God is going to tell Abraham to make a decision that can’t ever be taken back, by obeying a commandment that can’t ever be undone. And what does it tell us about how different our God is in how He feels about kids and slaves? And why weren’t women included??
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 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!)
We have a much longer section of Scripture to read today because it is very repetitive. That means that something is said over and over again. But why on earth isn’t it enough to just say it once? That’s a terrific question and the answer goes back to how people taught and learned things in the ancient world when almost no one could read, and those who could read were not very likely to have scrolls at home (there were no books yet—the first books were called codices (co-dih-sees)) because they were very expensive and time-consuming to make and they needed a safe place to be stored. But people would listen to the stories of the Bible, most would never read anything. When something was very important, they would say it over and over and over again so it would stick in people’s brains. Today we are going to read five verses and the word covenant (God’s forever promises) will be repeated six times and the word circumcise is repeated five times. We aren’t going to talk about circumcision today because we already talked about it back in Episode 116 of Context for Kids and Episode 180 of Character in Context for the grownups. What’s important this week is to learn about all the who’s and when’s and why’s about why God told Abraham to do this, as well as all his descendants. So, let’s read Genesis 17:9-14
God also said to Abraham, “As for you, you and your descendants after you, generation after generation need to keep my covenant. This is my covenant (between me and you and your descendants) after you, which you are to keep: Every one of your males must be circumcised. You must circumcise the flesh of your foreskin to serve as a sign of the covenant (between me and you). Throughout your generations, every baby boy in your household needs to be circumcised when he is eight days old—every baby boy born in your household or bought as a slave from foreigners. Whether the baby boy is born in your household or bought as a slave, he must be circumcised. My covenant will be cut into your body as a permanent covenant. If any man or boy is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that man will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”
Wow, that’s a lot of just repeating the same thing over and over again in different ways just because God wanted them to understand what was going on and also to make sure that they did it. Not only that, but at the end of this chapter, in the last three verses, they will say it all over again. Although we might think that God’s half of the covenant, His promises to Abraham to give him many descendants and the Land of Canaan for their forever home, is the most important thing in this chapter, when we read it to see what gets mentioned the most, it’s Abraham’s responsibilities that gets talked about the most. God made and established His covenant (which means He made it permanent and not just a promise) with Abraham to do everything He had been promising since Genesis 12, because God knows that Abraham is ready to begin living in a new way and to trust God a lot more than he has been up to this point. But first, God has decided to make Abraham’s entire household a holy and set apart people so that the world will see how different He is from all the gods of the other nations. In the ancient world, the people who were circumcised were priests but it didn’t happen until they were much older—God is telling Abraham that all of the boys born into his household have to be circumcised when they are just eight days old. But everyone else? They had to be circumcised now, no matter how old they were. And it didn’t matter if they were free or slaves—God saw them all as equals in His covenant with Abraham. They would all be circumcised, just like the priests of other gods in Egypt. But remember from a few weeks ago when we talked about the fact that the Canaanites didn’t circumcise anyone. That made Abraham and his household very different. God calls circumcision a sign, because it is a one-way thing. There are things in life that can be undone and things that can’t. If I make a recipe and put twice as much salt in it, it’s going to be horrible unless I make twice as much and then it will be normal. You can undo that sort of thing, but when skin is cut off, or a finger or a toe or whatever, it is gone and will not grow back. God was telling Abraham, “Once you do this, you are committing yourself and all your descendants to be my people forever, no matter what. You can’t get away from me any more than you can grow that skin back after cutting it off.
