Episode 106: Look at the Stars, Abram!

Gen 15:4-6  Abram has been promised that his kids and grandkids and great grands will be as many as the stars in the sky! God says that Abram is going to be a daddy but what about Sarai? This week we will talk about great faith in the Bible—from Abram to the people who surprised Jesus with their faith!

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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, 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!)

So, last week, the Word of the Lord came to Abram in his tent, at night, and gave him a vision where He promised to protect and reward Abram. But Abram asked why it should even matter since he still had no child and was planning to give everything he had to a trusted slave born in his house. Abram gave God two reasons why nothing mattered to him anymore. A visit from the Word of the Lord should have been exciting but Abram seems to be very depressed here and who can blame him? He left everything and everyone behind and traveled to a strange land because he was promised that he would become a great nation. But how can a man be a great nation when he has no children (hey wait a minute… is It just me or does that sound like Jesus?)? Abram has been waiting a long time and he is probably feeling like God got his hopes up for nothing and that he will never be a father, much less a grandfather. Will God be angry at Abram for pointing out that nothing else matters to him if he doesn’t have a child? Let’s see, starting in Genesis 15, verse 4:

Now the word of the Lord came to him: “(Your servant Eliezer) will not be your heir and inherit everything you have; instead, a child who comes from your own body will be your heir.”  He took Abram outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars, if you’re even able to count them.” Then he said to him, “Your children will be like that—too many to count!” Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.

Not only wasn’t God angry with Abram, but He responded to Abram’s double complaint with a double promise! No, you don’t have a son now, but you will! Yes, you think Eliezer will be your heir, but he won’t! God wasn’t telling Abram that he wasn’t seeing the present correctly; God was telling Abram that the present isn’t the same thing as the future and Abram’s future was going to be filled with the thing he had always wanted—at least one kid! How that child would happen, he had no idea because God didn’t tell him that, but he knew that there would be one. He also knew that the child wouldn’t be an adopted grown-up but would be his biological baby—which at this point would definitely take a miracle! Abram’s wife was too old to have a baby, after all, but God didn’t say anything about Sarai having a baby—only Abram having a baby. It was quite a mystery. Would Sarai die? Would Abram marry someone else? Abram had always been faithful to Sarai and never divorced her or took another wife, no matter how badly he wanted a child. That tells us a lot of good things about Abram. Yes, he let Pharaoh take her when he was scared but otherwise, he was much better to her than most men would have been in those days.

People believed that a woman who couldn’t have babies was cursed by God. They didn’t understand how many things can go wrong in a woman’s body to keep her from having a baby. They believed that a woman was like a cornfield on a farm and that there was either good soil or bad soil. They believed that a baby seed was planted in the soil (no really, they thought a baby started out as a teeny tiny, seed-sized baby and just got bigger and bigger) of the mom and if it grew into a full-size baby it was because the mom was blessed and if it died it was because she was cursed. Babies were like crops in the field as far as they were concerned! We know that isn’t true now but when the Bible was written, that’s what everyone believed. That’s why, in the Bible, it talks about the seed of the man and the seed of Abram and the seed of this and that person—they weren’t being fancy and poetic, that’s what they believed, and God used that belief to help them understand what He was going to do. That’s why, in Genesis 3, when God talked about the seed of the woman, it was so confusing because they didn’t think women had seeds. They had no idea that Jesus wouldn’t have a human father at all but would be from the Holy Spirit. And actually, in this verse and in other translations, sometimes it will talk about Abram’s children or his offspring but the Hebrew word is actually seed, zera, which is a whole lot easier to say than a lot of other Hebrew words. They believed that every person who would come from Abram was already stored inside of his body—that’s just how they thought about it. God doesn’t need us to know everything there is to know about science to teach us the important things we need to know about Him. In fact, He doesn’t need us to know anything at all about science to love, obey, and appreciate Him. Science just makes life a lot cooler.

