We are circling back to talking about what it means to become more like Jesus again because, as we will see again next week when we start Genesis 20, Abraham has a real problem with lying when he is scared and not trusting God. What did Jesus do when He was afraid? What does the Bible tell us about lying and when is it the right or wrong thing to do?
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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.
Before we start the next chapter of Genesis, I think it’s important for us to address the elephant in the room. Have you ever heard that expression? It’s something really big that everyone can see but no one much likes talking about—like my dentist back when I was a kid who had the stinkiest fingers you could imagine. And not everyone wore gloves back then. And I never said anything. He was the only dentist in our small town and it wasn’t like I had a choice and I was always told to respect people who were grownups and call them Mister or Mrs. or Miss whatever their last name was. Even though my last name is Rosenquist, that’s a mouthful and so I just say Miss Tyler because Tyler is my first name and very easy to say. Soon I might have to call myself Granny Tyler instead because I will be 55 years old in a month and most of the people I grew up with are already grandparents. Anyway, speaking of a mouthful. Twice a year I had a mouthful of this dentist’s stinky fingers and I know that I couldn’t possibly be the only person who ever noticed. Everyone had to know but I imagine no one was saying anything and so his stinky fingers were like an elephant that everyone could see but no one wanted to talk about. Close your eyes and imagine a huge elephant in your kitchen, and everyone can see it but no one says a word. That’s weird but everyone does it. But when it is the Bible and I see an elephant, I like to make sure everyone sees it! And next week, we will be talking about a big one. Whenever Abraham gets scared, he turns into a really dangerous sort of liar and that always gets his wife Sarah into huge trouble. We aren’t supposed to like that about Abraham, which is why it’s in the Bible. In fact, whenever we read about Abraham, we are supposed to think—“wow, he did some incredible things because He trusted God but dang, we need someone better than Abraham to save us!” Everytime Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, David, or whoever does horrible things, it’s supposed to make us look forward to reading about Jesus and everything He said and did. And one thing we don’t see Jesus do is lying and getting other people into trouble just to save His own skin.
One of the ways we can best see which ways we don’t trust God is by noticing what we are willing to lie about or to commit other sins for. Of course, not all sins are about trusting God—sometimes we just really, really want something and it has nothing to do with God at all. We’re just selfish sometimes, and at other times we are feeling bad and so we think that doing something we shouldn’t will help us to feel better and for a minute it does but that doesn’t last long and now we still have the same problem but we also feel guilty about having done something we shouldn’t have. All human beings have a problem with this—kids, adults, moms, dads, grandmas and grandpas and your pastor and teachers too. Do you have a pattern? I sure do. A pattern is something about our lives that is predictable—if this happens then I always or usually do that. When I get really sad or upset, I eat junk food. A lot of it. It makes me sick. And I know it will make me sick but I just want to feel better even though I know I will feel worse for a lot longer. UGH. Some people get mean or even violent—violent means hitting people or pushing them or just using their body to hurt someone else’s body or their words to hurt people. What kind of person are you when you get scared? Do you hide? Do you fight? Do you run or freeze in place, unable to move? Do you lie? Today we are going to compare what Abraham does when he is scared with how Jesus handled being scared. Yes! Jesus was sure scared right before He was arrested. He knew He was going to die in a terrible, painful, embarrassing way. He begged His Father to find another way, even though Jesus knew there was no other way to rescue all of us from all the sin and death that wants to control us and was controlling the whole world when Jesus was born. It takes more love than any of us can imagine to do something so terrible to save your enemies, even when you are afraid and upset. When Jesus was scared, Peter made it worse by telling Him not to die at all. But Jesus went to God when He was scared and He prayed three times. Then He did what He and God and the Holy Spirit had all planned to do from the very beginning—catch Satan and sin and death in their own trap and kick all three of them to the curb. But if you aren’t ready to do something like that right now, it’s okay—neither am I. I am closer to being like Abraham than being like Jesus and I bet you are too!