Jesus once told a story about the importance of being very sure about the commitments we make and the things we say we will do. He told a story about a person who wanted to build a tower and how important it was for that person to make sure they have enough materials to get the job done, otherwise everyone would laugh at them when they failed. He also told a story about a king who was at war with another king, but he was wise and counted his soldiers and his weapons before he went to the battle, to find out whether he needed to surrender or could actually win. What God was telling Abraham was something really big to ask him to do, and Abraham would need to count the cost to himself and everyone in his household. Abraham could have said no and walked away. He always had the ability to do that, but what God was asking him to do was like the last step. It was like at a wedding when the couple says, “I do.” They are married now and can’t just change their mind without a whole lot of trouble. Once Abraham obeys and cuts all the men in his household, they will be the special property of God forever. They will be under His protection but they will also have to obey Him. Abraham must have decided that it was a good deal because he’s going to obey at the end of chapter 17.
You know, everything we do in life requires us to make decisions about what we will and will not be doing. No one has time to be the President and a restaurant chef at the same time. They are both full-time jobs. You have to decide to be one or the other. Although, you might be able to do both, just at different times in your life. But God keeps teaching Abraham and Abraham’s children that they can either be His people, or they can worship other gods but they can’t do both. Circumcision will set aside the entire nation of Israel as belonging to God and Him alone. They will keep His commandments. They will pray to Him and only to Him. They will be His unique people in all the earth, and they will have to act in ways that show the world how much wiser and more powerful God is than all of the fake gods of the people around them. That’s a big responsibility and it means that there are things they can’t do. It doesn’t mean that they won’t ever sin. Abraham is still going to mess up a few more times, in big ways, before his story in the Bible ends—but committing to God and deciding to be His people means that we are promising to do better and better as He teaches and changes us to be more like Him. That’s what God is telling Abraham with all that repetition of the words covenant and circumcision. But there is also another word—the word “keep.”
The Hebrew word for keep is shamar and it is one of those words that is hard to translate into English and other languages. It’s one word that means a sentence! If we shamar something, it means that we watch over it carefully and keep it safe and secure. We have to treat that thing with respect and not allow anything to happen to it. The first time we see this word in the Bible is in the Garden where the humans are commanded to shamar the Garden. They have to guard it and protect it and keep it holy—but then that Serpent got in and made a mess of everything. The next time we see that word is when God puts an angel at the Tree of Life with a huge flaming sword, to guard it from the humans getting back in and eating some of the fruit. And then, the worst time of all was when God asked Cain where his brother was and Cain got spicy with God and said, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Yeah, Cain used the word shamar. Cain hadn’t protected his younger brother—instead he killed him in the field. The humans did the opposite of guarding the Garden—they let a Serpent in and then they rebelled against God because they wanted to be able to make their own decisions about what is good and what is bad. And Cain also did the opposite of guarding his brother and keeping him safe. So far, the only one doing a good job is the angel guarding the Tree of Life.
God is telling Abraham that a big part of guarding their covenant was teaching people from the time they are babies to carefully think about God’s covenant with them and to make sure that they teach their children about it as well. But God does something really interesting with this—it isn’t just Abraham and Ishmael, like they are somehow better than everyone else. Every single man in the household is included. No one is left out. Whether they are free or slaves, they are all equal in God’s eyes and they are all being trusted with keeping this covenant. Even if it seems terrible and crazy to you, they might have seen this as a very special honor because only certain people with special jobs were circumcised.
Now, you might ask why nothing happens to girls or women. Well, we don’t have any parts of our bodies that can be cut off without doing terrible damage to us. Our whole bodies, from head to toe, are important and special and we don’t have any extra parts that can be gotten rid of. What Abraham was told to do would hurt like the dickens but he would heal up and be okay afterward. We women need all our parts! Also, women who were priestesses in the ancient world weren’t like men who were priests. Priests helped people communicate with gods in the ancient world, but religious things that involved women were very wicked and God respects women way too much to have it look like the women in Abraham’s household were being forced to do terrible things. A lot of things that people did to worship our God in ancient times looked almost exactly the same as the things the other nations were doing for their gods, but God had to make some changes so that He could show how different and wonderful He is. The women of His people were to be respected and they could be amazing leaders, like Miriam and Deborah and Huldah, but He didn’t want the world thinking badly about what they might be doing if they served at the Tabernacle and Temple. So, women weren’t left out, they were being honored, respected, and protected. Not only that, but the work the priests would do later on was heavy, backbreaking work, which was better suited to men. Women were expected to be wives, and mothers and they often ran businesses out of their homes along with their husbands. In fact, that’s how the whole world worked until the industrial revolution.
