We’re going to talk about a very important part of God’s love this week—justice! What did Jesus mean when He said that people who exalt themselves will be exalted and people who humble themselves would be humbled? How do the stories of Joseph, David, Jesus, and the churches of Revelation teach us how God’s love works in making things right?
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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 last week I talked about grownups behaving badly on social media but this week we are back to talking about Lazarus and the Rich Man, and Joseph, and King David, and especially Jesus because in order to talk about God’s love we have to talk about justice. Justice is a very important part of the love of God because justice means setting things right that are wrong. Justice isn’t always easy, sometimes it is very complicated, which is why God is also big on being merciful—not doing the worst He can do when someone has done something wrong. I mean, just think about it, if He wanted, He could just give us a side eye and **poof** we’d be gone. Instead, He forgives us over and over again and gives us so many chances to get things right because that’s what love looks like when people really do want to do better and sometimes even when they don’t want to do better. One of God’s favorite ways in the Bible to make wrong things right is with something called an honor reversal. Honor was a person’s reputation—and it was based on things like how much money and power and influence someone had or if they had won a lot of battles in wars or were great athletes. Beggars had no honor at all, and rich people had a lot. So even if the beggar was a really good person and the rich person was a total skunk, the rich person had honor and the poor person had none. That’s because today, at least where I am, the word honor means something completely different. We would say someone is honorable when they are honest and brave and loving. When someone tells the truth even when it can get them into trouble, that is considered honorable. Or when someone refuses to do something wrong, we call that honorable. Words can have different meanings in different cultures. So, I want you to forget for a minute how you use the word and think about how the Bible people were thinking about the words honor and shame. Shame is the opposite of honor—it means people don’t think anything good about you at all, won’t listen to you, etc. No one wanted to be shamed, it was worse than having a negative one hundred credit score. No one would do business with you, trust you, let their son marry your daughter, etc.
And if you heard the episode about Lazarus and the Rich Man, right now you might be saying—hey, when Lazarus was alive, he had no honor even though we never hear about him doing anything wrong and that rich man wasn’t shamed even though he was just horrible! And you would be right. There is something that Jesus says, “Whoever exalts themselves will be humbled and whoever humbles themselves will be exalted.” And it means something similar to what happened between Lazarus and the Rich Man but not exactly the same. It means when we are making a big deal about ourselves and bragging and disrespecting and shaming other people and putting ourselves on the top of the heap, Jesus will make sure we end up on the bottom of the heap even if He has to wait until we are resurrected to do it. And a lot of people who are on the bottom and being picked on and treated cruelly are going to be up at the top when Jesus makes everything right. That’s exactly what happened in the parable—Lazarus ended up partying with Abraham and the rich man ended up in the Jerusalem trash heap far below. Talk about trading places, right?? And God loves to do this all the way through the Bible, from Genesis all the way to Revelation.
In Genesis, we are going to see this in the story of Joseph. Joseph is going to have so many ups and downs that his life is like the original roller coaster. He started out as the favorite son out of a total of eleven (and then twelve) brothers, and then the brothers will gang up against him and sell him to merchants who will take him to Egypt and sell him as a slave to a rich man. And the rich man really likes Joseph because he is so blessed by God and he ends up being the man in charge of the entire house! But then he gets accused of a terrible crime and ends up in prison, which is way worse than being a slave in Potiphar’s house. The head of the jail likes him though, and puts him in charge of the prison. And then the King of Egypt, the Pharaoh, puts Joseph in charge of everything in Egypt! Wow! Joseph’s whole life was a bunch of honor reversals, first he was up then down then up then down then up and then to the top! It doesn’t mean that Joseph enjoyed it all but at the end he had more honor than anyone else in the world except the Pharaoh. And that is a lot of honor!