One of the very first things we learn about Abraham all the way back in Genesis 12 is that he is terrified of being killed by the men on his travels because his wife Sarah is incredibly beautiful. And so not only did he lie about her but he had a plan to lie—we will find out about that plan in chapter 20. Abraham told Sarah, “Look, you are really beautiful, and someone is going to see you and want you to be their wife and they will just kill me so they can have you. So, I want you to do me a big favor, wherever we go, I want you to go along with my lie. I am going to tell them that you are not my wife, but that you are just my sister. That way, if they are really determined to take you, they will be generous with me and that will be a good deal for me.” What did Abraham mean by generous? Well, if a man sees Sarah and wants her for a wife, that means he will pay Abraham with money and critters and slaves and all sorts of things. So, not only is Abraham willing to lie to protect himself but he is also willing to lie in order to get richer—and he is telling Sarah to go along with the lie, even though that could mean being hauled off and forced to live with an idol-worshipper who might hurt her when he finds out she can’t have any babies. Sure, Abraham would lose his beautiful wife, but he would be a lot better off money-wise. Remember that critters and slaves were more valuable than money in those times and people usually didn’t actually have money because how could you even carry it around?? Abraham might have been terrified, but I bet Sarah was too. And of course, we know the rest of the story because the Pharaoh over Egypt did just that and if God hadn’t stepped in then Sarah would have been abandoned in Egypt once Abraham left.
Now, yeah, we can totally understand why Abraham might be scared and if he was anyone else, it would be more understandable but Abraham is a guy who left his family behind in a city called Haran to travel to the middle of nowhere (as far as he knew), and God point blank told Abraham that he would have kids and grandkids and all that jazz. If Abraham had been thinking, he might have realized, “Hey, wait a minute, I can’t have kids if I am dead. That means this God is promising to take care of me so I can’t die as long as I keep following Him. I don’t have to lie to all these men at all. I actually have like a golden ticket and they can’t kill me if this God is protecting me.” But Abraham didn’t really know God well enough yet to trust Him. Abraham listened to his fears about what might happen and forgot what God said would happen. Abraham didn’t trust the promise about the plan, and he wasn’t thinking about what that meant for him. As we will see in chapter 20, even with all that has happened since chapter 12, nothing has changed and Abraham is still telling that lie even though Sarah is now 89 years old and not the beauty she once was. Abraham is still looking out for himself—poor Sarah!
But Jesus is entirely different. Jesus knows God the Father better than anyone because they have always been together. Remember the Bible tells us that Jesus is God’s creative logos—which is translated as word but logos never means just words. Logos is like all of God’s thoughts—and it is very hard to explain. Let’s just say that Jesus knows everything on His Father’s mind because in some way, He is His Father’s mind—even if we don’t understand how that can possibly work. Remember, our brains are small and we aren’t smart enough to understand how God works! Sometimes we just need to know that we can trust God because Jesus trusts God because they are the same. They are good. Their plans are always good. They can see things we can’t see and do things we can’t do and they understand what is right and good when we can’t. That doesn’t mean that our lives will always be easy but it does mean that when we go along with God’s plans that our lives will always be blessed. Blessed doesn’t mean a lot of stuff and an easy life—it means that God is with us even when it seems like He isn’t and what He wants more than anything is for us to trust Him to do whatever it is He needs to do in our lives. And His plans for us rarely require us to lie to or about anything. That’s why Jesus could always be honest—even though He never shared the whole plan with anyone. There’s a difference between being honest, which means we don’t lie to trick anyone, and not spilling the beans so that everyone else knows every little thing. If Jesus had been telling absolutely everyone what was going to happen, then Satan would have been tipped off and he wouldn’t have allowed the chief priests and the Romans to kill Jesus. Jesus didn’t have to lie to trick them, all He had to do was to just let them do what they already wanted to do. God works like that a lot with His enemies, letting them do what they want. And the only people who lied were the people who were trying to kill Jesus.
