Genesis 15 is one of the most important chapters in all of the Bible! It is where God finally makes His covenant with Abram, promises to deal with the sins of humanity Himself, gives someone a vision, and says “Fear not!” This week, I will explain the difference between dreams and visions, talk about what the “word of the Lord” might be, and the difference between when God, the angels, and Jesus tell people to “Fear not!”
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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 without having to read an entire chapter every week!)
Hey there! Welcome to Genesis chapter fifteen—one of the most exciting chapters in the entire Bible. So much is going to happen here, and because of what happens here, that we’ll be talking about this all the way through the Gospels because this is the chapter where God promises Abram that He will pay the price for our sins someday. What does that mean? That means Jesus, of course, but it also means that God has never believed that we could be absolutely perfect or get everything right. Do you remember what God said after Noah sacrificed all those critters after he got off the ark? God said something like, “These guys are hopeless and they are always going to have evil thoughts—I won’t destroy them all ever again because it just won’t solve the problem. I will give them a rainbow to look at after it rains so that they can be reminded that I made a promise and when I look at it, I will remember my promise too.” God must get really frustrated with our nonsense, right? But He also loves us. He made a decision to do a new thing after the flood. And it’s a good thing too because stuff went wrong with Noah’s family right away. What was God’s new thing? And just so you know, God does new things all the time—He even says so in the Bible. Instead of starting out with two new people in a perfect Garden paradise, God is going to take a man and his wife who live in Babylon and who have no kids and make a new kind of people out of them. They are going to be different from the rest of the world because they will know the real God who created the heavens and the earth and every amazing thing that happens to them will be because God made it happen. They will live miraculous lives—not perfect lives or easy lives but lives full of miracles and signs and wonders—and they will both learn to trust God. Mostly because they will find out bad stuff happens when they don’t! Not so different from you and me!
A quick bit of background here because two weeks have gone by since our last lesson in Abram. Do you remember the four kings and how they went to war against the five wicked kings? And how they kidnapped everyone, including Abram’s nephew Lot, and took all their critters and stuff? And Abram and his buddies went after them and chased them all the way out of the Land of Canaan and rescued everyone and their stuff and brought them back so they wouldn’t be sold as slaves? Then Abram met Melchizedek, the good King of Salem (aka Jerusalem), who loved God, and the wicked king of Sodom who told him that he could go ahead and keep all the stuff (like it was his to give away, right? WRONG!) but he wanted all the people for himself. Which sounds pretty sketchy. I think he wanted them so that he could be the only king and have a bunch of slave labor but that’s just my opinion. One way or another, this guy was bad news. Abram told him to take a long hike off a short cliff. Kinda. But Abram resisted the temptation to take the stuff and he didn’t take Lot back either. Lot was living with those evil people, on purpose, before the war; then afterward, he went right back to live with them again. Abram did not need that kind of hassle. So finally, Abram has done absolutely everything that God told him to back in chapter twelve. He’s left his family, and his land, and followed God to the promised Land. What will God do next?
After all that happened (how long? We don’t know!), the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: Don’t be scared, Abram. I am your protector; your reward for trusting me will be very great. (Gen 15:1-2)
Whoa, dang! That would be really cool, right? How Abram handled all of that made God really happy. Remember that some days Abram trusts God a lot and some days he doesn’t—just the same as everyone else! But Abram is learning. He doesn’t need to fight wars to get money or slaves or land or anything like that—all Abram needs is what God gives him. And this is the only time we will ever see Abram fighting. In fact, this is the only war in the whole book of Genesis! None of the patriarchs of the children of Israel (which is what we call Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) will go to war! Except this one time, God does all of their fighting for them. In fact, we will see that’s usually what happens in general when God is the one who wants them to fight—they often don’t end up doing any or much fighting at all! But that’s a story for some other time.
