Before we start chapter fifteen of Genesis, I want to talk about what will start happening in chapter sixteen and continue all the way to the end of the Bible. There are a lot of bullies and God doesn’t like it. We’re going to look at some surprising bullies and also the people who were bullied and read a Psalm that tells us how people who are rich, powerful, strong, and popular are expected to treat those who aren’t. We’re also going to talk about our own responsibilities and how we can be bullies too and what the consequences are if we choose to do that.
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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 tweaked a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context).
Today is a different sort of program than I usually do. Today we’re going to talk about something I have a ton of experience with—and that’s being bullied. I was bullied as a child, a teenager, and even now as a Bible teacher. What? Bullied for teaching the Bible? Oh yeah, totally—but only by other believers. And even though it happens, it isn’t right. And the bullying isn’t my fault or because there is anything wrong with me. There’s something wrong with the bullies because bullying people is about not being anything like Jesus. It’s about not loving people. It’s about thinking that they are better than other people and those people deserving to be treated badly. It is about people who don’t want to be kind and understanding when people are different in any way. Sometimes it is about jealousy, but usually not. Sometimes the people who bully others have been bullied or hurt themselves, but not always. Bullying is something that just about everyone is capable of, but it is a choice some people make. Bullying is complicated but it is always wrong. In fact, when one of my kids decided he was going to be a bully along with his best friend, I had to take some pretty drastic steps to get him to stop. And that was in the second grade!! And he stopped because he did not like how I handled it.
And the Bible is full of bullies but it is also full of God telling us how much He hates it. A lot of the laws He gave to the children of Israel were about not being bullies and how He is on the side of the people being bullied and He hears it when they are crying out to Him. We’re talking about it now because starting after chapter fifteen, we’re going to run into not just kids but also grownups who are acting like bullies. And some pretty surprising people end up acting like bullies, including people we want to respect, like Abram’s wife Sarai. Laban bullied his son in law Jacob. Joseph bullied his brothers because he was the favorite and they bullied him even worse when they finally got the chance. Pharaoh and his taskmasters bullied the Israelites when they were slaves in Egypt. The Amalekites bullied and killed the children of Israel in the wilderness. Peninnah bullied Hannah because Hannah couldn’t have any babies. Saul really bullied David badly and even tried to kill him because he was jealous. Rehoboam bullied people so badly that it split the Kingdom of Israel in half forever! We talked about the evil Haman a few months ago and how he bullied Mordecai and the Jews in Susa. Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were all bullied for serving God in Babylon. Antiochus Epiphanes bullied the Jews and wouldn’t allow them to have Bibles or worship God the way He told them to. And Jesus? He was bullied worse than anyone. And over the last 2000 years, many people who follow Jesus have been bullied and even killed. But the worst thing of all is when people who say they are following Jesus have hurt and bullied people who don’t because it makes Jesus look hateful instead of loving.
First of all, let’s look at what God says about how people who are strong need to treat people who are weak, and what is going to happen if they hurt them instead. Psalm 72 is a really important one because it tells us that God expects the strong to protect the weak and the rich to protect the poor and the powerful to help the powerless. God doesn’t want kings or queens to hurt people but to help them. And there are a lot of words that the Bible translators use that mean the same thing as being bullied. Sometimes we see the word persecuted, and also afflicted. So how about when we read Psalm 72, I will put the words bully and bullied in there so it is easier to understand, okay? And this is the last Psalm that King David wrote, a prayer to God for his son Solomon, before he died:
God, teach your kings how to do what is right when people need to be judged, and make the sons of the kings fair in whatever they decide. He will be fair with your people and will do what is right when people have been bullied. Let the mountains bring peace to the people and let the hills bring people together to do good to one another. May the king do what is right for the bullied, and help the poor, and punish those who are bullying them as long as the sun continues to shine and the moon glows at night, forever and ever….Let all other kings bow down before him and let their nations serve him because he will rescue the poor when they cry out for help and the bullied when everyone else abandons them. The king will be merciful and feel sorry for the people who are poor and can’t help themselves and he will save their lives. He will rescue them when they are being bullied and beaten because their lives are like a treasure to him…. (Ps 72:1-5,11-13)
In Isaiah 53, there is like a whole chapter talking about how Jesus was going to be bullied by the chief priests and the Temple guards and especially by the Roman soldiers, but it also talked about how God was going to make sure that everyone knew that Jesus was innocent and didn’t deserve to be hurt—and God made Jesus king of the entire world too. So, it’s like, “Not only were you guys totally wrong and out of line and acting evil, but I am going to make Jesus the boss over all of you to prove how great He is!” Speaking of which, that same sort of thing happened with Joseph too!
