The King of Sodom wants to make Abram an offer that he figures can’t be refused. But Abram has other ideas because of his growing trust in God. But why does that rascally king think he can accomplish and why is he even doing it?
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to this week’s 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).
So, last week we met the very awesome and very polite King of Salem, Melchizedek. He came out of the city after Abram’s mighty victory over the four kings and offered him bread and wine and blessed him because Melchizedek was a priest who served the same God that Abram served! That’s our God! Abram liked him so much that he gave him a tithe (that’s one out of every ten things) of all the stuff he had taken back from those four kings as they ran them out of the country. Melchizedek had his city and he hadn’t been attacked, but he still treated Abram like a VIP—a very important person. Melchizedek gave Abram a lot of honor and respect in front of all of Abram’s friends. That made Abram look really good and in those days, that was very important. With Melchizedek for a friend, Abram’s name was getting more and more famous. After all, he saved all those kings and all their people and so everyone should be very grateful and singing songs about how great Abram and his God are. Or at least you would think so…but Abram hasn’t met the rude dude from Sodom yet, the skunk who ran from the battle and hid in the sticky asphalt pits while his people got hauled off the be sold as slaves. He probably ought to just sneak off and live in a cave alone for the rest of his life. But he won’t.
Then the king of Sodom said to Abram, “Give me all the people, but you can keep all the animals and loot.” But Abram said to the king of Sodom, “I absolutely promised the Lord, God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth, that I will not take a thread or the strap of a stinky sandal or anything that belongs to you, so you can never say, ‘Abram is only rich because I gave him everything I have’. I am not going to take anything except what the servants ate while they were rescuing everyone. But as for the men who came with me—Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre—they can decide what they want to do with their own shares.” (Gen 14:21-24)
First of all, I want you to notice what he didn’t do. Melchizedek was grateful and generous to Abram. He didn’t even have to come out of his city while Abram went by, but Melchizedek was classy. I guess that is why his name means “King of Righteousness” and since he is the king of Salem, which means peace, he is also the King of Peace. Remember all the awful, silly nicknames the Bible gave the five kings and how the king of Sodom’s name was Bera, which means evil? Well, after Melchizedek acted like the perfect gentleman and host, little king evil-sticky-britches walks right up to Abram, bold as you please, and starts telling Abram what to do. You know, as if he is still a king. And he even manages to do it in a way that sounds like he thinks he is being generous! You know, like all the stuff actually belongs to him! Or like, maybe he thought he was next in the tithe line.
“Yes, all the people, they are mine and you will give them to me pronto. I don’t care about anything else, their belongings, their animals, nothing—you can take all of that away with you as a display of my generosity because I am just that awesome.” Or maybe, “Let me take all these people off your hands and you can accept all the loot as a gift so you don’t have the hassle of dealing with them.” Okay, okay, so the Bible doesn’t say that, but we are playing the “what if” game because it makes it funnier. But king sticky-britches doesn’t have much of an army anymore and his clothes are probably smudged with gooey black sticky asphalt. But why does he even care about the people when he could have all the stuff instead? That surprises a lot of people, but the answer is pretty simple. Being king isn’t about having a lot of money. It’s about having a lot of power and without people to rule over, you aren’t a king. Being able to boss everyone around and make them work in the asphalt pits means that he will get his own money back even if the people are starving. I don’t think he wants the people back so that they can all go home and sing Kumbaya and be grateful to return to their homes because they are a big happy family—I think he wants them for slave labor so he can have everything he lost back again. And I have been wondering. He asked for all the people—maybe he isn’t just asking for the people who lived in Sodom but everyone else too! After all, the four kings would have taken only the people they could get a good amount of money for. Everyone else?–they would have left them behind in the cities. If king sticky britches gets all the strong young people, he will quickly become the most powerful king on the plains. It may not be a big kingdom, but it would be his. There seems to be a lot more here than meets the eye but one thing for sure—we just don’t get any sort of idea that the people would be in good hands with the King of Sodom.
But our man Abram isn’t fooled for one second. King sticky britches is trying to distract and tempt Abram with stuff, but Abram already has a ton of stuff that he got from lying to Pharaoh when he didn’t trust God to protect him. He had so much stuff that he had to send his nephew Lot away. And it is really hard not to be tempted by stuff, stuff and more stuff—even something as small as a piece of candy. But people who need more and more are called greedy in the Bible and we can be greedy for a whole lot of things. Maybe it’s money or popularity or sports trophies or food or more toys or whatever. Food is a tough one once we get greedy about having more of it than everyone else or more than we actually need. Food is a tough one for me, actually. And the king of Sodom knows that people are greedy and he is going to try to use that to get what he wants. He wants power. But Abram knows this, and he has prepared himself beforehand.
