Do you know what a prophet is? There are many stories going around that make it look like prophets were fortune tellers, but nothing could be further from the truth. God is going to name Abraham a prophet in chapter 21, but in Genesis 18, he is already being treated like one. Understanding prophets and what they are and are not will help you understand much more of the Bible than if you think they are all about predicting the future. And what does all this have to do with Sodom and what God is telling Abraham He expects from his family?
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! 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 usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.
Do you know what a prophet is? A lot of grownups don’t even know. Sometimes, popular books make it seem like the job of a prophet is to go around predicting the future but that’s rarely what they did and what we almost never see is date setting—meaning they rarely told anyone a specific day that anything was ever going to happen and when they did set dates, it was for Pharaoh and the people of Ninevah, people who needed proof of our God’s power—and that date was often tomorrow! Prophets simply told the people what God wanted them to know. When we look through the Bible, we see prophets warning people to change their ways and comforting them by reminding them that if they do what is right, then everything between them and God will be good again. The false prophets we see in Scripture mostly just predict the kind of future that people want to have happen—like telling a wicked king that if he fights against his enemies, he will win because God will be fighting on his side. True prophets went around warning people that if they weren’t loyal to God, He would boot them out of the land and stop protecting them from their enemies but they didn’t give specific dates because the point of them talking in the first place was so disaster wouldn’t happen. True prophets told the people that if they weren’t going to follow God, then they would find out what it is like to be like the other nations that weren’t protected. Israel was special to God because God loved Abraham, who was a prophet. In fact, Abraham is the first person to be called a prophet by God in the Bible. There would be many more men and women after Abraham, speaking for God—people like Moses, Miriam, Samuel, Huldah (she was a woman), Jeremiah, and Anna—but Abraham is special because he was the first. And we will even come across strange prophets like Balaam who wasn’t an Israelite but did speak the words of God anyway, even though he was wicked and greedy. The Bible can be super confusing. It seems sometimes like there aren’t any rules for who can and can’t be a prophet if Balaam qualifies!
Prophets don’t only warn people, but also pray for people. We will see Abraham do that in chapter 21, but we will also see him doing that in two weeks, after my special lesson on the book of Esther next week. When God gets angry or is trying to decide what He wants to do, it is the job of the prophet to beg God for mercy. When there is suffering going on, it is the job of the prophet to ask God for help and even for him to bring the ones hurting other people to justice. Prophets do all of these things because they all bring the messages of God to our world. God wants us to know what He wants, and He also wants us to ask Him for help and He is generally very kind to us even when we are sinning. So, if you ever see anyone who says they are a prophet but is nothing but mean and curses people or only tries to predict the future, be very careful because God’s true prophets have a lot of different jobs. If they are saying the same thing over and over again, they are probably just angry about this or that and it’s their opinion and not God telling them to say it at all.
Another thing we see prophets doing is talking to God about His reputation and what behavior is expected of Him and needed from Him. When God is super angry about terrible things that are going on, it is the job of His prophets to remind Him of how good and just and merciful He is. A true prophet who has God’s heart for repentance reminds God to be gentle with people because we are a mess and sometimes, we don’t even know what we are doing is wrong. Prophets remind God to spare the innocent when He is punishing the wicked who are hurting them. Prophets can even tell God that if He isn’t merciful and patient that the other nations will think He isn’t so great after all, and they will make fun of Him and say that He wasn’t powerful enough to keep His people alive. Because God’s plan has always been to save all of the nations in the world, they remind Him to always balance the need for justice against the guilty with mercy. People need to know they are doing what is evil but even more, they need to understand that if they do what is right then God is always faithful to forgive them. Those are the most important jobs of prophets—telling us what we need to do in order to be on good terms with God, encouraging us that He will be happy if we stop sinning and do what is right and fair, warn us about what will happen if we don’t do what is right, and reminding God to be merciful to us and to make sure to deal with the people who are hurting the people who can’t help themselves.