How about David? He was the youngest kid in the family, he had a ton of older brothers and probably a lot of bruises. When the prophet Samuel came to dinner, which was a huge deal, they forgot to even tell him and they left him out in the fields watching the critters. But he was God’s choice to be the next king
–that’s what it means when the Bible says that David was a man after God’s own heart. That’s an idiom, a saying meaning that he was God’s choice and not that David always did everything right or that his heart was always in the right place because there are whole chapters where he is acting like a jerk. And his life was also a series of ups and downs. He started out as the son everyone forgot about and then Samuel poured oil on his head to say he would be the next King. And then he killed Goliath and married King Saul’s daughter but then Saul decided to murder him so he spent years on the run living in caves before finally becoming King of Israel when Saul died. So Saul and David traded places kinda like Lazarus and the Rich Man.
In the book of Revelation, the author wrote letters to seven churches in Asia Minor, which is Turkey today. I know that it’s weird to have a country with the same name as a bird and I don’t know how that happened but no one asked my opinion before doing that so it really doesn’t matter. But we see some churches getting yelled at because they seem to be doing really great but God is warning them tthat they are headed to the bottom of the heap and some churches that look like everything has gone terribly wrong but God is making them all sorts of promises about how much honor they will have if they keep doing what is right. Sure, they are being smacked around and shamed by the rich and powerful now and even thrown in jail and killed, but someday they will have new names and be pillars in God’s new Temple and the people who hated them will have to admit that God loves them while bowing down at their feet. In fact, all of the book of Revelation is about honor reversals—the rich and powerful are really poor and blind in the ways that count with God and someday they will be so miserable that they will want to die. And the people they hurt and killed and were mean to will be sitting on thrones and stuff and singing songs that no one else gets to sing. But the biggest honor difference of all will be Jesus, who looks like a dead lamb come back to life. He was murdered by the Romans but returns as King of the world, riding a white horse with a sword coming out of his mouth—which means He will be speaking the truth about God’s Kingdom and that’s going to be enough to destroy all the evil in the world.
The Gospels tell us the whole story of Jesus—well, not the whole story because John says that if all the things He did were written down there wouldn’t be enough books on earth to hold all of the information. Jesus started out with God, creating the whole universe. Then He became a baby in a poor family. Isaiah the prophet says He was really nothing to look at—meaning he wasn’t super good looking the way we see him in paintings where they wanted Him to be super attractive and very white. God didn’t want people to follow Jesus for the wrong reasons and everyone wants to follow someone who is good looking. God wanted people to follow Jesus because of the message of the Kingdom of Heaven. So, he was poor, not good looking, didn’t have any political power or friends in high places. In fact, the people in high places were the ones who wanted Him dead and gone and forgotten because Jesus was getting a lot of people listening to Him. He was getting more and more honor, even though he wasn’t rich or from a powerful family or a great warrior or athlete. He was getting a good reputation because of what He was teaching and how He was teaching it. And because He was doing miracles and kicking demon butt to the curb and taking names. Any question anyone asked, no matter who they were or what they were trying to do—he made them not want to ask any more questions because His answers were just SO AWESOME. No one could trick Him or trap Him. No one could lie to Him and get away with it. He was making everyone else look bad just by being so good and perfect. And in that kind of society, if one person was looking better and better, everyone else was looking worse and worse. There were people who wanted to make Jesus king right then and there even though that wasn’t what He wanted, and if there was a new King, that meant bad news for the people who were already in charge.
A few days before the Passover, Jesus came to Jerusalem riding on a young donkey—not on a mule like King David. If you haven’t ever seen a mule before, they are bigger than horses and can be very beautiful. That’s why the Kings of Israel rode them, because they were bigger than horses. But Jesus rode a donkey that wasn’t much more than a baby. Big enough to be ridden for the first time but not big enough to impress anyone. And people were shouting “Hosanna!” which means “Save us!” They needed to be saved from the Roman Empire that was being so cruel to the Jews and to just about everyone else too, for that matter. Jesus was riding high—that’s what we call it when someone is doing very well and everyone is cheering for them. We could also say He was on top of the world, even though the world doesn’t exactly have a top. Or a bottom. Because that would be super weird. I guess from the way each of us looks at it, wherever we are has to be the top! Anyway, Jesus is being cheered on and called the next King and all. No one has ever done that to me or to you or anyone else you know, right? But just a few days later, one of His best friends will take money from some evil men and will get Him arrested. He will be put in chains and dragged off and yelled at and beaten and have his beard hair pulled and will be spit on and whipped and then killed in a terrible way. He would go from the top to the bottom within just a few days. One minute, people were giving Him glory and honor and the next, they were making fun of Him as He is dying. It doesn’t get worse than that. And once He was dead, people decided He had been a big fake working for the Devil. Jesus was dead, shamed, had no honor, and was considered to be the biggest loser in all of history.
