In Gen 15, God gets really specific about the scary future of Abram’s descendants, some good news for Abram, and the reason why he can’t have the Land of Canaan yet. We’re also going to talk about why Jesus’s disciples are just like fruit trees.
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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 reading an entire chapter every week!)
Last week, God told Abram to get a whole bunch of farm critters. So Abram obeyed, and then he chopped them all in half (he killed them first, I mean, that would be horrifying and cruel if Abram just went and sliced them down the middle) and stood guard over the pieces of cow, sheep, and goat so that the birds wouldn’t pick them apart. He waited and waited…but for what? We will get to that next week because all of a sudden, something happened that Abram didn’t expect at all that points all the way back to the garden and another four hundred years into the future. Let’s read Gen 15:12-16 to find out what happened:
As the sun was setting, a deep sleep came over Abram, and suddenly great terror and darkness descended on him. Then the Lord said to Abram, “You can know this for sure: Your descendants will be people without a country of their own for four hundred years, living in a land that does not belong to them. They will be forced to work as slaves, and treated very badly.But I will judge the country that does this to them, and afterward, they will leave with a lot of stuff. But you will go to your ancestors (which means he will die) in peace and be buried at a good old age (which means he won’t die young, but it is already kinda too late for that, right?). After four generations are born there, they will return here because the sins of the Amorites are not quite bad enough yet.” (Gen 15:12-16)
Wow! Abram, if you remember, has been having a vision since verse one. In this vision, which began in his tent, the Word of the Lord came to Abram and started making him some amazingly wonderful promises about getting the Land of Canaan and having a baby! Well, I mean, he wasn’t going to have a baby because, dang, that would really be a miracle, and God hasn’t ever done anything like that yet. And I am not holding my breath either! Remember that a vision is like a dream a person has when they are wide awake. Not like daydreaming because when you snap out of a daydream, the first thing you notice is your teacher giving you the stink eye because you haven’t been paying attention in class. Abram asked for what seemed like proof that God was telling the truth, but what he was really asking for was a permanent relationship with God for the rest of his life. And so, God told Abram to get the critters, and we already covered the rest last week. One thing we can see from this week’s verses is that, in Abram’s vision, he was guarding the critters from the middle of the night until the sun was setting the next day! That’s a long time for a guy who was probably in his eighties to be chasing birds away, even if it is just in a vision.
And Abram fell into a deep sleep, but this wasn’t any kind of normal sleep. Do you remember when we were talking about the time when Adam fell into a deep sleep in the Garden, and God took half of him and made a woman? Well, both of these stories use the exact same words. Whatever happened to Adam was the same thing that happened to Abram! And whatever it is, this is not normal sleeping because what happens next is very scary. The Bible tells us that a great terror and darkness descended on Abram, so I want you to think about a terrible, scary feeling swooping down on Abram like a bird and everything going so dark that he couldn’t see anything at all. I don’t know about you, but if this happened to me, I would be paying attention to whatever God had to say and taking it more seriously than I have ever taken anything in my life. One thing for sure is that when Abram looked back, he would always know that it wasn’t his imagination. Maybe that’s why God did it because something like this might just seem too strange to believe as the years went by, and it was important for Abram to remember every single word. Let’s look at what God says to Abram—oh, and did you notice that last week and this week, it’s God talking to Abram and not the Word of the Lord? Are they the same? Or different? Sometimes it is hard to know.
God says, “You can know this for sure.” You can’t see it in English, but just like when God told Adam that if he ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that he would die, this is said the same sort of way. God said, “On the day you eat of it, you will DIE DIE.” When God says a word two times in a row, that’s serious. And when God told Abram that he would know this for sure, He actually said, “You can KNOW KNOW this.” God has made up His mind, and this is absolutely what’s going to happen no matter what. So, Abram is very scared, and it is very dark, and God is telling him something that is totally a for sure and decided thing. And I think maybe this is so that Abram won’t try to avoid it somehow or beg God not to do it. God wants Abram to know that this is a done deal, even though sometimes Abram is allowed to try to talk God out of other things. But not this time.