Why did God rescue the Israelites from slavery? Because He heard them crying out to Him! Then the Lord said, “I have seen how miserable my people are in Egypt and have heard them crying out to me because of the people who have enslaved them and are bullying them to make them work harder and harder. I know about how they are suffering, and I have come down to rescue them from the power of the Egyptians who are forcing them to work as slaves and even killed their babies and I will bring them from that land to a good land that is big enough for them, a land flowing with milk and honey… So because the Israelites’ cry for help has come to me, and I have also seen the way the Egyptians are treating them, Moses, you need to go to them. I am sending you to Pharaoh so that you may lead my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” (Ex 5:7-10)
And there are many more verses about what happens when the rich and strong are unfair and hurtful to the poor and the weak. Over and over again, God warns them that if they are behaving badly toward people who are vulnerable, which means people who are easy to hurt and get away with it, that when they cry out and complain to God to do something about it, that God will hear them and the bully will be guilty. We aren’t robots. God lets us be mean but that doesn’t mean that we are going to get away with it forever. Jesus even took it one step further and was even more strict about it. In Matthew 25, He told a story about how people would be judged when He came back. He said that refusing to feed someone who is starving, or not giving clothes to someone who has nothing to wear, or not taking care of people who can’t take care of themselves, and a few other examples, would make us into people whom Jesus will say that He doesn’t even know when He comes back. He won’t want to admit to even knowing who we are if we are being that mean even when we have more than enough for ourselves. In another example, the apostle Paul was telling the believers in Corinth that there is no excuse for someone hogging all the food at a feast and leaving nothing for the poor and hungry person sitting beside him. Other verses in the Bible say that if you don’t pay a poor person right away when you owe them money for work, that it is a wicked thing to do.
Now, the reason we are talking about this is because, after chapter fifteen, we are going to get into a lot of situations where people are acting like total bullies to people who are weaker than they are, people who aren’t as rich or powerful or whatever. Sometimes, the people doing the bullying will be people who are the big heroes in the Bible and it is very tempting to say, “Well, if so and so did that, then the other person must deserve it.” But when we look closely at what the Bible says, the Bible makes no excuses for how they are behaving—at all. And that’s a wonderful thing because the Bible doesn’t give the rich and strong permission to bully the poor and weak. The Bible tells us that the only human being who was ever perfect is Jesus! The rest of us are really complicated and sometimes we can be really rotten to other people just because we can. But there are always going to be consequences. Sometimes we can see them and sometimes we can’t but they are always there.
In the Bible, we see people bullying their slaves as though they aren’t even human beings and even though that is how slaves were thought of back in those times, the only person in the Bible who ever gives God a name, “the god who sees me” is not only a slave but also a woman and even though no one else was calling her by her name, God did. And because God saw her and what had been done to her, God made her promises that He kept and she went from being a slave to being the mother of a very important man. Joseph was his father’s favorite child and because of it, he specifically picked on the kids of his father’s lower ranking wives. And although God had important plans for Joseph, he had to learn not to treat people that way and what would happen if he did. Joseph’s brothers turned on him and sold him as a slave, and then he was later thrown in jail when he hadn’t done anything wrong. Joseph suffered for many years because of how he had treated his brothers when he should have been kind.
