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Continuing with Gen 15, this week’s lesson is a lot about relationship building with the God who wants all of us, even our complaints! We’re going to learn about Ethan the priest’s complaint in the Psalms and about adoption in the ancient world and how the Gospel of Matthew tells us that Jesus was adopted by Joseph.
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, where I now post slightly longer video versions. (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! Although I had to take a lot of liberties with Psalm 89 to make it clear. Poetry is tough!)
After these events (the meeting with Melchizedek and the wicked king of Sodom), the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your protector; your reward (for trusting me) will be very great. But Abram said, “Lord God, what good is anything You can give me, since I have no children and Eliezer of Damascus is going to inherit everything I have when I die?” Abram also said, “Look, you haven’t given me any children, so a slave who born in my house will get everything I have and take care of us in our old age.” (Gen 15-1-3)
Wow, I backtracked a bit to last week’s verses because I want you to see something that is incredibly important—actually, a lot of things that are incredibly important! God made a promise to Abram to be his protector, his shield, and to reward him for being faithful and obedient. And you would assume that Abram would be down on his face thanking God and groveling or something. But that is not what happened. Abram stopped God dead in His tracks and started complaining. He began to protest! Protest is a word with a lot of different meanings but in this case, protesting means that Abram is pointing out a big problem with God’s blessings. Namely, that all of God’s promises mean absolutely nothing to him if he has no children to carry on his name and care for himself and Sarai when they are old and to bury them and remember them after they die. We’ve talked about this before—that people were very frightened in the ancient world of not being buried properly and remembered. Like, the worst thing they could think of was to have their bodies just laying on the ground and turning back to dirt and having people walk all over them. The bottoms of people’s feet and sandals also went through animal poop and so there was nothing more shameful than having someone literally walk all over you! It may seem silly to us, but they were seriously scared about this. The number one responsibility of a child would be to take care of their parents when they couldn’t take care of themselves anymore, and that didn’t stop just because they were dead!
And so, this was a big deal to Abram. It wasn’t like God was going to bury his and Sarai’s bodies or become their caregiver. They needed a human for that. And what was to stop their slaves from just running off, taking all their stuff, and leaving them to die? And what would happen to their slaves if they died without children? Who would protect them and run the household and keep them from being taken by someone else? Abram had more questions than he had answers. He was very rich and had many critters and so he didn’t need more of that—what he needed was the one thing on earth that he couldn’t buy and only God could give him. And we don’t know exactly how old Abram was at this point but it was more than 75 and less than 85—but it was probably closer to 85 because a lot has happened since Genesis 12 when we found out how old Abram was when he left his family in Haran. I mean, dang, I was almost thirty-two when we finally were able to adopt our twins and I was flipping out and I am not even worried about what happens to me when I am dead—imagine being in your 80’s!!
And so, Abram does something that might surprise you—he starts complaining to God and he is the first person in the Bible to do that since Cain complained about not being able to farm the Land. I mean, what gives, right? It could have been worse, at least Cain was better off than his dead brother! But Cain’s complaint was very self-centered and selfish. He was still only thinking about himself and he wasn’t even grateful that God wasn’t going to kill him for what he did. Cain’s complaint was like, “Oh poor me, you didn’t like the plants I gave you and now I can’t even grow them anymore.” But Abram’s complaint is very different. You see, Abram has been obeying God all this time—some days better than others but at least he has been trying and only seems to mess up when he is scared. Cain, on the other hand, doesn’t do his best and then gets angry and miffed when he gets told that disobedience isn’t okay. The Bible teaches us a lot when we know what to look for. And the most important lesson this week is to learn that God wants to have a real relationship with us—like family. Yes, He is God and yes, we owe it to Him to trust, respect, and obey Him BUT all through the Bible we are going to see people not only being allowed to question Him, complain to Him, and even get angry at Him and doubt Him but they are actually encouraged to do it and are sometimes even rewarded for it.
