I have been wanting to do this lesson for a long time and I wish someone had shared all of this with me—or even any of it with me—when I was a beginner. We never read anything without translating it in our own minds, and the Bible is no exception. We read the Bible and decide what it means based on our own lives, understandings, and what we have heard from others. How does the Spirit help us with our reading and what doesn’t the Spirit do? Is every thought while we are reading the Bible from God? How does God use Bible reading and Bible study (not the same thing) in our lives?
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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.
I’ve been wanting to talk to you guys a long time about something that I wish someone had told me before I got myself into all sorts of Bible foolishness—not that the Bible is foolishness but what I was doing with it sure was! There was so much I didn’t know about the Holy Spirit, and others, and my culture and myself that were causing me to read the Bible in some very wrong ways while doing some messed up things with what I thought I knew. I want to save you guys forty years by just telling you right now what I have learned.
First of all, the Bible isn’t a book. Say what? No, I am super serious. The Bible is a library of books—sixty-six of them in fact! If the Bible were just one book, it would sound very different and there wouldn’t be so much change from Genesis to Isaiah to Matthew to Revelation. Each book in the Bible has its own style, and its own writer and completely different times and locations. If we say Moses wrote the first five books—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—we sure can’t say he wrote Joshua after he died or I and II Samuel, that are about King David, hundreds of years later or the Gospels a thousand years after David died. The people who God used, therefore, had different things they believed about science and whether or not there were other gods besides our God, and different attitudes about a lot of other things too. The Jews who wrote the stories of Jesus in the first century were very different in their beliefs from the people who lived in the time of David. Their entire lives were different. When David and Solomon were king, the Jews were on top of the world and had certain beliefs about kings but when Jesus was born, they felt very differently. And what about the difference between the people who were slaves in Egypt and the Jews who were later living in Susa during the time of Queen Esther or before that in Babylon during Daniel’s life.
The stories that God could tell people about Himself through very different people let us see God in ways that we couldn’t ever understand if Moses was the one and only author or if everything was just written by one person a thousand years later. Different people had different questions and different problems and different ways of looking at God and understanding God. Why? Because God seems different when you have just been set free from slavery than He does when you are building a new Kingdom or when you have been forced to leave your home. But these kinds of problems help us to see the total picture of God and not just little parts. When Moses and David were writing, they believed that the world was flat and covered by a giant dome that rested on top of the mountains. Actually, everyone in the world believed it because that’s what it looked like from the ground and that’s what made sense to them. By the time of Jesus, everyone knew that the world was more like a ball. But the Bible wasn’t written as a science book—it’s a book about God. What God had them write about Him is true, but He let them write details about the world in ways that wouldn’t confuse them. When I was a kid, we were taught that there were nine planets in our solar system but I bet you were taught that there are only eight. If you had told me, when I was a kid, that there were only eight planets I wouldn’t have listened to you at all! If God had told me there were only eight planets while telling me something else about Him, I wouldn’t have believed it was God talking to me at all! God knows we aren’t all that smart and so He doesn’t confuse us by correcting our wrong ideas about science. I mean, after all, we have things wrong now too because we don’t understand everything yet. If God told us how things truly work now, we wouldn’t believe it either. So God’s Bible teaches us about Him and not about science. I love science but that isn’t why I would ever read the Bible.
The next thing I didn’t really understand was that Bible people lived in a world so different from today that just because something meant this or that to me, doesn’t mean that they understood things the same way. Abraham and Sarah weren’t living in a “love your neighbor” kind of world and so they did a lot of messed up things. When I went to Sunday school when I was a kid, I never really heard much of the Bible. My teachers just gave me short stories about people like Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, and David and Goliath. These were stories about heroes and villains but not really stories about a perfect God and the really not perfect people He was making into a new kind of Kingdom. So, I was often confused when they did things that would get you and me into huge trouble but we weren’t allowed to say anything about it. That made it confusing to me to know how God wanted me to act—which is more like Jesus for sure! And even today, I see a lot of grownups who think that unless something is actually called evil in the Bible, that it must be okay. But God never said anything like that at all. God was teaching them how to begin to love their neighbors, but with baby steps at first. We are told to love our neighbors the way we would want them to love us, so that anything we would hate, we can’t do to anyone else. Period. Learning that right away would have set me straight on what is and isn’t okay. Abraham and Sarah wouldn’t have wanted to be treated the way they were treating Hagar, period. The Bible isn’t a book that we should read telling us what we are allowed to do to other people, it’s a library full of true stories about people who didn’t do what was right and a God who always did what was right.
