Before we go back to Genesis and tackle the ever growing family of Abraham, we need to understand love as Jesus taught it. Otherwise, we might make the mistake of thinking that God approves of the nonsense those guys get into. Case in point—selling your little brother as a slave is not okay.
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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 want to do something very different before we go back to Abraham in the book of Genesis because the family of Abraham is about to get a lot bigger and that means more complicated. More people means that more stuff can go very wrong and we are going to be meeting people with very different personalities and ways of thinking—like Jacob and Esau and Laban, and Rachel and Leah, and oh my goodness the twelve sons of Jacob who were mostly a mess. These were people chosen by God to eventually bring Jesus into the world and God loved them but that doesn’t mean they were always good examples. In fact, they are going to be really bad examples in the stories we will read. For starters, selling your little brother as a slave isn’t okay. So, instead of just reading these stories about the family of Abraham without Jesus, I want to make sure we understand the love of Jesus first and what He wants from us in loving our neighbors, before we read their stories. That way, like with Abraham, we won’t get confused thinking that the bad things they do are actually okay. The Bible shows us the world of people before Jesus and even before the Bible. We have it a lot easier because of Jesus dying for us, and because we have Bibles too. Okay, let’s get started.
Have you ever watched anyone try to get out of doing something really hard? Or maybe boring? Or expensive? Sometimes a boss or a parent or a teacher will give us a job or a chore or an assignment that we really do not want to do and we might try to get out of it, thinking we are really clever but in the end we still have to do it or we get a bad grade or fired or no allowance because they needed it done and we let them down? I think most of us have tried that. Well, one day Jesus was talking to the crowds and even answering some questions when someone asked Him a very important question. The man was a Bible expert, which meant he could probably read and not many people back then could do that so it was a big deal. Although many people had huge parts of the Bible memorized, they learned it by repeating it after a teacher and often as a song because it’s totally easier to remember song lyrics than just writing. Because the Bible was so important to the Jews in Jesus’s time, way more Jews could read than Gentiles—like the Romans. But still, it was maybe only three or five people out of a hundred who could read. Really, most people never needed to read so it didn’t matter. They had people like Bible experts who would read stuff for them and who would write the things that needed to be written down. It wasn’t like they had any books or anything like that and the Torah scrolls (if a community was rich enough to even have one) were kept in a safe place. Most of the scrolls of the Bible had been burned by the Greeks almost two hundred years earlier and since they were handwritten in ink on animal skins, it wasn’t easy to make new ones. But the man talking to Jesus was an expert—meaning he knew his Bible really well—from the book of Genesis (which we have been studying) all the way to Chronicles.
If you look in your Bible, you might be confused and think that I should have said from Genesis to Malachi but they have the Bible in a different order than Christians. Neither way is wrong or right, it’s just the way Jews and Christians organized the different books. A lot of things in our Bibles are a bit different, but not really in ways that change them that much. Some of the verses are different and chapters but that’s okay—remember that chapters and verses in the Bible weren’t put there by the different people who wrote the books. They did that much later to make the Bibles easier to read and to find things a lot easier. But this expert? He didn’t have any chapters and verses to make studying easier, he had things memorized and even knew where in a scroll to find something. That’s really impressive. And so we are supposed to be very impressed with this guy because he has really worked hard to know all of this stuff. Let’s look at the story in Luke 10:25-37–
Then a Bible expert stood up to ask Jesus a question, “Teacher, what do I need to do to live forever with God in the world to come?” “What is written in the Bible?” Jesus asked him. “What do you think it says?” The Bible expert answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,” and to also “love your neighbor as yourself.” (And that was a very good answer because it combined verses from Leviticus and Deuteronomy instead of just choosing one or the other) “You are absolutely right about that,” Jesus told him. “Do that and you will really be alive.” But the Bible expert wanted what he was already doing to be enough, so he asked Jesus, “And who counts as my neighbor?” Jesus decided to answer the question and said, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and some robbers got hold of him. They stripped his clothes off of him, beat him up, and then ran away, leaving him to die. A priest happened to be going down that road, toward Jericho. When the Temple priest saw the man, he passed by on the other side. In the same way, a Levite, when he came to the same place and saw the dying man, passed by on the other side too. But a traveling Samaritan came up to where the man was on the road, and when he saw him, he was full of compassion. TheSamaritan went over to the dying man and put bandages on his wounds, pouring on olive oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day, the Samaritan man took out two days’ worth of money, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him. When I come back I’ll pay you back for whatever else you spend taking care of him.’ Jesus said,“Which of these three people, the priest, the levite, or the Samaritan, do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”“The one who showed mercy to him,” he said. Then Jesus told him, “You need to act the same way.”