You see, Abram has already protected himself from temptation by swearing an oath, which is an absolute promise, to God not to take even a tiny thread of anything that came from Sodom and the people there and especially their king. First of all, I don’t think it was in Abram’s nature to leave the people he rescued with absolutely nothing. After all, he didn’t go so that he could get rich. Abram went because his nephew needed to be rescued (and not for the last time, either) because that’s what family did in those days. This was about honor and not about loot. But he was only one of the men who went on the rescue mission—Aner, Eschol and Mamre had a say in the matter too. I am betting they took the stuff because they had a right to it. After all, it is better to be poor and free than a slave because there was no telling how they would treat you and it was totally legal to kill you if they wanted. Or worse. So, Melchizedek got a tenth of Abram’s share, and the three brothers would probably have taken almost all the rest. We don’t actually know what happened to the people or to the kings! The Bible never says but we do know that about fifteen years later, the city of Sodom was worse than it had ever been before. The people of Sodom were terrible bullies—all the men of the city is what the Bible says—and they were incredibly cruel to visitors.
But Abram was telling the king of Sodom that God was his only patron and that was a big deal in the ancient world. That’s actually the main part of what we are going to learn today. So, what does a society do when there are no banks? That’s tough because it means that most people can’t get a loan for what they need—whether that was to buy seeds or a plow or oxen to pull the plow, or a threshing board, or anything! We have it so much easier now because people can actually buy what they need but when Abram lived, there was nothing like that. If a poor farmer needed those things, they would go to a rich person and they would ask for something called benefaction. And this was true in Jesus’s time as well, it was the normal way of getting things that were expensive and difficult to find .
It went something like this, “Oh great master (or mistress because a lot of rich women gave people money to do things too), look upon your humble servant with graciousness and pity. You are too excellent not to be aware that my family lost everything in the fires last year and so we now find ourselves in need of seed for planting and a yoked pair of oxen. Most excellent master, if you will look upon our situation with kindness and provide what we need, your bakers will never lack for the very best of our grain and your steward will never lack fresh vegetables and herbs for your table! And we will tell everyone near and far of your greatness and mercy and generosity for the rest of our lives! And we and our children will always be loyal to your family.”
And so the rich man or woman would provide the family with what they needed to start their farm again and the family would immediately begin by telling all their friends and neighbors how amazing these people were, and not only that but they would show up bright and early on various mornings at the rich people’s home to see if they need anything done. Perhaps the son or the daughter would come by and offer their services running errands or delivering messages or doing this or that job around the home or on their property. This was all their way of showing their gratitude, their thankfulness to the family. And because that family gave back to the rich people in this way, because they could never afford to pay them back any other way, when they ask again for something else, the rich people will give them what they need. And as long as the poor family, who are called clients, keep being grateful for what they are getting, they will also keep receiving whatever it is that they need. And the reason for this is actually pretty interesting.
You see, money wasn’t nearly as important in the ancient world as a person’s reputation, or status, or honor. And when I say honor, I am not talking about how we would call someone honorable for being honest or for rescuing puppies from a fire or whatever. They didn’t care at all about that sort of thing and they considered both of those to be stupid most of the time. This was the world that Abram was born into and why he didn’t really mind lying to the Pharaoh of Egypt about Sarai just being his sister and not his wife. They figured it was just smart to lie to everyone and anyone unless they were actually family. When one of the ten commandments told them that lying was a bad thing, that was a surprise to them. What they considered honorable was totally different. To them, the people with honor were like the popular kids. And everyone who has ever been around other kids knows that popularity has nothing to do with whether you are a good person or not. Popular people are just popular and the reasons why aren’t always entirely clear. But in the ancient world, you knew exactly why someone was popular! And some of the reasons are the same then and now.
First of all, you had a lot of honor if your family was important. If they were politicians or related to the king or a general or anything like that. Second, you had a lot of honor if you accomplished something amazing, like if someone was a war hero or a great artist or a famous poet. Third, you had a lot of honor if someone important gave you an important job. You could be born into a family that already had a high honor status or you could earn honor through the things you did. And these rich people who gave away money and supplies were doing it not because they were kind but because that is how they kept their honor, or their good reputation in the community. They were buying their popularity and they had to because they were competing with other rich families to be on the top of the honor heap. If they stopped giving people things then people would stop talking about how great they were and no one would hang around their courtyard in the morning looking for favors and the family would develop shame. Not shame like being embarrassed for having done something really terrible like killing someone, because you could kill people and still have a ton of honor in the community. Which is, like, totally messed up, right? But shame because the whole world was like a ladder and honor meant you were at the top of the ladder and shame meant that you were down at the bottom. And they did a lot of things to get more honor that were pretty awful, but we can talk about that another time.
The people who gave the money and supplies were called benefactors or patrons, and the people who got the stuff and were expected to make their benefactors look good were called clients. They needed each other and so even though it could be upside down and really messed up, it worked out for a lot of people. In a world without banks and loans or rich relatives, this was how people survived. But if the people weren’t grateful and didn’t do things to help their benefactors, the whole thing just fell apart. And before we talk about Abram and the King of Sodom, let’s look at what Jesus had to say about it. When Jesus sent out His disciples in teams of two to go and preach and work miracles throughout the region of Galilee, He told them, “Freely you have received, and so freely give.” But what does that even mean?