The next problem I had came with learning Bible verses, and I know that doesn’t seem like a problem but hear me out. No Bible verse makes sense unless we know the who, what, where, and why about it. Lemme give you my favorite example. Who said, “And he said to him, “I will give you all these things if you will fall down and worship me.?” Sounds like something God would have said to Abraham or David, right? Nope, that comes from Matthew 4:9 and it is what Satan said to Jesus. Here’s a really funny one—and no these aren’t memory verses but they are just things that we can’t understand unless we know what’s going on in the rest of the verses! “Look, I am going to make terrible things happen to you, and will wipe out your family, and will get rid of everyone from Ahab’s house who pees against the wall.” Now, okay—I can totally see where your mom might wanna kill you if you peed against the wall, but she wouldn’t really do it. But this isn’t actually about peeing against walls—that was just a way that they talked about the differences between girls and boys. Boys can pee against walls but girls can’t. So, God wasn’t punishing random dudes for peeing against some sort of special wall, He was telling Ahab that all of his sons are going to die. Ahab and his family were doing things way worse than peeing against walls. But if I didn’t know that, I might be asking myself silly questions about walls that shouldn’t be peed on.
All that is just to show that when we know a bunch of verses but we don’t know what goes on around them, we can come up with some really bad interpretations—which is a word that means “deciding what things mean.” And the Bible is a huge library of different books written by different people telling stories about what God was doing in their times. They spoke different languages than we do and their lives were different than ours and they did different things than we do and the way they thought about what was good and bad and normal and wierd are very different than for us. They couldn’t have imagined a world like ours or making the kinds of decisions for their lives that we get to make. It took me a long time to begin to learn how to think like a Bible person and how different my life would have been if I lived during the times of Abraham or Esther or Jesus. And my life would be very different during all of those times. So we need to pay attention to all the wheres, whys and hows. So what happens when we read the whole Bible and we get the whole story from beginning to end? Or at least the highlights because any book that told the whole story, every day, about God and His people would fill up a billion libraries and all the trees would be gone.
When we read the Bible, we decide what it means. That’s what interpretation means. And it isn’t just with the Bible, we do that with every book we read. Even comic books—we think to ourselves, “what is this about? What is the writer trying to say? What does this word mean and why did they use it like that? Is this a book about heroes and villains or about friends or about history and is it made up or is it a true story?” In the Bible, we can ask questions like, “Was the world really created in six days or was Moses describing God’s creation work like he would talk about building a temple? Was that a snake in the Garden or something else? Is Job a long poem telling us how God does and doesn’t like to be talked to and talked about or is it something that really happened? What should I think about Jonah and how angry he was when God didn’t destroy Ninevah?” These are questions that Jews and Christians and Muslims have all been asking for thousands of years. There are more opinions on what the Bible is saying than there are stars in the universe and that’s a good thing because it means that we have been thinking about God for a long time and trying to figure out the Bible. We think about it because that’s how God made us. It’s why we explore and create art and build new things and make discoveries. God made us to be doers and thinkers and feelers too. The more I study, the more I wonder and the more I wonder, the more I know I love God a whole lot more than I understand the Bible.
And so I read what it says in English, about people who lived a long time ago, and I think about where the story is happening, what language they were speaking, what were their lives like, who is saying what and who are they saying it to and why. And then I look at what it says in Hebrew or Greek and see if I am missing anything. Of course, my understanding of Hebrew and Greek are just really bad so I need to look at what other people have said. But I didn’t always do that. When I first started, twenty-five years ago, I would start in Genesis and read all the way to the end and I would just do that over and over again. And when I read things, sometimes God would talk to me. He never told me what a verse meant or what the words were in Greek or Hebrew or any of that, but sometimes He would tell me something that He wanted me to know that would get triggered by the Bible verse. That isn’t what the verse meant, but it was like He was saying, “Hey, speaking of this, you need to know that I don’t like it when you do such and such.” Ugh, such a bummer.