You know the moral of that story? The lesson we should learn from it? Don’t try to outsmart Jesus! Okay, that’s not the only lesson here. That’s not even what Jesus was trying to teach this guy. This guy knew the Bible inside and out—remember that they didn’t have the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John or any of Paul’s letters because they hadn’t been written yet. It wasn’t like Jesus was opening His Bible and quoting from the Gospel of Luke here—I mean, those books of the Bible tell us what Jesus already said. But this story is easy to understand but also kind of tricky to understand as there are six different kinds of people in this story, and four different places, and words like up and down and they all help us understand what was going on here. Jesus told His parables, His teaching stories, very carefully and His stories were supposed to make people think and even surprise them. Sometimes, His stories made people angry. This one sure made some people angry, and made other people laugh a bit.
The man was going down from Jerusalem, and you need to know in the Bible that Jerusalem is always “up” because even if you were traveling from Mount Everest to Jerusalem, you would still be going up to Jerusalem. Even though Mount Everest is over 29,000 ft tall, and Mt Zion is only 2500 ft tall (so, like a tenth as tall), because that’s where the Temple was, Mt Zion would be up and Mount Everest would be down. Not because Mount Zion is tall but because it is more important. The Bible calls it the Mountain of the Lord, even though we would mostly just call it a hill. Can you even imagine building a Temple all the way on top of Mount Everest or Mount Fuji or the Rocky Mountains? Ain’t nobody gonna walk up there to worship God. It would take forever. And people would die because there wouldn’t be any food or water. So, God was really very kind in having His Temple built on a very small mountain that everyone could get to. He wanted to spent time with His people—not hold the Olympic games with all of the best athletes at the top. God wanted rich and poor, old and young to be able to enjoy His festivals. And so, from all over the land of Israel, people would leave their homes and farms and go “up” to Jerusalem. This man in the parable was going down, which means he had been in Jerusalem but was now probably going back home. We don’t know why he was traveling but he was alone, which means he wasn’t coming back from a festival. The people going to and coming home from the festivals traveled in big groups for safety and for company, but this man was alone and we don’t know exactly why. It wasn’t a safe thing to do and robbers found him. They took his clothes and beat him up and left him there, probably bleeding to death in the cold and the heat. It doesn’t say anything about money or animals or possessions, so it seems like maybe this is a poor man—maybe even a beggar who had gone to Jerusalem to try and get some money to live on. And if that was the case then these robbers were just spiteful and hurting him for no reason at all.
There were a lot of robbers in those days but they were more like Robin Hood—they robbed rich Romans but instead of giving the money to the poor, they kept it for themselves. They were Jews who hated the Romans who were running their country and who were taxing poor people and so they roamed the roads punishing anyone they believed they could rob and get away with it, but this man seems to have done nothing wrong. These robbers were sometimes popular with the people who hated the Romans (which was practically everyone). But Jesus is talking about robbers who steal from poor people on their way home from Jerusalem even though God promised to protect their lands while they were gone. These robbers are the lowest of the low. And at this point, the crowd listening probably thought that this was a parable about really evil robbers. But they would be wrong.
