God appears to Abram for the first time in twenty-four years (I am not counting the vision appearance of the Word of the Lord in Gen 15), introduces Himself by a new mysterious name, promises a new covenant, and gives Abram a new command!
If you want to watch me recording a slightly longer version of this live on YouTube, check this out! If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.
Hi! I’m Miss Tyler, and welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you 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 Christian Standard Bible)
Hey there! We are finally beginning Genesis chapter 17 and this is a really important chapter. We are going to get introduced to so many important topics, like what did “God Almighty” mean in the ancient world, how do we live in God’s presence, what does it mean to be blameless, and what the heck happened to the last thirteen years of Abram’s life?? And how is the Lord “appearing” to Abram different from his being visited by the Word of the Lord in chapter fifteen and Hagar’s meeting with the Angel of the Lord in chapter sixteen? And that’s just the first two verses of this chapter! Let’s read those verses!
When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him, saying, “I am God Almighty (El Shaddai). Live in my presence and be blameless. I will set up my covenant between me and you, and I will multiply you greatly.” (Gen 17:1-2 CSB)
So, one other mystery here—wasn’t the Covenant set up already in chapter fifteen? Sometimes it seems like, the closer we pay attention to the Bible, the more confusing it gets! And sometimes that is true—but usually it is an invitation to learn more in hope of solving the mystery. Learning to think about the Bible critically—which means looking at it in ways that ask questions which don’t always have answers—will teach us more about God and His love than just assuming we know it all. This is a fantastic chapter to ask a lot of questions. I will have some answers for you but on other things, all I can offer are some “what ifs.” The wonderful thing about God is that He loves it when we ask the hard questions and trust him even when and especially when we just don’t understand. But you can’t trust God just because you read the Bible—God teaches us to trust Him through relationship. Just like anyone else. When we do awful things and He doesn’t kill us with a lightning bolt, we begin to realize that we can trust Him and He isn’t just waiting for us to screw up. And we see that even though Abram and Sarai spent chapter sixteen being just awful, that they are still around thirteen years later and God hasn’t given up on them. And Hagar was promised many things about her son Ishmael too, and right now she is just waiting for him to grow up so that they can happen. But as we will see over the next few chapters, things are good between Abram and his son Ishmael, whom he loves very much, but things are definitely not okay between Abram and Hagar, and between Sarai and Hagar and Ishmael. As chapter seventeen begins, the only two people who are happy are Abram and Ishmael. Abram is happy because he has a thirteen-year-old son, and Ishmael because he has a father who loves him and is teaching him to be a great leader of men.
So, the first thing we learn is that Abram is now ninety-nine years old. Last time, we saw him, he was eighty-six and Sarai was seventy-six. Ishmael is thirteen and Hagar is probably in her twenties. Hagar is still a slave, even though she is Ishmael’s mother. It must have been frightening for Sarai, wondering what would happen to her when her husband died—which could happen anytime now. She had planned on adopting Ishmael as her own, but God said that Hagar would name him. Sarai didn’t have the son she had wanted and Ishmael would be in charge once Abram died. Sarai had been very cruel to Ishmael’s mother and Abram was probably the only one keeping her safe from Hagar getting revenge. Abram and Sarai have been living in the Land of Canaan for twenty-four years now and it seems as though God hasn’t had anything to say to them for the past thirteen. The last one God had anything to say to was Hagar in the wilderness when He sent the angel of the Lord to speak His words to her. When we get to the Gospel of Luke, the angel of the Lord appears to Jesus’s mother Mary and calls himself Gabriel. But is there more than one “angel of the Lord?” Is Gabriel the same angel who spoke to Hagar? No way to know for sure, but it would be cool if the first and last time we saw him he was talking to these two young women. The Bible is full of fun “I wonder’s” and “what if’s” and when we get comfortable with questions that have more than one possible answer, it makes it a lot easier to listen to what other people have to say about what they see in the Bible without getting hostile or thinking that our way is the only way to see things. It helps us to love other people.