God told Abram that his descendants, the people who would come from him, won’t inherit the Land for at least another four hundred years. And considering the fact that God had just promised to give him the Land and a kid and grandkids, Abram probably thought it would be happening a lot sooner, and this would be very disappointing, right? But because of the fear and the terrible darkness, Abram can’t even say anything. But wait—it gets worse! Not only won’t they have the Land of Canaan, but they would be living in a place where the people would take them to be their slaves! And not just slaves, which is bad enough, but slaves who are treated very badly. So badly that God will punish them for how they treat Abram’s descendants. When they were finally freed, they would be rich, but if someone told me that my kids would be slaves in a land that wasn’t their home for all that time, I wouldn’t be saying, “Oh well, they will come out with a ton of cash so it’s all better now.” No! I would be very upset and worried. Sometimes I think about the moms and dads left behind in Africa after their children were captured by slavers and how sad and horrible it must have been for them, for the rest of their lives, wondering about their kids and their grandkids living as slaves and how they were being treated. I think that if Abram could have talked to God, he definitely would have. And the reason that God gives Abram for the wait is that the Amorites, who were the most famous of all the Canaanite clans, weren’t so bad yet that they deserved to be forced out of God’s Land. Remember that God is patient and fair, but humans aren’t. God is patient even when we don’t want Him to be patient!
But I guess the really confusing question is, why did God even tell this to Abram? Would you want to know something like that? I wouldn’t. I would rather die thinking that everything was going to be just awesome. And does this mean that God made it happen, or that He could look into the future and see it was going to happen? It’s very hard to understand, but because God doesn’t treat us like robots, He allows us all to do bad things to each other. He lets you be mean, and He lets me be mean too. Being mean is an easy choice, and being good is a harder choice, but it has to be our choice, or else it doesn’t even matter. Imagine a world where everyone hugged you because they had to and not because they loved you. Hugs wouldn’t be special anymore, right? Not only that, but I don’t want hugs from everyone. I just don’t. I want hugs from the people I love and who I know love me. If someone gives me a present, I want it to be because they want to and not because they think they have to. It’s hard to understand the kind of love that allows us to make our own decisions, but right here, God is telling Abram that the Egyptians are going to do evil to his family sometime in the future and that the people Abram is living with now are going to get a lot worse.
Now, you might think that if he knew his own family would be taken as slaves that maybe Abram would get the hint about maybe thinking about his own use of slaves. Anyone could become a slave in the ancient world—one day, you could be rich and powerful, and the next day a mighty empire could roll into your city, and BOOM, you aren’t free anymore. Abram and Sarai were given a bunch of Egyptian slaves by Pharaoh when he took Sarai for a wife, and so right now, it’s the Egyptians who are slaves to Abram’s family. How do Abram and Sarai treat their Egyptian slaves? Actually, we are going to find out in Genesis 16, the very next chapter and it isn’t a good chapter for either of them. We’ll specifically learn about a young woman named Hagar, and we will see throughout the Bible that what people do has a tendency to come back to bless them or to bite them, depending on what it is. Liars get lied to, and tricksters get tricked. And how Abram and Sarai treat Hagar over the course of the next few chapters is going to end up coming back to bite their great-grandchildren. Life is like that sometimes, even if it isn’t obvious right away.
Abram, though, is told that he will die of old age before any of that ever happens. What’s more, he will be buried, so he doesn’t have to worry about that anymore. I have told you many times that ancient people were terrified of not being handled properly once they died—between having their bodies walked all over forever and having animals eat them and then poop them out, they were super stressed out about it. But God reassures Abram that his kids won’t be slaves forever and will come back to the Land–and this time it will be theirs! Four hundred years, though, I am pretty darned sure that wasn’t what Abram originally had in mind, or maybe it was. I want you to think about this very carefully.
