Oh my gosh, we start Genesis 22 in two weeks and can you believe it? The Bible hasn’t mentioned love even once! Is that a problem? Not really. Love will be mentioned for the first time in chapter 22. And it isn’t even God’s love. This week we will talk about how God has been showing His love and faithfulness and loyalty in a lot of ways even though the word isn’t mentioned—and when we really want to see God’s love in action, there is no better lesson than the life of Jesus.
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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.
Okay, so we’ve finished chapter 21 of Genesis, the very first book in the Bible, and guess what? No one has mentioned the word love yet! Boy was I ever surprised when I learned that. How can the book that is, from front to back, about God’s faithful love for us to rescue us from sin and death and everything bad not talk about the one thing that the Bible says God is—love! And not only that but when we do hear about love in the next chapter, it is Abraham’s love for his son and not even God’s love at all. Should that bother us? Not really. I mean, we saw what God’s love looks like in every single chapter so far. Chapter one showed us that God made us an amazing place to live, full of good things to eat and everything else we need to have good lives. Genesis two talked about how God doesn’t want us to be lonely. Genesis three teaches us that even when we turn against Him, He still wants what is best for us. Genesis four shows God’s mercy even toward someone who would kill his own brother. After the flood, God said, “Wow, these people are truly messed up and they aren’t ever going to stop sinning so I will figure out a way to save them, because they are hopeless, but I am perfect”—or something like that anyway. Over and over again, we see everyone from Adam, Eve, Cain, Noah, and Abraham messing up in big and small ways and God’s response it always the same. God’s response is love—meaning he never gives up on them. He is patient. He is kind. He doesn’t keep punishing people forever for the same thing they did ten years ago. He is happy when someone bad begins to do what is right. He loves giving people second, third, and 490th chances. He gives good things to us even when we don’t deserve it. And He often rescues us from the messes we make with our own mistakes. Of course, the best lesson in God’s love is Jesus. God loves us so much that He was willing to die to prove it, which meant He had to become a human being just like us. I don’t understand exactly how all that works, with Jesus being God and also being the Son and God also being the Father and all of that because my brain is too small. All I know is that however it all works, it sure does work! What God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit did is just amazing and most of all, it was loving. Without that, we’d all be pretty much doomed. I can’t even imagine that kind of love but I am so happy that it is real!
Human love, however, is very different but also the same in some ways. God’s love toward us since the flood can be described as loyalty. He said He wouldn’t destroy us but that he would keep the world going for our sake, and when He made a covenant with Noah and his sons and all their descendants forever not the destroy the world like that again, He was swearing His loyalty to the earth and everything on it and in it. Loyalty is a very powerful form of love which we also see humans can have. Loyalty means that one person will always do what is best for the other person. Loyalty means no lying to trick another person, no stealing, no hurting them or anything else that would be bad. If I am loyal to you and someone attacks you for something you didn’t do, my job is to stick with you no matter how big and scary the other guy is. If someone is saying bad things about you, if I am loyal to you, I will stick up for you and tell them to cut it out. Loyalty is a special kind of love because it says that the relationship between two people is so important that they will do whatever it takes to protect and help one another. God’s covenant with Noah to keep the world working correctly and all the seasons happening when they should is an agreement that He made with people everywhere but also with animals and our planet. God is loyal to human beings. God loves humans because He made us to be His images in the world. We are supposed to be like Him, so that the animals and the planet can see Him when they see us since He has no body and isn’t even a man because that would require DNA and if He had DNA He wouldn’t be invisible to us. Jesus had DNA, and was a man, because what had to be done couldn’t be done without a living body. God has always wanted us to be good images of Him and He will never stop wanting that. But for that to happen (1) He can’t go and kill us, and (2) He had to find a way for us to be free from living the way that serpent in the garden wanted us to live. God’s loyalty to us looks like Jesus—and it also looks like the fact that there are so many of us because for sure I would have killed us off already if I was having a cranky day. I would make a terrible god! I doubt there would be five people left. Just me and a bunch of cats.