Joseph ended up saving all of Egypt and the nations around Egypt from starvation, but one day people forgot how awesome Joseph was and they began bullying his family. They forced them to be slaves and to build their temples and storage cities, and when there got to be so many of them that the Egyptians got scared of them, they started killing all of the baby boys! But it was because of that, that God put his plans into action to rescue His people from Egypt and to do to the Egyptians what they had done to their slaves. Because of what Joseph had done, they had plenty of food but God was going to take that away from them because they weren’t grateful or kind or merciful. Sometimes, God removes His blessings from people so that they won’t be able to hurt anyone anymore. That’s what happened to Egypt, and Sodom and Gomorrah, and Babylon too almost a thousand years later.
Poor Hannah couldn’t have any babies and that was a terrible thing in the ancient world. They didn’t understand medical stuff and so they believed that any woman who couldn’t have kids was cursed for being a sinner. Some people actually still believe that! Her husband had another wife named Peninnah because in those days, men would sometimes have another wife if they couldn’t have kids with the first wife. Peninnah was very cruel to her and bullied her—she had a lot of kids and because of that she felt like she was better than Hannah. But Hannah prayed to God at the festival and promised to give God her child if she could just have one. Hannah did have a baby, the prophet Samuel! And then she had more kids than Peninnah did! Sometimes kings could be terrible bullies too. David had times where he stopped being a good king and became a bad king like they had in the nations around them. He took what he wanted and then when someone wasn’t cooperating with letting him get away with it, he had them killed in a very cowardly way. But God saw, and for the rest of David’s life he paid a high price for what he did.
And we might look at some of this stuff and say, “Hey, I am just kidding when I am picking on people—not like I have killed anyone, right?” But the truth is that kids kill themselves very often because the bullying just gets so bad that they don’t think things will ever change and they decide that being dead is better than being alive. And bullying now is way worse than it was when I was a kid because now you can do terrible things to people and put up a video on YouTube, or record something embarrassing and show it to the world, or just be so cruel in social media comments that someone doesn’t want to be alive anymore. And you know what? When you do those things, you can never take it back or really fix what you did. Words can’t ever be taken back. Things we see can’t ever be unseen. And when the people we hurt cry, God pays attention, and He doesn’t care how many times we have read the Bible or go to church if we are making people wish they were dead. There is a big difference between singing about Him and following Him and acting like Jesus. Just imagine if Jesus and the disciples had made fun of the people who were disabled instead of healing them. What if they had been cruel to the lepers and the people who were being hurt by demons? What if he had sent the five thousand and the four thousand home without feeding them after leading them out into the wilderness to hear Him teach? I have known a lot of people in my life who would do things like that and a lot of them believe that they are following God. But if they really knew Him, they would be kind and merciful when people are in trouble or disabled or hurting. They would know that, compared to God, we are all in trouble, disabled and hurting. When we treat people like that, we are telling Him that He should treat us like that. He is kind and patient and doesn’t do that until there is no choice, but when we hurt people who have less than we have and say that we are Christians, we make God look like an evil, cruel, bully instead of a God who is on the side of people who are bullied!
Some people are surprised when they hear the commandments that God gave Moses about bullying—this one should really make us think a good long time before picking on anyone! A few verses before the second most important commandment of all to love our neighbors the way we want to be loved, we see these two “Do not bully your neighbor or steal from him in any way. If you have hired someone to do a job and they do it, you had better pay them right away. Don’t ever say anything nasty to someone who can’t hear anything or put anything in front of someone who can’t see so that they will trip and hurt themselves. People who do that need to be more afraid of what God will do to protect people who can’t defend themselves; I am the Lord.” (Lev 19:13-14)
But you know what? There’s more than one way to say something nasty to a person who can’t hear you—like gossip! Gossip is a form of bullying where you say terrible things about someone when they aren’t around and can’t do anything about it. Or how about when someone on YouTube says terrible things about someone else and anyone in the world can listen and they just believe it even if there isn’t any proof? That happened to me once and dang, when ten thousand people think something terrible about you that isn’t true, it really hurts. But that was just that guy’s way of trying to bully me. And you know what? God protected me and He blessed me because when He told me not to get even, I didn’t and good things have happened to me and that bully hasn’t been blessed at all for what he did. Of course, if that man had loved me like we are supposed to love our neighbors, he wouldn’t have made that video even if what he was saying was true. God showed me how to love the person who hurt me by not getting even and by letting Him handle it. Believe me, if I had tried to get back at him it wouldn’t have changed his mind and it would have made an even bigger mess and the guy would have sinned even more than he already had and then I would be sinning too! If I had gone after that guy, then God wouldn’t be able to trust me to teach you guys about how loving and patient He is with us even when we are being mean sometimes.