So, Abram made God happy by finally doing everything he had been told to do in the first place (and Lot would have been better off if he had left him back in Haran for sure!). Sometimes other people get all the bad consequences when we don’t do what is right. Lot made mistakes that he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to make if he had stayed with the rest of his family as a younger man who needed to obey the elders of his community. He was on his own when he was too young and foolish. And so now we get a new thing in the Bible. Abram has a vision. That means we need to talk about what a vision is and what it isn’t. A vision isn’t a dream but it is like a dream. When we dream, it is because we are asleep but visions happen when we are awake. A dream can be from God or just our brains taking out the garbage at night. Have you ever dreamed about something you saw on TV or did in school or a place you went? Those are the kinds of dreams I am talking about when I say that our brains are taking out the garbage. If you have a scary dream after seeing something scary, that’s usually your brain trying to deal with information that doesn’t belong there. Dreams from God are entirely different. When I have a dream from God it isn’t usually telling me the future or anything, it is God showing me that He needs to fix something in my life or He is telling me something that I can’t hear when I am awake. God never tells me anything in a dream that I really want to hear. In fact, God rarely tells me anything I want to hear because I don’t need to hear things that I already agree with, right? Visions are like that, but different.
In a vision, you are wide awake but you see things the way God sees them. And God can talk to you in ways that He otherwise couldn’t because we’d flip out and maybe even die if we saw Him how He really is up close and personal. The presence of God is very powerful and so He protects us from it because He doesn’t want to hurt us. Although sometimes He gives us a good dose of it when we need to be seriously dealt with. Years ago, I was in the bathtub thinking about stuff and talking to God, and all of a sudden, I said, “You know, God, I know I should trust You and respect You but I really don’t and it’s not like a switch I can flip on so if you want me to respect You then You are going to have to do something pretty drastic.” And then I had a vision that changed my life because God was standing right in front of me the way that the prophet Ezekiel saw Him. His legs were like burning metal and I could feel how hot they were even in the cold bath water. And His chest and arms were gleaming white like the purest silver, and His eyes were like fire and I just rolled over in the tub and hid and was so terrified. And once He had answered my prayer—because that’s what it was. I was praying to know Him well enough to respect Him. Anyway, once He answered my prayer,
He never had to do anything like that ever again. He doesn’t go around scaring people but I knew that it was a problem in my life that I didn’t really understand and appreciate how awesome and powerful He was and so He showed me. And so that was a good thing, even though I try not to think about it very much. That was not a dream because I was awake. That was God visiting me in a vision and if it hadn’t been a vision I probably would have been burnt to a crisp.
And it might sound like God wanted me to be scared but that isn’t the case at all. God just knew that I couldn’t know Him like I need to unless I knew He was all-powerful. And now, because I know that, and because He has proven to me how much He loves me by sticking with me even when times are just awful, His power makes me feel safe. And His power can make you feel safe too. But we do need to know that He isn’t like us. Or like our parents or teachers or leaders or anyone we have or will ever meet. Our job is to become more and more like Him! Of course, we do that by becoming like Jesus. That’s why we are called image-bearers in Genesis 1. Our job is to look as much like Him as possible so that the world will want to know Him and not avoid Him. Sometimes the way we act makes people want to avoid God entirely! God has a number of jobs to do in each of us so that He can rule over our hearts and our minds and our actions. He has to gain our trust, our respect, and our loyalty. That means that we have to believe that whatever He is telling us is the best thing we can do (or not do), that His judgment is way better than ours and that He is way smarter, and that we owe it to Him to cooperate with His plans for our lives and the lives of everyone around us. And that’s not easy because we tend to think that we are the ones who know best.
So, God didn’t tell me “Don’t be afraid,” when He gave me that vision because I needed to be afraid right then and there. I haven’t needed to be afraid ever again, let me tell you! But in the Bible, there are many examples of God, Jesus, and the angels telling people “Don’t be afraid,” or “Fear not!” Right here with Abram, this is the first time in the Bible that anyone says it to anybody. When Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, God didn’t tell them “Don’t be afraid,” because what they had done was incredibly serious and they really did need to be more than a bit scared—which they definitely were when they hid themselves from the sound of Him coming to the Garden to investigate what had gone wrong. I mean, it wasn’t like they took Him by surprise, right? It wasn’t like He turned His back for one minute and lost track of them. Sometimes, we do stuff that makes us really scared about our parents or teachers, or neighbors finding out. My kids did something so awful when they were nine years old that I called the cops on them and the cops made sure they gave them a severe talking to. I didn’t want them to be scared of the police—I just wanted them to respect the law. And it worked. And one of them is going to the Police Academy next year! Isn’t that funny?