The Land of Canaan was very big, at least for a small wandering household like Abram had. There were a lot of people already living there, and wild animals too. Do you remember why ancient kings were called mighty hunters? It was because there were dangerous animals who would attack travelers on the roads. There were lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Okay, okay, no tigers in Canaan. But kings were responsible for sending out soldiers to keep the wild animals in check and away from the roads as much as possible, so when Nimrod was called a “mighty hunter,” that would have been calling him the kind of king who kept the roads safe not only from dangerous animals but also robbers. Later, in the book of Joshua, when they were finally going into the Land to take it, God told them that He wouldn’t give it to them all at once because they wouldn’t be able to handle that much land, considering how few of them there were—God said that the wild animals and the land would be too much for them to deal with yet. And by then, there were thousands of them, plus all the other people with them, who had escaped from Egypt. These people had been in the wilderness for forty years, and no one who was still alive knew how to be farmers or to do much of anything except take care of their critters because most of them had been born in the wilderness. The ones who hadn’t been were all under the age of twenty when they were freed from slavery. God knew that these people needed to start slow and grow, or it would be a complete disaster. God is really smart.
With God’s promises, they are often “hurry up and wait” sorts of promises. God makes a promise, and we get all excited, but we really don’t take much time to think about how important it is that He prepares us for that promise. I want to tell you the story of Jesus’s disciples and the fruit trees. And no, this isn’t a story you can read in the Bible—not exactly, anyway. It starts out in the Book of Leviticus, where God gives the Israelites a very puzzling instruction about how to treat the fruit trees they will be planting when they come into the Land: “When you come into the Land, and plant any kind of fruit or nut tree, you are not allowed to eat any fruit that grows on it. It will be totally off-limits to you for the first three years; You can’t eat anything that grows on it. In the fourth year, all the fruit that grows on it needs to be presented to the Lord. But in the fifth year, you can eat the fruit. If you do this, then I will make sure it gives you lots and lots of fruit; I am the Lord your God.” (Lev 19:23-25)
We planted a bunch of fruit trees last year. Two cherries, two apples, a pear tree, two cherry bushes, and four blueberry bushes. I also planted a ton of strawberries. The strawberries can be eaten right away because they only last about three years before they have to be replaced anyway, but with the apple and pear trees, we pull off all the blossoms so that they won’t make any fruit until they are nice and big. It’s important to make sure that the tree isn’t trying to grow fruit before it is big enough to handle it. Just think of how heavy apples, pears, and peaches are and how small the branches on new trees are. The tree needs time to grow and get strong. With cherries, that is harder to do, and so I am just letting the tiny fruit grow, and there are so few that the birds will eat them before we would get a chance anyway. When we wait for a fruit plant to get nice and healthy and big before we grow fruit on it, the trees will produce a lot more fruit than they would have if we hadn’t waited. God knows that, and He is very wise. But you know what? People are the same way! We need time to grow before we can do grownup stuff too, and even grownups need time before they can do what God has planned for them. I was in my forties before God let me start teaching, and boy, am I ever glad about that!
But what does any of this have to do with the disciples of Jesus? Well, according to the Gospel of John, Jesus traveled with and taught His young disciples for three and a half years before He died. If you have ever read the Gospels, then you know that His disciples were always doing messed up stuff—not because they were evil, unintelligent, or hopeless, but because they weren’t mature enough yet to produce good fruit. They were just like those baby trees trying to make nice big apples (and a lot of them), but who really just kept making a mess. As they learned more and traveled more with Jesus, they got more mature, and they were even sent out in groups of two sometimes so that they could go on mini-mission trips to preach the good news of the Kingdom, heal the sick, cast out demons, and perform miracles. But they always had to come back to Jesus later—they weren’t ready to be on their own for very long. If Jesus had just taught them a little while and then sent them out right away, it would have been a total disaster, and it wouldn’t have been their fault–it would have been Jesus’s fault! Because Jesus knows exactly what we need to do a good job and to help people and not hurt them, He takes His time to do the job right.