I have been around a long time now and I have seen a lot of predictions from people who say they are prophets and not many of them ended up happening. But the people who do hear from God, they hear all kinds of things and they pray to God for people and not just against people. God’s prophets want people to do what is good and to know about God’s love and forgiveness and not to just be scared all the time. God hates sin, yes, but He loves it when we stop sinning. And we couldn’t ever stop sinning if He was going to just kill us all at the first sign of trouble. God is patient and so His prophets must be patient too. God’s true prophets are people who become more and more like Him, and not just people who are bossy and are trying to get everyone to listen to them. We’re going to see a really good example of what prophets are supposed to do in today’s lesson, so let’s look at those verses. Remember that God and two angels are visiting with Abraham disguised as normal men, but he didn’t know that for sure until they repeated the promise from God that Sarah would finally become a mom even though she was almost ninety!
The men got up from under the trees at Abraham’s camp and looked out over Sodom. Abraham was walking with them to see them off on their journey. Then the Lord said, “Should I hide what I am about to do from Abraham? Abraham is going to become a great and powerful nation, and all the nations of the earth will be blessed through him. I have chosen him so that he will command his children and his whole household forever to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just. This is how the Lord will keep all of His promises to Abraham. Then the Lord said, “So many people are crying out about Sodom and Gomorrah, and their sin is extremely serious. I will go down to see if what they have done justifies all of the crying that I am hearing. If not, I will find out.” The two men left and went toward Sodom while Abraham remained standing before the Lord. (Gen 18:16-22)
In the Bible, one of the things we see about prophets is that they stand before the Lord in one way or another and hear things. This is the very first time we see this in the Bible, but it will also happen to Moses, Isaiah, and others. God tells them exactly what to do and say and they do it—usually. Abraham walks with them as they head in the direction of Sodom, which is near the Dead Sea even if we don’t know exactly where—along with the four other cities there. If you remember from our lessons on chapter 14, these cities were very rich because of asphalt mining. Asphalt was used in the east as part of their temples and buildings because they only had clay bricks and not rocks like the Canaanites had to make their buildings out of. Asphalt is probably what your roads are made of. The Greeks named the Dead Sea Lake Asphaltitus because the asphalt would float to the top of the Dead Sea and people would go out in boats to harvest the sticky goo off of the surface. Pretty cool job, eh? They would push the goo with their boats to the shore. It has to be the weirdest lake in the world! At one time, they were able to get a ton of asphalt out of it but now there is only a little every once in a while. That’s what made the five cities around the Dead Sea very rich in the time of Abraham.
God ends up having a sort of meeting with Abraham and the two angels before they head off to Sodom. In fact, God is treating Abraham like a friend, or what we would call a confidant. A confidant isn’t just a friend but someone you trust with your secrets. Abraham wasn’t allowed to ask them why they were traveling or what they were doing because of hospitality rules but now God is going to tell him. This is a big deal. The last person God shared His plans with was Noah, telling him to build an ark because there was going to be a terrible flood so that He could clean up His creation to be like it was in the beginning again—without all the evil that was ruining it. Unlike the gods of the other nations, who were rumored to kill everyone just because they didn’t like the noise, God wants us to know that He is interested in justice, mercy, and love. Sometimes, terrible evil has to be dealt with—and that must have been more evil than we can possibly imagine. People were living so long that bad people weren’t dying off; instead, they just got worse and more powerful. Imagine a world where bad people live for almost a thousand years—they would probably spend that time killing all the good people and then they would fight against each other!
It was a big deal for God to tell His secret plans to Abraham. It was a great honor. The reason He gave for telling Abraham was because he had been chosen to be the beginning of all God’s plans to rescue and bless the world. Everything that God does with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and David and everyone else has to do with Jesus. Jesus is how God blesses all the nations of the world. Jesus is the biggest reason why Abraham has a great name—almost a third of the people in the world know Abraham because they know Jesus. But all in all, about fifty-five percent of the world sees Abraham as a prophet—that’s the Jews, Muslims, and Christians combined. Do you think that Abraham ever thought he would be that famous?? I doubt it. And there are a lot of people who aren’t any of those religions who still know about Abraham. He might be the most famous person who ever lived. Definitely in the top five. Abraham wasn’t perfect and we have seen how he messes up in some really big ways, but he was a man who was born an idol worshiper in far off Babylon and by following God and obeying and trusting Him, he became less like a Babylonian and more like Jesus even long before He was born.
