Well, whenever someone says goodness is how to be like Jesus, it makes me want to say, “Well, duh…” but what does goodness even mean? It means so many different things in English that it makes your head spin. This week we will talk about what “goodness” means in the Bible and how the Holy Spirit works in us to get us closer and closer to being good.

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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.

Goodness is a confusing word in English—I mean, what exactly does it mean? Is it the opposite of badness? How can we be good when Jesus said that only God is good? And how is it different from the other ways that we are supposed to be like Jesus? Is self-control goodness? How about gentleness and faithfulness and kindness? Goodness seems so vague that we aren’t really sure what to make of it. Adults tell kids to “be good” or “on your best behavior” when relatives come to visit or at the store or school or whatever. But what does all that have to do with Jesus? How was Jesus good as opposed to being somehow bad? What did the word mean when Paul used it and how would the Galatians have understood it? What did it mean to the Jews whom Jesus was preaching to when He said that no one is good except God? What does good mean to us now? Out of all of the fruit of the Spirit, goodness is definitely the most confusing.

Good grades. Good hair. Good dog. Good Morning. Good news. Good enough. Good grief. Good is a word that can mean so many different things in English. But when we are told that the Holy Spirit will teach us and change us to make us “good” it’s sort of like hearing that we’re expecting good weather during a drought. Does that mean sunshine or rain? Which one is good? Does good simply mean nice enough to go out and have a picnic at the park or does good mean that rain will fall and the plants won’t die? And what does it mean if we are being good? Does it mean that we are just behaving ourselves or that we are doing things that are actually good and helping others? Paul was talking to a bunch of grownups when he said this, and so we have to take that into account too. In fact, Paul was talking to a group of people who weren’t being allowed to sit and eat at the same table with other people. There was an in-group and an out-group and these people were on the outside and not allowed to sit with the in-crowd because they weren’t considered to be good enough. Unless they did a certain thing, they weren’t considered to really be fully a part of God’s family. Paul was telling them that the thing they were being asked to do wasn’t really a sign of belonging to God’s family at all. Let me tell you a story of something that happened to me this week that made me very sad.

I know someone whom I like very much. Recently, he changed denominations—which means he is going to a new church now, which is fine. He was asking me some questions and at one point he told me that unless I also go to his church, that I am not fully a member of the family of God with him. I was very surprised. That’s the same exact problem that Paul was dealing with, when one group wouldn’t have anything to do with another group unless they did a certain thing. And it wasn’t like that thing was believing Jesus or worshiping God. But, do we get to decide who belongs in the family of God and who doesn’t just because they aren’t doing a certain thing that is important to us? Paul said no—he said that the Holy Spirit would make the people who belong in the family of God to be more and more like Jesus. That’s how we know. We look at who people were before they believed and we watch God change them for good. If only God is good, like Jesus said, then as we keep following and believing Him, we will never be entirely perfect but we will get closer and closer to being good and further and further away from being bad. And that’s because the word that Paul used that we call good actually meant excellent.

To be excellent is much different than simply being “good” and behaving ourselves. To be excellent means that whatever we are doing, we do the very best we can. That doesn’t mean that everyone is going to get straight A’s in school because sometimes, a person’s best is B’s or C’s. Just like not everyone is going to get an A in Gym class or get chosen for the choir or to have a role in the dance recital. Goodness, or excellence, means that we are determined to be the best we can be in those things that God has given us to do. It means that we aren’t out there setting a bad example by being lazy or treating people badly when we know very well how to treat them well. Imagine if Jesus had only made enough bread and fishes for half the people who were listening to Him preach—that would be so mean! There would have been a riot when the people who didn’t get fed found out about it. Jesus could make enough bread for them all so He did. Imagine if that poor man with all the demons only got half of them chucked out of him! So he still had to live in the graveyard hurting himself and others! What would be the point of getting rid of any of the demons at all? What if Jesus only healed one of the legs of the paralyzed man?

Of course, Jesus could do it all and so He did. Jesus was always excellent. He preached the best sermons anyone had ever heard. He prayed the best prayers. He gave the best answers and asked the best questions. Of course, let’s be honest; He had a huge advantage over us, right? But that doesn’t mean that Jesus couldn’t have decided to just do a little bit for us when He could do a lot. Jesus was often very sad when He saw how much people were suffering, and so He helped the people who were in front of Him when they came to Him. Jesus was very generous with His power to heal and feed and teach. That’s another definition of goodness—to be generous. Being generous means that you share what you have with others and don’t keep it all to yourself. God made me to be really smart with books but a terrible dancer—you just have no idea how bad. He made it so that I love history and the Bible. And then about ten years ago, He gave me the gift to teach people. And then He told me to teach you. But what if I just read my books and enjoyed learning but didn’t share that with anyone? What if I just used what I know to make people feel bad? I’d be showing the opposite of goodness, that’s for sure. All of that is what God gave me and so I give that away to you. It doesn’t mean that I know everything or that I am the best teacher in the world—not by a long shot. But I work hard and study because I want to be excellent in this. I can’t be an excellent dancer and I can’t play musical instruments or read sheet music, and I am so bad at sports that it’s just sad. Even trying would be a waste of my time. But I can become more and more excellent, or good, at what God created me to do. The Holy Spirit helps me with that.

Have you ever wondered how the Holy Spirit works to make us less bad and more good? The Bible says that we are God’s images. All of us. Every human being in the world is created as God’s image. Not animals—just people. All people. In the ancient world of Abraham and even later with Jesus, an image was usually an idol. Someone would make a carving or a mold of something that made them think of their gods and goddesses and then they would perform a ceremony with a knife (I don’t know why they used a knife) and they would touch it to the mouth of the idol and they believed that the spirit of the god would go into the idol—which would turn the idol into a real representative for that god. Because before that, they knew it was just a worthless chunk of clay, rock, wood, or metal. That’s what an image of a fake god or goddess is—something dead that they believed had part of the god or goddess living inside it that they could talk to, worship, feed, take to the bathroom, dress up in fancy clothes, and put to bed at night.

When Moses taught the children of Israel in the wilderness about how our God is different, he used the same exact words to describe how we are the real images of God. That He made us like Him in how we think and in a lot of what we can do. We aren’t God, but we are living, breathing reminders of God throughout the whole world. That’s why Genesis 2 says that God made man out of clay and breathed into him—because that was something they could all understand. They understood that unlike the gods and goddesses of the other nations who were just rocks and wood and clay and metal who couldn’t think, talk, hear, or walk because there was no life at all in them, that we are different. We are made by God and He did put part of Himself in us. Not so that we can be worshiped but so that we could show the world how wise and wonderful He is. He did it so that we could be excellent and rule over all of the things He has created like He would if He were us. That’s how it should have worked but the whole Bible reminds us that it never did. We are always being bad, and sometimes as bad as possible, instead of allowing God to make us excellent in ways that tell creation the truth about who He is and what He is like.

Now, even better than being created as His images is what happens when we believe that Jesus is Lord and we give ourselves over to Him forever. That’s when we receive a special gift—the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit moves in, bad stuff has to start moving out so that goodness can take over more and more. Of course, the bad stuff doesn’t just leave right away because with some of us there would be nothing left. The Holy Spirit works inside us to teach us and to help us want to get rid of the bad and to become better and better so we can be filled with more and more goodness. Somedays, I feel so surly that I am surprised the Holy Spirit doesn’t just move right out but as God is patient and gentle, so is the Spirit. The Spirit can’t be anything that God isn’t, which means that we don’t have to worry about the Spirit hurting us or changing us in ways that will hurt us. Sometimes the Spirit asks us to give up things that are very difficult to give up—like if we hate someone or don’t want to forgive someone we are really angry at. You know, sometimes hating people can make us feel like we are safe from them hurting us ever again but all it really does is make us miserable. But I can promise you that every change the Holy Spirit wants to make in you is a change that will make your life a whole lot better.

I guess we can say that the Holy Spirit is sort of like a balloon that gets bigger and bigger. Inside the balloon is goodness and as we learn to trust God more and more, the balloon gets bigger. That’s going to leave less and less room for the bad stuff that God wants to get rid of. I probably shouldn’t tell you this but before I knew Jesus, I was swearing and cussing all the time. The really, really bad words, even. Then two weeks after I gave my life to Jesus, someone at work noticed that I had stopped swearing. I hadn’t even noticed! That’s what we call a wonder—proof that God is real and working in our lives even if we can’t see Him. There was no reason why I would have ever stopped swearing because I didn’t think anything was wrong with it. I never even tried—just all of a sudden I stopped because I had a Holy Spirit balloon beginning to grow in me and that’s the first thing God wanted gone, I suppose. But it was only the first. I have been a Christian for twenty-five years now and the Holy Spirit has pushed out so much bad stuff that I can’t even hardly remember what I used to be like. That’s probably a good thing. I wasn’t totally bad or anything, but God wants me to be good and so He keeps working on me to make me better even if I never will be totally perfect.

The idols of all the fake gods couldn’t hear, see, smell, taste, talk, breathe or walk—but we can. Of course, their gods couldn’t hear, see, smell, taste, talk, breathe or walk either so I guess stone and metal and wood and clay did a pretty good job of representing them! But our God is real and created everything—if something is going to represent Him it needs to be able hear Him and talk about Him. Only humans can do that, and it’s why He made us different from the animals. Only humans can teach others about God and show them what He is like. Of course, there is one perfect image of God and that’s Jesus. Not only can Jesus teach about God but He can do it perfectly. Not like me because I get stuff wrong. I haven’t been with God forever. I didn’t create the world with Him. I can’t hear God whenever I want to and I haven’t ever seen Him. But Jesus has. The Bible tells us that Jesus is the one and only perfect image of God, who we can’t see. But Jesus could be seen and when He did things, people were seeing what God would do and what was important to God and how loving, and kind and amazing He is. When He talked, it was God talking. Wouldn’t it be great if we could be like that too and we wouldn’t ever be mean or wrong?

Jesus told a story once about God’s goodness—how generous and kind He is and how angry that can make people:

The way things are in God’s Kingdom is like a landowner who went out very early one morning to hire people to work in his vineyard where his grapes were ready to be harvested. He told the men standing around that he would give them a denarius (which was a fair wage for a day’s work), and he sent them to work picking grapes for the day. He went back three hours later and found some people just standing around with nothing to do and so he told them that he would hire them too and pay them fair wages. He went again at lunchtime and late in the afternoon and gave jobs to everyone he found standing around. When it was almost quitting time, he found even more people and asked them why they weren’t doing anything and they said it was because no one had given them any work to do. So he gave them jobs too.

When the sun was beginning to go down, very late in the day, he told the man who managed his fields to bring to workers to him—starting with the people he hired when it was almost time to go home for the night. Everyone was surprised when the landowner gave them pay for an entire day’s work! The landowner was a very generous man, paying them that much money when they had hardly worked at all. And the people who had been hired very early in the morning, when they heard about it—boy oh boy did they get excited. “If that is what he gave those slackers who hardly did anything, just think of how much money we’re going to get!” they said to one another. But when they came to the landowner, he paid them exactly the same amount as the people who had only worked an hour. And boy were they angry about it and started complaining!