Sometimes, when we don’t trust God to do what we want and even when we think that what we want is what God wants, we think that lying is a good idea to make sure it happens. And that’s a big problem. It’s one thing to be dishonest, to lie, when you are hiding an innocent person from an angry mob who wants to kill them and quite another to lie about someone else so that you get what you want. The first lie doesn’t hurt anyone and can actually save the life of an innocent person, but the second kind of lie is actually what the ninth commandment is about. We are not allowed to tell a lie that hurts someone else. There is never a good reason to do that. That’s what Abraham was doing with Sarah, he was telling a lie about her that got her hurt at least twice. It worked out good for him but not for her and not for Pharaoh and not for Abimelech and his family in the next chapter of Genesis. Lying is something we have to be wise about and we have to always be honest with ourselves about why we are doing it. You know, I always say that if you have to lie about someone you don’t like then maybe the truth is that you don’t have enough of a reason to hate them. People tend to want their enemies, or just the people they don’t like, to look way worse than they already are because if they can do that, it makes them look better in comparison. But we need to always tell the truth about our friends and even more, we need to be extra truthful about the people we don’t like because if we are lying about them then we are the ones who are sinning against God and against them. Lying is serious business and it is addictive. Once we start lying, it gets easier and easier to do. Some people lie without even thinking about it. I grew up with someone like that and it was scary to never be able to trust them. They would lie about me without even thinking about how it would hurt me. Abraham doesn’t seem to be thinking about how his lies will hurt his wife Sarah either and he should love her more than he loves his own life. He should be willing to die to protect her, but that isn’t what happened. Abraham lied because in that area of his life, he didn’t trust God to keep His promises and he was so scared to die that he was willing to sacrifice his own wife. Lying is something that twists our brains around so that we stop thinking about how much other people need us to be honest.
Think about the lies Jesus could have told to save His own life! Goodness sakes, He could have even saved Himself by telling some really bad truths about other people. But Jesus came to save people and not to get them killed just to protect Himself. That kind of Jesus wouldn’t be someone we could trust at all. But not even being anxious, worried, and scared could get Jesus to sin and lie. Because Jesus trusted God completely and He trusted the plan to rescue us from sin, death and the Devil. He knows that God is truthful and so when it came down to it, He understood that dying in such a terrible way was the only way to save us.
Now, I want to tell you something really important—just because you have an opinion about someone or something doesn’t make your opinion right. An opinion is how you think about something. I might put on a hat or get new glasses and really like them a lot. But you hate my hat. Do you need to tell me that you hate my hat? Is that the same thing as being honest? Now, if I ask you then you need to be honest with me but just because you hate my hat doesn’t mean it is a terrible or ugly hat. It just means that you don’t like it. I love it or I wouldn’t be wearing it. What if I tell you I am going to do something that you know is very dangerous? Is that just an opinion or is that something true you need to share with me? You would feel really terrible if I got hurt and you didn’t say anything so that’s a good time to be honest. Like if I told you I was going to take drugs or run away from home or rob a bank. If you told me the truth about those things and I didn’t listen, being honest means that you need to tell a grownup you trust what’s going on so that they can help. And if you know I am going to rob a bank, I suggest you call the police too! Believe me, I would get caught and would totally end up in jail. Being honest can save someone’s life but it can also ruin a person’s life. Gossip is what we call it when we are telling stories about someone to other people when they aren’t around. The stories can be true or they can be lies but they can still hurt people very badly. We have to be wise and we have to be kind about what we share. It’s one thing to say, “Hey, did you see Rick at the swim meet? He was so fast!” Or how about, “Did you see Rhonda’s science fair exhibit? Wow, she’s super smart.” It’s quite another thing to share something terribly embarrassing that they would be hurt if you told everyone about it. How about, “That big bully was after the Whittaker twins yesterday and they ran away screaming and crying.” That may be true but it is cruel. There isn’t any good reason to share something like that. You would certainly hate it if people were saying it about you.
Now, there were some things Jesus said in His parables that look like lies but they were actually just examples of good storytelling. The rich man and Lazarus were made up people and Jesus wasn’t telling a real story of something that happened—it was a made up story teaching the people about how different things will be in the world to come based on how we treat people in this life. When Jesus called the mustard seed the smallest seed in the world, He wasn’t teaching science. Everyone knew it wasn’t the smallest but it was an expression—a way of making a point that everyone would recognize. No one is going, “Um, no Jesus you are so wrong. Orchid seeds are smaller and I know because my family plants them and eats the tuber roots.” And Jesus would have said, “Hey, dude, you know what I am talking about here—it’s just about a way of looking at things. Chill out.” We call expressions like that proverbial. Like, when you would hear the Jews in Galilee talking about a camel going through the eye of the needle, it meant something impossible. To the east in Babylon, they wrote about an elephant going through the eye of a needle. That’s because the camel was the biggest animal in Israel and the elephant was the biggest animal in Babylon. That story you might hear about a gate in the walls of Jerusalem being called the eye of the needle and being so small that a man had to take all the stuff off his camel to get through is just made up. No one would do that. They’d just use another gate. We know the names of all the gates and that isn’t one of them. But sometimes grownups want to tell an entertaining story to make a point and you will find stories out there that are completely made up. And maybe the first person who told this story was just saying, “what if?” and then others passed it along like it was true. Sometimes people don’t even know that they aren’t telling the truth.