Maybe Abram thinks that everything is perfect now and so God has been leaving him alone—after all, he has the son he always wanted and so he is very happy and the last thirteen years have been pretty darned quiet. God never said anything to Abram and Sarai about how He felt about what they did to Hagar. The last thing God said to Abram is when He promised him that he would have a son and that his descendants would have the Land of Canaan for their own. God didn’t mention Sarai having a baby or how long it would take. This was a test to see if they would wait for God to keep His promise and they failed it terribly. They made it happen in a very bad way and now, even though Abram loves his son, their lives are a big mess. The Bible says that the Lord “appeared” to Abram. Doesn’t say this is a vision (which is like a dream when you are wide awake) this time but like He did all the way back in chapter twelve right after Abram got to the Land of Canaan. And it doesn’t say how God appeared to Abram, just what He says to him: “I am God Almighty (El Shaddai).”
El Shaddai (El Shadd-EYE)? What does that mean? Well, El is short for the Hebrew word, elohim, that is translated as “God” in English. Elohim can mean all sorts of things—just like the word “god.” But El almost always means our God or other gods in the Bible, and when it doesn’t, it means a powerful person. Shaddai? No one alive today knows what the heck that means even though there are many theories based upon similar words in related languages. That means, languages that have a lot in common like German and English or French and Spanish. Anyway, Shaddai is a word that shows up six times in Genesis and thirty-one times in Job but very few other places. Because of this, many scholars believe that this is a very old word and that the meaning of it was lost a very long time ago. After all, no one was writing dictionaries back then where they could say, “Shaddai is a noun meaning such and such that refers to God.” So translators use the word almighty because it is as good a guess as anything else! Something interesting is that the word is related to a mother breastfeeding her baby in Hebrew, and so maybe God is telling Abram that He is the only God who makes babies happen and that Abram and Sarai didn’t respect that when they took matters into their own hands back in chapter sixteen. It’s a big mess and God has been allowing them all to stew in it. There are a lot of reasons why God doesn’t talk to us or why we don’t hear God and some are good and some are bad.
Sometimes, we think we have done the right thing because God leaves us alone about it—like with Abram and Sarai. They got what they wanted and maybe they think God is okay with it because He didn’t yell at them or anything. Sometimes, we do that too and we think that we have done everything right just because God isn’t correcting us. But the Bible says that God is long-suffering, and that means He is incredibly patient with us when we have messed up. Other times, God is silent as a test of our trust in Him. He makes a promise and then leaves us alone (and I know what that is like) to see if we will watch and wait and prepare ourselves to see how He works things out, or if we will do everything we can to make it happen ourselves. Sometimes, we don’t hear Him because we are so busy that we aren’t listening, or maybe we just don’t know how to listen or even that we need to. Maybe we are expecting a loud, outside voice that is obvious and sometimes that happens but usually we have to start by listening and wanting to hear whatever He has to say even if it is hard to hear. Usually, when He talks to me it is because He wants to fix something I am doing wrong. And He doesn’t talk to me about it until I am ready and can handle what needs to be done. That’s never fun. God generally doesn’t tell me when someone else is doing something wrong. After all, I can’t fix them so it wouldn’t do much good. God promised Abram a baby and they came up with a clever way to “help” Him to make that happen, when they wanted it to happen. But He is El Shaddai, and He makes His own special babies, exactly when He wants them to be born. Isaac wasn’t just any baby, like you and me, he was a baby of promise. Ishmael was a baby of planning by people, not a baby of promise. He is special and loved by God, like all children—but not promised.
