Genesis 12 begins next week, and we have two more things to learn before that. First, we are going to discuss theology with typology, which is a fun and clever way to discover clues about Jesus throughout the Bible. Then, we get serious and talk about human sacrifice, but don’t worry— I am not going to be gross about it.
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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.
Just FYI, grownups, today on the second half of the program we are going to have to talk about human sacrifice and there is just no way to avoid it when teaching Genesis 22, but don’t worry, I won’t be gross about it.
First off, we are going to talk theology, which isn’t my specialty. I prefer to teach context, which means looking at the history of Bible times and what the Bible says about itself and the types of literature we find in the Bible like poems and stories and all that because they are all very different and have to be read in different ways. I like all of that because I am a scientist. I love chemistry and got a college degree in it because I love things that make sense. I love puzzles. But theology is very different in a lot of ways. Theology is like art, and I am not much of an artist. My friend Dinah is an artist in the way she looks at the Bible and notices stuff that I just can’t see on my own. We need history and context and we need theology to understand God and the Bible better, and some people have brains that can handle both at the same time. That would not be me! But today I am going to teach you a super easy kind of theology, called typology. Just like with love and whole burnt offerings, typology is going to be very important to understanding Genesis 22 because it is one heck of a complicated chapter of the Bible. And maybe a lot of stuff will just be too confusing but don’t worry. By listening, you can learn things even if they aren’t clear yet. And maybe today you will learn things about Jesus that are very important to know. If you have a brain that likes art more than science, you will learn some tricks today to help you see some of the mysteries in the Bible that pointed to Jesus! The whole Bible is about Jesus, because Jesus has always been God’s rescue plan to get us out of the trouble that started in the Garden. Typology is the name we use for all the hints about Jesus that we find in the lives of Bible people.
Like Luke calls Adam the son of God, and also says that Jesus is the Son of God. Adam was the first man, and he was supposed to be God’s priest, taking care of the garden, but Adam decided he wanted to follow that nasty serpent instead and he betrayed God by stealing the fruit from His special tree and eating it. Adam is called a type. He is not totally the same as Jesus—I mean, no one is. But we can look at one part of his life and see a hint about what God has to do to make the world right later. Adam is a type and we can compare his life to Jesus, because Jesus will be the Son of God who doesn’t listen to Satan when he tries to get Jesus to betray God. Because Jesus is like Adam but also not like Adam, Jesus is called an antitype. Anti is a word that means against—not like Jesus is against everyone but because no one is totally like Jesus. There is something about Jesus and His story that is like Adam, but not totally the same. Satan talked to Adam and Eve in the Garden, and they believed his lies and obeyed him, but when he tried the same thing with Jesus, Jesus told Satan to take a hike and that there was just no way Jesus was going to be fooled. Adam (and Eve too) are a type, in that they were both tempted just like Jesus, but Jesus is the antitype—against what they did or the opposite of what they did—because when Jesus faced the same choice, He did everything right.
In the next chapter of Genesis, we are going to see Isaac as a type like Jesus but not exactly the same. God calls Isaac Abraham’s only son, his beloved son, and God also says that about Jesus being His only beloved Son. In fact, that’s just the beginning of the ways that the story of Abraham and Isaac on Mt Moriah are types of the story of Jesus. But we’ll talk about that more at the end of the chapter when we wrap the whole thing up. Isaac’s grandson Joseph is another famous type to Jesus, and so is Moses and King David and Jonah and many others. There are important parts of the stories that we will see later in the life of Jesus. Like Joseph, Jesus will be sold to enemies by his own people, and He also became a powerful leader after being treated very badly. Like Jacob, Jesus will escape to Egypt and like all of the children of Israel, He will come out again too. Like Moses, a powerful man will try to kill Jesus as a baby. And Jesus will go up on a mountain and preach to people about God’s laws and His Kingdom. Like Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Samson, and Samuel the prophet, Jesus was a miracle baby. Like David, Jesus is the good shepherd and God’s chosen King. Like Jonah, Jesus was buried for three days and three nights. Jesus is greater than all of His types, and so there are many parts of His life and His story that are against the terrible things that David and Samson did, and He wasn’t a trickster like Jacob. And it isn’t only people who can be types, but things too. When the children of Israel were bitten by a plague of fiery snakes, Moses saved them by lifting up a carved snake on a pole and Jesus compared Himself to that.
