to talk about this week before getting back to Genesis and the life of Abram next week.
You see, when God delivered His people from slavery in Egypt, He gave them a whole bunch of parties to celebrate forever. These parties, which happened during three different months in the year, were full of secret clues about Jesus the Messiah, our Savior! But until He lived among us, died, rose from the dead and poured out His Holy Spirit on everyone who believes Him—no one could see any of those clues that God had given Moses in the wilderness. The Bible is like that, you know. God puts clues in there that no one can understand until after they have already happened! Like God told the prophet Isaiah, He kinda does that to show off and prove how much better He is than all of the fake gods of the rest of the world. Their gods couldn’t ever predict the future because they didn’t even know what was going to happen to themselves the next day. God sees everything from beginning to end and so He can tell us all about it but that doesn’t mean He is going to make it understandable. God told Isaiah that He gives us clues about what will happen but not so that we can figure things out ahead of time—but so that after things happen we can say, “Oh man, there it is right in the Bible! I can’t believe it! God told us this would happen thousands of years ago! I never thought it would happen like that!”
And that’s how all of the promises in the Bible about Jesus worked. People had figured out from studying the Scriptures that there would be a Messiah who would be their king, or maybe their high priest, but they were confused because different Scriptures said different things that they didn’t think could all be true. Some people thought there would be two completely different Messiahs coming to save them in entirely different ways. They didn’t understand how some verses in the Bible said that Messiah would be a mighty king forever while others said that he would suffer and die! That’s how God likes to keep us on our toes—if we could just read the Bible and predict the future, we wouldn’t have to depend on Him anymore. Jesus is the best example in the world of that. Now we look at what Moses and David and the Prophets all said and we just say, “Oh yeah, duh, that’s all totally about Jesus,” but that’s only because we live in a time after He came. But we are waiting for Him to return now as King of the world and although we may think we have all that figured out—how it will happen and when—we probably don’t because no one has ever been able to do it before and why would now be any different? God is going to do what He is going to do and what He will do will be the absolute best and we will be shocked and excited and we will look at the Bible and say, “Oh duh, why didn’t we see all that ahead of time? Why did we think all those other things?” Just like many, many Jews like Peter, James, John, and Paul did—but only after everything had already happened. Before that, even when Jesus told them to their faces what was going to happen, they still didn’t understand. The Bible is a special book—not here to tell us the future but to tell us after things happen that God was in control all along and nothing takes Him by surprise. God knew what wicked people were going to do to Jesus and they used it to trick Satan and set people free from all of his evil ways.
The name that Moses gave us for the fifty most exciting days in history was the counting of the omer. Wait—the what? Miss Tyler, you said this was exciting and I don’t even know what an omer is and I doubt I want to count one. And you probably haven’t even heard of it and especially since people mostly ignore this now. The omer was very important in ancient Israel because it was the beginning of the new harvest season. All winter the Jewish people were eating what they had stored away during the year before. Old barley. Old wheat. Dried fruit. And if they had a bad year? Then they might not be able to eat much at all by the time spring came around. But all that changed on the first day of the counting of the omer. You see, the barley that was planted in the fall, right after the big festivals in Jerusalem and right before the early rains fell, was always ripe at the time of the Passover celebration during the first month of their festival year. But no matter how ripe it was, they weren’t allowed to eat any until the week after the Passover. On the day after the weekly Sabbath, when no one was working and everyone was resting and celebrating and learning about the Bible in the synagogues, the priests would go to their special barley fields that they grew themselves especially for the Temple, and they would cut a sheaf—which is a big bundle of barley stalks—and they would take it to the Temple and present it to the Lord and only after that happened could everyone sell and buy and eat the new crop of barley. God gets his share first. Since the Land of Israel is His special place, everything that grows there belongs to Him and they had to give Him the very best before they took anything for themselves.
And the week Jesus died was no different. Just like everyone else, Jesus rested in the grave on the Sabbath and on the very next day, He rose up from being dead and was alive again. A bunch of women had come to take care of His body but when they got there, the stone had been moved away from the opening to the tomb and there was no one inside! They were incredibly upset because they thought someone had stolen His body, but then they got the surprise of their lives! Jesus was alive, and they were told to go and tell the rest of the disciples that He was alive! Because those women never abandoned Jesus like the men who followed Him, they were the very first to spread the good news that God had proved Jesus was good and innocent and the Messiah by raising Him from the dead. The wicked leaders of the world were wrong to kill Him and God wanted everyone to know that Jesus being dead forever wasn’t okay with Him. And Jesus told the women not to touch Him because He still had to go up to His Father. But why would He even say that? The answer is one of the mysteries of Scripture answered—Jesus was the first to be dead and to come alive again in a perfect body to live forever and never die again. All the people who Jesus raised from the dead died again later—like Lazarus, and the widow’s son and the synagogue leader’s daughter. But Jesus is different. When He came back from the dead, He never died again. Because of that, Jesus is called the firstfruits of the Harvest. And I will explain what that means.
