We talked about this a bit back in episode 107, but this episode is actually about a lot more than it looks like on the surface. When we know what to look for, this is the most powerful promise yet about the Messiah, Jesus. God made a promise to Eve, and now He makes an even greater promise to Abram! This will be the last lesson in Gen 15.
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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!)
Today we are finishing up Genesis 15, and you guys have learned so much. But you haven’t learned the most important part yet! God promised Abram the Land, a child, and told him to go fetch a bunch of critters for a special ceremony that we only ever see one more time in the Bible, and, as you remember, that one didn’t go so well for the citizens of Jerusalem! But this is possibly the most important covenant anywhere in the Hebrew Bible because this one is the forever promise that gave us Jesus! When normal people would perform this ceremony, which is called the Covenant of the Pieces, they would cut the animals in half and place the pieces on opposite sides to make a path down the middle. The two people would say, “Whoever breaks this covenant, may what happened to these animals happen to him!” Then they promised by the names of their gods to be faithful, and they believed their gods would take revenge for making them look bad if they didn’t. That’s why Abram has been shooing all those birds away—he has been waiting for God to show up somehow to walk through the animal parts with him. But then Abram was put into a deep vision where everything was scary and dark, and God told Abram what would happen to him and his family in the future. What happened next was completely shocking and unexpected.
When the sun had set, and it was dark, a smoking firepot and a flaming torch appeared and passed between the divided animals. On that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “I give this land to your offspring, from the Brook of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates River: the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaim, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites.” (Gen 15:17-21)
What??? Abram didn’t walk between the pieces? And why on earth did a smoky firepot and a flaming torch float through them instead? This just doesn’t make any sense at all, right? No Abram and no God either. Or was there? What was the smoke and the fire all about anyway? God tells His people all through the Bible that He doesn’t have a body, even though everyone else believed that the gods of the nations had bodies like ours. God isn’t a human. He doesn’t have DNA, so God isn’t really even a man either, or a woman. God is just described in ways that help us to understand that He can be like a father, like a mother, like a mamma bird, like a king, like a husband, and like a whole lot of things. But God isn’t a person in any way that we could possibly understand—even though sometimes He does seem to show up in human form or speaks through the Angel of the Lord. It is just all very confusing because our brains are small, and God is big. I suppose it would be really nice not to have a body sometimes—a lot less complicated, that’s for sure.
So, what’s the deal with the smoke and fire?? One of the ways we see God showing up in the book of Exodus is specifically as a cloud of smoke and a column of fire. The cloud of smoke protected the Israelites from the hot sun during the day, and the fire kept them warm all night—pretty awesome, right? And maybe you remember God speaking to Moses through a burning bush where the fire didn’t hurt that bush at all! And later, God told Moses and Aaron that He would appear above the ark of the covenant in the Tabernacle, with His glory hidden in a cloud. When the Temple was built, and Solomon threw a huge celebration in God’s honor, a cloud came into the Temple that was so big and amazing that the priests had to get out because it was too intense for them to handle! When Elijah was proving to the priests of Baal that their god wasn’t even real, God proved that He was very real by sending fire down from heaven to burn up an animal on an altar that was completely soaked with water and even had a moat around it! Other times in the Bible, God says He is coming on the clouds, and that always means that somebody is in big trouble and someone else might even get rescued. Jesus said in the Gospel stories that He would be coming in the clouds and that it would be bad news for the people who were lying about him, including the high priest, just so that they could get the Romans to kill him. And let me tell you a secret–when Jesus said that, it made those guys just furious because they believed that only God could judge the high priest.