What does God say after introducing Himself? “Live in my presence and be blameless.” What does it mean? This is the fifth time that God has told Abram to do something—first, to leave his home and follow God to the Land of Canaan. Second, Abram was told to walk all over the Land God promised to give him. Third, God commanded Abram to look up in the sky to see the stars that couldn’t even be counted because there were so many—just like his descendants. Fourth, God told Abram to bring all those critters to be cut in half for the Covenant of the Pieces. Now, God is telling Abram to “Walk in my face and be complete.” Or at least that’s how we would translate it if we were just using Strong’s concordance as a dictionary. But walking in God’s face seemed more than a bit disrespectful to me! Instead, this is more like an idiom. God generally talks about His “face,” or His paneh (pan-A) in Hebrew, even though He doesn’t have one. In the ancient world, they thought of someone’s face as something you could only see once you were close enough to them. In other words, you can only see someone’s face when you are where they are, in their presence—this was before television and movies and photographs, so that was the only way. So, being in someone’s face was to be where they are, close to them. Not to be confused with the American idiom of “getting in someone’s face” meaning to threaten them and challenge them to a fight.
And what does “blameless” mean? Does it mean to be absolutely perfect and never do anything wrong? Abram had better hope not because he still has some messing up to do. And only Jesus was ever totally perfect. The Hebrew word, tamim (tah-MEEM), is another word with different meanings but the most important one is that something or someone is complete or whole. This word shows up a lot in Leviticus and Numbers—the Bible books that talk about the animal sacrifices and how they weren’t allowed to take the animals that were sick or torn up by wolves to give to the Lord. They had to give their best animals to God, just like they would if they were entertaining a king or a queen. The Bible often translates this as “without blemish” or “perfect” not because anything or anyone is perfect but because they weren’t damaged in any way. Did that mean that Abram wasn’t allowed to break a leg or go blind or deaf or get a scratch or a disease? No, nothing like that. A person can be whole and complete on the inside without being that way on the outside. Goodness sakes, people my age don’t even always have all their original body parts anymore! But we can still be whole, complete, blameless, and tamim no matter what is going on with our bodies. That’s why, even though Priests who were disabled couldn’t serve in the Temple, they were still priests and were still able to eat the special tithe offerings that no one else was allowed to eat and they could teach the Bible and be elders in the communities where they lived. Serving in the Temple was hard, heavy, slippery, and difficult work. God protected the priests who couldn’t do the work but He still treated them like priests because they got all the perks!
Throughout the Bible, we see different people who are said to have walked before the Lord, like Noah and Abram, those who walked with the Lord, like Enoch, and those who walk after Him—like Moses told the children of Israel in the wilderness to do right before they crossed over the Jordan River into the Promised Land. And Jesus told His disciples (and that means you and me too!) to follow Him. We don’t know much about Enoch so we can’t really say what walking with God so good that you get taken away, but we do know that in the ancient world, to walk in front of your King meant that you were a faithful servant. You would be the first person to spot problems and dangers and you would be the one telling people that the King was coming so that the people would clear the way and cheer him once they saw him. I think for this year at Purim, we will talk about how Haman was forced to walk before Mordecai (who he was trying to kill, so this was not fun for Haman). King Ahasuerus told Haman to walk before Mordecai the way God told Abram to walk before Him! So hilarious. Just not for Haman.
God was telling Abram to be His ambassador to the world, and even His spokesman sometimes. So God was telling Abram that if he was going to have that job, He had to represent God’s character and His words as perfectly as possible because whatever he did wrong made God look bad. Moses told the people to walk after God, to follow Him, and Jesus said, “Follow me.” Those are both saying the same thing. To learn how to show the world who God is, we have to follow along behind Him and do what He does and that’s why Jesus is so important because looking at Him and what He does is the same thing as looking at God and what He does. To be like Jesus is the same thing as being like God. Moses told the children of Israel to follow God by loving God and by loving their neighbors as themselves, and foreigners and strangers too. To truly love God is to make sure that we don’t shame Him and make Him look bad by treating others badly, lying to them or about them, stealing from them, tricking them, or saying and doing mean things to them. When we do things like that, we are following someone but it isn’t God! I once knew a young man, a teenager, who liked to say that he was a godly man to his teachers at school. But then he would turn around and cheat on his schoolwork and tests and would cut and paste things from the internet and pretend like he had written them himself. What he said didn’t match up with who he really was on the inside and the proof was in how he behaved on the outside. Fortunately, he snapped out of that nonsense and is learning to be a good man. He is learning to follow God even though he has been taught about God since he was a baby. Kids aren’t Christians just because their parents are—it’s a decision each one of us has to make for ourselves. God wants you to follow him and not just your parents. You are important to Him, to His Kingdom, and to His plans. I guess we can say that God was telling Abram, “Stick with me and behave yourself!”