But God never needs us to lie in order to make His promises happen. Can you imagine a God who is so pathetic and weak that He needs us to lie? This year you will be seeing a lot of that because it is an election year here in America and a lot of people are out there absolutely lying about this or that person or topic just because they want to get people to vote the way they want them to vote. And they think it’s a good idea to lie. But if someone only does what you want them to do because you or I lied to them, then they didn’t have a chance to really do what was right. When we lie, we make it almost impossible for them to know what the truth is and especially if they trusted us. And then, someday when someone comes along and tells them the truth—and they find out we lied—they aren’t going to trust us anymore. And it’s one thing for people not to trust us when it comes to elections and politics and politicians, but someone who doesn’t trust us with those things is never going to trust us if we tell them about Jesus. Wouldn’t that be sad? Whoever becomes President is nothing compared to people needing to be able to trust what we say about Jesus. In another fifty years, those people running for President will be long dead and forgotten, but people will still need Jesus. When they can’t trust us, that’s something that Jesus calls a stumbling block. A stumbling block is something that causes people to trip and fall down.
Can you imagine what would have happened if Abraham had tried to tell Pharaoh or Abimelech about God after he lied to them and got them in all sorts of trouble? Do you think they would even want to listen? Pharaoh told Abraham to get out of Egypt and never come back. All because Abraham lied. When Jesus’s disciples went out into all the world telling people about Jesus, they had to try to be as perfect as possible because if they were dirty, rotten, scoundrels then no one would want to hear about their god. Psalm 135 and 115 say that everyone becomes just like whatever or whoever it is that they worship. How the disciples acted showed the people of the Roman Empire what God was like. Is God honest or a trickster? Does God only love the Jews or does He also love the Gentiles just as much? Peter once got into some bad trouble because he was making it look like it was okay for the Jewish believers in Jesus to not eat with the Gentile believers. Some people came from Jerusalem to where Peter was preaching in Antioch in Galatia, and convinced him that there were two kinds of people—them and us. And so Peter stopped eating dinner with the Gentiles and that made it look like God thought of them as second-class citizens and not His own beloved children, no different from the Jewish believers. And boy oh boy did Paul let him have it because what Peter did is what people thought God would do. Peter could work miracles and was one of Jesus’s closest disciples and so being rejected by Peter meant being rejected by God. It got so bad that a lot of them were considering having circumcision surgery and becoming Jewish just so that they could be included with the popular kids who were eating with Peter.
You know, the Bible tells us that at Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came and lived in the believers, everyone who accepts Jesus as their King became a part of a living Temple. A Temple made from stones that are alive and those stones are us. So, when we lie, we are making God’s temple dirty. We make it look like a filthy and gross place where no one in their right mind would want to worship. My good friend Ryan White told me something yesterday that is really interesting. In the early days of the church after Jesus went back to God the Father, people in Jerusalem were all living as a group because they thought Jesus would be coming back very soon. And people who owned land would sell the land and they would take the money and give it to the group and that money would be used to feed everyone. And that was a kind thing to do. But there was a husband and wife named Ananais and Sapphira who sold some land because they wanted everyone to be impressed with them. They only gave part of the money to the disciples, which wasn’t a problem because it was their money, while pretending to give them all of it. Because they both lied, they died on the spot. God couldn’t have them lying like that in His holy community and getting away with it in front of everyone. That community of people was a Temple and they were in Jerusalem where God put His Name forever. When Ananias and Saphira promised that they had really given the disciples all the money they got, it was like lying in God’s own Temple and they fell down dead just like someone would if they touched the Ark of the Covenant. They didn’t have to lie. They just wanted to show off and get away with it.
I love you. I am praying for you. I want you to think about and talk about a time where you trusted someone and they lied to you for a really dumb reason and if you still trust them, or if you don’t trust them even when they are telling the truth. It’s a terrible thing when we tell the truth but people don’t believe us because of lies we have told them in the past.