You know, God could have said, “Are you doubting me? How dare you! I am going to find someone else to replace you and he can start a nation. I am gonna lightning bolt your butt! Say your prayers, dude, but I won’t be listening!” That’s what a lot of people think about God, but God really does understand when we are discouraged. And more than that, we can hear God tell us something quite clearly but as time goes by and the promises don’t happen, we begin to wonder if it was all just our imagination. Like Joseph’s dreams about ruling over everyone—after becoming a slave and then being put in prison for something he didn’t do, he must have been thinking that those dreams were just from eating bad burritos or something—which in his case would be stale lentils, bad mutton, and moldy unleavened bread! I think those thoughts went through Abram’s mind too because he isn’t really that much different from the rest of us. And so, God comes to Abram when he is discouraged and depressed and probably feeling lonely without a child, and when God promises him everything he already has, who can blame him for not caring anymore? Abram wasn’t mean to God or disrespectful, He was talking to God like a friend. And God even calls Abram his friend in Isaiah 41:8. Abram could say things like that to God because they had been walking out an adventure together for quite a while at this point.

Now, sometimes when Bible people talk back to God, they get rebuked instead of rewarded and I suppose it has a lot to do with how and why they did it. God is very compassionate, and he knew Abram’s heart and how sad he was after about eighty years that he still had no child. Honestly, I can tell you that nothing in my life ever made me sadder than not being able to have a baby. Sad like all day every day and especially at night. Just because Abram’s a man doesn’t mean he wasn’t hurting just as badly as I was, and Sarai too. Men and women and boys and girls all get sad—some people just hide it on the inside, but we can’t hide it from God and Abram didn’t even try. Abram was honest with God, which is what friends do. Besides, lying to God is beyond pointless—He doesn’t ask any questions that He doesn’t know the answer to. I don’t know why Cain thought he could outsmart God.

And this must have all happened in Abram’s tent because then we see that the Word of the Lord took Abram outside. Remember how I said two weeks ago that the way the Bible talks about the Word of the Lord is really strange? Sometimes, the Bible makes it clear that the Word of God is just words, and then sometimes it sounds like the Word of the Lord is actually a someone and not a something? Well, this is one of those times because if I tell you to come outside, and you do, you can’t say that the word of Miss Tyler took you outside. No, this says that the Word of the Lord not only took Abram outside but also spoke to him. Why does a word need to speak? A word is speaking! Clearly, there is more here than meets the eye, but the Bible isn’t telling us anything for sure. The Bible doesn’t explain everything, and I suppose there are a lot of things about God and what He can do that we just can’t understand and I don’t think that when this was written down that the writer knew exactly what it meant either. Remember, our brains are small and God is big.

What did He tell Abram? He said, “Look up in the sky!” He said, “Count the stars!” He also said, “If you can even count them all!” And if you live in the city or even in the country where there are lights at night then this might be confusing. I live in a place right now where counting the stars I normally see wouldn’t be too difficult for anyone who could count to twenty. One of the problems is that the city installed a streetlamp in my front yard so most of the stars can’t compete with that but also, it’s usually cloudy here at night anyway. Especially during lunar eclipses and meteor showers or anything else that’s cool that I want to look at. But I have also been in places where I could see so many stars that I could barely even see the rest of the sky and they were so many beautiful colors. If you go backpacking, way out in the middle of nowhere, sometimes you can still see things like that and if you ever have, then you understand that Abram is being shown something amazing that no one could ever count even if they used the Hubble Telescope. The Word of the Lord told him, “That’s how many kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, etc.  that you will have—more than anyone would ever be able to count.”

How would you respond if you were Abram? I would be shocked, I think. I wouldn’t know what to say. I would probably cry. My mouth would be hanging open, looking at the sky, and I would definitely not have anything intelligent to say. It seems as though Abram doesn’t say anything for a while, but the Bible says that he believed what the Word of the Lord was saying and that God “credited it to him as righteousness.” And that’s kind of a strange thing to say, right? It sounds like God made a deposit in Abram’s bank account or something. And people wonder exactly what it means but I will tell you what I think. A lot of people have a lot of really good and interesting ideas about it, for sure. But I think that this was the moment when God and Abram finally and fully committed to each other. Abram finally believed God completely and God saw that Abram was finally ready to take a huge step forward—something he wasn’t ready to be trusted with before this. Abram won’t turn back now. Abram is only interested in going forward. Abram’s not going to spend time thinking about his family back home in Haran anymore because God is Abram’s home now and forever. He’s still going to mess up, mind you, but no one is perfect in this lifetime, right?