Why is that important to understand? Because as you grow up, it is important to see in the Bible that if there is anyone in your life who you aren’t allowed to be honest with, complain to, or ask questions about what they are doing, or disagree with or doubt, then they are making you treat them better than Abram and the Prophets and even Jesus treat God. That’s idolatry, when we are treating someone else like they are superior to God. You should always be able to respectfully have real conversations with other people. You should be able to ask questions. When things are unfair, you should be able to speak up. You should be able to say when you think someone else is wrong about something. You should be able to be honest. Now, you won’t always be able to do those things but when you can’t, you need to ask yourself if the reason is good or bad. What good is a teacher if you can’t raise your hand and ask them an appropriate question? You can always ask me anything about what I am teaching you or if you think I am wrong, you can tell me why. Nothing terrible will happen to you if you do. In fact, I like to hear from you guys. Maybe you know more about something than I do, and you can teach me! As you grow up, there will be a lot of things you know more about than me and I really hope that someday you know more about the Bible than me. Maybe I will listen to you teaching! That would be so cool. If I say something mean or unfair and it bothers you, you should be able to speak up. You should be able to respect me, but I need to respect you guys too, and I do.
Abram feels safe enough with God at this point that when God makes him these promises, Abram talks back this time. But he isn’t rude about it–Abram calls Him Lord God, which is a special title that only God has. Many people in the Bible are called lord, or adonai, which can mean master or husband or can just be a title of respect for someone who is older or a stranger. But when Abram says Lord God, he is saying that God is his only master and not just one of many like his family could say about all the gods they worshipped. Titles in the Bible are actually sort of a funny thing. Just like lord can mean a lot of things, so can the word Elohim, which we translate into English as God. It can mean our God, or the false gods of the pagans, or an important person. Then there is also the Hebrew word ba’al, which means the same sort of thing as adonai—master or husband or important person or it can even be the name of a pagan god like Ba’al Hadad of the Canaanites. And the word that we translate as messiah can just mean anyone who is anointed to serve God even though THE Messiah is only Jesus. And that isn’t just with Hebrew words! In the Greek, the word that means the same thing as messiah is christos. That’s where we get Christ from—it’s the Greek way of saying Messiah. Sometimes people think that Christ is Jesus’s last name but it isn’t; Christ is just a special title meaning that He is THE Messiah. And the word kyrios means all the same things as the Hebrew word adonai. Most words, even the words we use to describe God, aren’t all that special by themselves. What makes a word special is how it is used.
So far in the Bible, God has only had conversations (where there is back and forth talking) with Adam and Eve, Cain, and now Abram. So, this is a really big deal. Abram trusts God but I bet he is getting really frustrated and impatient and things were seeming more and more impossible every single day. It’s hard to wait on a promise. It’s one thing when someone says, “Okay, we’re going to the beach next weekend,” and you know the where and the when and all you have to do is wait. But Abram doesn’t know when. At all. And he definitely doesn’t know how. We just have to hope that Abram is patient and waits for God to make things happen. What do you think? Will Abram and Sarai wait for God to work out the details or will they make another mess like in Egypt? Will they let God help them or will they try to help God get things done?
Abram complains to God that a man named Eliezer of Damascus is going to get everything once he dies, and we also find out that Eliezer is a slave. Does that surprise you? Slavery in the days of Abram and even Jesus was really a lot different than we think of now. It wasn’t like what we had in America—I mean, it could be but in Abram’s day, people who were enslaved could be educated and very important members of a family. People usually became slaves if they were very poor and sold themselves to someone they owed money to, were captured in war, or if their parents were slaves. So, anyone could be a slave or become a slave. It wasn’t about skin color or anything stupid like that. You couldn’t look at a person and tell if they were a slave or not unless they had a tattoo from their master. Because Eliezer, who was born a slave in Abram’s household (which would include his family and all his servants plus any people whom they had hired) had been chosen to inherit everything Abram had when he died, we know a few things about him: (1) Eliezer was completely trusted by Abram and Sarai; (2) Eliezer was educated and was able to handle not only their property but also the buying and selling of animals and wool and that sort of thing; (3) Eliezer was respected by the other slaves and the hired workers, and (4) Eliezer had probably been adopted by Abram and Sarai.