God also told Abram, “I will set up my covenant between me and you, and I will multiply you greatly.”
Now, wait a minute! Didn’t that already happen like fifteen years ago??? When Abram cut all the critters in half and God appeared between the pieces as fire and smoke—just like He would do for the children of Israel in the wilderness??? Something strange is going on here. Well, if we go back to chapter fifteen, we see something interesting. That covenant was all about the Land of Canaan! God promised it to Abram and his descendants and then Abram asked, “How do I know that I will get this Land?” That’s when God told Abram to get the critters. You see, Abram believed that he would have many descendants and didn’t ask for any proof, but he did ask for proof that the Land would belong to them. That was what we call a Land Grant Covenant, when a king gives a gift of land to a family forever (or as long as he and his kids are kings, anyway). But this time, God is making a covenant promise to multiply Abram greatly. Which probably confused Abram because he already has a son. But God is saying, “I will set up a covenant,” and not, “I did set up a covenant when Ishmael was born.” We don’t know if Abram is worried yet or not, but that’s about to change in a big way.
You know, at this point, we have heard the words, “Be fruitful and multiply,” so many times that we might think it will go on forever—but we would be wrong. In fact, we see it eight times in Genesis and only once in Leviticus in the covenant promises to the nation of Israel living in the Land, if the entire nation obeys God (which never happened, by the way). But once the children of Israel enter the promised Land they are called a great and numerous people—meaning there are a lot of them—and we never hear anything again about their needing to be fruitful and multiply. Does that mean no one needs to have kids anymore? What does Jesus say about having kids? Well, He does say that people will be getting married and having babies and stuff until He comes again, but He never tells anyone that it is the purpose of life. Instead, He tells men and women to follow Him and to tell everyone about Him and to go out into the world and make disciples of all the nations of the world. What does that mean?
Well, as we go through Genesis, everyone is talked about for two reasons—how long they lived and who their kids were. Some people get more than that—like Noah, Abram, Sarai, Isaac, and Jacob—but mostly it seems like the only reason we know most of these people ever lived is because they had kids. The Bible doesn’t seem to care more about them then that and since God wasn’t working through them and they weren’t following Him, that’s all that mattered about what they did when they were alive, as far as God’s story goes. They were born, they had kids, they died, the end. Most of the time when women are mentioned it is because they were wives and mothers and men because they were husbands and fathers. It was important for God to teach us how important it is to fill His Kingdom with people. But what did Jesus say right before He went back to Heaven to be with the Father?
Jesus came near and said to them, “I have been given all the power to rule over heaven and earth. So go make disciples (followers of God) of all the peoples of the world, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have told you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matt 28:18-20)
Luke tells the story a bit differently in the Book of Acts: So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, are you restoring the kingdom to Israel at this time?” He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” After he had said this, he was taken up as they were watching, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going, they were gazing into heaven, and suddenly two men in white clothes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up into heaven? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come in the same way that you have seen him going into heaven.” (Acts 1:6-11)
Wow. He told them to be fruitful and multiply, but to do it by travelling near and far and telling everyone in the world all about Him. That’s why, at the end of the Bible, in Revelation, we see people from every nation, every tribe, every color, and every language standing side by side as sisters and brothers all worshiping the Lamb of God, Jesus. And when we do that, we won’t be thinking of any of the ridiculous stuff we think now about people who are different from us. We will all love Jesus and we will all love each other.
I love you. I am praying for you. This week, I want you to think about how many more “children” we can bring to God by talking to people about Him versus how many we can get by getting married and giving birth to them. There was a time when God needed for there to be a lot more people to fill the earth but now that it is filled, its time to make sure they all know about Jesus. All of you are my special project.