So here is the guy, dying, okay? And a priest is coming down the road, so the priest is coming from Jerusalem, the city of God, and heading to Jericho, the city where evil King Herod has one of his palaces and there were like fruit trees galore. Anyway, the priest was heading in that direction which means that he was done working at the Temple for his week (he would do this two times a year plus he would come and work at the festivals if he was chosen. When he was working at the Temple, he had to follow special rules so that he wouldn’t be unclean at all. Unclean doesn’t mean dirty, it just means that you have to do some things and wait a certain amount of time before you could touch the holy things in the Temple, but he was leaving Jerusalem and so he could be the normal kind of clean again. It’s impossible to be that kind of clean all the time. And so, probably heading back home, he saw this man and he should have rushed over to help him. Only the High Priest wasn’t allowed to touch someone dead, and so this priest had nothing to worry about in touching the man who was dying. And we would think that a priest would take care of the man, right? Of course, right! But he went all the way to the other side of the road and just left him there to die.
Well, that’s just horrible and he had no excuse. One of the jobs of the priests was to teach the people the difference between good and bad and right and wrong and clean and unclean. The commandments specifically told him not only to love his neighbor but also to be kind to the poor, needy, sick, widows orphans and foreigners (people from other places). And this poor man was definitely at least one of these things. But the priest, who knew better, went to the other side of the road and kept on walking. Well, next, a Levite was walking down the road toward Jericho from Jerusalem. The Levites were related to the Priests, and they did all of the singing and music at the Temple, along with other jobs. Like the priests, they had to do special things before they could be singing in the Temple, but not as much as the priests. Maybe the Levite would help the man. They were much closer to being normal Jews than the Priests. Nope. He walks to the other side of the road too and ignores the poor dude. That is so messed up! The people who work directly for God should be the first people to help.
By now, Jesus’s audience was probably just shocked and angry. They were used to the very highest priests being evil and cooperating with the Romans, but the priests and Levites lived in their own communities and taught their children. Everyone knew them and it was surprising that Jesus was telling a story that made them look like such villains. But it was about to get worse, much worse. Along comes a Samaritan, the enemy of the Jewish people. And because the Samaritans are kinda complicated, we’re going to have to do some serious talking about them.
The Samaritan Bible was very similar to the Bible the Jews used in some ways but there are also some big differences. The Samaritans only use the first five books of our Bibles—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And those books are changed a bit to make it look like God wanted them to worship, not in Jerusalem, but on Mt Gerizim in Samaria. How this happened is a bit of a mystery but we have some guesses as to who the Samaritans are and how they came to be. We know that in the time of King Solomon’s son, Rehoboam, the kingdom of Israel split into two kingdoms because Rehoboam was a mean gooberhead who told the people that he was going to whip people with scorpions. Now, who even does that? And how would they do it? And why would you even try? So, most of the kingdom left and never came back. I do not blame them. Their capital city wasn’t Jerusalem anymore, but Samaria. And they set up Temples in Dan far in the north and Bethel in the south, with idols in them. But these people didn’t become the Samaritans—these folks got taken away to Assyria hundreds of years later after they lost a war. Only the very poor people were left behind in the land and foreigners were brought in from other countries to live there instead. People started getting eaten by wild animals and so they brought some priests back to teach the people how to worship God. And then, the other kingdom that didn’t leave Rehoboam got taken away to Babylon and when they came back, the Samaritans who lived in the north were very powerful and they believed that the Temple should be on Mt Gerizim instead of in Jerusalem. In fact, it became one of the Ten Commandments in their Bible. For hundreds of years, the Samaritans and Jews fought and usually, the Samaritans were winning because they had more money and power. Not only did they fight about where the Temple should be, but they also played dirty tricks on each other. The Jews destroyed the Temple of the Samaritans and the Samaritans sneaked dead people’s bones into the Jerusalem Temple. Pretty gross for sure. One thing for sure, the Samaritans hated the Jews and thought they were the ones really doing God’s will, and the Jews hated the Samaritans and believed they were the ones doing what was right. They had been fighting like this for hundreds of years and they still don’t agree with each other to this very day.