Jesus also compared Himself to the Temple and to shepherds and kings and landowners and farmers and all of that even though He never herded sheep or worked in the fields—and that’s another sort of comparison we find in the Bible because when Jesus says that He is the good shepherd, He ain’t talking about taking care of actual sheep like David did when he was a boy. That’s just a metaphor because kings in the ancient world would compare themselves to shepherds and had gardens (even if they weren’t pulling weeds themselves). A metaphor is what we call it when two things are compared with one another, but not by using like or as. Jesus isn’t “like” a good shepherd, He is a good shepherd of people—just not an actual shepherd of sheep. Let’s just wrap this part up by saying that Jesus is so big that it takes a whole lot of types and metaphors and symbols to try to explain just how much more He is than everyone else in the Bible. Jesus makes everyone else in the Bible look like they aren’t even trying. Remember that our brains are too small to really understand this stuff and so God gives us ways to think about it. A thousand Bibles wouldn’t have enough in them to really tell us all we want to know about God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
And now we’re gonna get really serious and talk about a really yucky thing in the Bible—human sacrifice. And a lot of times, we think that sort of thing shouldn’t be in a holy book at all. But you have already seen horrible things in the Bible and there are worse to come. That’s because the Bible tells us what did happen and not usually what should have happened. Apart from God and Jesus, no one does everything right. And understanding human sacrifice is going to be very important for the next chapter. Today we are going to talk about what human sacrifice is and why it was done and what God thinks about it. We are also going to tackle the very hard question of whether or not Jesus was a human sacrifice—because some people say that is true when they don’t want people to believe that Jesus is the King. They just don’t really understand Jesus or why He did what He did. But I want you guys to understand so you can’t be tricked.
We talked about animal sacrifices a couple of weeks ago—we talked about one kind of sacrifice called an olah. But really, sacrifice isn’t a good word. Offering is better and the Hebrew word for that is korbanot—which means that someone is doing something to come closer to God. Not just because of sin because there are a ton of reasons why people would want to bring a gift to God. And God taught the ancient Israelites that the ways to come closer to Him were by offering animals at His Tabernacle or Temple, by washing themselves and their clothes, through different kinds of worship, and most especially through repentance, which means being truly sorry for the bad things they did. But offering animals didn’t make God happy if the person wasn’t sorry for what they did. The gods of the other nations didn’t really care, they just wanted blood and meat and they wanted humans groveling on the ground scared of them and offering them expensive gifts no matter how poor they were. And the people had no idea how to please their gods because there weren’t any rules written out for them given by their gods. So, if things started going wrong, they didn’t think, “Well, dang, bad things happen to everyone and I don’t think the gods are punishing me,” but “Not only don’t I know which god is mad at me but I don’t even know why they are angry at me.” They didn’t have codes of commandments from their gods like Israel did. Their kings wrote law codes that mostly just gave the punishments for different crimes but there wasn’t anything in there about having to love their neighbors. Their gods were pretty nasty anyway so doing bad stuff might make them happy! That’s why it could be impossible to figure out what they had to fix when bad things started happening. From the Bible, our God lets us know that sometimes bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people and that’s normal life. Just because someone is suffering doesn’t mean that God is wrecking their life. God wants us to do what is right, but He accomplishes that by telling us what is right—not by making us guess or by making us confused.
But sometimes people in the ancient world were really desperate and their gods were really nasty so they would do something that God absolutely hated—instead of killing and offering up an animal to their god, they would kill a human being instead. After all, if the life of a sheep was valuable then certainly they would figure that the life of a human was a much better offering, right? Well, all throughout history, there are stories about people killing their own children to make their gods happy and some of them are true and some of them are not true. You might hear that archaeologists who were taking apart the wall of Jericho found dead babies in bottles in the wall but that is pure nonsense. I found that in a book my old pastor wanted me to read for Bible studies but once I found that I tossed it because it was just one of those old made up stories—an urban legend where a lot of people think something is true just because a lot of people say it. And someday you might hear a story about the god Molech who they made a giant bull shaped furnace and they would toss in babies—but that isn’t true either. That story might be true about the Carthaginian god Chronos like a thousand years later but not Molech. It’s a super gross story and very upsetting—which is exactly the kind of story that people like to believe. The Romans said it about the Carthaginians but sometimes the Romans made up nasty stories about their enemies. Even if it was true, there is a big difference between the Carthaginians all the way over in Northwest Africa vs the Ammonites east of the Land of Canaan. Possibly the best known of all is the really weird story about babies being killed for the goddess Ishtar of the Babylonians—but we know that isn’t true because they dug up her Temple in Ninevah and they found detailed records of what they were doing and how they worshiped and there wasn’t anything about killing people—she liked sheep and unleavened bread, actually. By the time of Jesus, sacrificing people to the gods had been illegal throughout the Roman Empire for over a hundred years (114 BCE).