Whenever the children of Israel grew anything in the Land God gave them, they had to give the firstfruits to God—which means the first and very best of what they grew. The biggest and juiciest dates, olives, pomegranates, barley, wheat, etc. You might even remember that Cain did that and God wasn’t happy at all with what Cain gave Him. Cain must have not given his very best to God but God wasn’t fooled. Think of giving God a bunch of brown, moldy old bananas that aren’t even good for banana bread anymore! Or apples with worms in them. Or wheat flour from the bottom of the batch that had dirt in it! God is going to be, like, “Dude, I wish you hadn’t even given me anything at all instead of THAT. Who is it that you are trying to fool because if it was me? No, it didn’t work.” In fact, when the Bible describes what Cain gave to God, it just said that it was “some of the land’s produce.” Wow, that’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the quality, right? If, on your birthday, you walked up to a dessert table and you saw fig newtons and jolly ranchers and huge chocolate cakes and cheesecake and fancy donuts and chocolate truffles and crème brulee, and someone brought you a plate and all it had was a broken fig newton, half-eaten black licorice and a brussel sprout flavored jolly rancher then you would not only be disappointed but you might even be angry. That’s what Cain did to God, probably, although it doesn’t say that for sure.
But the priests, when they cut that new sheaf of barley each year, they made sure that it was beautiful and that all the grain heads were perfect and beautiful and ripe with no mold on them or bite marks from bugs. They found the best of the best from their very own fields and brought it to the Temple and waved that beautiful grain so that God could see it and be honored that they remembered that everything they had and everything that grew in the Land was because of Him. And after everyone presented their sheaves of barley, the people could eat it. They could roast the kernels over the fire and eat them whole, or they could grind them into flour and make bread or whatever else they wanted to do. And that sheaf of barley was called the omer. And that day was called the first day of the counting of the omer. It was also the day that Jesus was raised up from the dead and appeared to the women in the garden outside the tomb He had been placed in after He died. And when Jesus said that they couldn’t touch Him before He went to His Father, He was saying that He was just like that omer of barley, the best and first of the entire harvest that needed to be given first to God before anyone else.
But what is the harvest? Jesus wasn’t a plant, right? Well, the harvest is a way that the Bible talks about God gathering up His own people and rescuing them from Satan. Jesus is saying that He is the first and best that the world has to offer because He is God’s own Son and He is just the first because everyone who believes Jesus and everyone before Him who ever served and loved God will come back from the dead in a perfect body just like Jesus someday. After Jesus told them that He had to go to the Father, He left them and when He came back and talked to His disciples and all His other followers, they were allowed to touch Him and He ate meals with them and taught them the most amazing things over the next forty days. So, the first forty days of the counting of the omer were spent actually with Jesus, back from the dead, and teaching them all the places in the Hebrew Bible that talked about Him and exactly what He was going to do. I bet they were just amazed at all the Bible verses they knew that were talking about Jesus but they just never realized it! Moses had talked about Jesus. David had talked about Jesus. The Prophets had all talked about Jesus! Why hadn’t they put all the pieces together???
Because if they could figure it out then so could everyone else and especially Satan. Same with Jesus coming back again—if we could figure it out, we’d do a whole lot of messed up stuff with that information. And people have been doing just that for almost two thousand years—setting dates and very sure that Jesus was going to come back right away and they could even prove it by comparing Bible verses to what they saw happening all around them and people do it today too! But everyone has always been wrong even though they were absolutely sure that they were right. Jesus told everyone to just ignore what was going on around them because there are always strange things happening but that believers in Him had to just keep on doing what was right and telling people all about Him and what He did and the Kingdom of God. We don’t have to worry about when Jesus is coming back, we just have to live our lives in ways that make Him happy and help others. If we do that then we don’t need to worry or care about when He is coming back. Who knows, maybe He will come back when you have great-great grandchildren and I will have been dead a very long time by then! I am not worried at all because I trust God. Because He has everything figured out, I don’t have to. He can get it done without me! In fact, it will probably be easier for Him to get things done if I don’t know anything about it. We humans have a way of messing everything up when we know what’s going to happen and when, right? And every single year, people write books proving that Jesus will come back this year or that year and a ton of people buy those books and they make some bad decisions because they think they can make plans, and then when it doesn’t happen, they can be in some pretty big trouble.
And during those first forty days of the counting of the omer, Jesus’s disciples were probably very confused at how the great Bible scholars had all been so wrong too. But I also imagine that they were learning so much from Jesus and were so glad to have Him alive again that they weren’t upset about it at all. Can you imagine getting your Bible studies from Jesus? Man, I am wrong sometimes but He was never wrong about anything. And He went through the entire Bible with them showing all the parts that talk about Him. Don’t you wish that someone had written all of it down for us to read??? But I guess that we just weren’t ever meant to know everything. And even the disciples were wrong about things later and Jesus had to correct their wrong ideas—like when Peter didn’t understand that it was okay for him to eat at the same table with people who aren’t Jewish. During those first forty days, a lot of things changed. Jesus’s brothers started to believe that He really was the Messiah and not just crazy like they had thought before. All the people who ran away came back to Him, and I bet they were very embarrassed, but Jesus forgave them and didn’t yell at them or send them away. Jesus was very generous. Most regular people would be so angry that they would never trust those people again but Jesus knew that they were going to run away before it even happened and He also knew that they wouldn’t be so prideful anymore and they would be willing to die for Him, which they mostly all did many years later.