God even shares what Abraham’s job is in the world and it is very simple—to teach his children and everyone in his household the ways of the Lord. God says that He chose Abraham to do this, but that word doesn’t just mean like eenie meanie mynie moe where He chose some dude at random. The word chose actually means that God knows Abraham—that means that God has made a covenant with him of forever promises to be with Abraham and to never give up on his family—not ever. God is going to bless the world through Abraham, no matter what. Abraham and his kids and his family all the way to Jesus has done wonderful and terrible things but God made promises and He keeps them. Good thing for us. Without Jesus my family would be worshiping idols for sure! But whenever Abraham’s children didn’t teach their kids what was right and just, things went from bad to worse every time and God had to get His plans back on track.
What does it mean that God wanted Abraham’s children and household to do what is “right and just?” Those are two very important words, not only in the Bible but in the languages of all of Israel’s neighbors. Right comes from the word tzedakah and it means to be on the right side of things—like when two people are having a problem and someone else comes in and listens to them and says to one, “You’re right,” and says to the other, “You are wrong.” Or we could say that the first person is righteous and the second person is unrighteous. It’s a word that people would use in a courtroom. Right or righteous doesn’t mean a person is always right but about that one thing they are. That’s why the Bible talks about the righteousness of Jesus because He was innocent and perfect even though they killed him like a violent criminal. When we tell the world that Jesus was innocent and right and that He is our King, we are right to do that. The most important job in the world for us is to tell people that Jesus is right.
That’s what Abraham’s children are supposed to do. When Jesus returns, God will prove that we are right, or righteous, to follow Him as our King—no matter how many other things we are wrong about.
The other word that describes the behavior of Abraham’s children is that they need to do what is just—which means that they need to be fair and to make sure that people who do terrible things are held responsible and that the people they hurt are helped. That word is mishpat—but that’s only half the story. When the two words are used together—right and just or maybe as righteousness and justice, it means something a lot bigger. Like, the word nice means something and warm means something but when you say “it’s nice and warm” it’s a way of saying that the temperature of something is just right and very, very pleasant. And so, when God is talking to Abraham, the word right means one thing and just means another but right and just meant to take care of the people who were usually treated badly by bullies in the ancient world. Kings were supposed to be right and just—they were supposed to make sure that people who were in jail but shouldn’t be were let free, and that the people who were hurting people who had no one else to protect them were punished.
When God told Abraham that his children were supposed to be right and just, he was telling Abraham that He expected him and his children and everyone who would ever be in his family that it was their responsibility to act like good kings and queens. When we call Jesus our King and make Him the boss of our lives forever, we become children of Abraham too. That’s why God changes us to be more and more like Jesus, so that we can become the kinds of people who can make sure that the world is more right and fair—just like the Kingdom of Heaven. And that’s why, right after God said that to Abraham, He told him about the problem with Sodom and how people were crying out because they had been hurt by the people who lived there. It was important to God to find out how bad things were because if what He was hearing was true, then their sins were just beyond terrible. The people of Sodom were just the kind of people who had the power to make other people’s lives miserable because they were very wealthy and they lived at a time where there were no police or anyone to take care of the people who weren’t. The problem wasn’t that the people in Sodom were rich and had a lot of privileges that other people didn’t have, but that did make it easier for them to do what was evil and to get away with it.
In the Bible, we see that being rich and privileged comes with responsibilities. Ezekiel has things to say about the sins that God was wanting to check out in the city of Sodom and the four other cities in the same area. All the same people living there that Abraham had rescued over twenty years earlier when stronger and richer kings came after them and took them as slaves and stole everything they had. When people have been saved, they should want to save others, right?