“What the heck is going on here? We worked our butts off all day long in the hot sun and we’re getting the same amount as those guys who only worked an hour? This isn’t fair!” But the landowner was very kind and replied, “My friend, I haven’t hurt you. I paid you exactly the amount I said I would and you agreed it was fair at the time. Take your pay and go home. I really wanted to give these other guys the same amount of money as you got—and the money is mine so shouldn’t I be able to do with it whatever I want to? Are you jealous of them because I was kind and generous to them?”

That’s a really good story that shows us how good God is. If that had happened in real life, those men wouldn’t have had enough money to feed their families that day if they had only gotten paid for an hours’ worth of work. We don’t know why they hadn’t been hired or what they were doing all day and all the landowner cared about was making sure they got paid what they needed to survive. And that’s what God’s goodness is like. He is just as concerned with the person who became a Christian today as He is with the person who has been a Christian for fifty years. And they will both get the same reward when they die—they will live forever. When Jesus was talking to the thief on the cross beside him, and that thief asked Jesus to remember him when He became King, Jesus told the man—even though he was a criminal—that he would be with him forever in paradise. Some people don’t like that—it’s the bad inside us that wants to be jealous and mean. But goodness wants for everyone to be saved and to be changed to be more like Jesus. Just think of what would happen if everyone in the world who does bad just keeps doing bad and no one ever changes? I suppose the world would be like it was before the flood when everyone was just evil all the time and no one was safe. But that isn’t a good world—that’s a terrible world. We shouldn’t ever want Satan to win, and that’s what happens when people who do terrible things never change. Just think of how angry it makes Satan when one of his favorite bad guys totally changes into a good guy! Yikes! It’s like someone came into his house and robbed him! We can imagine a world where Hitler changed before so many people were killed. Wouldn’t that have been better? Satan really won big time with Hitler. I hope they enjoy each other’s company.

Goodness is always a challenge that never ends—whether it means being generous, or being excellent in what we are doing to serve God, or in being less and less bad all the time. Jesus was once called, “Good teacher,” and He said, “Why are you calling me good? No one is good except for God!” Does that mean that Jesus was disagreeing with the man, that he wasn’t really good? Not at all. Jesus knew that the man was about to ask Him a question that went something like this, “What do I have to do to be good enough to have eternal life?” Jesus knew that “good enough” is not what we should ever be aiming for in our lives because when we reach “good enough” we don’t have to continue to be better anymore. Jesus wasn’t saying that we can never be good enough to make God happy, but that there is no such thing as good enough except for God. If God is changing us, we will always be getting better. Good enough for that thief next to Jesus on the Cross meant seeing that Jesus really was the King of the Jews and God’s unique Messiah. He was dying and so he wasn’t ever going to be any better than he was. If he had lived longer, then he would have become even better than that. He would have developed more goodness as his Holy Spirit balloon got bigger and bigger inside him.

God never stops changing us, not ever. Sometimes, there are a lot of changes. Over the last two months, God has majorly changed me three times. I mean, like, dang. I have more goodness in me and less badness but that badness surprised me when I finally saw it! Yikes! And then sometimes a lot of time goes by and things seem to stay the same but probably God is letting me rest and get used to my new normal before He starts finding new badness to get rid of. And sometimes my badness fights back and doesn’t want to go and I get all stressed out and start playing video games all day. That’s how I always know that God is trying to fix something—I get really irritated and start avoiding Him. Aren’t people just funny like that? It’s like I can tell He wants to fix something but I have no idea what it is and not knowing is the worst thing about it so I just go and hide. Maybe you think that Bible teachers aren’t just like regular people and that we don’t do silly, ridiculous things when God wants to change us but I can tell you for sure that we aren’t any more reasonable than anyone else is. We’re all pretty much the same. So you don’t have to be perfect—you just have to let God make you more good than you are right now.

I love you. I am praying for you. Goodness isn’t something we will ever get right but we can get a whole lot better. Better is what God wants. He wants it for us and He wants it for everyone around us too.

What faithfulness means to us today and what the Greek word pistis meant to Paul are sort of the same but also very different. Fortunately, what Paul meant will teach us how much we can trust Jesus and how we want to become people who can be trusted by 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 is from the MTV, which is the Miss Tyler Version, which tweaks the CSB in order to be more understandable to kids.

If I am telling you that Jesus is faithful—what does that even mean? In modern society, faithfulness means that if you have a husband or a wife or a serious girlfriend or boyfriend—that you can’t have another. That’s what being faithful means to us and that is a good word and a great thing to do. But is that what the apostle Paul was telling us? In ancient times, what we call being faithful in your marriage was actually part of self-control instead. That was one of the main definitions, and some types of philosophers preached it as being very important—while others didn’t care nearly as much. Philosophers were men who thought deep thoughts about the world and how it works in ways we can and can’t see, and how people should behave and treat one another, and what does and doesn’t make sense. And they usually taught rich kids how to think about the world, but they would also speak in public to big crowds. There was no television and most people couldn’t read and there were no bookstores anyway, so they were very interesting to listen to. They would debate each other in public to show how smart and wise they were. But they weren’t generally very nice about it!

Paul used a word, pistis, that we translate as faithfulness in English Bibles because there is no English word that means exactly the same thing. I want you to think about a big army with privates, sergeants, colonels and generals. That army needs generals who know how to win their battles, okay? So that they can win the war they are fighting. But the truth is that they can do all the planning in the world, but it won’t mean anything unless they can trust the colonels to honestly give the right orders to the sergeants, and to be able to answer any questions the sergeants have. And that colonel has to trust the sergeant to tell the privates what they need to do. And the sergeant has to be able to trust the privates to follow orders. But that isn’t all. The privates have to trust the sergeants, colonels, and generals to know what they are doing so that they can obey orders. A good army has a bunch of people who trust and who can be trusted. A bad army is one where no one trusts anyone. Pistis means that kind of trust and also being trustworthy. And we have no word for that in English—it took me an entire paragraph to explain.

And so, when Paul was telling the people in Galatia about how the Holy Spirit trains us to be more like Jesus, that’s the word he used. Faithfulness, which we see in our bibles, is a kind of pistis and a part of pistis, but it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what pistis means. Translation from one language to another can be very difficult that way. If you only have one word, faithfulness is probably the best because a faithful person is very trustworthy but that isn’t enough because trusting God is the most important thing the Spirit teaches us. We can have self-control and be gentle like Jesus even if we don’t trust God, but it makes it really hard to obey Him when He asks us to do something difficult. We have to learn that He is worthy of being trusted—that isn’t just something we can decide to believe. So, if you don’t always trust God, that’s okay. You aren’t evil or malfunctioning. You are a normal human who has to figure out through experience that God isn’t out to get you but wants to save you. That comes in time. He really does understand.

Our best bet in learning to trust God is by being so familiar with who Jesus is and what He does and doesn’t do that we begin to see that Jesus showed us exactly what God is and isn’t like. Everyone else in the Bible was less than Jesus—way less than. Abraham didn’t trust God to save his life—twice—and so he lied and put his wife Sarah into terrible danger. Moses didn’t trust God enough to go to Pharaoh and so God had to send his brother Aaron to do the talking for him. And they aren’t the only ones—the Bible is full of people who didn’t trust God enough to do what was right and it is the same today. People still want to lie instead of trusting God. But I am going to tell you a secret. God works best when we are honest and there are only a few times when lying is a good idea. If you have ever watched movies about the Underground Railroad here in America or about Nazi Germany, then you have seen people who lied in order to protect people who were innocent from slavery and from dying. The Bible commandment about lying tells us not to lie against others in such a way that would hurt them. But when Rahab lied to protect the spies from being killed, she was rewarded because she trusted God and she was even one of the grandmothers of David and Jesus!

So, one of the most important things we can do is to learn all about Jesus because only Jesus can truly teach us about God the Father. Anyone else you listen to, including me, is going to get some things wrong. And let me tell you that Jesus loved and trusted His Father absolutely, but that doesn’t mean it was always easy to obey. In fact, on the night of the Passover, Jesus was having a hard time getting Himself ready to do what needed to be done to save us. Does that surprise you? A lot of times, we forget that Jesus laughed and cried and had all of our emotions—He just didn’t do terrible things when He had them like we do sometimes. But that night, He was so anxious and terrified that he was begging God to find another way to save us. Even though it was their plan, together, Jesus was the one who had to be arrested, humiliated, beaten, whipped, and crucified to death. If Jesus hadn’t been upset, then He wouldn’t have been human—and even though Jesus is also God, He was still totally human. That means He felt all the things we feel, and it means that when we are worried or scared or sad, that we aren’t alone.

Have you ever had something really sad happen to you? Did people try to comfort you and make you feel better? In some ways and for some things, we can feel better but with others there is just nothing to do but be sad and angry and to accept that those emotions are huge—too big for us to handle. And what’s worse is that no one else can really understand because even if they can hug us on the outside, we still have so much going on inside that no one can see or make any better. That’s one of the reasons that Jesus came here to be with us, live with us, live like us as one of us, and to feel everything we feel—so that when we don’t have anyone in the world who can understand because they can’t see or hear what we are thinking—He can. When we can’t describe how we are feeling to other people, He already knows. So we are never really all alone even when the people around us don’t understand. And when someone understands everything that is going on inside us and still loves us, we know that we can absolutely trust them. Jesus is the only person who can do that—and Jesus trusted God absolutely and so we can too.

Jesus had been telling His disciples for weeks that He was going to be turned over to the Romans to be killed like a criminal, even though He was innocent. But they just weren’t really understanding Him. Maybe it was because He taught them so many times in parables and riddles, and they were too embarrassed to ask questions. Maybe they didn’t want to know that He was serious. After all, they had been trusting Him all this time—following Him everywhere, even leaving their families and their jobs. They believed that He was going to be the next King of the Jews—like King David but only better because they wanted rescued from the Romans who were very cruel and greedy. They believed it because of everything that He could do and they knew that the only way Jesus could do those things was if God was with Him, just like He was with the greatest prophets of the Bible like Elijah and Elisha. They knew that big things were ahead and they trusted Jesus—usually. When they got scared, sometimes they stopped trusting Him. You know, just like we do. But Jesus kept proving to them that He was trustworthy. He didn’t hurt people and He didn’t steal from them like the powerful people did. He healed them and gave them food to eat. He kicked demons to the curb and worked so many miracles that when they saw Moses and Elijah come to prepare Jesus for His death, that they probably thought he was being anointed as King of the Jews at last, and they would be His councilors and generals—big, powerful people in the Kingdom of Heaven. When He told them things like, “The chief priests are going to turn me over to the Romans and they are going to kill me,” that just didn’t make any sense to them. It just wasn’t possible. That would put them in danger, and they wouldn’t get to be mighty men in the new Kingdom. They were confused, but they also knew that Jesus was the real deal—working miracles and doing battle against demons and winning every time. They hadn’t learned yet that it is okay to be confused, but that God is still trustworthy. God is like that general I told you about at the beginning of this lesson—the one everyone has to learn to trust and believe that He knows exactly what He is doing even when everything looks wrong. People mess up but God never does.