Sometimes when I was reading, my brain would decide that such and such a verse meant this or that only to find out later that, no, it really doesn’t mean anything like that. But here’s where the problem is and I didn’t understand it when I was a total noob. Sometimes, and especially in the beginning, I believed that any thought in my head about what I was reading came from God. Actually, a lot of times it was just my imagination or me using my brains and coming up with wrong answers. Nothing at all wrong with thinking and learning and our imagination but we have to make sure that we know it isn’t usually the Holy Spirit talking to us. If everyone who loves God and who has the Holy Spirit only heard from God when reading the Bible then we would all agree on what it says and reading it once would be enough! So, we have the voice of God and our own voice inside our heads talking to us about the Bible but we also have the voices of other people. Do you know how hard it is not to think about what other people have said? Oh man, it’s really hard. And we just assume that they are right. I was reading a book recently by one of my favorite Bible teachers and he is always really good but he had a story in his book that I know isn’t true even though a lot of people believe it about the gold in the Temple. And I was shocked and thought, “What? Doesn’t he know there is no proof of that?” And then I remembered how many times God has shown me that the only reason I believe something is because someone told me it was true and I never made sure it was.
If you ask most people where Adam was created, they will say in the Garden but it isn’t true. He was created on the outside and brought into the Garden. There are lots of things like that in the Bible where we think one thing because people have said it enough times but the Bible says something else entirely. One of the prophets once said that in the times of Messiah—when Jesus is King—that the wolf will lie down with the lamb, meaning that there won’t be any more violence in the world. But people just swear up and down that it says the lion will lie down with the lamb. I know what it has always said because I have this very old figurine with a wolf cub lying down with a baby sheep with that Bible verse. And people can read that verse and believe they are actually seeing a lion and a lamb. A lot of times, we read whatever it is we expect to see. And everyone does it. One of best friends is about to get his PhD in Bible studies and I was helping him by reading his final paper before he gives it to the big muckie mucks who are going to decide if it is good enough or not. You know, his research is so good and I learned a lot but I kept finding things that shouldn’t be there because he knows what he is trying to say and it makes it hard to see what is actually there. I have the exact same problem with my own books. But my friend Sarah can read my books and find all sorts of mistakes that I don’t see no matter how many times I read it.
A really good example in the Bible is, “How many apostles are there?” A guy was telling me there were only ever twelve and I told him that isn’t true and he got kinda spicy with me and I had to show him a few verses—calling people like Barnabus and Junia apostles too! It isn’t that he hasn’t ever read the Bible, he loves the Bible, but he had been taught that there were only twelve apostles so many times that he read right over what was there. He saw it but he never really saw it. And I have done that with so many things so many times that I can’t even remember them anymore. It doesn’t mean a person is stupid or even that they haven’t read the Bible but the Bible is a ginormous book and there is so much in it that no one could possibly ever know it all. And that’s okay because knowing everything about the Bible isn’t our job. Becoming like Jesus is our job, and that’s the number one reason we should be reading the Bible.
I have taught you guys so many times to notice how different Noah, Abraham and soon Isaac and Jacob are from being like Jesus. And how we don’t need to pretend like they were perfect because that wasn’t their job. Their job was to be better than the world around them but it wasn’t like they had any sort of example walking around with them the way Jesus walked with people, and they didn’t have the Holy Spirit either. God hasn’t ever expected anyone to be absolutely perfect right away or even ever. We can’t be perfect even though we should want to be—and that’s why we read about Jesus and learn from Him. When we read what Jesus says and then go back to the stories of Abraham and all the rest—even Jesus’s own disciples—we can see what they are doing wrong, how they are being unloving and untrustworthy and even cruel and oppressive, Jesus shines brighter and brighter and then we read about Jesus again and the next time we read about all the humans in the Bible, we can see the differences even more. And as we see the differences between them and Jesus we should also be seeing the differences between ourselves and Jesus.