This is what Ezekiel said about the sin of Sodom—let’s see how it matches up with the job of Abraham’s family to be right and just in the world. Let’s compare them with how Abraham treated the strangers who came to his camp: Now this was the terrible sin that the people of Sodom were committing on purpose, and Jerusalem is just like Sodom (like they are sisters from the same family): Sodom and the other cities close by were very proud, and had plenty of food, and were very comfortable and safe from harm, but they didn’t do a thing to help the people who were hurting and needed help. They thought they were better than everyone else and did horrifying things right in my face, so I got rid of them when I saw what they were doing. (Ez 16:49-50)
God was telling Abraham that He expected him to act one way and then confided in Abraham that He has heard that Sodom is behaving the opposite of how He wants Abraham’s family to be in the world. What God is hearing is serious enough that He is sending His angels to go and check out the stories firsthand. God is going to test the people of Sodom by sending strangers into town to see what happens to them, but those strangers won’t be in any real danger because they are actually two of God’s angels. You can tell a lot about people by how they treat strangers and especially when there are no laws to protect outsiders. What would people do if they weren’t afraid of being punished? What good things will people do when they know they won’t be rewarded for it? Everyone likes to call themselves “good people” but that doesn’t mean anything. God is going to find out the truth about Sodom and the only way to do that is to send two spies into the city. Would they be like Abraham and welcome the strangers in and take care of them, or would the angels be treated the way God was hearing cries about?
One thing we hear about a lot in the Bible is how much God cares about the people who are being hurt by others who are bigger, stronger, richer, more powerful, smarter, etc. When God gives us advantages and gifts, it is because He wants us to use those gifts to make the world a better place for the people who are hurting. When we take those gifts and use them to make people suffer, then we are insulting God. We’re being like the powerful people who killed Jesus who were both Jews and Romans. In Matthew 25, Jesus tells us that God chooses sides and favors the people who are hurting instead of the rich and powerful. God isn’t like us at all. He gives us power so that we can rule wisely and with mercy, but when we are greedy and cruel, we aren’t doing what is right and just. In Jesus’s time, there were people called the sons of the light, or the sons of righteousness, or the sons of Abraham but there were also sons of darkness, or sons of Belial who were very wicked. We show whose family we belong to by how we treat people. It’s easy to treat people nicely when they have money or power or are good looking or whatever—you know, the popular people—because we want them to do good things for us. We want to be more like them. But Jesus told us to be sons of God and to do what God told Abraham to do—to be right and just.
Right and just people don’t spend all their time thinking about themselves and so they don’t care if someone can do something for them, they only care about doing what is right—which doesn’t mean being right about everything. Now that God has told Abraham what He wants him to do and to be, the two angels will leave and God will find out how serious Abraham is about doing what is right and just. How will Abraham respond to what God is planning to do? We know from chapter 13 that Abraham knows exactly how terrible a place Sodom is, and that his nephew Lot is at least living somewhere outside the last time we heard about him. And in chapter 14, we learned that Abraham hates the king of Sodom because he is a wicked man—so wicked that Abraham doesn’t want to touch anything that belongs to him. Will Abraham be glad that God is planning to destroy the city if He finds out it is as bad as the rumors He is hearing? Is Abraham worried about his nephew Lot and Lot’s family? Will Abraham try to warn the people of Sodom? So many questions, and in two weeks we will find out exactly what Abraham decides to do. What will Abraham decide is the right and just thing to do? How will God respond to whatever it is that Abraham decides to do? And what will it all tell us about the kind of relationship that God wants to have with us as Abraham’s family through Jesus?
I love you. I am praying for you. Have you ever wondered what you would do if God came to you and said He was going to deal with someone who bullied you? Think about it very carefully and then in two weeks we will see what Abraham does. Next week, we’re going to talk about the great big mess in the book of Esther and ask, “Where is God while all this is happening??”