But what about the first time that love is actually mentioned as a thing in the Bible and not just something we can see because of how God acts? Well, we are about to get to that in our lessons because God will be the one to use that word and He uses it when He talks to Abraham about his son Isaac. But He only ever says it once, which is kinda weird when we look at it. The Hebrew word translated as love is ahava and it can mean some different things. I mean, you know how we use the word love in different ways in English and it is the same thing in Hebrew. We can say, “I love donuts!” and Isaac will tell his favorite son Esau that he loves to eat the wild game animals that Esau hunts for him. Of course, if I really loved a donut and Isaac really loved those animals, we wouldn’t ever eat them! We enjoy the taste and it has nothing to do with real love, even though we use the same word! Another way love is used is when we see that Isaac loved his son Esau but his wife Rebekah loved Jacob instead. Jacob and Esau were twins and I would hope that doesn’t mean that Isaac didn’t love Jacob and Rebekah didn’t love Esau. You can love two people but one of them might be your favorite. God will even say later through the prophet Jeremiah that He agreed with Rebekah and loved Jacob but hated Esau. But did God really hate Esau? Not at all. God even gave Esau special lands that the children of Israel weren’t allowed to take away from his descendants. Sometimes, love just means that someone is your favorite and so you choose them instead of someone else for special things—not that you hate the other person. Jesus even talked like that once.
Now huge crowds of Jewish people were traveling with Jesus. So, he turned around and told them, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate their own father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—and even their own life—they cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry their own cross and go where I go cannot be my disciple (my follower and student). “Because, if you wanted to build a tower, wouldn’t you sit down and add up all the costs to see if you have enough money to finish the job? If you don’t, then after you have laid the foundation (like after you have laid the concrete slab) and cannot finish it, everyone watching you will begin to make fun of you, saying, ‘This dude started to build the tower and couldn’t finish it.’ “Or what king, going to war against another king, won’t take the time to sit down and decide if he can beat the dude with twenty thousand soldiers when he only has ten thousand? If he figures out he can’t win, while the bigger army is still far away, he sends a delegation and tries to surrender. It’s the same thing, because you have to choose me over everything else you have if you want to follow me and learn from me and be my disciple.” (Luke 14:25-32)
Now, if there is anything we know for sure, it’s that Jesus doesn’t want anyone to hate their families or their own life. But that’s the words He used, right? Kinda. But also not really. If we are following Jesus, then we are supposed to love everyone more and more as we become more like Him. What Jesus was saying is that He needs to be our number one choice. He needs to come first, before anyone else and even our moms and dads and everyone else we love. So, if someone we love tells us that we can’t follow Jesus, we have to choose Jesus anyway if we actually love Him. I mean, no one can tell you that you can’t love Jesus—that’s impossible. But what if someone forced you to make a choice between them and Jesus? Oh man, that would be so awful, right? I hope you don’t know anyone who would say something like that. In Jesus’s day, a lot of people would say it and sometimes they were the family members of the people who were listening as Jesus was teaching the crowds. Jesus wasn’t telling anyone to hate people who didn’t believe what He was saying, just that if anyone had to choose between Him and someone else, that they need to choose Him. And that was even before He died to save us so now we should really, really choose Him.
I can even prove to you that Jesus didn’t hate his family even when they were trying to stop Him. In the Gospel of Mark, we hear this story, where Jesus is preaching and teaching and healing people and his family comes up to the house where he is at and they want to grab Him to stop Him, Jesus entered a house, and the crowd gathered again so that they were not even able to eat, “When his family heard (that He was being swamped by large crowds), they set out to stop him, because they were saying, “He’s gone crazy!” (Mark 3:21) That must have been really hard for Jesus because He loved His mom and brothers but they didn’t understand what was happening, and because they loved Him, they were worried about Him. It’s easy for us to think, “Hey, they are the crazy ones—this is JESUS!” And the truth is that a lot of people thought Jesus was crazy, or possessed by demons, or whatever. They didn’t know what we know and sometimes it is hard to imagine a world where nobody had ever heard of Jesus dying on the Cross for us and coming back to life! Just imagine if your brother was going around preaching and talking about the Kingdom of Heaven and all that. But if Jesus hated them, just because they didn’t believe Him and were embarrassed by what He was doing, they wouldn’t have become His followers after He died. His brothers became very important men after He rose from the dead and so I am assuming that He appeared to them along with all of the other people who had been His disciples. And as He was dying, Jesus made sure that the disciple He loved was going to take care of His mom.