When you have come to a point in walking with God that you make a huge jump in how much you trust Him, it is just amazing how much easier life gets. It isn’t something you can just decide to do and BAM you have perfect trust, but it is a gift that God gives you when you decide that you are willing to trust Him and willing to allow Him to change you into someone who trusts Him more. Trusting God is a blessing. It gives us feelings of joy and peace that we didn’t have before. We still get sad and scared and confused and we still mess up and bad things will still happen, but trusting God is always about knowing Him better and better and as we get to know Him better, we begin to realize that He doesn’t think it is funny when we are in trouble, and He isn’t waiting around like a cosmic cop to catch us doing something wrong so He can hurt us. More than anything. God wants to be together with us in perfect trust. He wants us to trust Him/believe Him and He wants to be able to trust us to care for His Kingdom and for others. But He knows we can’t just do that overnight. Abram will be a hundred years old before he is ready to be Isaac’s father. And he will be about 137 years old before he trusts God enough to obey Him no matter what. God doesn’t expect us to do anything that isn’t possible for us to do yet. He is patient and He works with us and grows us and helps us to know Him so that when He says jump, we don’t have to ask, “How high” because we will just know how high and we will know that we can do it. People aren’t like that but don’t make the mistake of thinking that God is anything like us.

When God finally gets us to that point, our lives are blessed—not with money or critters or a bunch of kids or success or whatever, but with Him. Knowing God is better than anything we can get in this world. I know because I remember what it was like not to know Him and to not even want to know Him. I hated Him. I was angry at Him. I was scared of Him. I thought He was like the people who had hurt me. I thought that they hurt me because He didn’t care. Or maybe because I deserved it. And if people didn’t love me then God wouldn’t either because His standards have to be much higher! He’s God! But I had it all wrong. He wasn’t rejecting me, and He wasn’t hurting me and He was there with me but I was too hurt and angry to notice. I was never really alone. And I bet that Abram felt alone even with everything he had. But when he looked up into the sky and saw a billion stars, he suddenly realized that he had never been forgotten at all and he wasn’t alone. And whenever he looked up into the sky for the rest of his life, he must have smiled and seen them as his kids.

Jesus, though, could be surprised by the faith of people. I think He spent a lot of time being discouraged and especially with the nonsense that his teenage disciples were pulling. Peter was probably the only grownup, but he might have been no older than twenty. No one really knows but since Peter was married, he had to be at least eighteen. And even though they saw miracle after miracle, sometimes they had the least faith and trust of anyone Jesus dealt with. Let’s talk about some people who made Jesus happy and surprised by how much they trusted Him.

There was the soldier, a very high-ranking Roman soldier called a Centurion, and his servant couldn’t move and he was in terrible pain. He went to Jesus and asked Him to heal his servant and Jesus said, “Let’s go see him now.” But the Centurion stopped Jesus and said, “No! I am not good enough to have you in my home! But I know that if you say the word, my servant will be totally healed! I have soldiers who do whatever I say and so I know that if you say he is healed then he is healed.” Wow, what do you think Jesus said to that? First of all, this enemy soldier loved his servant (probably a slave) enough to go out to ask Jesus for help. And second, he actually understood that Jesus could just say something, no matter how far away, and it would be done! Jesus’s disciples didn’t even believe that! Jesus was amazed and He told the Centurion that He had never met anyone like him among his own people, the Jews. And more than that, He told the Centurion a secret—that when He was King, a lot of people just like the Centurion would be part of God’s Kingdom, just like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and many more. And He told the Centurion that his servant was healed and just like that, he was!

And then there were the four men whose friend couldn’t move at all and he had to live on a mat on the floor! But when they heard that Jesus was in town, they actually tore a hole in the roof to lower their friend down to Jesus because they couldn’t get past all the people who were trying to get into the house to hear Him teach. Because they believed enough to actually do something like that (which, I am sure, got them in deep trouble with whoever owned the house), Jesus didn’t hesitate to heal that poor man and he got right up and picked up his mat and went back home right in front of the whole town.