I remember when I was first a Christian, just a baby Christian even though I was almost thirty years old. I think I had only been a Christian for six months before they gave me a Sunday School class to teach. I was teaching kids out of a booklet, so I guess maybe they thought that would be okay. IT WASN’T OKAY. Most of the kids I was teaching just sat there with confused expressions on their faces because they probably knew more about the Bible than I did. But not this one woman. She was forty years old and had Down Syndrome. I can’t remember her name, but I do remember she was so upset that she smacked me over the head with her Bible. And you know what? I don’t even blame her. She knew I had no business teaching them. At all! I shouldn’t have done it, but I didn’t know any better because I was just a baby. I didn’t understand how important it was to be a mature Christian before I taught the Bible to anyone but especially kids. Honestly, I think that God told her to do it. She didn’t injure me, but it was sure a big wake-up call. The leadership at the Church wasn’t making sure that I was who I needed to be before they tried to make other people eat the pathetic fruit that was coming from my life. I was like a baby tree that they were forcing to grow great big apples, and my branches were snapping off, and the fruit was not going to be yummy or good for anyone.
Jesus’s disciples were different than me, though; they only needed three or four years because they had been worshiping God all their lives and had been hearing the Bible—Genesis through the Prophets—since they were babies. They knew a lot of stuff. I didn’t know much of anything. So, even though they were only learning from Jesus for three years, they were already very familiar with the Bible. But for what was coming next, they needed to be taught and prepared. Every day, all day. Imagine going to a school for three and a half years where you traveled on foot, everywhere, and listened to Jesus preach to the crowds—the same stories and lessons over and over again. And you watched how He healed people and fed them. You saw amazing miracles and went to all the festivals at the Temple in Jerusalem. You spent every Sabbath learning from Jesus in the Synaogues, and there were probably lessons in everything. With everything He did and said, you learned about love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control. I mean, up close and personal. Jesus fed people who were hungry and too far away from a town to buy food. He healed things that doctors didn’t even remotely understand. Jesus helped people who had been pushed out of their communities so that they could live normal lives again. He helped people who had nowhere else to go and no hope unless He helped them.
And they could do those things too, but unless Jesus really helped them to grow up and be the right people for the job, a lot of terrible things could have happened. When you have gifts like that to work miracles but aren’t ready to use them the way God wants, it’s easy to just want to do those things for rich people and charge them money for it. It’s even easier to start acting like you are the one doing the miracles and not God doing them through you. They could have become very rich and powerful if Jesus hadn’t waited until they were ready. Don’t get me wrong—they still messed up, but they became the kind of people who knew how to listen so that God could set them back on the right track. Peter and the others, for about ten years, were only teaching the Jews about Jesus, even though Jesus told them to take His message to the ends of the earth. They thought that meant to only preach about the Kingdom of Heaven to all the Jews in the world. But that wasn’t good enough, and Jesus had to show Peter in a vision that He wanted everyone in the world to know about Him. Because Peter trusted Jesus, he gave that message to everyone else, and soon there were Gentiles hearing about Jesus all over Africa, the Roman Empire, and Asia. But the early followers of Jesus never became rich or powerful. Just imagine if Judas had lived—I bet he would have figured out a way to make a lot of money preaching about Jesus!
I am going to teach you a special prayer—I will have a special file on my Context for Kids website for you to print out. I began praying this almost twenty years ago after a church really hurt me badly, and I decided I never wanted to hurt anyone like that. This prayer doesn’t mean I haven’t ever hurt people, but it does mean that God was able to take my prayer and begin to change me into a different kind of person:
“Dear Heavenly Father, I don’t understand how the people in charge of churches can be so hurtful when you tell us to be so loving. I know I am not perfect either, and I bet I could do the same kinds of things unless you change me. Lord, I don’t want to have any ministry gifts, and I don’t want to be any kind of minister until you teach me how to love people the way you love them. I don’t want to hurt anyone the way I am hurting right now. I would rather never tell anyone about you at all than to make people not want to know you because of anything I did. Please Lord, I am willing to have you change me however you need to and no matter what you have to do. In Jesus’ Name, I pray, Amen.”
And you know what? It worked, and it is still working. He still changes me. I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you learn to love people the way you want to be loved.