And we can also put things in the way of people that will cause them to trip and fall even if they aren’t blind. For example, in a lot of places it is hard to get a job if the people who own the business don’t like the color of your skin or they don’t want to give you a good education. The reason they don’t want to be good to people of a different color or religion or who come from a different country is because someone tripped them up and told them that those people who are different can’t be trusted, or aren’t as smart, or are all violent, or criminals, or just whatever. And those things can happen too in places where they don’t believe women are just as good as men. Sometimes girls aren’t even allowed to go to school or do certain jobs! When we tell those kinds of untrue stories about people and other people believe those stories, then we can say that they are tripping over our lies and when they hurt other people based on our lies, even more people trip and those people actually do tend to get hurt. I remember once when one of my sons, who has disabilities, wanted to go to a summer camp and I asked one of the people who worked at it if they were open to people with disabilities and the guy said, “No, they would slow us down too much.” Wow, he didn’t even know what my son’s disability was and he was making a whole lot of assumptions about what he can and can’t do! Then I told someone else about it and she said, “That’s crazy, how on earth are Christian kids supposed to learn how to lead people with special needs if they aren’t ever around them in this kind of setting?” And that was even worse because she was assuming that special needs people need to be led when they can be just as awesome leaders as anyone else can! And so my son has these stumbling blocks in front of him to trip him up not because of the parts of his body that don’t work normally but because of what people assume is true about his abilities.
People tend to be afraid of what they don’t understand or anything that is different and so people can be bullied over just about anything and when bullies can’t find a reason they are just too happy to make something up. Humans tend to hate anything that is different than they are used to or feel comfortable with and that is a big problem we have. That is something that Jesus really wants to deal with. I mean, when we really think about it, it is incredibly silly to look at a stranger and think that you know anything about them just because of the color of their skin or their religion or the language they speak or what job they have or how educated they are! Today I went to the hardware store in overalls and with my hair in a messy bun with a smudged face because I ran out of staples for my staple gun when I was installing soffit baffles over the garage. No one could look at me and know anything about me. They wouldn’t know that I am a Bible teacher or where or if I went to college, or what kind of job I do or if I was married (because I take off my wedding ring when I am doing really dirty work) or if I have kids. They wouldn’t know what my hobbies are or what I am good or bad at. And you know what? The same thing is true for everyone you meet. When we decide things about people based on how they look to us, that’s really not fair or good or smart. Especially when we decide bad things about them or decide that we are better than they are.
You know what? You never know who the most important people are in God’s Kingdom just by looking at them. Just because someone is a pastor or a priest or does things that seem really good on the outside doesn’t mean that they are making God happy. And just because it seems like someone else can’t possibly be doing great work for God doesn’t mean anything at all. Some people are loud about what they do while others are very quiet. God isn’t impressed with outside appearances—He cares about who we are on the inside and how we treat people. People can look fabulous on the outside and be very ugly on the inside. Other people say all the right things but then when people aren’t looking they do all the wrong things. You know what? Even though I teach you guys every week, you don’t know if I am a good person or a bad person and there really isn’t any way for you to find out. But with bullies, they treat people the way they think they deserve to be treated. They decide a person deserves to be treated badly and they do it. But Jesus took all of us who deserve to be treated badly and He loves us as family. Jesus allowed terrible bullies to kill Him so that we could live forever with Him. And not only that, He forgave them because He wanted them to be with Him too! He didn’t want Satan to bully us anymore. So, when we are being like Jesus, we are kind and loving and when we are acting like Satan, we are being bullies in our thoughts and in our words and in the things we do.
I love you. I am praying for you. And it would break my heart if I found out that anyone was hurting you. It would break my heart even more if I found out that you were being a bully to other kids. I want you to be like Jesus because we need a whole lot more of Him and none of Satan.