But then, He not only came back to life, but He had a perfect resurrected body that couldn’t ever die again. And then, even better, He sat down next to God on a throne as King of the whole world, not just King of the Jews like the Romans said He was on the sign they made. The prophet Isaiah even said that it wouldn’t be enough for Him to just be the King over one nation. And His followers were able to look at the Bible with new eyes and see Him talked about everywhere. It was like the entire Bible was shouting about how awesome and obedient and brave and powerful and perfect Jesus is, because that’s exactly what the Bible was saying. It wasn’t just the people who saw Him come back to life who were giving Him honor and glory and power, it was God and the Bible and the Holy Spirit too! You know, it’s one thing for people to call you awesome and quite another for God and all the angels to do it. Jesus went from poor to popular to arrested and killed, to alive and King over all kings and Lord over all lords. Wow!
That’s how God works through the whole Bible. He can take a tiny army and defeat a big army, and sometimes he doesn’t use any army at all except His own army of angels. Jesus’s Kingdom is all upside down and strange to us. We think that having a big army means being powerful, but Jesus tells us that we should be peacemakers, and merciful, and kind. The world tells us that being peaceful, merciful, and kind will get us into big trouble and we will be in danger but the problem is that no one has ever been willing to do things Jesus’s way. We think His way won’t work because we are way too scared to try it and too worried about getting enough to eat to trust Him. But the Bible is full of stories of people doing things God’s crazy way and it working out. I don’t know if you guys ever studied World War II but the nation of Germany was 99% Christian. That means that ninety-nine out of every hundred Germans was either a Protestant or a Catholic who went to church. One out of every hundred was Jewish. If all the Christians did things God’s way, then Hitler wouldn’t have had anyone in his army. Not even one person. All of the Jewish people who were killed, wouldn’t have been killed if people were doing things Jesus’s way. Hitler could have gotten up in front of a crowd saying his nonsense and all the Christians would have said, “Nah man, no way. That’s messed up. You want us to go take over Austria, Poland and Holland? They’re like almost all Christians—how can we go to war against our own brothers and sisters? And I don’t know what it is you have against the Jews but like, dude, Jesus is Jewish and we are His disciples, so, heck no. If we start rounding them up and picking on them, they aren’t going to want to follow Jesus too, okay? I mean, they aren’t idiots and if Christians messing with them they won’t want to be like us or listen to us or anything. Dude, you need to go home and read your Bible because you aren’t making any sense at all.” And same thing goes for the Italians with Mussolini. And without them, the Japanese wouldn’t have had any allies. World War I wouldn’t have happened either. Or the Crusades, or a lot of stuff. We don’t listen to Jesus because we think that down is up and up is down. We believe what the world tells us, that we need to be the biggest kid on the block with the biggest army and the biggest weapons but I wonder a lot about how much different the whole world would be if Constantine hadn’t decided that fighting other people in the name of Jesus was a good idea back in the fourth century—like three hundred years after Jesus lived. We have definitely made a big mess because we don’t understand that Jesus is telling us to be very, very different and we weren’t and now we don’t even know what to do.