So, in the middle of the night, after their Passover meal, Jesus and His followers went to a place at Gethsemane where there was an olive orchard and a cave that they sometimes stayed the night in when it wasn’t olive harvesting season. They were all very sleepy because they had been eating meat and drinking wine—which wasn’t what they usually had to eat. And they hadn’t gone to sleep yet. They were probably about to drop. While the others wrapped themselves in their cloaks and went into the cave (it can get really cold outside at night during the Passover season), Jesus asked Peter, James and John to stay up and pray with Him. Jesus knew what was about to happen and He didn’t want to go through all of that, and especially not alone. He went a short distance away from them and began praying to God and asking Him to find another way. Jesus knew that it was going to be a terrible thing, and incredibly painful and humiliating. He knew that all of the young men following Him would run away and leave Him to deal with it alone. Only God would be with Him, and some of the women who also were His disciples. His mom would be there but I bet He didn’t really want her to see what was about to happen. Jesus trusted that this had to happen but He asked if there was another way to do this. It was just too terrible. Jesus knew that it would work, and that we would all be saved from our sins and that we wouldn’t stay dead forever, but it was a horrible thing to have to go through. He wanted to save us, but no one would ever want to be crucified.

Three times, Jesus prayed and begged His Father to find another way, but finally He said, “if this is the only way it can be done, then I trust you and I will do it.” That’s a lot of trust. Even though God will never ask us to save everyone in the world, we do know that when He does ask us to do something that it is needed and necessary. And it can be scary. The overwhelming majority of things God will ask us to do aren’t even remotely dangerous—they just scare us. And that feeling of being scared never entirely goes away because we still have our emotions and we are very often scared that God isn’t actually asking us to do it at all! That can be really hard, learning to hear God’s voice while still knowing that we aren’t always right about what we think He is saying. Many people in the world have done terrible things and believed God told them to do it. That’s why it is so important to know Jesus and what He would and wouldn’t do. If you see someone treating people badly or hurting them, then you can look and see that Jesus healed people and fed them and taught them and showed them mercy. He never turned into a rage monster—He had total self-control. That’s why we learn about what it takes to be like Jesus so we can spot the people who want to fool us into thinking that being cruel is okay.

When Paul wrote the list of how you can tell if a person is following Jesus or not, He was speaking from experience. He knew exactly what it was like to be so sure that He was right that He was willing to hurt the people who followed Jesus. He believed that He trusted God, but he didn’t really know Him as well as he thought. He believed that God wanted him going all over the land of Israel and even outside of Israel to places like Damascus, to arrest the people who believed that Jesus is the Messiah and God’s one unique Son. He even found Himself part of an angry mob that killed a man named Stephen, just because he said he had a vision of Jesus sitting at the right hand of God. That made them so furious that they killed him and they believed with all their hearts that they were obeying God. But what they were doing was based on anger and not on love. When Paul later became a believer, he called himself a murderer because he knew he had been wrong even though he was sure that he was right at the time.

When we trust God, we know that if He really wants us to do something that He will let us know and if we still aren’t sure then He will help us. But we have to know what He does and doesn’t expect from us. That’s the thing that is hardest. Paul knew that better than anyone, and when God changed His heart, He had to become a different kind of person even though He was still worshiping the same God. Paul wasn’t wrong about everything and He didn’t have to get himself a different religion, but He did have to learn that the hatred and anger he had grown up with as part of a persecuted minority in the Roman Empire, wasn’t going to work in God’s Kingdom. Paul had been an important man. He was a genius—incredibly smart and determined and hard working. He knew the Bible backward and forwards and he had one of the greatest teachers in all of Israel. He had huge parts of the Bible memorized because there was no way to carry one with him. He probably knew it in Hebrew and in Greek and in Aramaic. Of course, all he had was what Christians call the Old Testament because nothing about Jesus was written down yet. And the Bible was originally in Hebrew but it was translated to Greek about two hundred years before Paul was born and they also had Aramaic versions in the synagogues because most people in Israel understood that better.

Isn’t it crazy that Paul was a Bible expert but didn’t see anything wrong with what He was doing? And that He thought trusting God meant going and hunting people down? And how much can we trust God knowing that although He could have killed Paul, He loved him and changed his mind about Jesus instead. Knowing the Bible isn’t enough. We have to know God, know Jesus, and know what they are really like or we can make the Bible mean whatever we want it to mean. Which lets us do whatever terrible things we want to do. The Bible is a rescue story, and when we don’t understand that, we will do things that make it harder for God to rescue people. But Jesus knew all of that—it was their plan from the very beginning to rescue us. So, if we are doing anything that makes people want to run away from God, then we aren’t being like Jesus at all. Paul believed that He was serving God and that He was doing everything right. And I’ve done things like that too. Nobody ended up dead, but I know I have made it hard for people to trust God when I am not trustworthy and when I make God look like someone who couldn’t ever love them.

Jesus even told one of His stories, a parable, about a father being able to trust his children near the end of Matthew 21 when the chief priests (the guys who ran the Temple) were demanding to know why He was doing what He was doing and saying what He was saying.

Tell me what you think! A man had two sons. He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go work in the yard today.’ And the son answered, ‘I don’t want to, I am beta testing the new Call of Duty game and we’ve got a huge boss battle that will take all day’ but later he felt sorry and changed his mind and did the yardwork. Then the man went to his other son and said the same thing. ‘Yep, I’ll go do that right now, sir,’ he answered, but he got busy playing video games and didn’t go. Which of the two was trustworthy and did what their father wanted?” They said, “The first one.” Jesus said to them, “You know, all the people you look down on because of how they are living now will be part of the Kingdom of God before you will. When John the Baptist came and told everyone that they had to clean up their act, all those people you look down on were waiting in line to be baptized and believed him—while all of you didn’t.”

Jesus was telling the highest of the priests that they weren’t trustworthy because they were telling God that they would serve Him and be faithful but they really weren’t. But all the people whom they looked down on as the worst of sinners and traitors and rebels because they weren’t living right?–When they heard John, they began to be different because they believed God. But Jesus? He is way greater than John, and the chief priests didn’t believe either one of them, or the miracles, or anything that was happening. They lived at a time when there hadn’t been a real king of God’s choice in a long time, and so the priests were running most of the country and getting very rich doing it. They had to keep the Romans happy and so when they had a choice between obeying God and obeying the Romans—they did whatever the Romans wanted them to do. They knew they could be replaced, and so they were doing whatever they had to do so they could stay in power and keep making money off of the people who came to visit the Temple. They were trying to serve two masters—God and the Roman Government. They went through the motions pretending to serve God by running the Temple and making sure the ceremonies happened like they were supposed to, but in their hearts what they wanted was the power and money and for that, they had to do what Rome wanted them to do. They were more afraid of the Roman Emperor and Pontius Pilate and Herod Antipas than they were of God. And so, they could do all the sacrifices and ceremonies all they wanted but Jesus was telling them that God didn’t trust them at all because they weren’t doing what they said they were doing, and what they were doing, they were doing for the Romans and not for God. They weren’t faithful.

It’s strange isn’t it? What we are saying we are doing isn’t always what we are really doing, and the people who say they are going to do something don’t always do it while some people who seem like they will never do the right thing end up doing it after all. So, we can’t ever trust people based on what they say about themselves. Mostly, the people who go around telling other people how awesome they are, are fooling themselves. People who are really awesome don’t need to go around telling it to everyone. People do figure out who they can depend on after a while. Who says they will help and then helps? Who says they will help and then just never shows up when they are needed? One thing for sure about Jesus—if He said He was going to do something then He did it. He didn’t go around making empty promises that He didn’t keep. He said what He meant and meant what He said. He isn’t waiting across the street watching us through binoculars waiting for us to screw things up. We can trust Him. We can trust Him when we are doing things right and we can also trust Him when we are on the wrong track. The Bible is full of people doing things wrong who could still trust God to keep His promises. Just because they weren’t trustworthy and faithful, doesn’t mean that God acted the same way.

And it isn’t until we understand how much we can trust God that we can really start to be trustworthy in what He asks us to do. The chief priests went out and did their jobs in the Temple everyday but that didn’t mean anything. God wanted more from them. He wanted them to love people the way He loves people—the way He loves me and the way He loves you.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to begin to learn more and more about Jesus so you can see what God is like and how much you can trust Him to keep every promise.

Mercy is a huge thing in the Bible and so we would expect Jesus to not only teach about the importance of being merciful but also that He would be merciful. Mercy is a big step up from showing self-control. To show how mercy works, we’re going to look at one of the funniest parables about the Ungrateful Servant. It doesn’t seem funny at first, but believe me, it’s really hilarious once you stop to think about what is going on and how crazy the situation is.

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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 Bible verses are taken from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked to make the content and the context more understandable to kids.

Last time, we talked about Jesus’s self-control which not only means what He did do but what He could have done but didn’t. He could have done anything He wanted, including kill people. After all, it’s easier to kill people than raise them from the dead, right? And He raised a few people from the dead—including Himself so killing everyone who irritated Him with the snap of His fingers would have been—a snap. But Jesus isn’t Thanos—Jesus came to be an actual Savior and not a fake one. That required a lot of self-control. I can think of times in my life where I might have used that kind of power to kill people who don’t use their turn signals on the freeway. That’s just one difference between me and Jesus but if you stick around, there are enough to fill a thousand books.

Something very much related to self-control is another one of Jesus’s character traits. A trait is something that you notice from someone all the time. It doesn’t change in that person and not everyone acts like that. Last week, we talked about when Jesus went up on the Temple Mount, saw what was going on, went back to the home of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary for the night, and after thinking about it all night, went back and forced all the people making a ruckus by buying and selling animals and money for the tax and all that to close up shop and go somewhere else to do their business. People were there to pray and worship and listen to the singing of the Levites. Some Jews had to travel up to a month or more just to get there and then had to do the same to go back home. And there were also Gentiles who had traveled long distances to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. What kind of an example was this to them? Or to the Roman soldiers watching everything from the Fortress Antonia when the Temple grounds looked like a barnyard? It looked like the Jewish High Priestly family didn’t care about God at all and just wanted to be rich—which is what history tells us was the truth—while the families of normal priests were just barely able to survive. Of course Jesus was angry about it but He didn’t kill them. He didn’t whip them—He used the small flail to herd away the animals. I mean, He had to make it there on the spot so it isn’t like He had anything other than cloth or a belt to work with, right? Not like this was Indiana Jones and the Temple of God.

Jesus saw a problem—a terrible problem that was disrespecting God and keeping people from being able to worship Him. And not in a synagogue or anything, but at the Temple, which is actually holy ground. So holy that the priests walked barefoot. So holy that people weren’t allowed to carry stuff up there or use the grounds as a shortcut through the city. The prophet Hosea, who had to deal with some really messed up nonsense in His life, tells us that the Lord says it is mercy God desires and not sacrifice. That means gentleness—it is just another part of not doing the worst we can do. Sure, we can insult people, but is it going to make a situation any better? We can hit them, but is that really going to help or make things even worse? When we take what we really want to do and maybe even think we should do and we take it down a notch, or go home to have a cup of chamomile tea while we think and pray about it, or sometimes don’t do anything at all because we are too angry to do what is good—that’s mercy.

Jesus told a story once about the importance of being merciful, and that when God judges us it isn’t about a lot of the things we might think are important but about how we treat others as we want to be treated.