Adoption in the ancient world was way different and way easier than it is today and it wasn’t strange to adopt someone who was already a grown-up, like Eiliezer probably was! Did you know that most of the Emperors of the Roman Empire weren’t the sons of an Emperor but were adopted? Yeah, they didn’t just make their firstborn son the Emperor, they would choose another family member and adopt them so that the person they thought of as the best choice for the job would get it. They thought that just making someone a king based on being the firstborn son was foolish, and actually from what we see all through the Bible—God agreed with them. God rarely chooses the person who was born first for His plans. David was the youngest of seven sons! Moses was the youngest in his family too. Solomon was born a long time after David’s older sons. Judah was the fourth-born and Joseph was the eleventh-born and Levi was the third-born. Isaac and Jacob and Ephraim weren’t the firstborn either. God chooses whomever He chooses because He looks at what is inside and not our birthdays.
When we adopted our kids, we had to go to a lot of trouble to do it and it cost a ton of money but that wasn’t the way it was in the days of Abram or Moses or Jesus. People just did it if they wanted to. Now, sometimes they used a special contract and that is probably what Abram and Sarai did with Eliezer. In a place called Nuzi in modern-day Iraq around the time that Moses lived, they made a whole bunch of cuneiform tablets—remember how they used to write things down on clay tablets and then bake them to save them? Some of these tablets were about adoption. People who had no children would adopt another grownup to take care of them. BUT they would also include something in the tablet saying that if they had a child, the adopted adult wouldn’t get everything and sometimes even anything which I think is kinda messed up. Our twins were adopted but if I had ever had a baby, Matthew and Andrew would still get just as much of our stuff as our other kids. But then, they weren’t adopting Eliezer because they loved him and wanted to be his mommy and daddy—they were adopting him because they needed a son. My kids, I love them more than anyone in the whole world and wanted them because they were them and not because I needed them to do stuff for me. Are you adopted or do you know anyone who is adopted? Being adopted means that you were chosen and that someone went through a lot of trouble to make sure you are part of their family because it sure isn’t easy! Eliezer was chosen too, and they had a lot of people to choose from; that means he had to be really special in a lot of ways. Abram still didn’t trust that God could make him into a great nation any other way and so that’s another reason they would have adopted Eliezer. Do I know for sure that Eliezer was adopted? Nope. But we do know that this is how people did things around the time when Abram and Sarai were alive. So, there’s a really good chance that it happened. And you just learned something interesting about history, so there’s that.
Do you know who else in the Bible is adopted? Jesus was adopted! And God even told Joseph to adopt him, if you know what to look for. In the Gospel of Matthew, Joseph finds out that his fiancé Mary is going to have a baby but they aren’t married yet; so he doesn’t understand what happened and he was very upset. He had decided not to marry her and to quietly get out of their engagement because he wasn’t a mean person and cared about her. But one night, before he could do that, an angel appeared to Joseph and told him not to be worried about Mary’s baby just because he wasn’t the father. The angel told Joseph that the baby came from God’s Holy Spirit and that it was Joseph’s job to name Him Jesus—well, Jesus is what we call Him in English but the angel told Joseph to name Him Yeshua, which means “God saves”! And that’s exactly who Jesus is! God’s one and only perfect plan to save us!