So there’s no way that Jesus was telling people to hate their families because He loved His even though they were being irritating. Jesus was telling people that He deserved their loyalty more than anyone else does. And He’s right. But He isn’t the first one to say something like that. Moses, over a thousand years before, told all the children of Israel that they had to love God with all their heart, all their soul and all of their strength (Deut 6:5). In other words, God wants us to love Him with everything we have and everything we are. We’re supposed to love everyone else too, but we’re told to love our neighbors the way we would want to be loved and not the same way we love God. I don’t know about you, but I would be creeped out if anyone loved me the way they love God. I don’t want to be worshiped, and I sure don’t want everyone to do whatever it is that I tell them to do. I am not always right the way God is so if you do everything I say or believe everything I say then you are going to be wrong about a lot of stuff. In fact, no one is right about everything. No one except God. Everyone in the Bible except Jesus is wrong about stuff, because Jesus is absolutely as perfect as God is. That’s why it is such a good idea to love Him more than anyone else.
Now, I totally understand if you don’t love Jesus more than your mom or dad or grandparents and all of that. You can see your family, and it is easy to love people you can see who love you in ways that you can see and hear and feel. No one doesn’t want you to love the people who love you. We have to learn how to love God in ways that are different than we can love the people we see. We have to learn how to trust God just like we learn how to trust the people in our families from the time we are born. But once we really know Jesus, it gets easier and easier to trust Him and to be loyal to Him.
When God talks about His love for us, He compares it to a lot of things—just like He compares Himself to a lot of things. God isn’t a human being like we are so He isn’t an actual father and He doesn’t have an actual wife and He isn’t even really a man because He doesn’t have a body or DNA or gametes or anything like we do. When God talks about how much He loves us, sometimes He compares himself to a dad and other times to a mom, or a mama bird, or our husband even if you are a boy and He can’t be your actual husband. When God talks about His love that way, it gives us ways of thinking about how much and how totally He loves us in every way we can ever be loved. In other words, God uses what is normal to us so we can have ways of thinking about Him and about what He does and how much He loves us even though the comparisons are never going to be exactly right. When we finally see Him, we will know the truth and it will be so much better than we can possibly imagine or anything we have ever experienced before. God is our king because He is the boss and he is taking care of us; no human king or queen ever really loves the people they rule over because they don’t know them all, but God is a different kind of King. God is our master even though we aren’t slaves but members of His family. God is our father but He never makes mistakes like real dads do. God cares for us like a mom but won’t be tucking us in or reading us a story. Like a mom or a dad though, He never forgets about us or stops caring—not even when we get mad and yell at Him.
As members of His family, because Jesus also said that everyone who does things His way and believes Him are His children, we are also supposed to love one another like family. And that is really hard. We can all be really annoying, right? And a lot of times, we don’t even like each other. But like and love are two different things. You know, a lot of times when they are growing up, I didn’t like my kids very much and especially when they were going through a phase where they were making my life just miserable by being mean or stubborn or making me scared because of the choices they were making. Sometimes I didn’t even want to see them, but I still loved them. I made sure they were taken care of, and I tried my hardest to make sure they knew I would always take care of them. I wanted them to understand that they were always safe with me and that I wouldn’t leave them no matter how difficult they were being because that’s how you love kids. When I have been very difficult, I have been very blessed to have people love me like that and even though I didn’t understand it at the time, that’s what I needed. Of course, if I was really hurting them, that’s something else entirely and they would have to love me by telling me that they weren’t going to let me near them until I stopped. Love looks different in different situations.