“For this reason… (wait! For what reason? Let’s backtrack or we won’t understand what is happening here! Peter had just come up to Jesus and asked how many times he has to forgive his brother—and no, we don’t know if he was talking about Andrew or about people in general. Maybe Andrew told the other disciples about the time that Peter…oh nevermind. Peter thought he only had to forgive another person seven times but Jesus said something like, “Um, no, actually, you have to forgive him so many times that you will lose count. Unless you are taking notes about how many times you have forgiven him, which is messed up and totally missing the point”)…

…the kingdom of heaven can be compared to a king who wanted to get back all the money his slaves owed to him. When he looked at the books, a guy who owed 10,000 talents was brought before him… (hold up! How much money is that? Well, it was what a person would earn if they worked for 160,000 years. So, it was a lot. Maybe as much as four trillion dollars today.) Since he had no way to pay it back, his master gave an order that the man, his wife, his children, and everything he had be sold to pay the debt. (which wasn’t even going to come close, right? Remember that parables are stories that paint pictures—they aren’t really very accurate) “When the slave heard all this, he fell down on his face before his master and begged, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you everything!’ (yeah right, four trillion dollars? I don’t think so) Then the master of that slave had compassion, set him free, and said, “You don’t owe me anything anymore.” (wow, right? How much money does this guy have if he can just forget when someone owes him 160,000 years worth of work?) “But that slave went out and found one of his fellow slaves who owed him only a hundred days’ worth of work money. He grabbed him, started choking him, and said, ‘Pay me what you owe me!’ (seriously, does anyone think this was a good idea?) “At this, his fellow slave fell down and began begging him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’ But he wasn’t willing. Instead, he went and threw him into prison until he could pay what was owed. (and who exactly can pay back money when they are in prison? Does this sound like a good plan?) When the other slaves saw what had happened, they were really upset and went and told their master everything that had happened. Then, after he had summoned him, his master said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that money because you begged me. Shouldn’t you also have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And his master got angry and handed him over to the jailers until he could pay everything that was owed. So, My heavenly Father will also do the same to you if each of you does not forgive his brother from his heart.”

And if you miss the point of this, you’re going to be having nightmares about how mean God has to be. But this sort of story was only meant to be scary to the sorts of people who aren’t changed by God’s forgiveness and mercy. At all. In fact, this guy was what we would call an oppressor. The Bible has a lot of stuff to say about the people who aren’t just mean because they are hurting or have a headache or because God is still working on them to make them more like Jesus. Nope, this guy owed so much money that you have to ask yourself what on earth did he do with it? Right? When Jesus was here on earth teaching the people, they talked about sin like money owed to God. That was how they explained it. So much money that you couldn’t ever pay it all off no matter how hard you worked. The only thing anyone could do to be forgiven was to ask God for mercy and to be loyal to Him forever. That’s what God wants. God doesn’t want to punish us—He wants to forgive us and change us to be more like Jesus. God wants us to see that we are His servants and that we need His mercy. But what is mercy? Mercy is when someone has the power to punish you but they decide to forgive you instead and give you another chance. Mercy is when I got caught daydreaming and was driving 35 mph in a 25 mph zone and the officer didn’t give me a ticket because I admitted that I was speeding and said I was sorry. Mercy is when an orphan steals a loaf of bread because he is starving and the grocery store owner doesn’t press charges. Mercy is when we are really angry at someone else who has done something wrong and we don’t hurt them. Mercy is when we ask God to forgive us for the terrible things and the small things we have done and He does.

God is God and God is absolutely perfect. He has absolutely no reason to forgive us and He doesn’t even owe it to us to forgive us. But He does forgive us because of His mercy to us. He knows that it is hard to be a human being and that sometimes we make bad choices and at other times we make very bad choices. He forgives us because He wants us to be able to start over again with Him even when we can’t start over again with the people we have hurt. He wants us to change. He knows that we can’t be more like Jesus when we aren’t forgiven. Being merciful to us—being gentle with us—is how He helps us to learn to be different in a world that tells us that being merciful makes us weak and wimpy. But God is gentle with us and so we are supposed to learn how to be gentle with others. And especially gentle with people who are weaker, poorer, and sicker than we are.

That’s actually the message of that parable. A master is more powerful than their slave, right? A master has the law on their side and can do whatever they want to their slave (which is why we can’t have slaves and still be loving our neighbor because a person who has been taken as a slave is still our neighbor but we aren’t treating him like a neighbor when we make him a slave). In Jesus’s world, slaves could be crucified for any reason at all. A slave who owed their master money was lucky to be thrown in jail because the alternative was way worse—being nailed to a cross! That’s our first clue that this master is merciful. Two, this master actually gave his slave almost four trillion dollars in today’s money. That’s not just a one-time loan—he had been giving this slave money for a long time. He had been giving this slave a lot of chances but never getting paid back. Three, when the slave was never going to be able to pay him back and begged him for mercy and promised to pay him back anyway, even though they both knew it was impossible, the master let him go and crossed the debt off his books. The master didn’t just let him go, he let everything go. He was never going to get that money back. It was gone and no one would be punished for it. Wow. That master was awesome. He was gentle and merciful. He didn’t do what he had the power to do. In fact, no one would have blamed him no matter what awful things he did to that slave. His friends would even call him a fool for doing it and say that he was just asking for trouble. And that’s exactly what God is like. As you read the Bible, you will go through the stories of the kings of Israel and read about Manasseh and say, “Excuse me, He forgave Manasseh??? Don’t do it!!!” The master in this parable is very powerful and very wealthy, but he isn’t unfair. He’s someone who can always be trusted.

What about his slave who owed him 160,000 years’ worth of work wages? What kind of person is he? One, he isn’t really responsible with what people give him, right? Oh my gosh I could live forever and still never spend four trillion dollars. He’s the kind of guy who is given a million chances and just wastes them all. BUT, that doesn’t mean that his master is heartless. After all, it was the master who gave him all that money, right? His master is very generous, so generous that it’s just crazy! He has a wife and kids, we know that. He doesn’t want to go to jail and so he begs for mercy, and promises to pay back the money even though he’s lying because it’s not possible. But when his merciful master lets him totally off the hook, what does this guy do? Does he go around telling everyone how merciful and generous his master is? Well, that’s what he was supposed to do in those days. If someone did something amazing for you, you were supposed to make them famous for it. And frankly, four trillion dollars should have bought a lot of positive PR. But it didn’t happen. What happened instead would have shocked Jesus’s audience.

Instead of being happy and dancing and singing in the streets of Jerusalem and making his master famous, he went to another slave, okay? This slave had borrowed like, six-thousand dollars from the guy who had just been forgiven. AND WHERE DO YOU THINK THAT 6,000 CAME FROM? That’s right—it came from the money he had borrowed from his master. Which he now didn’t have to pay back. Which should have meant that he needed to forgive everyone who borrowed money from him because who they had really gotten it from was their master who gave it to him in the first place. He didn’t have any personal money to loan. He was what we call a middleman, just passing money from his master to other people. That’s how crazy this all is.

And did he ask for the money nicely? You know, like his master had asked him? No, first he grabbed the dude and then he started choking him and then he demanded the money back. Money that wasn’t his in the first place. You know how they say that violence isn’t the answer? Actually, Jesus says this in the Sermon on the Mount when He tells us to turn the other cheek when we get smacked. Not only isn’t violence the answer, but he gets violent before he even asks for the money. This guy ought to be working for the mob and not such a merciful master. Of course, the guy doesn’t have that much money to pay him back the money that wasn’t even his in the first place—are you confused yet?—and asked for forgiveness and time to pay back the loan. Payback on this loan would be hard but not impossible. But nope, the forgiven slave chucked that poor guy in jail after beating him up. He went from zero to total rage monster in less that sixty seconds, okay? Well, of course the other slaves were really upset about that. The other slaves knew their master, obviously, and knew this would upset him too otherwise they wouldn’t bother him with it, right? Remember how the people mostly tried to avoid dealing with the false gods of the nations because it was better if they left you alone? It’s the same thing with slave masters. Of course, our God isn’t a slave master. In the Bible, we see He is the god who sets slaves free. Parables show what God is like and what He is not like. So there will be things that do and do not fit in the story but because this story is about gentleness and mercy, that’s the part we have to pay attention to.

Well, the master was really torqued off and in the Roman Empire, he could have the slave crucified as easy as one-two-three. But He doesn’t—He is still merciful. He isn’t violent, doesn’t grab him and choke him either but he does send the man to prison for not being merciful when he was shown such amazing mercy. He doesn’t even do to that man as much as he did to his fellow slave. Even though the punishment is harsh, life in prison, it is way less than what he did to the guy who owed him the much smaller amount of money. The master was merciful, because he didn’t do all the same things, but he was also just because his slave was what is called an oppressor and needed to be put somewhere that he couldn’t hurt anyone anymore. Oppressors aren’t merciful. And so, to understand mercy and gentleness, we have to understand the opposite.

An oppressor is a bully. How terrible an oppressor is depends on what the bully has to work with and how they can use it against others. Men and women and boys and girls and old people and young people can all be oppressors. People can use money, food, weapons, power, and their bodies to oppress other people. An oppressor uses whatever they have to keep other people under control. Someone who is big and strong can use their strength to keep everyone else too afraid to stop them from whatever it is they want to do. Weapons can be used the same way. If you have money then you can hurt people who don’t have it. If people are starving and you have all the food then you can make them do whatever you want before you give them any. During the life of Jesus on earth, the two big bullies in the neighborhood were the Romans and the High Priest’s family. They used what they had to get richer and more powerful while everyone else got poorer and less powerful. The Romans used their soldiers to get what they wanted. The High Priest’s family was even more shameful because they used the Bible to hurt the people. Did you know that people can use the Bible to hurt others if they ignore all the commandments that tell them to love their neighbors? When the Romans took over the province of Syria, it gave them total control over all of the people living in the Holy Land. And they demanded to be paid 25% of all the food people produced on their lands—plants and animals. That’s a lot. That means for every four figs or almonds they picked, they had to give one to the tax collectors and it was all taken far away to feed the people in Rome. But that wasn’t the worst part because we would expect them to be evil and not care about the Jewish people (or anyone else either). The worst part was that the High Priest’s family had gotten rich from the tithes that the people paid—another ten percent a year, so one out of ten of everything. They didn’t need the money and they could have returned it to the people because the tithe also belonged to the people who were poor but they weren’t getting it. They were having to sell their land because they couldn’t make enough to pay all the taxes and still have enough left over to feed their families.

What could they do? The regular priests weren’t getting that food either and they were losing their lands too. Since the chief priests didn’t need it, the Pharisees who ran the court system could have made a law to help out the people but they were so determined to keep the law perfectly that they were making it impossible for the poorer people to survive and keep the commandments. Jesus was really harsh with them about it—He told them that they were all anxious to tithe even their tiny garden spices, because they could afford it, but they weren’t being fair to the people who were the most vulnerable—the people who would die if they just made the rich priests richer. The Pharisees were what we would call fundamentalists today—they were determined to do what the Bible literally said even if people got hurt although sometimes they interpreted the Bible in ways that let them do whatever they wanted, like divorcing their wives for whatever reason they wanted to and marrying someone else.

Jesus said that it was great that they were tithing and all that, but they weren’t being faithful to what is most important to God–mercy, justice, and faithfulness (Matt 23:23-24). Those words meant something then that is different from how we would use them today. Faithfulness is about being trustworthy—it was the word used to describe how soldiers trust their commanders to make good decisions and how commanders trust their soldiers to do what they are told. Jesus was telling them that they weren’t obeying God just because they were tithing everything they grew. Justice and righteousness were two words in Hebrew that meant taking care of the people who were vulnerable—the poor, hungry, widowed, orphaned, sick, and wrongfully in prison. And we’ve been talking about what mercy means—being gentle to people who have less strength, power, and resources than we do. They could keep the Sabbaths and go to Jerusalem for the festivals and never eat pork and that was great but if they were causing poor people to lose their land and starve then they weren’t doing what is important to God. Jesus called them blind because they saw what the commandments said but didn’t see the suffering people around them. They didn’t know God well enough to see what He cared about most.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope that you will spend time thinking about mercy and gentleness. Are you gentle when you have things that can be used to help or hurt? Are you gentle with your words and with your body when you are angry? Are you as merciful to others as God is with you?