The smoke and the fire were a promise of protection. This promise told Abram that until the end of the world, God would always have His eye on the children of Abram—no matter what. Abram doesn’t know all of this, of course, because none of it had happened yet, but God was giving Abram a clue about how He would appear to the children of Israel in the future. Abram was probably very confused about the smoke and the fire until he heard God’s voice saying that the covenant between them was forever and that his children would inherit everything the Canaanites had all around him. And some of those Canaanites were even called giants! But what did it mean that only God passed through the animal pieces? Certainly, God wasn’t going to break His promise to Abram or do anything wrong. But whoever goes through the animal parts is supposed to die if they break the promise. And, one day, Abram’s descendants would completely break their pledge to serve, obey, love, and worship God. They would fill His land with idols and even His own Temple. They would bow down to the Sun, Moon, and Stars, and when they did that—it meant they were putting their butts in the air toward God’s Holy of Holies. They baked unleavened bread for the Queen of Heaven, who was either Ishtar or Asherah—we aren’t really sure. Women cried and cried at the Temple for the Babylonian shepherd god Tammuz during the summer months when they thought he was trapped in the land of the dead, and there was no rain. They did absolutely everything God told them not to do. And so, one day, the cloud that God’s glory was hiding in just up and left and never came back. Isn’t that sad? God loved them so much that He stayed for hundreds of years while they did those things to Him. And the prophets had all warned the people, but nobody listened.
When God left His Temple, the people weren’t protected anymore, and the Babylonians came and destroyed the city and the Temple and took all the wealthy and powerful people so far away that they would never be able to go home again. But God wasn’t through with His people. He still loved them because He remembered how much He loved Abraham. Abraham’s descendants had broken God’s covenant, but because Abraham hadn’t walked with God through those animals, someone else had to make things right again. God’s people, even when He brought some of them back to the land of Israel, had to serve cruel pagan kings for another five hundred years! And they were always praying for the Messiah to come and rescue them, and to destroy all their enemies. They wanted their own kingdom again, with their own King. They wanted everything to be like the “good old days” but a whole lot better because the “good old days” are never really all that good for most people. They studied the Bible, and they could see that God had promised a new and better king who would come from King David’s family. Sometimes, that King would seem like a mighty warrior, but at other times, it seemed like he was rejected, hated, and very humble. Some even thought that maybe God would send them the King they deserved—one kind if they were worthy and doing what God wanted and another kind if they weren’t doing what God wanted.
What they never suspected was a King who would be both—a King who would be gentle, trustworthy, and loving toward people who were hurting but who would be a mighty warrior against demons, sickness, and everything that was hurting His people. A King who loved them all so much, not just them but all the world, that He would make everything right between them and God again and teach them how to trust God. He showed them exactly what God is like by just being Himself. And that King, of course, is Jesus. Do you remember when we learned about God’s Creative Word all the way back in episode #2? Jesus has always been with God (no one knows Him better!), and Jesus is how God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Everything good that we see around us, including the stars in the sky and all the planets, is God’s love for us poured out through Jesus. God didn’t need a planet, and He sure doesn’t need food or water. He created all of those things because we need them, and He was making a good home for us. But when Adam and Eve sinned, the world got broken. It was still good because God’s creation is good, but things were broken. God told Adam and Eve that there would one day be a child who would come from a woman who would fix everything they had messed up when they tried to be like God.
When the smoke and the fire passed in between the animal parts, God was making a forever promise that the child would somehow come out of Abram’s family—but this isn’t the first time God had hinted at that. Do you remember when God first spoke to Abram at the beginning of chapter twelve? God told Abram that he would be a blessing to all the families of the earth! Did Abram understand what that meant? His family were all idol worshipers from Babylon. Abram was commanded to get away from them! Many generations had passed since Noah and Abram’s ancestor Shem had come off the ark. Did anyone still remember that God had promised to send someone to crush the head of the serpent who had tricked Adam and Eve into rebelling against God? Or had people given up hope so long ago that they had to be reminded again? Whether Abram understands everything or not, we know that God is always busy setting up His plans to rescue us from sin and death. This was a big step. The family was chosen at last, and now that Abram had finally obeyed everything God had commanded him (it took ten years), God is rewarding Abram. It’s like God is saying, “Okay, Abram, you did what I asked, and so now everything comes down to you and me. You are my choice to start a new family, and that family will become a great people, and one day, one of your own children will bless every person who will ever live. And whatever goes wrong between now and then, I will make things right. My plans don’t depend on you and your kids doing everything right. One of your kids will do everything right, and He will change the world forever.”