Well, Jesus was telling them that He was their benefactor, and they were his clients. He gave them everything they needed to go out and preach—He gave them the message to preach and He gave them the power they needed to do amazing things like heal sick people, raise dead people so they would be alive again, cure leprosy, and chuck demons out of people. And He had given it to them for free but in return they needed to do two things (1) they needed to be grateful and tell everyone about Jesus’s message and to make everyone honor Him, and (2) they needed to do for others what Jesus had done for them. In return, people would have given them a place to stay while they were in town and they would have fed them. Because they understood what was happening, they wouldn’t just take and take and take and give nothing back. Jesus is telling them not to demand money, just like they hadn’t paid Him, but that people would take care of their needs in return for what they were doing. Otherwise, Jesus would have just called a bunch of rich people who could afford to be His disciples. We honor Jesus by being generous with the people He sends to help us. But Jesus told His disciples to be very careful and not to favor the rich people over the poor people because that was like the opposite of the Kingdom of Heaven. In this world, we are always going to be judged for how much money we have, how we look, what our jobs are, if we are good athletes, and all that kind of stuff. But, in God’s Kingdom we are judged based on what we have done! Someone who spends their life translating Bibles into new languages or cares for orphans or refugees—they are the ones who have high honor in God’s Kingdom, where money and how we look and if we are good at sports just mean absolutely nothing. God isn’t impressed with those things. He wants us to show the world what He is like—that’s a job that everyone can be equally good at.
And the King of Sodom… well… Abram was a rich man, and his friends were rich men and seemed like mighty warriors at this point and so little sticky britches wants to act like he is Abram’s benefactor and patron and that what Abram has is all because of the generosity and greatness of the king of Sodom. That’s what it meant when Abram said that he didn’t want the king of Sodom to be able to say that he made Abram a rich man. Doing that would give a whole lot of honor to the king of Sodom and he just doesn’t deserve to have any of it. The person who gives was seen as better and more honored than the person who received the gift. And so, the king of Sodom would have been able to say that he was greater than Abram—even though Abram was the one to win the battle and rescue the people and their stuff. The king of Sodom should have been on his knees thanking Abram and treating Abram as his benefactor because Abram did something for the King of Sodom that he couldn’t do for himself. In fact, he and the other four kings had failed miserably! I tell ya, that rude dude had a lot of nerve trying to pretend like he was doing Abram a favor!
Abram told little sticky britches that his benefactor and patron was God and only God and that he would never accept even the smallest string or stinky sandal strap. Abram was telling the king of Sodom that his stuff wasn’t even remotely worth having. What Abram said to the king of Sodom was very insulting and Abram really shamed him. Abram didn’t recognize him as a mighty king and he didn’t recognize him as being much of anything. Abram was saying, “You aren’t better than me or my friends.” And that would have made the king furious and especially if his people saw it happen. A king could only stay a king if everyone agreed that he had the highest honor status in the city—if he was the most famous and most powerful and the richest of them all. But without the people, he had no power—he was just a regular guy. Without his stuff, he wasn’t rich either—just a regular guy. And Abram wasn’t going to let him be famous. Since the guy who rescued everyone is disrespecting their king, he might not be a king for much longer. That’s how it all worked in the ancient world and still does in some places to this day. What happened to that king amounts to one huge kick in the pants. And we will never hear of the evil king of Sodom again.
And that is the very end of Genesis chapter fourteen and chapter fifteen is one of the most important chapters in the Bible!! But before we get to that, I want you to notice something. Remember what God told Abram at the beginning of chapter twelve? Let’s take a look:
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)
Why is this important now? Because finally, when Abram doesn’t have anything to do with Lot after rescuing him, he has finally totally obeyed God. He left his home—check. He left behind his relatives—check. He left behind his father’s house—check. And he went to the Land of Canaan—check. Finally, Abram is totally cut off from everything and everyone he left behind and it is just him and his own household and God now. How will God respond? What will God do? In chapter fifteen, things are going to get really exciting and you are going to see and learn things that we just haven’t seen or learned up until this point. We will even see the beginnings of God’s plan to give us Jesus as a Savior. But as we have seen, Abram had to learn to trust God and he had to learn how to begin to obey Him. Abram won’t always get it right and in some chapters, he is a total mess but God’s plans don’t rely on Abram being a perfect person—or on you and me being perfect either (good thing or I would have messed everything up already). God’s plans depend on God. God’s plans depend on God being perfect. And we can all be very relieved about that.
In chapter fifteen, Abram is going to get some brand new promises—and God is even going to tell him what will happen to his children and grandchildren in the future!
I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to remember the big lesson from chapter fourteen—that even when God doesn’t get mentioned and doesn’t seem to be a part of the story, He is always there, always paying attention, and always working behind the scenes in big and small ways to work things out.