There was also a woman who had been bleeding and bleeding nonstop for twelve years, and because of it her life was very difficult and she couldn’t be married or have children. And she had spent all her money trying to get better, but nothing worked. But she saw Jesus coming and she thought to herself, “If I just reach out and grab the bottom of his robe, I will be healed!” And that’s exactly what she did! Jesus wasn’t paying attention, but He felt a lot of power go out of Him. And He asked who had touched Him, even though a ton of people were touching Him. She told Him what she had done and why and He told her that she was completely normal again! I am sure it was the happiest day of her life!

One time, when Jesus and His disciples left the Galilee and went to where the pagans lived, a woman came up to Jesus and begged Him to save her daughter because she had a demon inside her who was hurting her. But Jesus wanted to see if she really trusted Him or not because her people were terrible enemies of Israel and they ate food that was taken from the Jews in high taxes that left them starving and sick. So, He ignored her. Sometimes Jesus ignores me too just to see what I will do. I totally hate it but it does teach me to trust that when He does it, it isn’t forever because He always comes back. And He isn’t really ignoring me or gone, He just isn’t letting me feel that He is with me anymore. No one likes that! But the mom wouldn’t give up and she was crying and yelling after them and His disciples were like, “Hey, please tell her to go away because this is getting really annoying.” But when the disciples failed the test and didn’t even have pity on her daughter, Jesus decided to talk to her. “I am only here to help the people of Israel,” He said. And she bowed down before Him, which a rich woman from Tyre would never do because they were very proud and hated the Jews, and she begged him again to help. And then Jesus decided to see if He could make her angry, to see what was in her heart, and to teach His disciples about love and compassion because they weren’t getting it, at all. They saw enemies but Jesus saw people who needed help that they couldn’t get from anywhere else.

So, He decided to talk about what was happening with her people robbing the Jews of their food. “Nope, it wouldn’t be right to take the food that belongs to the Jews and just throw it to a dog.” Oh man, if she is proud and wicked then she won’t like that at all. She will yell and throw rocks at him and leave! But she didn’t do any of that. She said, “Don’t the dogs who sit under your tables at least get the food that falls to the floor?” Whoa! I think Jesus smiled when she said that because she had taught the disciples an important lesson about faith. She believed that Jesus could heal her daughter, so totally, that she was willing to go through anything to get Him to help her. That’s the kind of faith and trust we should all have. Jesus didn’t really think she was a dog—He was making a point. The disciples thought she and everyone else in her city were dogs unless they were Jews. Jesus knew better. And the disciples saw that anyone can have great faith, even if they grew up worshiping false gods. Jesus told her that her daughter was all better and she believed Him. She didn’t ask for proof or for Him to come to her house or anything. She just knew He could do it and believed that He did.

That’s kind of like Abram with the stars. Once Abram had that vision and saw all those stars, nothing could turn him back. He was all in with God just like the Centurion, the friends of the paralyzed man, the bleeding woman, and the pagan woman were all in with Jesus. None of them had any doubts. That’s what God is asking us for, to believe that He will keep His promises no matter how long it takes. He has to get us ready and that doesn’t usually happen overnight. We’re living in a crazy, violent, and cruel world and God has to teach us how to be different before He can really trust us to take care of the most important part of His Kingdom, and that’s the people all around us. Remember how the evil king of Sodom told Abram to keep all the loot from the battle but he wanted the people for himself? God is different than the king of Sodom, but He is also the same. If God has the choice between giving you a billion dollars and having you, He’ll save you every single time. Even when you don’t know it! And so, He teaches us to love each other. Because His kingdom is made up of people and not dollars and not critters and not trophies or anything else we think we need.

I love you. I am praying for you. And you are going to have a great faith someday. Little by little, God will change you into someone who can do greater things than me because I didn’t even start until I was twenty-nine years old. You guys are amazing. And I trust you to learn to trust God.

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