But throughout the Bible, when God or the angels appear in some way to humans, usually the first thing they say is, “Don’t be afraid.” Because if God wants to deliver a message, it doesn’t do any good if the person runs away or faints or screams and pees their pants—which I would definitely do. God knows that seeing an angel is very alarming and so they have to make us understand that they aren’t here to scare us to death or to hurt us. And as scary as it has to be when it is an angel? Imagine when it is God! And that’s what we see happening here in Abram’s vision. God appeared to him and began to speak to him. But wait a minute—it doesn’t say God appeared to Abram but the “word of the Lord” and that is a bit more complicated. And this is the first time we see that in the Bible too. So, this is a big verse. Sometimes the Word of the Lord, the d’var Yahweh, where d’var means word and Yahweh is the name of the Lord in Hebrew—sometimes it just means whatever it is that the Lord said, and sometimes it seems very much to mean a person (maybe Jesus or a messenger angel). I guess that makes sense though, that God’s words would be more than just words like you or I might say. So, it can be confusing but don’t worry about it. We can’t figure everything out because our brains are too small and God is just too big. And it’s okay not to know everything because there won’t be a test. You can love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength and never have even the slightest idea what the “word of the Lord” always means. I sure haven’t figured it out!
What does the word of the Lord say? “I am your protector (your shield); your reward (for trusting me) will be very great.” How do you think Abram will respond to that? Will he fall down on the ground? Will he say “thanks!” Will he ask questions? We’ll have to wait until next week to find out because I want to talk about Jesus and when He had to say, “Don’t be afraid!” When He said it, it wasn’t because He was scary or threatening but because He didn’t want people to worry about things that they couldn’t control or about what people might do to them if they followed Him. For Jesus, “Do not be afraid,” was always about trusting that God has things figured out and really does love us.
When God was dealing with Abram, Abram was really rich. He had a ton of critters and servants and then he got more from Pharaoh. Abram didn’t have to be scared of a lot of things that the people who lived at the time of Jesus were scared of. Abram had men who could even fight for him if he needed them to. Even when there was a famine and there was no food in the land of Canaan, Abram just up and went to Egypt where there was plenty of food. Remember when we learned about Naomi and Ruth last week? How there was a famine in the land and Naomi and her family had to move away but she came back with nothing? That’s like the opposite of Abram. He never worries about having enough stuff. That sort of thing always works out for Abram. But the Jewish people during the time of Jesus had lived through many hundreds of difficult years where their country was passed from one world power to the next. First, they were taken over by the Babylonians, who destroyed their walls, Jerusalem, and Temple. And then the Persians and the Medes—that’s when Haman tried to have them all killed! Then the Greeks took over, and things got really bad because they wouldn’t let the Jews keep God’s commandments and would even kill them if they tried! As if all that wasn’t bad enough, for a while the Jews got their country back but the rulers in charge became even more wicked than the Gentiles from the other nations, and the people suffered terribly. And finally, the Romans were able to just step in and take over and they were charging the people so much in taxes that they were losing the Land God had given them and most people were very poor and dying very young. One out of every three babies died before their first birthday and more than two out of three were dead before they turned 18. They had terrible diseases because they didn’t have enough food, and head lice and their teeth were rotten when they were only about thirty years old. So, when Jesus was talking to the Jewish people, they were a very different audience than when God talked to Abram. The movies don’t really do a very good job of showing what life was like. And the Bible tells us that Jesus felt just awful for how much they were suffering.
But Jesus was also angry, and there were some people He told to be afraid. He told the people who were suffering to “Fear not” and He was telling the people who were getting rich and powerful by hurting their fellow Jews and/or just not helping them that they needed to be really afraid of what was going to happen when God judged them. You see, there were some people called the Sadducees and they didn’t believe that anything was going to happen after they died and so they should enjoy life now and that it was totally okay to get rich by hurting other people. Do you want to know what was even worse? They were the highest-ranking priests in the whole land of Judea, where Jerusalem was. The normal priests were mostly poor people just like everyone else but the most powerful priests were very wicked. I mean, if someone doesn’t think that God will someday make things right then why would they bother to behave themselves? They didn’t believe that anyone would be raised from the dead! They didn’t believe that God was going to reward the people who had done what was right, or that He would make things good for the people who suffered, or that the people who made them suffer would face the consequences of it even if they got off scot-free in this life! I mean, anyone can see that there are terrible people who do awful things and pretty much get away with it, right? Bullies who keep on bullying and thieves who keep on stealing?