But according to the Bible, people in very ancient times did offer up their kids to the gods of the Ammonites and Moabites—Molech and Chemosh and we aren’t quite sure exactly what happened but it did involve fire. Some of the kings of Israel even did that with their own sons, which made God furious. All the way back to the time of Noah, God said that no one was allowed to kill human beings—not people or animals and whoever or whatever did it had to die. Unless a rock fell on someone because what are you going to do to a rock, right? But animals who killed someone were supposed to die because people are created as God’s images. And Abraham might have known about that commandment to Noah, the one not to murder people, but he also knew what was going on in the nations around him. He knew that when times were tough, sometimes desperate people would kill their kids if they thought it would make their gods happy. And there are five main types of human sacrifice that we know of in the ancient Near Eastern world shared by Abraham and his neighbors from Egypt to Asia Minor to Babylon and Assyria. And I need to add that this seems to be a very rare and desperate thing for people to do, not something they did just everyday. It was not normal, but it was a fact of life in the ancient world in a lot of different cultures.
So, there are five different reasons why people might sacrifice a person instead of an animal. (1) In ancient Egypt, when a Pharaoh died and they were placed in their tomb, their servants were killed too so they could still help their king or queen in the afterlife. Oh man, it was bad enough to be a slave while you were alive, but these people didn’t even believe that they could rest in peace either. They had to be slaves forever. No thanks. (2) Foundation sacrifices, which are really messed up—they would sometimes kill children and put their bodies underneath new buildings to make sure that the buildings couldn’t be destroyed. They figured there were evil spirits who liked to make buildings fall down and you had to make them happy by killing children. I mean, like, dang—who even thought this up in the first place??? They actually did this in Sumer, near where Abraham came from. (3) In Mesopotamia, if they thought the gods were angry at the king of their country, the king would abdicate—a fancy word meaning he stopped being the king—and for a hundred days someone else was king and then they would kill that fake king to make the gods happy and the old king would become king again as if the gods were too stupid to understand that they were being tricked, right? Before they figured out what eclipses were, when the moon gets between the sun and the earth and makes everything dark in the middle of the day, people thought they were bad omens but now we know that they are natural and we can even tell when the next one will happen. (4) Now this one has to do with ancient Israel—killing children when there was a war or some other terrible event and people wanted to make God happy by killing their kids. Which God says over and over again doesn’t make Him even remotely happy and it was one of the big reasons He had the Babylonians come in and destroy Jerusalem and the Temple so they would be carted away to another land and would have to stop it. This was called an expiation sacrifice and I don’t expect you to remember that word. Expiation means “making amends” which means what you do when you make someone angry and need to make them happy again. And this sure didn’t work, because–dang! (5) On special occasions. I don’t know about you, but when I have a special occasion, I want a cake and I want everyone to feel safe coming over because they know I won’t kill anyone to celebrate. Unless they take the piece I want—just kidding!
Now, because Abraham was from the East, Mesopotamia, and traveled through Assyria, and had lived in Canaan for a long time and even in Egypt, he knew all about humans being killed to make the gods happy. Even if he hadn’t ever seen it or participated in it, it was part of his context, the stuff going on in his world that he knew about whether he liked it or not. We all have things going on in our own context that are normal but we hate them, right? Some people make dogs and roosters fight each other because it is part of the culture they grew up in but most people really hate it, including me. But even though I haven’t ever seen it because most people don’t do that sort of thing, I know about it. That was probably the way it was normal to Abraham too—he hadn’t ever done it but he knew it was done and he knew why.