Now, the weird thing this week is actually a big mystery. It’s the Hebrew word karet and no one knows for sure what it means. Well, that’s not right—we know what the word means but we aren’t sure how exactly it worked out. Let me explain. Verse fourteen says: “If any man or boy is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that man will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.” Where it says, “cut off”? That’s the Hebrew word karet. And no one seems to know what it means to be cut off from the people. There are a lot of theories. Some people wonder if they were supposed to get kicked out of the community, but how do you justify doing that to a kid just because his dad refused to obey God? That doesn’t seem quite right. Some think that maybe it meant that the people who disobeyed would be shunned—which means that everyone would ignore them until they obeyed. In the ancient world, where people depended on one another, that would be a good motivation to start being obedient. Others wonder if God would kill them or would make it so they couldn’t have any babies. No one knows for sure. And there are different sorts of things in the Bible that, when you do them or don’t do them, that’s supposed to be the punishment. And no one knows what on earth it means. So, it sounds like it was probably something that never ended up happening or I guess we would know. There are commandments like that in the Bible, where people are very confused because they aren’t clear or don’t make any sense to us. I suppose that when God told this to Abraham, either he knew exactly what it meant or he didn’t and he just never found out because he made sure to do it. There are so many mysteries in the Bible, and that’s okay. Personally, I think that God was telling Abraham and the children of Israel who came after him that the people who didn’t want to be a part of God’s people, didn’t have to be. If they decided not to follow God, they would just stop obeying and circumcising their sons and they would be just the same as foreigners and strangers and they wouldn’t be a part of God’s great and amazing plan to save the world through Jesus, the Messiah. As we will see as we go through the Bible, not everyone related to Abraham will be the people of God. Only the people who stuck with Him. I don’t think that God was making them drop dead—that isn’t what we see in the Bible—but we do see people turning their backs on God and getting into all sorts of trouble. Goodness sakes, out of the twelve tribes that made up the children of Israel (thirteen if we count the Levites), ten of them abandoned God and disappeared.
Let’s look at the verses again and see where all our special words for this week are and how they change the way we read it: After making all of those amazing promises to bless Abraham and his descendants with the Land of Canaan, God also said to Abraham, “As for you, you and your descendants after you, generation after generation need to keep (carefully watch over, guard, protect, and obey) my covenant of forever promises. This is my covenant (my promise between me and you and your descendants) after you, which you are to make sure to carefully keep: Every one of your men and boys must be circumcised. You must circumcise the flesh of your foreskin to serve as a sign of the covenant (between me and you) so that people know you belong to me and so that you know you belong to me. Throughout all of your generations, every baby boy in your household needs to be circumcised when he is eight days old—every baby boy born in your household or any man bought as a slave from foreigners. Whether the baby boy is born in your household or is older and bought as a slave, he must be circumcised. My covenant will be cut into your body as a permanent covenant. If any man or boy is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that man will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant and doesn’t want his family to be part of my special people.”
Do you understand how faith works? How God walks with us in bigger and better ways as we get to know Him and trust Him more and more? So many people are afraid of God because they are scared He will ask them to do something that they can’t handle but He never does. When we come to believe in God and decide to follow Him, He never responds by immediately sending us to a far off country to preach and teach and work miracles. Even the disciples of Jesus, who knew their Bibles (just the Hebrew parts, of course, because the stuff about Jesus obviously hadn’t been written yet!)—well, even they were with Jesus for a few years learning from Him and learning to trust Him before they were sent out into the world to do amazing things. Paul knew the Bible backward and forward before Jesus spoke to him on the road to Damascus—and when he started to preach about Jesus, he figured out right away that he needed to get away for a few years, learn about Jesus, and get prepared. He was a Bible expert who was taught by one of the greatest Jewish sages who ever lived! And God still didn’t force him into anything he wasn’t ready to do.