Just imagine if Abram had known that it would take almost another two thousand years for the time to be just right for Jesus to be born, the Messiah, Savior, and King of the world! But what does any of that even mean? Why is it important that Jesus is our King? What does that mean to us? Remember how I told you that the descendants of Abram weren’t sure if the Messiah would be humble, gentle, and rejected or a mighty warrior? Well, let me tell you about the mighty warrior King we see in the Gospel of Mark. We see Jesus fighting against demons, even a whole legion of demons at once, and destroying them. Jesus also destroys sickness, disabilities, and every kind of disease and even brings people back from being dead. It’s like Jesus goes into evil places and rescues people. When Jesus is fighting the forces of evil, He isn’t messing around—no mercy and no forgiveness. But when Jesus is dealing with people who are hurting, He is gentle and kind. He treats demons one way and people another. In fact, we rarely see Jesus being unkind, but when He is, it’s because He is talking to the religious leaders who aren’t helping the people and who are even hurting them. Some of the religious leaders followed Jesus, but not very many. Most of them were trying to keep the people from believing that Jesus is God’s Messiah, the King. It was the same thing as telling people that God isn’t God either. Many of them, especially the chief priests and the high priest, were just jealous and were afraid they would lose their power. If they lost their power, they would also lose their money because they were making a lot by using the Temple as a business. They had teamed up with the cruel Romans, who had soldiers everywhere, so everyone had to do what they said. Others were just afraid that if people were listening to Jesus, they wouldn’t listen to them anymore. It can be really hard when you are used to people wanting to hear what you have to say, and then all of a sudden, those people are listening to someone else instead. And especially when that someone else can work miracles! Who can compete with that?
Jesus is a King who shows one side of Himself to demons and another side to those who are hurting. Jesus knows who the real enemy is. Jesus wants everyone to turn away from doing bad things, from making other people’s lives miserable, and to follow Him instead. You see, there are two Kingdoms in the world—the Kingdom of Heaven, where God rules over everything and everyone and things are good, and the Kingdom of the Beast, where rich people hurt poor people, and strong people hurt weaker people; where some people believe that they are better and more deserving of good things than others and people hate each other for totally stupid reasons. When we choose Jesus as our King, when we believe that He crushed the head of the Serpent like God promised Adam and Eve, that Jesus is how God promised to bless the world through Abram’s family, that it was Jesus who went through those animals disguised as smoke and fire and promised to fix the covenant between God and Abram that was broken by his descendants, it means that we are choosing to live by the rules of the Kingdom of God—to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love other people as we want to be loved and we would want people to treat the people we love. Anything that you wouldn’t want someone to do to hurt the person you love most in the whole world, serving Jesus means that you wouldn’t do that to anyone else either.
To have Jesus as King means that He is our example and that He is the only human being that we can really trust totally and obey completely because He will never tell us to do anything that is evil. God wanted us to have an example to follow—but Noah wasn’t perfect, and neither were Abram or Sarah, Moses, Aaron, David, or anyone else. They are going to do really awful things sometimes. We have them in the Bible to teach us that there isn’t a human on earth, no matter how special or chosen by God, who is a perfect example. Goodness sake, God chose me to teach you guys, but it doesn’t mean that I am right about everything I will teach you, and it doesn’t mean that I don’t get pretty salty when I am cranky or feel like I have been backed into a corner or am embarrassed. I am still trying to become more like Jesus. I have a long way to go. And so, if someone was to tell you, “That Miss Tyler can be mean,” you can say, “Yeah, I know, but she’s working on it and feels really bad about it when it happens.” Or if another person says, “Miss Tyler is wrong about such and such,” you can say, “Yeah, sometimes when she is teaching me, she tells me that she found out she was wrong and teaches me something different instead. She says we are all wrong about something. I don’t listen to her because I think that everything she says is right. I listen to her because grown-ups force me to.” Or how about, “Miss Tyler did this really awful thing once,” and you can say, “That’s why Miss Tyler tells us to follow Jesus and not just do whatever she has done. Only Jesus can be totally trusted.”