So when Jesus tells the people that one of their priests and one of their Levites were both so cruel and left that poor man to die, and that a Samaritan helped the dying man instead, that was like hearing the worst thing possible. That would be like someone telling a story where your mom and then your favorite grandpa left someone to die but your worst enemy helped him. It would be so embarrassing, and you wouldn’t even know what to do. There have been times in the history of my own country where groups have hated each other like that for different reasons. If Jesus told that story about eighty years ago, He would have had a white preacher and a white schoolteacher refuse to help a dying child and a black man stopping to help save the child’s life. That doesn’t seem weird to us today, but back then, white people especially in the south would have been really angry. They would be wrong, but that’s the way it was, unfortunately.
Not only does the Samaritan, who worships in the wrong place, help the stranger he found, but he bandages him. Maybe that meant tearing his own clothing or property to make bandages. He also poured olive oil and wine on the wounds to help clean and heal them and keep out infection. Then he put the man on his own animal—maybe a donkey or a mule—and took him to an inn to take care of him. And in those days, going to an inn was risky business. There could be dangerous and tricky people there, and the people who ran the inns were famous for stealing. But still, the Samaritan was in Jewish territory and so an inn was the only place he could stop. The man needed to be rested and cared for. So, the Samaritan man spent his own money and told the innkeeper that if he took care of the man, he would give him more money on his way back. If he hadn’t made that deal, no way would the innkeeper take care of the man. He’d end up dead, but the innkeeper wanted more money and the Samaritan knew it.
And so when Jesus had finished His shocking story, He asked, “So, which one of these guys was a neighbor to the dying man?” And the Bible expert had to admit that the Samaritan was the neighbor, because he had helped. What Jesus was saying is that it is wrong to ask, “Who is my neighbor” because the only reason we would ever ask that is to find out who we have to help and who we don’t have to help. But Jesus tells us that it is our job to be a neighbor to whomever needs help. They don’t have to be our neighbor because we are their neighbors. It’s up to us to love those who need help. And remember what love is, love is doing what’s best for someone else. Acting in their best interest is a fancier way of saying it. It isn’t their job to be our neighbor butt our job to be theirs. We don’t get to say, “Okay, so my neighbors live in each side of me and across the street, or go to my church, or are the people at school who I like, or people from my own town or country.” Jesus taught us how to love our neighbors as ourselves not by telling us who our neighbors are but by showing us that we have to do for others what we would want done for us if we were dying on the side of the road, or hungry, or whatever. We don’t get to decide who really is and isn’t our neighbor. And of course, you can’t help everyone in the world who needs help, but you can look out for their best interests and speak up when you see something bad happening. If you were in trouble, or had been hurt, you would definitely want people to start yelling about how things aren’t right. If no one said anything, you would feel sad and lonely and probably scared and angry too. Like the Quakers we talked about last time. When something was wrong, they had a lot to say about it. And they didn’t only talk, they did something—just like the good Samaritan.
Jesus wants us to know that we can’t just look at any group or country or religion or whatever and say, “They are all bad and evil.” That’s one of the things He was telling His Jewish neighbors in that parable. He was saying, “You can’t afford to think that every Jew is good and every Samaritan is bad. That’s just nonsense. People are people and some are kind and some are cruel, but you can’t just look at someone and know for sure. You can’t just find out how much they agree with you and then decide how good or bad they are. Remember that compared to Jesus we are all super messed up! So, do me a favor, pay attention to what people say and do. If someone says, “those such and such people are all bad and deserve bad things and do bad things,” you don’t have to say anything but you can have a quiet inside talk with God about what He thinks about when grownups say those sorts of things (usually because our parents said those kinds of things too). Ask yourself, why would anyone think of an entire group as bad? Is that even possible? What happens when one group hates another? Do they help them or hurt them? What did Jesus say about the Romans who killed Him? Did He say that all Romans are wicked and need to be destroyed? A lot of His neighbors believed that.
I love you. I am praying for you. I hope that you will all become critical thinkers and especially when people are saying things that sound good but can’t actually be true. I hope that you will always take Jesus seriously because He loves you, which means He wants what is best for you and wants you to want what is best for others. All others and not just some.