God waited for twenty-four years before asking Abraham to take this very big step for himself and his household. God had proved Himself over and over again. God hadn’t ever let Abraham down and even saved him when he messed things up bad—and God will have to do it again in a few chapters! Abraham’s problem was Abraham, but God was working on Abraham’s “heart” which actually means his mind and his ways of thinking. Abraham came from Babylon, from a family of idol worshipers, but God was patient and spent twenty-four years getting Abraham ready for this next big step. Becoming circumcised would change Abraham’s body forever, and it would remind Abraham that he was different and special not because Abraham was the greatest man alive but because God chose him to begin a new family in the world who lived in a new sort of way. It was a huge responsibility, and God wanted Abraham to succeed. Succeeding doesn’t mean never failing or getting things wrong—that’s impossible for us—but it does mean that we keep trying and learning and doing better. That’s all God has ever asked from us—to trust Him and cooperate with Him and to become different people. He will change us, and all we have to do is cooperate (which can be super hard, I know). Or at least try to cooperate because sometimes we can be very confused about what He wants. Sometimes He has to tweak what we think we know because we just aren’t right about everything.
God has been patiently working to turn Abraham into the kind of person who would do anything God asks. God is going to ask Abraham to do something, in about another forty years, that would be so incredibly difficult that I don’t think I could ever do it. Fortunately, it was something God only told one person in all of history to do—and then He didn’t let Abraham do it, thank goodness. God wants us to become the sorts of people who are willing to do whatever He asks us to do, no matter how difficult, but what He never does is ask us to do something that He hasn’t gotten us ready to do first. God isn’t going to ask you to go someplace until He knows you are ready to go there. He isn’t going to tell you to do something without making sure that you can do it. It may even take sixty-five more years but He will make sure you are ready. God isn’t in any hurry. He wants you to do what He created you to do. He made you to do something that I can’t do, and not anyone else either. I will never know all the people you know. You and I don’t have all the same talents and skills. You can help people that I can’t because I won’t ever meet them, and they don’t know me or trust me. But they will know and trust you.
Abraham’s children are often called “seeds” in the Bible. Seeds are baby plants. They aren’t the full-grown crops or flowers or fruit or vegetables or grain that can feed the world and everything in it. Abraham is just the first step in God’s plan to save the world from sin and death. Abraham is the beginning and so he doesn’t have to worry about the whole plan depending on himself. He was just a part of the plan to bring Jesus into the world. Jesus was always the plan. When God chose Abraham, it was because God had to create a certain family in a certain place, the land of Canaan. And Abraham had many sons before he died, but his son Isaac will be the next step, and then Isaac’s son Jacob. Jacob’s son Joseph will rescue his entire family from starvation by bringing them to Egypt. And when God brings them out of Egypt, He will take the miraculous family of Abraham and make them into a people whose only King is God Himself. And He will teach them a new way of living as people with their own country—something Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob never had. And so, they will need new kinds of laws, first for living in the wilderness and worshiping at a Tabernacle, something their ancestors never had, and then for living in the Land of Canaan without a human king. And over the course of hundreds of years many good things and bad things happened but God never gave up making the way for Jesus to be born, because Jesus was the plan. But even Jesus didn’t have to be ready until he was thirty years old. If God was that determined to make sure His own son was ready for the work Jesus had to do, and only Jesus could do, how much more do you think He will make sure that you are ready for what He wants you to do? You don’t need to be scared or to worry about what God has in store for you because when He wants you to do it, you will be more than ready. He wants you to succeed.
I love you. I am praying for you. I want you to think about how much God loves His Kingdom and how much He wants you to do good things to help build it up. God wants you to do a good job. So it is His job to get you ready. All you have to do is trust Him and cooperate and become the type of person on the inside who can do whatever it is He wants on the outside.