And maybe when I read that it didn’t really seem like an adoption, but we know from ancient documents and contracts that all that was required for a man to adopt a child was to take him or her when they were born and name them. Lemme tell ya, it’s not that easy anymore! When the angel told Joseph that it was okay to take Mary as his wife and that he was supposed to name Jesus, he would have understood that God was specifically telling him to adopt Jesus and be his dad. And this wasn’t anything like adopting a grownup later on to inherit everything you have. When Joseph adopted Jesus, that made Jesus the heir and oldest son of Joseph. And that was more important than it might seem at first because Joseph was a descendant of all the kings of Israel and Judah. Joseph was a son of David! That made Jesus a son of David too! It meant that Jesus could be King of the Jews. Jesus’s mother was also a descendant of David but through David’s son Nathan. That meant that Jesus was a unique son of David but that he wasn’t physically related to the kings of David, who had been cursed and cut off for their wickedness. God had promised that David would someday have a kingdom that would last forever and ever and that he would always have a descendant who was king. But from the time that the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and sent all of David’s descendants to Babylon, there was no king from David. People wondered why and there is even a special Psalm in the Bible asking God to explain why His promise to David had been broken! It’s Psalm 89 and I won’t read the whole thing, but I am going to rewrite the parts where the priest Ethan is telling God how confused he is. It is a very long song of sadness to God and can be hard to understand:
You told us once that you had chosen a warrior, a fighter, from the children of Israel and that you were with him to help him. You said, “I found David, who became my servant, and I poured holy oil on his head to make him king. I will never leave him, and I will always help him. I won’t let anyone win against him in battle and I won’t allow anyone to hurt him. He can always trust me because I will always love him. And because of me, his name will always be great. I will give him the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Great Euprahtes River. He will call out to me as his Father, and he will depend on me to save him. I will make him like my firstborn son—the greatest king on earth! I will never stop loving him and I will never forget my promises to him. His sons will be kings forever and ever, as long as there is a sky above. But if his sons don’t keep my commandments or live the way I want them to, if they shame me by going their own way, then I will punish them like they are disobedient rebels. But even if that happens, I will still never stop loving David and he will always be able to trust me. My promises to him are forever and ever and I won’t change my mind. This is my final word on the subject: I have promised David by my own holiness that he will always have children of his in the world, and there will be kings from his family forever. David’s throne is like the sun and the moon, it will always be there.”
Ethan the priest is absolutely right! God did promise all of these things but when Ethan lived, they had no king except the pagan kings of the other countries that took them over! What the heck?! Did God break His promise to David? What happened to kings and a throne forever and ever? Ethan was very confused. He loved and trusted God but he could also see that there was no king. The kings who came from David had become wicked beyond belief and they worshiped other gods and were doing the most terrible things! What does Ethan say next?
But you abandoned David and threw his sons out like garbage because you were so angry with them! You even went back on your promise to David and You have shamed him! All of the walls David built are destroyed and his cities are piles of rubble. People come and take whatever they want, and David’s reputation is ruined because everyone all around can make fun of him. You took the side of David’s enemies and helped them to destroy everything we had, and boy are they happy about it! You stopped helping David’s people and there is nothing we can even do to defend ourselves without You. Everything that was awesome about David and his Kingdom are gone and destroyed. His kingdom was supposed to last forever, but you took it away and now everyone laughs at him.
Wow, does that remind you of anything? How about Abram in today’s lesson? What was Abram saying? “Lord God, you have promised me this and that, and a great name, and a great nation but I don’t even have one child, so it doesn’t even matter to me.” Abram, Ethan, and many others in the Bible understand that God wants every bit of us and wants us to be open and honest with Him. If we are angry with Him, we can say so. I sure have. When we feel like he isn’t being fair with us, we can tell Him that too. When we think He has broken his promises, we can tell Him that too. That’s called a lament, where we pour out our sadness to God like we would with any real person whom we trust. There are 150 Psalms in the Bible and more of them are laments and complaints than any other kind. Isn’t that cool that God is so powerful but also so gentle and patient that He lets us do that?? But Ethan has one more thing to tell God:
How long will you ignore us, God? Will you always hide from us? Will you always be angry? Please remember that I am not going to live very long, and I have to wonder if our lives are even worth it without you. Is there anyone who will live forever? Can anyone come back from the dead? Lord, where is everything you promised to David? Please remember us and how humiliated and embarrassed and ashamed we are and how it hurts us when people abuse us. Lord, all your enemies are shaming David! Please remember! Please do something about it.
And He was doing something about it—He had a special King of kings in hiding who had been planned from the very beginning—Jesus. Ethan was confused and sad and even angry, but he still knew that God was God and He was the only one they could depend on. I love you. I am praying for you. And you are no different from Abram or Ethan. God wants to hear what you have to say too.