Now, when Jesus told us to love our neighbor as ourselves, that doesn’t mean that we do to them whatever we would like, or we tell ourselves we would like. If someone is allergic to peanuts and our favorite food is a PB&J sandwich, we don’t give them one. Even though we might feel very loved if someone makes one for us, that would be hateful to do for someone who can’t eat peanuts. It might even kill them. Instead, do what you would really like; ask them what they would like instead and make that for them. Or, if someone says, “If you really love me, you will do this or that,” then be really careful because they might be trying to trick you into doing something that isn’t right. Not everything that people like to have happen to them is healthy or good. You don’t take drugs or give people drugs just because it will make someone else happy. You don’t touch someone or let them touch you in bad ways just because they say they like it, or that you will like it. There are a lot of people in this world who want you to make them feel good by doing something that is bad for you, but that isn’t love. That’s just selfish. Love is very different from making someone feel good. If I tell you to buy me a dozen donuts to eat all by myself then don’t do that because it will make me very sick. It will only make me happy for a little while. Love is about doing what is right for a person at the right time in the right way and it can be very complicated, and if you are confused about something someone is asking you to do, go to a grownup you trust. Sometimes you might even have to call the police. I want you to love each other but I also want you to be safe while you are growing up and figuring things out. Sometimes, grownups and other kids try to trick people into thinking that certain things are loving when they definitely aren’t.
Love is a covenant word in the Bible. God loves us because He has made a decision to love us and we love others because we made a decision to have God as our god and Jesus as our King. When we think about God, we ought to think about that word ahava I told you about earlier. Ahava can mean loyalty, which means that no god and no king can ever be more important to us than them. And I know you probably aren’t thinking about other gods because we don’t believe there are other gods besides our God anymore but when the Bible was written, they still did. It means, if God tells us to do something then we do it. Sometimes, we aren’t sure if it is God telling us to do something or not so we have to be careful but God isn’t angry when we want to make sure it is Him. We always need to make sure it is God first and especially if we believe that God is telling us to hurt someone else. There are a lot of foolish people out there who are so convinced that they know what God wants that they keep doing things to other people that we know Jesus would never do and if Jesus wouldn’t do it then we know it isn’t God telling us to do that. Some people believe they hear God so clearly that they mistake their own imagination for God’s voice. That’s why it is so important that we know what Jesus said and did—everything He said and did.
Jesus told us in the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew how to be loving people. The Apostle Paul wrote a lot of letters to people telling them how to love each other in difficult circumstances and how to be more like Jesus and less like the Roman Emperors who were very cruel but still called what they were doing peace and love. What the world calls love is sometimes hateful to God because it isn’t helping others but hurting them. So what does love look like when it is really, really loving? When Paul wrote to the churches in Corinth, it was because they were a big mess and doing things to each other that were really hateful and wrong. They were fighting and pushing each other around and doing terrible things and Paul told them that it didn’t matter who they were and how rich they were and what gifts God gave them because all that is nothing compared to loving one another. A lot of people like to have this part of the Bible read when they get married, but in context, Paul was scolding them for being total gooberheads.
If I can speak like angels or in lots of languages but I am not loving, I am as annoying as a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal in someone’s ear. If I can tell you everything God wants you to know and can understand every mystery and if I know everything, and if I have so much faith that I can move mountains but don’t love anyone, I am nothing. If I give away everything I have, and if I sacrifice myself to impress everyone, but don’t love anyone, I will get nothing at all for it. Love is patient and kind. Love isn’t angry that someone else has something we want, it doesn’t brag about stuff and doesn’t think it’s just all that and a bag of chips, it isn’t rude and surly, it isn’t just looking out for itself, is doesn’t get angry easily and doesn’t keep a list of everything everyone has done wrong so they can’t ever be forgiven no matter what they do. Love doesn’t like it when people are doing what isn’t right but is very happy when people get it right. Love waits patiently and doesn’t abandon people forever because it knows that God can do anything and never totally gives up hope.
Love never ends. But prophecies will stop some day; as for languages, they will too; as for knowledge, it will all come to an end because we know a little bit now, and we talk about what God wants a little bit, but when the perfect comes, that little bit we think is so big and awesome now won’t even matter anymore because the truth is so much greater than we ever knew. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I figured things out like a child. When I became a man, I got rid of the things that were immature. Right now, we see everything like it is just a reflection as if we were looking in a mirror (and they didn’t have nice mirrors like we have now—they were super blurry), but then, we will see everything like we are face to face. Right now, I only know a little bit, but then I will know everything, the way God knows everything about me. Now these three things will last forever: faith, hope, and love—but the most important of all is love. (I Cor 13:1-13)
And I love you. I am praying for you. I know that seems like an impossible list and in some ways, it is impossible, but as we become more and more like Jesus, we will learn more and more about what it means to truly love others as we love ourselves and you know what? We will love ourselves more too.