It’s one thing to say that Jesus had every single fruit of the Spirit to perfection, but quite another to look at what that really means when you have the authority and power to do absolutely anything you want. It isn’t so much about what Jesus did but what He was capable of. That makes Him even more amazing!

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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 tweaked a bit to be more understandable to kids.

A lot of times, when people talk about Jesus, they make Him look like a normal guy who could work miracles. But today I want to introduce you to the unique Son of God who was all-powerful but never used that power to hurt people. I want to talk about what He could have done when He was sad and angry and frustrated and when people disrespected Him.  What would we have done? What do we do in those same sorts of situations? What would we be capable of if we had the same power Jesus has? The first time I really thought about it, it scared the snot out of me. There are a lot of good reasons why I am not God, and if I had powers, everyone would figure it out really quick. Even though I am better than I once was, and even better than I was last month, I still don’t have as much self-control as Jesus. And that’s what we are going to talk about today—self-control.

Self-control is just what it sounds like, controlling ourselves! Self-control isn’t controlling our emotions because those happen without us even thinking about them beforehand. We can’t stop feeling happy when we see someone we love for the first time in a month. We can’t feel calm when we walk into a dark room and all of a sudden all of our friends yell, “Surprise!” and we see a cake and a pile of presents just for us. When a pet dies, we can’t keep from feeling sad. When someone hurts us, we can’t feel anything but angry at that moment. If our pants fall off at school, we can’t help but feel really embarrassed. That’s how I felt in the first grade when I sneezed while we were singing “God save our gracious Queen,” and I peed all over the floor. I was living in Canada, and we actually called it grade one—that’s why we sang that every morning along with “Oh, Canada” in English and sometimes in French. But there was no way I wasn’t going to feel really upset about having an accident in class. Fortunately, my teacher’s aide saw me and got me out of the class before anyone noticed. Those reactions are normal because our emotions are normal—they are what they are. They are gifts that God has given us and they happen without asking for permission. Although they can change as we get older, they never go away. So, self-control isn’t about controlling our emotions. Self-control is about becoming able to control how we act when we have an emotion.

When we are babies and we are hungry or thirsty or need a diaper change, we might throw a fit because we don’t have any words to talk about how we are feeling or to ask for what we want. When we are that small, we don’t really understand that we won’t die just because we are hungry right this minute. But as we grow older, we know that hunger just means it’s time to eat but even if we have to wait a while, we aren’t in any danger. It’s just a bit uncomfortable, that’s all. We learn that not everything is a big deal. We don’t need to cry when we are hungry or tired or don’t always get what we want. But it takes a lot of years to figure those things out. Parents have to be patient and remember that kids don’t know what they don’t know and that big emotions can erupt in really big ways.

Did Jesus cry when He was hungry? Of course. For a baby, that’s talking. There is nothing wrong or sinful about a baby crying. As He grew older and became able to talk, just like the rest of us, He learned better ways of dealing with getting what He needed. Babies don’t have any self-control at all. They can’t decide not to poop and pee until they get to the bathroom. But we can, because we can control ourselves. Toddlers will sometimes hit or bite to get what they want because they are having huge emotions, but hitting and biting isn’t okay and they have to be taught to control themselves and to be angry in other ways. When I was little, a man named Mister Rogers taught me how to deal with being angry—by pounding on clay or hitting the piano keys and making a big sound or by talking to a friend about it. But never to hit or be mean.  We can’t obey Jesus when He says to love our neighbors as ourselves when we hit people or scream at them every time we get angry. No one likes for that to happen. It hurts. And because everything Jesus did was about showing us the love of God, we have to pay attention to all the things He didn’t do. And we can’t do that unless we know all the things He could do.

Satan gives us our first clues as to what Jesus was able to do. When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness when He hadn’t eaten for forty days and was really hungry, he dared Jesus to make bread out of rocks. Why would Satan do that if it was impossible? He knew exactly what God’s power in Jesus could do. He wanted Jesus to stop trusting in God just because He was way more hungry than we can even possibly imagine. That means that Jesus could have made the rocks into bread the very first day, or the first week, or the first month—but He didn’t because He was trusting and obeying God. Wow. If I could make rocks into bread then I could also probably make them into cream puffs and that would be the end of eating healthy and all the rocks in my yard would be gone, right? Jesus could have, but Jesus didn’t.

Satan also took Jesus to the tiptop of the Temple in Jerusalem on the holiest day of the year, on Yom Kippur, and dared Him to jump down and make the angels catch Him. Satan wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t know that Jesus could tell the angels to do absolutely whatever He wanted them to do. In fact, if He had done that, then everyone in the Temple would have seen it and would have known that Jesus was God’s Messiah right then and there and no one would have been able to kill Him. Everyone in the world would have followed Him immediately. But Jesus had to control Himself because if that happened, we would all still be doomed to be sinners forever and we would still die at the ends of our lives and stay dead. Jesus would have gotten old and died too, and He never would have fought Satan on his own turf and destroyed Satan’s kingdom. Jumping down would have been easier and more pleasant, but Jesus had to control Himself and do things the hard way so that we could be saved.

Finally, Satan told Jesus that he could give Him all the power to be king over all the kingdoms in the world. By doing that, Satan was showing us that Jesus had the ability to choose whether or not He was willing to be loyal to God, His Father. Jesus wasn’t a robot. He made choices every day. Because He was with God from the very beginning, Jesus had always known what was right and had always done what was right. When He became human, like us, He understood how hard it is for us to make the right choices but He still always did exactly the right and good thing. But Satan wouldn’t have kept telling Him to do what was wrong if Jesus had no choice about His own actions. Jesus had perfect self-control but that doesn’t mean that His choices were easy ones to make when He was hurting, sad, angry, and afraid. Jesus had all of our emotions, but He made better choices than we do with how He handled them.

Sometimes, Jesus had to make certain choices because of what the prophets had written about Him—things that only Jesus could do and that don’t apply to us. Jesus walked on the water because Job says that only God Himself can do that (9:8). Jesus told the terrible storm to stop because the Psalmists say that only God can do that (65:7, 89:9, 107:29). And there is one especially famous episode, in all four Gospels, where Jesus walked up to the Temple Mount and was standing in the Court of the Gentiles, where people from all over the world came to worship and learn and teach about God. But on that day, you couldn’t hear the Levites singing praise music and you couldn’t smell the incense burning inside the Temple, or the frankincense or bread burning on the altar or the smell of roasting whole lamb.

Jesus had visited the Temple, His Father’s house, the day before and what He had seen had made Him very angry. People had come from all over the world to celebrate the Passover—many had traveled for weeks to get there from places like Babylon and Rome. But the people who used to sell animals for sacrifices on the Mount of Olives had been given permission by the corrupt High Priest and his family to sell them right there on the Temple Mount. It would have been very noisy, and stinky, and you would have heard the people who were making deals and paying for stuff. But first, they had to buy the special money, which cost them even more money. They had turned God’s holy Temple, the house of prayer for the whole world, into a shopping mall where they were hurting poor people by forcing them to pay way too much to obey God and getting richer and richer every year. And so Jesus did something that only Jesus could ever do. And people who don’t understand what was happening will tell you that Jesus lost control and flipped out, but Jesus knew exactly what He was doing because He had seen it all the day before and went away to think about what He would do the next morning. Jesus was angry and disgusted by what He saw, but He calmly went to the home of His friend Lazarus to plan what He would do the next day. Believe me, if He was flipping out, He wouldn’t have left and come back later.

Psalm 69:9 tells us something important about the Messiah. It tells us that He will be consumed with zeal for His Father’s House—the Temple. What is zeal and what does it mean to be consumed with zeal? Zeal is a fancy word that means we care very, very much about something. Some people are zealous to protect others—like the members of the Underground Railroad who risked their lives, their families, and everything they had to help people who were being kept as slaves to be free. That kind of zeal is good. That kind of zeal comes from God. Other kinds of zeal can be very bad. Sometimes people care so much about this or that thing that they hate anyone who doesn’t feel the same way—even their own families. That kind of zeal isn’t from God. Jesus cared about the Temple because it was the place that Jews from all over the world came to worship God, every single day of the year. But these people who were doing business and selling money and animals were just out to get richer than they already were. In Jeremiah 7:11, the prophet calls the Temple a den of robbers because of how people were treating it. A den of robbers is where people who steal from others go to hide out and be safe. That people who were doing evil things would think that they are safe doing them right there in God’s House is really messed up.

So, in Mark chapter 11, Jesus sees all of this on His first day in Jerusalem. And He didn’t do anything. He went to the home of Lazarus, Mary and Martha a couple of miles away, and then went back the next day. John says that He made a little whip, the kind that ranchers use to get animals to move in a certain direction—not like a big old dangerous Indiana Jones whip. This is what Mark says happened, “They came to Jerusalem, and he went into the temple and began to throw out everyone who was buying and selling animals. He tipped over the tables of the people selling the special Temple money and the chairs of the men who were selling doves to the poor, and He wouldn’t let anyone carry anything on the Temple Mount. He was teaching them: “Is it not written, My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations? But you have made it a den of thieves!”

Mark said that Jesus was teaching. Not that He was out of control or flipping out or whipping people. Sometimes you will see painting that make it look like it was a rampage, but Jesus would have been arrested by the Roman soldiers in the Fortress Antonia that was attached to the Temple Mount on the northwest side. They always had an eye out for troublemakers. And it wasn’t strange not to let people carry things on the Temple Mount—we see latter that the Rabbis wrote that no one was allowed to do it ever and so those people were doing what was already wrong by Jewish law. They were disrespecting God by turning His Temple into a shopping mall. Jesus tipped over their tables so that the money went everywhere and it was impossible for them to do business. He told them to get out of there and made sure they knew that if they tried it again, He’d come back and tip their tables again. And then He taught the people who were gathered there trying to worship God that what they were doing was an insult to God.

But what could Jesus have done if He had wanted to? If He had no self-control? That’s a scary thought. When He was being arrested, the night before He was killed, one of His disciples took out his knife and cut off someone’s ear and Jesus point blank told him (probably Peter) to put the knife away and if Jesus wanted to, He could command more than twelve legions of angels to do whatever He wanted them to do (Matt 26:53). Oh man, now that’s a scary thought. No one can defend themselves against an angel. No one. No one is smarter than an angel. Angels can’t be killed. And only God can order angels around and tell them to do things. No one else can. At all. One of these days, read the Gospels and ask yourself, “What if Jesus had called down a huge truckload of angels to deal with that guy?” Because a legion—when Jesus was on earth, that number could mean anything from three to five thousand soldiers but sometimes just meant a huge group. So, at minimum, Jesus was telling them that He could call for thirty-six thousand angels on the spot if He wanted to. Boom. Immediately. To do whatever He wanted them to do. So every time Jesus was angry at someone, or frustrated, or whatever, He could have summoned angels to kill them all but He never did. Be really glad that I can’t tell angels to do stuff. It would be bad. I can get super feisty.