And it is awful but it won’t always be unfair like that. Jesus told the people who were suffering not to be afraid because they weren’t the ones who needed to be worried; that when we die and we come back and Jesus is King, everything will be different and the people with power will be the people who were kind and generous and faithful and the people who were wicked and greedy and violent aren’t going to be very happy. Because we know everything will be good and right in the end, we don’t have to worry so much about the things that other people worry about. Are we going to worry anyway? Yeah, we will. We aren’t perfect. I mean, even Jesus, on the night before He died, was very upset because it would be very terrible. But He trusted God and He knew that His suffering wouldn’t last forever but being with His Father would be forever. And if Jesus knew that, then we can know it too. But when we don’t believe that things will all be right in the Kingdom of God, then it is really hard to deal with the unfair stuff that is happening right now. Sometimes the bad stuff is big and sometimes the bad stuff is small, but we never like having to go through it. So, when you are going through something terrible, imagine Jesus putting His arm around you and saying, “Fear not! Things are hard and sad right now but it isn’t forever. I promise that in my Kingdom this sort of thing will never happen. You will always feel safe and things will always be fair.”
But what about when we aren’t doing what is right? What happened to Cain? God told Cain to watch out because if he didn’t control his temper, his life was going to get really bad. God didn’t lightning bolt Cain’s butt or anything or kill him. God actually protected Cain so he wouldn’t be killed, even though he had killed his brother Abel. Even though Cain was punished, God didn’t throw him away like a piece of garbage. I think that God always hoped that Cain would wake up, realize he was wrong, and come back. It was totally Cain’s choice. And it is our choice too. God is so patient with us and even when people are doing wrong, He is trying to get them to do right instead. What we need to be afraid of isn’t God, but ourselves. God doesn’t want everyone to be terrified of Him because He wants our love and respect and trust and loyalty. God wants us to be scared of disobeying Him not because He wants us to be afraid of Him all the time but because when we disobey Him, bad things happen to us and the people around us. I know we have all been sad and hurt because someone broke a commandment and because of it, we got hurt. Or maybe someone we love got hurt.
A lot of people are scared of God because grownups in their lives hurt them very badly and when that happens, it seems like God must be mean too and that we can’t trust him. Sometimes people who teach about God make Him sound like someone who is just waiting for you to do one thing wrong and then you are in big trouble. But is that what we have seen in the Bible? Has God been quick to get angry and lash out at people who have made bad choices? Even the worst possible choices? Or does He try to get them to come back to Him and do what is right? Cain killed his brother. Noah got super drunk and passed out in his tent. His son Ham found out and humiliated him in front of everyone. Abram lied and got his wife in terrible trouble. Lot keeps making terrible choices and the worst are still to come. Sarai is going to be very cruel to her slave Hagar. But God doesn’t give up on any of them. People get even when they are angry, but God tries and tries and tries until there is no choice but to step in. He wants the right things to be done but what He really wants is for us to do what is right. And doing what is right and good and true can sometimes be the scariest thing of all. But when we trust God and trust that He knows best, we can know that what we are doing is the right thing no matter what happens.
When David had the chance to kill the man who was trying to kill him, he didn’t do it. No one would have blamed him, but he knew that it was God’s job to make things right and God did finally take care of the situation. Joseph had the chance to let his brothers starve to death or go to prison forever for selling him as a slave, but he trusted God instead. Abigail was risking her life when she went to David and begged him not to kill the people in her household when her husband insulted David, but it was the right thing to do. They all trusted in what was right and in God.
I love you. I am praying for you. I know that it is easy to be afraid and we usually can’t help it, but if you ask God to help you to “Fear not” then He will help you feel the right feelings at the right times. Even if you do scream if you ever see an angel!