On the fortieth day of the counting of the omer, Jesus told them not to go anywhere—and to stay in Jerusalem for ten more days because something amazing was going to happen. He told them that God, the Father was going to keep His promise to send them the Holy Spirit. And that was really special because in the Hebrew Scriptures, people rarely were filled with the Holy Spirit. Prophets, Kings, High Priests, Moses and the seventy elders, and the two men who were responsible for making the Tabernacle in the wilderness—they were but the people around them weren’t. And so, this was different because now God was going to pour out His Holy Spirit into just regular people who followed Jesus. Not just artists or prophets or leaders but poor fishermen and former tax collectors and normal men and women. That was exactly what John the Baptist had said years before, and the prophet Joel as well. Joel said that the spirit of God would be poured out on ordinary girls and boys, young people and old people, men and women, servants as well as free people—everyone who believes Jesus. Not just people the world thought were important. And it wouldn’t just be Jews either, although for about ten years that’s the only people who believed Jesus. Soldiers and slaves and rich people who used to worship idols, they would be included too—but right now the disciples didn’t know that. And now there weren’t just twelve, or even seventy-two, but a hundred and twenty of them.
But they were still confused. Wanna know what they actually asked Him? They asked Him if He was going to “restore the Kingdom to Israel” right away. That means they were still wanting Him to be that fighting Messiah who would go to war with the Romans so that they could be their own Kingdom again. But Jesus had different plans, plans that His disciples still couldn’t understand yet. They wanted the Romans who had been hurting them for so long gone and dead but Jesus wanted the Romans to be saved. After all they had gone through with Him and learned from Him, they still didn’t understand all that He came to do. And we’re the same way still, to this very day. But Jesus just said to them, “You know what? That stuff isn’t for you to know—not how or if or when—that’s the Father’s business and not yours. Here’s what you need to be concerned with—the Holy Spirit will come just as I promised and when that happens, you will get the power to do amazing things and you will use that power to tell everyone about me. You will tell everyone in Jerusalem about me, and in Judea, and you will even tell the Samaritans about me even though you hate them. And then you will keep going until absolutely everyone knows about me.”
You know, we can spend a lot of time with Jesus and still get a lot of things about Him and about the Bible and about God and the Holy Spirit all wrong. Sometimes that happens because we want something really bad and we spend too much time thinking about it. All their lives, they had suffered because of the pagans around them and especially the Romans and the Greeks. They were tired of it and nobody wants for their terrible enemies to be forgiven and to be part of the family and the Kingdom of God unless God really changes them a lot first. I know that has been very true in my own life and it will almost certainly be true with you as well. We humans are more interested in hurting the people who hurt us than we are in forgiving them and praying for them and even wanting God to help them, right? God just makes us weird when we start believing Jesus and following Him.
But then Jesus left them. A cloud swallowed Him up and then He was gone. As they were looking up in the sky, two angels started speaking to them and asked why they were looking up in the sky—and told them that Jesus would return in the same way that He disappeared. But they didn’t say when or even where or anything like that. Jesus had given them their orders and it was time to get to work. Their first job was to count the next ten days leading up to the Spring Festival of Pentecost—a Greek word that means “fifty days” or really “fifty count” Imagine the long conversations they had, well into the night and early the next morning and all through the days that followed. They probably ate meals with Lazarus, Mary and Martha, who lived just two miles away. Jesus would have returned to God the Father on a Thursday, and Pentecost always happened on a Sunday. People would be coming, like a huge parade, from all over Judea and the Galilee with offerings of their best produce—veggies and fruits and nuts. They would march their baskets full of food up to the Temple; they would give it to the priest and say, “My father was a wandering Aramean. He went down to Egypt with just a handful of people and lived there as a foreigner with no land of his own. There he became a great and powerful nation with many people. But the Egyptians abused us and treated us badly because we had no power or way to defend ourselves, and forced us to work very hard as slaves. So, we called out to the Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the Lord heard all of our crying and saw how miserable we were, how hard they forced us to work, and how they did whatever they wanted to do to us just because they could. Then the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, with terrifying power, and with signs and wonders. He led us here and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. I have now brought the first of the land’s produce that you, Lord, have given me.”
And while they were doing all of that, all 120 of His disciples were gathered together and praying. They didn’t own any land and so didn’t have baskets of food to present at the Temple, but they had something much better. They were about to be filled with the Spirit and when that happened, they would be able to tell everyone about Jesus. But we’ll talk about that in another six or seven weeks.
I love you. I am praying for you. I want you to think as you count the days leading up to Pentecost, about those wonderful times Jesus had with His friends, His followers, His brothers, and especially His mom.