What about the time the disciples were ticked off because the people who lived in Samaria didn’t want to let Him come through their town because He wouldn’t worship at their Temple? In Luke 9, Jesus is heading down to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover and He sent some messengers down to one of the Samaritan villages so they could get ready for Him, but when they found out He would be going to the Temple in Jerusalem instead of to Mt Gerizim where they kept the Passover, they told Him that He wasn’t welcome there. And James and John, they got really angry and asked if Jesus wanted them to call down fire from heaven and kill everyone in the village. And Jesus was clearly angrier at them for even suggesting it than He ever could be for being rejected by the Samaritans. James and John wanted to do their worst, just because they felt disrespected. Which reminds me of someone else we have studied about in the past—Lamech, the first guy in the Bible to have more than one wife. Do you remember the song he sang to his wives when a kid hurt him in Genesis 4? A kid???

“Adah and Zillah, listen to me; wives of Lamech, pay attention to what I am saying. I killed a guy for hurting me, a young man for hitting me. If Cain is to be avenged seven times over, then for Lamech it will be seventy-seven times!”

One, it’s just creepy when someone writes a song about themselves killing a guy for something so ridiculous as hitting him and frankly, from the sound of this nonsense, he probably had it coming. Two, this guy is so over the top with no self-control whatsoever that he sounds more like a toddler having a tantrum than a grown man. Three, that this guy is going to assume that God will be on his side and defend him if other people want to come and get revenge is ridiculous. Four, can you imagine what would happen if this guy had twelve legions of angels he could boss around? But that’s why the Bible included his story—not to tell us that yeah, God is going to defend him but to show us what having no self-control looks like. I mean, the guy wanted more than one wife and if you scratched him he would kill you. This guy is ridiculous and the Bible wants us to know it. And what isn’t always obvious is that the Bible didn’t have chapters and verses until like the last five hundred years so when it was originally read, the story of Enoch being so awesome that God took Enoch away to be with Him happened just about right after that. We’re supposed to roll our eyes and facepalm and not want to be anything like Lamech—at all. Those kinds of comparisons happen a lot in the Bible. We will see that a with Abraham and Lot in Genesis 18 and 19.

And so what lessons can we take away from learning about Jesus’s self-control? What do we do when we are right? What do we do when someone else is wrong? How do we treat children, and especially as you get older? How do we behave when we are bigger, stronger, smarter, richer, or more popular? How do we use what we have to help or to hurt others? What do we do when someone hurts us? How much getting even is enough? Do we forgive the small stuff that people do to hurt us? How do we handle the really big things people do to hurt us? Do we call the police, or do we do something even worse to them instead? Do we require everyone around us to be perfect and punish them whenever they aren’t? What does it look like when grownups in our lives don’t use their self-control. Is it scary? Does it make us mad? How do we use our words and our bodies or whatever else we have when we know they can be hurtful?  Are we careful not to embarrass and humiliate people when it isn’t absolutely necessary?

Those are all very important questions and as you get older and become more mature and get to know Jesus better in your own life, He will help you to use the good things in your life (and even the bad things) to help other people instead of hurting them. Sometimes the meanest people in the world are the people who have been hurt badly by others, but sometimes they are just people who enjoy being mean. Sometimes the kindest people in the world are the people who have been hurt the most but don’t want to make others feel the same way, and sometimes kind people are just people who were always treated kindly. There are no rules to why some people control themselves so that they can be a blessing to others and why some people don’t. But there is one thing that is absolutely true—anyone who is determined to listen to and follow Jesus will become more able to control themselves, more able to bless others by being kinder and gentler than the world around them.

God gave us each gifts that can be used to do good for others or do bad to others. Strong people can be bullies or they can be protectors. Smart people can teach and invent things or they can make other people feel stupid or trick them. Rich people can hurt others and get richer or they can help others with their money. People who are popular can change the world for the better and help people who are suffering, or they can make the lives of other people just miserable. Our emotions are just like the gifts we have—do we use our anger to get even with people we are mad at or do we get angry when someone else is being hurt and do what it takes to help make their lives better?

There are always going to be people who take what God has given them and make people’s lives better and others who will take what God has given them and selfishly make other people’s lives worse. Your life is about what you decide to do with your gifts and talents and blessings. No one else can make those choices for you. The people around you can make it harder or easier for you to do what is good and right, but you have all the power to decide if that is what you want to do. Learning about Jesus helps us, but learning from Jesus changes us from people who don’t care about others into people who do care.

I love you. I am praying for you. Maybe you don’t know your gifts yet, but as you figure it out, I pray that you will always remember to ask God what He wants you to use those gifts for. We aren’t all the same, and we can serve God and other people in thousands of different ways and they are all good no matter who we are or where we live or what we are good at.

Have you ever been scared to pray because you don’t want to say the wrong thing or because you are afraid that you can’t trust God to do what is right or that He will be angry if you are honest? Today, we’re going to talk about why we can always be ourselves when we are talking to God. And not only that, but about how having to be perfect in our prayers comes from pagan religions and not from the Bible.

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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 Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to be more understandable to kids.

Did you know that a lot of grownups are too scared to pray? Sometimes, people get the idea that God is so untrustworthy and mean that He is listening to every single word and every single thought just so He can have an excuse to do something awful to us or other people—like somehow He is waiting for permission from us to do something just terrible. Where did that kind of thinking come from and does it make any sense? Sometimes we get way too many ideas about God from how other people worshiped their gods and still do. So, we are going to talk about prayer in other ancient religions and how people have confused what those gods were like and what our God is really like. We can’t trust our God if we are thinking about Him like the people who worship a lot of gods do. Their gods were always just like people—only like people with superpowers who could be way more dangerous and mean than any human ever could!

Do you know any bullies? Bullies are kids and adults who are just mean and nasty and they are looking for an excuse to do something rotten to anyone they don’t like. What about people who are nitpickers and critical? Nitpicker is a name we call people who have to just mess with us on every little thing they think we are doing wrong no matter how unimportant it is. People who are critical are always just making us feel bad for whatever they don’t like. People like this are no fun to be around and most families have at least one person who is like this. Hopefully, we aren’t that person! I used to be very nitpicky and critical, just getting on people for whatever it was that they weren’t doing perfectly or whatever irritated me or whatever I thought they were wrong about. I thought I was helping—maybe not helping them but helping myself to make everything more like the way I wanted it to be. Being around me was not pleasant at all when I was being like that. I made people feel like I didn’t love them at all and like I didn’t see anything good about them. I am really sad about that now.

And when I became a Christian and was still doing that (and sometimes I still do it), it made God look like He must be that way too—just waiting for you to make a mistake so that He can pounce on you and make you feel bad about yourself. And I personally know that’s the opposite of what He is like. But the gods of all the nations around the children of Israel actually were like that. You never for sure knew exactly what would make them angry or even if you could do anything that was good enough to make them happy. There is a prayer that archaeologists discovered. It was written by a man going through a bunch of terrible things and he went from temple to temple, making sacrifices and trying to make all the gods happy because he didn’t know which one was angry or why they were angry and punishing him:

I wish I knew that what I am doing actually makes the gods happy! What seems like to me just makes the gods angry; The things I think are horrible are somehow okay with my gods. Who knows what the gods in heaven even want? Who understands the plans of the underworld gods? Where is anyone who has learned the ways of the gods? (rephrase mine from Walton’s Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament pg 145)

Isn’t that just awful?—Knowing that your god approves of really horrible things and doesn’t care enough to let you know what it is that they want? And because there are so many gods and goddesses, not even knowing which one is angry at you? And because there are so many gods and because they all have different personalities and likes and dislikes, what makes one of them happy might make another one angry. If two gods are fighting, and you worship one, will the other take their anger out on you? And to believe that when you die, you don’t just stop existing but you end up in the underworld and who the heck even knows what those gods will do to you—or your dead loved ones if you make them angry. It was a total nightmare. But that’s what life was like in polytheistic nations—which is a fancy way of saying “groups of people who believe in a whole lot of different gods”. We’ve talked about this many times, how really pathetic these gods were. They had to be fed every single day by priests, or they would get weak and they wouldn’t be able to do their jobs. The sun wouldn’t come up or the rains wouldn’t fall or too much rain would come down and there would be a flood, or all the animals and people would stop having babies, or whatever. Keeping the gods happy meant that they did their jobs and ignored the people. No one wanted the attention of the gods because that just got you in trouble one way or another. Bored gods were nothing but trouble. They wanted them well-fed, happy, and too busy to mess with humans! But they were also a mystery, which is what makes them a lot different from our God—who is really the only God there actually is.

God explained, through Moses and the Prophets and then perfectly in Jesus, exactly what He wants. No one had to guess. In fact, all of those laws (and some of them only made sense to the people they were originally given to because we don’t even know what they mean anymore and even the great Jewish scholars of the past couldn’t figure it out for sure)—anyway, all of those laws told the Israelites one thing. They said, “You have to be better than the world all around you. You have to love no other god except Me, and you have to love your neighbors.” And that’s hard. It’s still hard and especially since Jesus told us that our neighbors are actually everyone and not just the guy next door or the people who look like us or have the same religion or whatever. God used the commandments to tell us in every single generation forever that, “however good and kind and generous the world around you is, you have to do better to show them what I am like.” And so, we learn, little by little, to not be like the example set by the gods of the other nations who were hateful, cruel, and selfish. They loved stirring up trouble, hurting the weak, and starting wars. But if Jesus is right (and we know He is), then we have to be different than that. We can’t be thinking of ourselves and what would be good for us if it hurts someone else. Jesus never did that. In fact, He was willing to be hurt for the good of absolutely anyone who would ever believe Him. And what turns out to be good for us should be good for everyone we come in contact with.

And if God expects that from us, then we can expect even more from Him. If He wants us to be better than everyone around us, that means He is better than absolutely everyone—in fact, He is perfect. He gave us the Bible so that we could read the whole thing from front to back to learn who He is and how much He is willing to sacrifice so that we can be His people. In fact, when Moses wanted to see God, God told Moses His name, Yahweh, and said this—“Yahweh–Yahweh is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to get angry and full of faithful love and truth, always faithful and loving for a thousand generations (like 40,000 years—forever), forgiving people who decide to do wrong things, who do wrong things because they don’t care what is right, and people who just make mistakes. But that doesn’t mean there will be no consequences, because the wrong that people do can make things bad for a very long time for their own family.” (Ex 34:6-7)

God wants us to succeed, not to fail. There are plenty of humans beings who just want the worst for you and will trick you and take advantage of every mistake you make, but that isn’t what God is like at all. That’s why He is so forgiving, because He wants every single one of us to be more like Jesus and that can’t happen if He is just waiting around the corner for us to mess up so He can kill us or torture us. Believe me, if that was true, I wouldn’t have survived my twenties! Or even my forties! God knows how ridiculous we are and He also knows that, without Him, we are stuck in sin—not even knowing what is right or wrong. God wants His Kingdom on earth, the whole earth, to be a place where we all love Him and one another—that is His goal. That’s been His goal ever since the beginning. That’s why He created the Garden and put Adam and Eve in it, so that they would love Him and each other without any of the nonsense awful things we do to mess stuff up. Next week we will talk about what love means so I am gonna stop right there. I almost got off track. Again. It’s like I am a dog who sees a squirrel and forgets what they were doing!