God has a lot to say about it throughout the Bible, but we have to remember that it was all said after Abraham had been dead for a very long time. Moses hadn’t written anything down yet because he wouldn’t even be born for hundreds of years. The only things that Abraham knew about God was what God had been telling him to do and how God kept all His promises. We are really much better off because we have all those things and we even have them in books in our homes! No one in the Bible ever had anything like that. Let’s look at what God says about it: “You cannot give over any of your children in the fire to Molech, the god of the Ammonites. Do not make me look bad, as though I think that is okay; I am the Lord.” (Lev 18:21) “Say to the Israelites: Any Israelite or any person from another country living in Israel who gives any of his children to Molech, the god of the Ammonites, must be killed; the people of the country need to kill him with stones. I will turn against that person and get rid of him, because he gave his child to Molech, making me look bad and making my Holy Place filthy. But if the people of the country look the other way and ignore it when that man gives any of his children to Molech, and don’t do anything to stop him, then I will turn against them and their whole family, and cut every single one of them off from their people—them and anyone else who thinks it was a good idea because they have decided to do terrible things they believe will make Molech happy.” (Lev 20:2-5) And how about Deut 12:30-32? “When the Lord your God gets rid of all of the Canaanites who are all around you, when you go to get the Land I have promised to you, and you drive them out and live in their land, be careful not to be tempted to do things the same way they did after they are gone. Don’t even ask about their gods, asking, ‘How did these nations worship their gods? I’ll do that too.’ You must not do those things for the Lord your God, because they do every horrible thing that the Lord hates, for their gods. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods. I have told you what makes me happy, you don’t need to do more or less based on what the Canaanites did.”
Later on in the Bible, we come across stories of people who somehow believe that killing their kids is okay anyway—even kings of Israel! Kings Ahaz and Manasseh both killed their sons. And when God finally decided to let foreign armies conquer them and send them away from their homes, their sins were listed—the horrible ones that finally made God say something like, “Enough is enough—if I don’t do something then there isn’t anything these people won’t do and Jesus won’t ever be born!”—one of the very last and worst sins to be mentioned was that they were killing their kids and giving them in the fire to Molech. God couldn’t let them keep doing that, and they had become worse than all of the Canaanites who lived in the Land before them. God’s holy Land had become worse than a landfill. If God didn’t do something drastic, their kids would be even worse and there wouldn’t be any Jewish people living by God’s commandments for Jesus to be born to. Almost all of the people had forgotten about God. They were worshiping the gods of the Canaanites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Egyptians. They were worshiping everyone except the God of Abraham! And those gods wanted them to do terrible things because they were terrible gods. Once the children of Israel got sent away and they began studying the Word of God, they realized all the wrong they had done and they changed their ways. They began to see that there was only one true God and that the rest were nothing. They decided to follow Him and to do what He said needed to be done without adding stuff from the Babylonians they were living with in the east. Don’t get me wrong, they weren’t perfect and they found other things to be wrong about but they weren’t killing their children anymore, or making idols to worship, or practicing witchcraft or anything like that. They got rid of the sins of the Canaanites, and they rebuilt Jerusalem and the Temple again and began gathering on the Sabbath in synagogues and homes so that they could learn how to live as God’s people. God’s plan to bring Jesus into the world was back on track. And it was beginning to rub off on the rest of the world too because for over a hundred years before Jesus was born, no one in the Roman Empire was allowed to sacrifice any humans to gods anymore. That’s good news.
And so, today we know that we know that we know that God hates it. That’s why Jesus said that He laid down His own life. He allowed Himself to be killed by wicked men so that He could defeat sin and death. Really, Jesus ambushed them. He went to their turf where they were strongest and defeated them then and there, and He did it so that we could be free too. Jesus wasn’t a human sacrifice, but He was kinda like a sacrifice. The evil powers wanted Him dead but they weren’t trying to make any gods happy by doing it. They were just trying to win. But all of the evil in all of the Universe wasn’t enough to match the goodness of Jesus—Jesus swallowed up all their sin and all of their death and showed us that we don’t have to be afraid anymore. People who are loyal to Jesus will be like Him someday in perfect bodies because sin and death can’t keep us dead anymore. They got kicked to the curb, punked, trashed, wrecked, beaten up, and now they are just doing their best to pretend like it didn’t even happen. But it happened. Jesus brings us nearer to God when we are loyal to Him—and that’s what the sacrifices did, the korbanot, they brought people who were far away from God closer to Him. But those sacrifices had to be given over and over again. They were never enough because people would do wrong things again. But Jesus is enough. Jesus isn’t a sacrifice, He’s better than a sacrifice. He’s God’s rescue plan, and His death was the biggest trick of all time, played on Satan and sin and death.
I love you. I am praying for you. We can all be glad we live in a world that knows what Abraham didn’t know because he is going to have some hard decisions to make when God decides to test how much Abraham trusts Him, and also what Abraham thinks of Him.