If we follow Moses or anyone else, then we are going to think that doing bad things is actually okay. After all, those guys are famous. Moses and Aaron and Miriam all made God so angry that He wouldn’t let them go into the Promised Land. But Jesus, He never made God angry. The Holy Spirit will help us be more and more like Jesus if we are willing and wanting that, but we make the Spirit’s job a whole lot easier by learning what Jesus said and did. What did Jesus do all the time and what did He only do sometimes and what kinds of things did He only do once? When was Jesus teaching us what to do and when was He doing something to prove He is the Messiah? We read the Bible and try to learn as much of the history of those times as we can so that when we decide what Jesus meant when He said or did something, we are more likely to get it right. There are a lot of people who haven’t ever read the whole Bible, or who only know a few verses and who don’t really understand what following Jesus means because all they are interested in is going to Heaven when they die but Jesus doesn’t ever talk about any of that as being important. Jesus talked and talked and talked about what being loyal to Him looks like here and now—not after we die. The Bible tells us that Jesus brought the Kingdom of God with Him and how to live as a part of that Kingdom in ways that turn the world upside down—like being loving to the people who hate us and honest with the people we don’t really like.
The Bible is the story of God and we find out about Him through the Jewish people—because they are the family of Jesus the Messiah. Did you know that I didn’t know Jesus was Jewish until I was like thirty years old? I don’t know why I didn’t know that—I guess I never gave it much thought. All the art had Him looking like he took baths in Sunblock 5000 and lived in a cave instead of being outside all His life. But almost all of the books in the Bible were written by Jewish people (except Luke and Acts maybe), all of His disciples early on were Jewish, and for the first ten years after He rose from the dead all of the believers were Jews! They didn’t think they were creating a new religion because they had been looking for the Jewish Messiah, their King, for hundreds of years. The Messiah was part of their religion—they just didn’t quite know what kind of a King He would be. Some verses seemed to say this while others said that. No one knew exactly how God would make all those promises work together. Jesus’s Bible and the Bible of all of His disciples was the Hebrew Bible, starting in Genesis and going all the way through the prophets and the Psalms and the historical records. But that should make sense, right? It isn’t like Jesus was teaching people out of the Gospel of John. He was just teaching and then later they wrote John and all the other books about Jesus and those were added to the Bible Jesus grew up with.
As we go through our lessons, remember that everything starting from chapter three of Genesis is telling us that we need Jesus. No one else gets things right. No one else is like God. No one else is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. God put His Spirit in the Tabernacle and the Temple so that He could be with His people without destroying them with His power. But by the time Jesus was born, the Spirit of God hadn’t been there for about six hundred years—and that’s a long time. Jesus was born the Temple of God because He is the greatest Temple. Temples are just places where God’s Spirit lives, and so Jesus was the living, breathing, loving, kind, powerful Temple who could walk with us and talk with us and work miracles and speak every word of God perfectly and cast out every demon and heal every sickness. Jesus’s Bible told the story of a people who were constantly messing things up and a Temple building that was too far away from most of the Jews to be very helpful and priests who had to make sacrifices every single day to try to clean the Temple from the sins the people were committing. And both Temples were destroyed, by God working through foreign armies, when His people had gone too far and the Temple had become too defiled and ruined for God to let stand.
But Jesus—people tried to destroy Him, the perfect Temple of God and when He rose from the dead it was in a body that couldn’t ever be destroyed again. Jesus is God’s forever Temple and when we accept Jesus as our King and follow Him and love Him and obey Him and become like Him, we become pieces of His Temple—like parts of Jesus’s own body!
I love you. I am praying for you. Reading the Bible is like finding a book about the person you are in love with and you read it over and over again because you want to know everything about them. Except, that book would have things in it that aren’t always so great. If we know that much about someone, we might not like them anymore. But God is good, and we can trust Him. If He wasn’t good, kind, and loving then He would have killed me a long time ago!