God is going to treat you and everyone else however it takes to make His goals happen. That’s why He told Moses how patient and loving and trustworthy He is. It’s why He is so careful not to just kill us all when what we need is to be taught and loved and healed. He didn’t create us perfect. He created us with the ability to make good and bad choices and because we are His children, He cuts us a lot of slack and just rolls His eyes when we make mistakes. And when we are doing bad things, He works to change us so that we can do better. He isn’t a nitpicker, and He isn’t just critical and upset with us no matter how hard we are trying. In the Bible, there are a bunch of instructions, but you know what? They were nudges for them (and us) to learn to be better than the world around us and to save our communities when things are desperate. But behind them is always His goal to get us to love one another excellently. Unfortunately, until Jesus, people found ways to use those instructions to do what they wanted.

What does all this have to do with prayer? Everything! We have to know what God is like and what His goals are before we can settle down and be honest with Him, and before we can be honest with Him, we have to be able to trust that He is nothing like the false gods of the rest of the world—just waiting for an excuse to hurt us and the people we love. How can we be honest when we are afraid of every word we say? I know there are people like that but if God was like that then Jesus wouldn’t have died to save us—because God wouldn’t have wanted to save us.

The truth is that we can tell God anything because there is nothing we can say to Him that He doesn’t already know. But that doesn’t mean that He doesn’t want us to talk to Him about it. You can say all the wrong words about all the wrong things and all the wrong people while feeling terrible feelings and it is absolutely okay. He isn’t going to go off and do something messed up just because you are angry with someone. He will help you with your emotions because He gave you those emotions to tell you about what’s going on inside you and outside you. Emotions are our friends and also our enemies sometimes if we do the wrong things with them, but emotions aren’t ever wrong. Emotions just are whatever they are. God knows how wild and uncontrollable they can be. And sometimes, we need to be really mad when bad things are happening. And we need to cry when sad things happen. We also need to laugh during good times. So, we can come to God with all our emotions and He knows what to do with them and help us with them, so that we can control them better in the future or maybe even feel them more because He feels that way too. Do you believe that God is happy when there are wars and little children are killed because of terrible grownup decisions? No, He gets angry and He doesn’t care who those children are. So, we can tell Him in our prayers that we are angry or scared or tell Him about our good news too. It is all important to God.

Now, I didn’t used to know all this, and I would be so careful while praying. You see, I knew God was real and it was very important to me to please Him but I also didn’t trust Him at all. Someone did something terrible to me when I was about 34 years old—twenty years ago. And then he got other people against me too and it hurt worse than anything because it was in my church. My heart was broken and so I would talk to God about it and I kept asking God to fix it, but then I would get all freaked out and say, “But please don’t hurt his family God, please protect them. I don’t want them to suffer for what he is doing.” Isn’t that sad? I actually thought that God would hurt innocent people if I didn’t ask Him not to. I was a pretty new believer then and I still didn’t understand Him. It wouldn’t be until I was thirty-seven that I realized I could say absolutely anything I was thinking and feeling—even if I was angry at Him. And I have been very angry at Him many times. But prayer isn’t just magic, like they believed in the ancient world—our prayer is a talk with someone who loves us very deeply and forever. God is committed to you, forever, and He will always want you to be able to be honest with Him and trust Him because once you do, He can really start making you more like Jesus.

And I guess this is a good time to talk about the prayers of people to their false gods. I told you that it worked like a magic spell, right? First of all, they had to bring some kind of gift to that god—to bribe him or her. Their gods weren’t interested in them at all unless they brought some sort of expensive present. And then they had to say the god’s name exactly right because if they didn’t then that god wasn’t smart enough to hear them but if they did say their real name exactly right then the god had to do whatever they asked. Those gods could be bribed and controlled, and they weren’t all that smart. That’s why all the nations around Israel and also the children of Israel themselves had a hard time understanding God because He was just nothing like any of the other gods. He confused them. How could one and only one God create everything and do everything and know everything? It seemed crazy. They had to learn and it took a long time. That’s why they didn’t understand how prayer worked and why they kept worshiping God while also praying to other gods for help at the same time. They didn’t trust God to handle all their needs. They believed He was just like all the other gods who weren’t even really gods at all.

And we can still do that even when we know there is only one God. There are people who will tell you that God won’t hear you if you don’t use the right names or say the exact right things or that if you don’t understand the commandments perfectly that He won’t listen to you. And it is sad they believe that about God because with a god like that, no one can ever be good enough no matter how hard they try. That’s a god leaving you to feel hopeless and angry and that’s the sort of god that people give up on because what’s the use of believing in someone who can’t ever be pleased? Have you ever known someone like that? Someone who doesn’t like you no matter how good you behave or how much you do or anything? I do, and it is an awful way to live. What if you get straight A’s in school except for a C in PE and all they care about is that C in PE? Not everyone is good at sports—I wasn’t no matter how hard I tried. And what if you get all good grades except in math no matter how hard you try because your brain just has a tough time with numbers and equations? That’s so hard. It’s God who gives us the abilities to do certain things and not others. I have a beautiful singing voice but cannot read sheet music or play an instrument. I would get bad grades in those things. But when people blame that on you, they are really blaming God and the way He made your brain to work really well in some ways and to struggle in others. Not everyone is good at everything. Unlike people, God knows what you can and can’t accomplish. Your best really is good enough even if that best is only a C grade!

And you know what? Understanding God and our Bibles is even more complicated than anything you take in school. He isn’t nearly as hard to understand as we make Him out to be just because all these people have all of these ideas about Him being all sorts of ways because that’s how they were taught. If they had parents or a Pastor who was always yelling at them about how mean God is and how angry He is at them, that’s the god they are going to teach people about. I suppose that’s one main reason why God sent Jesus, so that we would see and hear and experience what God is and does in real life. The disciples are kind of hilarious in how much stuff they got wrong about God and how Jesus has to keep setting them straight. When two of them wanted to call down fire and brimstone on a city of Samaritans, Jesus said, “Dudes, no, that is not okay. Dang.” They kept wanting Him to be violent and He kept saying no. They wanted Him to take revenge on people who were mean to Him or wouldn’t listen to Him and He kept saying no. They wanted Him to send all the children away, and He really said no. In fact, He told His disciples that anyone messing with children was messing with Him and it would be better for them if they had a stone tied around their neck and get thrown into the sea. And then He told His disciples that not only did the angels who cared for children see God’s face up close and personal every single day, but that we should all be more like those children coming to see Him.

Jesus cared about the poor, and people in prison, and those who were hungry and thirsty and who didn’t have any warm clothes to wear, and who were sick and disabled. He cared for the people whom everyone else thought were suffering because they deserved it and didn’t deserve any special attention. He cared for all the people who were messed up in some way or another and let me tell you, the religious experts were really angry about it. And the religious experts today can be just the same. Jesus said that the most important commandments weren’t about giving enough money to God or keeping the Sabbath or any of that but were about doing what is right for other people. Giving money to God is good, but when we make things better for people who are hurting, it shows the world what God wants and how He wants to world to be a more peaceful and loving place where people don’t have to be scared anymore. They didn’t like that because some of them were rich from taking advantage of poor people. They didn’t want to hear that just keeping the commandments as written and ignoring the importance of love wasn’t good enough. There are always people who think they can please God by just doing the easy stuff, but loving people has to be learned and it is much harder. Some commandments are way more important than others and loving others and God are the two most important. If keeping one of the other commandments makes us do something to hurt someone else who is already hurting, then we aren’t making God happy at all.

That’s the God we are praying to. And so, we can say all the wrong things when we pray and it’s okay. We can be angry at Him or other people and it’s okay to trust Him with that. In fact, there is this prayer in the Bible that is really disturbing. A guy who has been through terrible things is so angry at his enemies that he wants their babies dead. What??? Who wants babies dead? Well, sometimes when we are really angry, we just forget what is right and good and we say whatever it is that comes to our mind. Because the babies of his own people were killed, he wanted his enemies to know what that feels like. He probably didn’t really want those innocent babies to die, he just wanted revenge. He wanted his enemies to feel how he was feeling. I think we can all look back to times when we felt the same way. And it is absolutely alright to be honest with God about that sort of thing. Believe me, He isn’t going to do it, but He can and will help you with how you are feeling. Not by smacking you down and saying, “Dude, that is so messed up,” but by comforting you and crying with you and not abandoning you even if it feels like everyone else has.

So, we can trust God with our messy emotions, and the messed-up things we are thinking, and our confusion, and frustration, and just everything. He isn’t looking for an excuse to smack us down for being honest, but when we are talking with Him, sometimes He talks to us about it. He doesn’t expect us to know things we don’t know or to be more mature and loving than we are right now. He’s here to help us become more like Jesus. God isn’t ever unfair even though people are. God isn’t waiting for us to mess up so that He can make fun of us like some people do. God doesn’t want to destroy us—He wants to give us life and wants to be with us forever when Jesus comes back as King of the world here on earth. The Bible says that He will wipe away all of our tears and people won’t be dying or getting sick or in wheelchairs or anything like that. My son’s body will work perfectly—that makes me happier than anything else! And no one will ever hurt you again.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you will take a chance on God today and talk with Him about anything and everything and be honest about how you feel. I promise you that He isn’t going to be mean or tricky or unfair to you. God is better than the best person you will ever know in real life.

Forgiveness is hard to understand and even harder to do. Grownups ask me all the time about what forgiveness is and isn’t, and if it means forgetting and acting like nothing happened or if we can still be careful when someone is dangerous. Learning about the forgiveness from God we have through our King Jesus, and what Jesus told us to do, and how He helps us grow from people who never want to forgive and don’t know how to even begin, to people who are able to forgive, helps us to follow God maybe more than any other thing He asks us to do.

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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.

Forgiveness is a really tough thing to understand. It’s even tougher to do, and especially when we are confused about what forgiveness is and isn’t. What about when we are told we need to forgive someone? What about when we want someone to forgive us? Does forgiveness mean pretending like nothing happened or that everything is okay? Does forgiveness mean that everything goes back to the way things were? These are all questions that grownups really struggle with and I get questions all the time. The answer to all of the questions about is—it depends on what happened and why it happened. Like all difficult things in our lives, we need something called wisdom when it comes to dealing with forgiveness. And when things require wisdom, we know that there are never any easy answers or rules that apply to absolutely every situation in the same way. That doesn’t mean that we don’t need to forgive or that it’s going to be easy. Not at all. Forgiveness is something that has to be learned, and true forgiveness isn’t something we can fake. But it is something we can get better and better at as we learn to walk with God and listen to Him, and we can also get better at deciding what forgiveness looks like in different situations. Not all sins are the same and so not all forgiveness is the same either. I guess we should start with looking at the forgiveness God gives us through Jesus.

The forgiveness we have in Jesus is different than all the other kinds of forgiveness that we have here on earth. In the days of Jesus, the Jews were talking about sins in terms of a debt or a bill that needs to be paid. A debt is money that you owe to someone. Like a house payment or a car loan or maybe you borrowed five dollars from someone and promised to pay them back. That’s a debt and the Bible tells us how important it is to pay our debts—especially when someone has done work for us and we owe them money for it, because they have to eat, right? But the Bible also tells us to be merciful when people owe us money and they just don’t have it. Every seven years, the children of Israel were commanded to forgive the debts of anyone who owed them money. That’s right, they had to just tear up those bills and toss them in the fire. God promised to make things right for the people who were generous and kind to people who just couldn’t pay them back.