I like something Paul said to the Corinthians about the upside-down world of God, which is the real world. The Corinthians were Romans through and through and not Jews. Even though Corinth was in Greece, the Romans had torn the original city down and then they rebuilt it and let their soldiers retire there. These people had been idol worshippers, so they were very different than the people Jesus taught:
“Talking about the Cross and what happened and about the Kingdom of God sounds ridiculous to people who are dying, who don’t have eternal life waiting for them, but for us it is everything and the absolute power of God to save us. According to the prophet Isaiah, God gave this promise long ago, so listen to this because God said, “I will totally destroy everything the wise people think they understand, and I am going to show the intelligent people that what makes sense to them doesn’t make sense to me.” So, who thinks they know what to do in every situation? Where are the Bible teachers? Who is a good and convincing talker? Hasn’t God just turned everything upside down, showing us that the way we think of things makes no sense to Him? For all of the philosophy and learning of the world, has any of it led a single person to God? Nope. Instead, God reached out with what seemed like the craziest story ever told–it sounds utterly ridiculous. The Jewish people, they want to see miracles straight from God to prove Jesus is Messiah, the King, and the Gentiles want us to make convincing, logical arguments that make sense to them before they believe. But, what we are saying, that God’s Messiah, His King, was tortured and killed on a Cross like an enemy of the state—well, that’s just so shameful that the Jews can’t deal with it, they like trip and fall over it, and the Gentiles are laughing their heads off because it makes no logical sense to them that a god can die. But to the people that God Himself is reaching out to, not only Jews but also Gentiles, Jesus the King is God’s power and God’s wisdom. And even though it seems strange to everyone else, if God was being ridiculous it would still be wiser than all the wisdom of people and even if God was weak it would still be stronger than all of us put together.”
“Hey guys, my brothers and sisters in the family of God, think about how you have been called to live. Most of you aren’t particularly clever, gifted, powerful, or high-ranking. Instead, God specifically has chosen people who don’t seem have a lot to offer the world so that He can shame the people who seem to have everything going for them. In fact, God chooses whatever people think of as worthless to show the world how worthless power and money and rank and everything that people admire really are. He did that so that no one could boast and brag as though He should be impressed by the same things that people are impressed with. It’s because of God that you are together with Jesus, and He and everything He ever said and did is wise and right and He shows us the way to be right with God, so the only thing we ought to be bragging about is Him because nothing else matters as much.” (I Cor 1:18-31)
Wow, now that’s upside down! Whatever the rest of the world thinks of as important isn’t important. What Jesus says is important, and wise, and right—that’s really what is important, wise and right. We people come up with ways of doing things because the things Jesus said about how He wants us to live are really scary. But you know what? For hundreds of years, the people who followed Jesus didn’t have money or power or armies and they did amazing things. They did miracles, and they changed people’s minds about Jesus because of how they lived their lives. They saved babies who were abandoned and built the first hospitals for poor people. They were good to strangers and didn’t do the shameful things their neighbors were doing. They stopped going to pagan temples and worshiping false gods. They were honest and could be trusted. Well, except some of those Corinthians because when Paul talks to them, some of it is really hard to listen to. They started out as pagans and it was hard for them to change, I suppose. Their gods didn’t have very high standards and some of them had no standards at all.
All that is to say that it doesn’t matter who you are or what your life is like or how strong or rich you are or aren’t. What matters is whether or not you belong to Jesus or not. What matters is who your King is, even though very few people actually have kings anymore and even the people who do have kings don’t have kings with much power to do anything. But in the ancient world, kings had a lot of power. They could decide whether you lived or died. The people of Corinth totally understood that. They needed to know that Jesus was a King who could give them eternal life in His Kingdom when He came back. They needed to know that nothing any human king could do would make any difference about our forever lives. If they got killed, Jesus had their back. Jesus showed that when they killed Him and He came back anyway. There is nothing that anyone can do that will get in the way of what Jesus promises.
I love you. I am praying for you. When we call Jesus King of kings and Lord of lords, we are saying that all of the power of every king and lord who has ever lived put together is nothing compared to Jesus and so we should listen to Him and obey Him more than we would all of those kings and lords all put together.