That’s why God gave us all these stories about how the people He chose did awful things—so that we wouldn’t think that we could follow those people instead of Jesus. Some people do terrible things when they are scared, and others when they want something that doesn’t belong to them. Sometimes people do something they think is right because their culture (which is the world and people around them) tells them it is right because they don’t know God well enough yet to understand that the Kingdom of Heaven isn’t like that. Sometimes, we will see things in the Bible that we wouldn’t ever think were okay today, and we’ll be like, “What the heck were they thinking???” But to them, it was a normal part of life. God isn’t going to fix everything right away; He had to be patient, and He is still being patient. Look how long it took Him to get us to stop making people work as slaves! Jesus told His disciples that some of the commandments that Moses gave the children of Israel in the desert would be because the people’s hearts were hard. So they were still allowed to do some evil things, but Jesus always told people to be perfect, like God is perfect. If you wouldn’t want God to do something to you, like enslave you, then don’t do it to anyone else. Jesus showed us that loving others is about serving them and understanding that we aren’t better than anyone else. He did that by showing us that even the greatest person who ever lived, who could work miracles and raise the dead and who was one with God at Creation, would die just so that He could fight Satan and sin and death and all his demons and win once and for all.
Satan looked at Jesus and probably thought to himself, “I need to stop Him, or everyone in the world will follow Him, and they won’t listen to me and do things my way anymore. If everyone listens to Him, there will be no more murder, stealing, hunger, cruelty, or hatred. There will be no more war or torture. Kids will be able to play anywhere they want with no one watching to make sure they are safe. I won’t have anyone who wants to do things my way once they all start living like He wants. I need to get rid of Him, but I need to do it in a way that is so terrible, embarrassing, and shameful that no one will even want to admit they ever knew Him. People will either be ashamed that they thought He was the Messiah, or will believe that He is a criminal, or will be too scared to even admit they know Him because they won’t want to be killed too.” Satan didn’t know that he was being tricked into having to come face-to-face with Jesus, the all-powerful Son of God. When Jesus died, He went to Satan’s turf (where Satan was strongest and most powerful) and beat the heck out of him, and now (even though he still causes trouble) Satan is dying. He isn’t giving up trying to trick us the way he did with Adam and Eve, trying to tell us not to obey God because we can decide for ourselves what is right and what is wrong. If Jesus followed God, with all the miracles He did and after creating the earth and everything in it, it has to be the only smart choice. Obeying God was why, when Jesus was murdered, Satan couldn’t fight against Him. Jesus didn’t have any reason to be ashamed, and He wasn’t guilty. Satan had never had to deal with anyone truly good and perfect before. But, by the time he figured out his mistake, it was too late.
That’s why we must have Jesus as our very real King and why we need to understand the importance of living in His Kingdom the way He wants us to. The more we do things His way, the bigger and better His Kingdom grows, but when we do things Satan’s way, we are just keeping that dude alive because he gets to hurt people through us. I mean, he isn’t doing it—we are doing it. When we are mean or bullies, if we steal, or spread lies or embarrassing things about other people, if we don’t keep our promises to help people do what is good, and when we don’t treat people like God loves them just as much as He loves us, then we are part of Satan’s Kingdom. That’s how Satan’s Kingdom works, and that kind of terrible behavior is called the Mark of the Beast. The prophet Ezekiel tells us that God has a Mark of His kingdom, and John tells us that Satan has one too. It isn’t anything a person can see, but it is about who we are following, and a person can pretend to be following God but really be doing terrible things when no one is looking. God sees us always and loves us always, so we can trust Him to live like He wants right now.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you will learn how to trust Jesus not just as your Savior but as your King too.
Parents–Genesis 16 has some very sensitive themes in it so on Friday I will be uploading a special teaching on my grownup channel covering the material if you want to teach the material that I can’t teach.