And you know what? By the time I finally started listening to Jesus, I had such a huge bill from all the sinful, mean things I had done, and all the lies I had told, and even the mistakes I had made that hurt people—well, there was no way I could ever pay God or the people I had hurt back for all the awful things I had done. And I was doing just fine (well, not really) until the day that God told me how much I was hurting people and hurting Him too. Wow. And it took him two whole months of talking to me all the time, poking and prodding me with thoughts about how much I needed Him and that He wanted me to be an entirely different person. Boy oh boy did I put up a huge fight. But it was that last week that was just the worst because day and night, night and day He wouldn’t leave me alone. He was determined to get through to me that He loved me, even though I wouldn’t understand it for many years. I just thought He wanted to be the boss of me and, in fact, when I finally gave my life to Him that’s exactly what I said, “Okay, I get it, you’re the boss of my life.”

And even though I was wrong about that—well, not totally wrong but I sure didn’t realize that God loved me yet—things began changing in big ways in my life. That was twenty-five years ago and I am still changing a lot. I was really messed up, so He is still working on me. So, anytime you think you are hopeless because your life isn’t changing overnight, just remember that God is still working on Miss Tyler to get her to where He wants her to be. No one can go from being like I was to being like Jesus overnight—it takes a lifetime and even then we aren’t exactly like Him. He’s perfect.

The thing is that God wanted to rip up the bill I owed Him and everyone else so He could throw it in the fire. He knew that I couldn’t ever hope to carry all those terrible sins and make a fresh start. Have you ever heard that expression? To make a fresh start? It’s like those poor people in ancient Israel who owed more money than they could ever pay—maybe because a famine had destroyed their food or their land or enemy soldiers had come in and stolen everything. There are lots of reasons why someone can be too poor to pay their bills. But unless someone tore up those bills, they would be paying them for the rest of their lives and they wouldn’t ever be able to have a chance to be free. We all need to be forgiven sometimes, right? It might not be money—sometimes we need for people to forgive us when we have done something wrong so that we can be friends again or at least not enemies. To forgive someone else is a very great gift. Until we forgive a person, they have to carry their guilt forever and even after they are sorry and have changed.

Have you ever done anything to hurt someone, where you feel really sorry and want to be friends again but they won’t forgive you? That hurts a lot, right? It’s like they are holding you in a prison that you can’t ever get out of until they say so. Maybe they do it because they are hurting and they don’t want to hurt anymore and they are so angry that they want you to hurt as much as they do. They might be angry that they can’t go back and change things to the way they were before they were hurt in the first place. But when we hurt people, or help people, we change their lives. They can’t go back to being the same person that they were before they were hurt or helped—they have that memory in their mind and they were changed whether they wanted to be or not. That’s why, the sooner we give our lives over to God as our King, the better because we can’t ever totally take anything we say or do back. When we agree to let God be our King and believe that Jesus is our King, and let them change us, we will hurt people less and less because we will begin to care more about them and the Holy Spirit helps us to stop being mean, little by little, day after day, year after year. That’s how we learn to love people the way Jesus tells us to.

When we start to understand that Jesus wants us to have a clean slate, meaning a fresh start, by forgiving what we have done in the past, it means that we have the freedom to start living a different way. We aren’t stuck in that ditch of sin forever. God lifts us out of it and we can be different people. Imagine if you owed someone else a bazillion dollars and you had to pay them back a thousand dollars a day. You would know that there was no way you could ever get it done. It would be hopeless. No one has that kind of money. But with God, it is never like that. Sure, we owe Him a bazillion dollars but His favorite thing to do is to tear up bills and throw them in the fire. It’s what He wants most in the world. He isn’t just hoping to be able to punish us—that’s the last thing in the world He wants. He wants us to accept Him as our King so that He can forgive us and show us a new way of living where we can begin to forgive others too, the way we have been forgiven. But we can’t do that unless He forgives us first. That’s one of the ways that we follow Him. But what does forgiveness look like in our lives?

There are different kinds of forgiveness. A lot of people don’t understand that. The first kind of forgiveness is called “turning the other cheek.” In Jesus’s time, reputation was very important and if someone slapped a man, he had to slap them back or he would be shamed and made fun of by the other men. His whole family would get angry at him for making them look like a bunch of wimps. Getting revenge was very important to them so that people would respect them and their family. But Jesus told them to stop doing that—when someone insulted them by smacking them across the face, they had to forgive that insult by refusing to get even. That wasn’t something that anyone wanted to hear. That was the opposite of what they were all doing and had been taught to do. I can hear them grumbling in the crowd, “What? How on earth does He expect us to be respected if we just let people get away with insulting us? Everyone will think we are pathetic weaklings! They will walk all over us and our lives will be ruined!” And maybe they were right, but Jesus was very serious. Not insulting those people back was a way of forgiving them for being mean. Jesus was telling His fellow Jews that it was important to God that they become peacemakers by letting the small stuff go. People insult me on the internet all the time, but if I fight back then I know I will start looking just like them and then people will take sides and it will be a mess. But if I talk to them calmly instead and they keep insulting me, it makes them look bad and people see that they don’t need to take sides at all because I have things under control and I am not hurt at all. When I do that, I am forgiving them and giving them another chance.

But what if someone robs my house or attacks me with a weapon? Do I get them back by robbing their house or going after them with a weapon? Jesus says no. I should call the police to let them know that there is someone dangerous out there who needs to be stopped, but if I go after them then I am just getting revenge and revenge is the opposite of forgiveness. And I won’t be happy no matter how much I hurt the person who has hurt me, scared me, or robbed me. I will just keep hurting them over and over again because my hurt will never go away. As long as we are getting even, we will always be angry and hurting because nothing will ever be enough. We have to know when to say enough is enough and so enough has to be before we get even in the first place. Justice is very important to God and so it should be important to us too. People do need to be caught when they have done bad things, by people who will hold them responsible—the Bible teaches us that. But it’s about impossible for us to do it and still be merciful when what we want isn’t justice but to get even. Getting even with someone else is always about doing something worse to them than they did to us. That’s why we call the police because hopefully they will be fair.

Jesus told His disciples that they need to be willing to forgive or they wouldn’t be forgiven and that scares a lot of people but I don’t want you to be scared. Jesus knows how hard it is for us to learn to forgive, and that we have to be taught how to do it and how to be gentle and loving. He is very patient to teach us all those things and He understands that it isn’t something we can just decide to do and suddenly be good at it or wise about it. The best place to start forgiving is to be kind to the people who have hurt you and are really very sorry and want another chance. Maybe someone lied, or maybe there was just a misunderstanding and they got mad at you for something you didn’t do, and they said something mean. That happens to all of us, and we all do things that hurt other people. We want people to forgive us and give us a hug when that happens and to understand that it wasn’t because we hated them. That happens in families all the time, right? We get frustrated and cranky and we say something nasty just because we want someone to feel hurt, but then we come to our senses and realize that it just made things worse and we want a clean slate to start over again. So, we say we are sorry and do nice things to try and make up for it. Forgiveness means that the other person decides to be kind and understanding and accept you again. But if they hold a grudge and don’t forgive you for even the small things, that can feel worse than anything you did to them. That’s another way to get revenge—by not forgiving.

That’s a very dangerous kind of unforgiveness because we are all guilty of sinning that way. I have apologized to my kids and my husband for being mean—a lot! I want them to know that I love them and that I am sorry and that I was wrong to be mean. I want them to know that they deserve an apology. I want them to know that they are important to me, and that I owe them an apology. I don’t apologize to get them to forgive me. I can’t make them do that. I apologize because I was wrong and they didn’t deserve what I did to them. I can’t make it so that my sin never happened, but I can let them know that I was wrong. We won’t all steal or hit someone with a stick, but we have all said and done things that are hurtful. If we aren’t willing to forgive others when we do the same things that they do, then how can God forgive us for doing the exact same things? Fortunately, He is very patient as we learn how to forgive. It takes a long, long time. But it also gets easier the more we do it.

It’s funny, in a way, that God tells us that we have to forgive BUT we can’t force anyone to forgive us. All we can do is ask, and whether they forgive or not is up to them. That’s why we need to learn not to sin against other people because we never know what will be the last straw for them—the thing that they decide is too much and they never want to be around us again. We owe it to God to forgive people, but that isn’t the same thing as us being able to force people to forgive us. Honestly, when we do that, we aren’t looking like we are very sorry or understanding about what we did to hurt them. And some people will get angry over a misunderstanding and won’t forgive us even when we didn’t do anything. We can’t do anything about that either except to be kind and leave them alone. That’s really hard, let me tell you. I had a really good friend in the 8^th grade and we were close all through the summer before our first year of high school. One the first day back, she looked at me with hatred and hurt in her eyes but to this day I don’t know why. She would never tell me. I wouldn’t have hurt her on purpose, but I guess she thought I did and never forgave me. I had to be kind because the only other thing I could do was be mean. I wasn’t a Christian then, but I knew that being mean back to her wasn’t going to solve anything. I couldn’t make her tell me what was wrong and I couldn’t force her to forgive me. But I could learn to forgive her. It took a long time.

What do we do when someone hurts us and apologizes and then hurts us again and apologizes again and it just keeps going on forever? Well, there is the kind of forgiveness where we are friends again just like we were before and then there are sad times when we forgive the person who is hurting us but have to keep them away from us. When we can go back to normal with a person, that’s called reconciliation. Reconciliation is like a hug after an argument, okay? Where there is still love there and trust and the relationship you have with a person has been hurt but can get better again and you want to work on it. But what about when someone is dangerous? You can forgive them by not getting back at them and by being kind to them instead when you see them, but that doesn’t mean they should be a part of your life. Someone once told me a story and I wish I knew where it came from because it was a good one. Someone came up to Jesus once and asked him how many times he should forgive his brother for sinning against him—seven times maybe? Jesus said, seventy times seven times! And that doesn’t mean you keep a score sheet for every time you forgive a person—that’s messed up. It means that we keep on forgiving forever. But what does that look like in real life? Here’s where the story comes in–

A friend knocks at your door and you open it and they punch you right in the face and walk away. Then they come back later, knocking on your door and saying they are sorry, so you open the door and after forgiving them and talking a while, they punch you in the face again. And this happens again and again. Opening that door was reconciliation, okay? Trying for things to be good again. But there comes a time when forgiveness is all we can give because the other person doesn’t want the relationship to be good—they just want us to open the door so that they can punch us again. At some point, when you hear the knock at the door and the person says sorry, you leave the door closed and say, “I forgive you but I am not going to open the door again to give you any more chances to punch me.” I really like that story because it shows the difference between forgiving someone and letting them hurt you forever. You don’t have to let anyone hurt you forever. You can leave the door closed when it is dangerous to open it. That doesn’t mean you aren’t being forgiving, it just means that you are done with being punched. And, if anyone is doing something like that, I would suggest calling the police. You don’t deserve to be hurt. Forgiveness means that you don’t hurt the person who hurt you, but it doesn’t mean you have to let them hurt you forever.

Forgiveness is really hard to learn. I don’t want you scared that God is going to like send a lightning bolt at your butt for not being able to forgive perfectly and especially not right away. There are times you will feel like you have forgiven a person totally and then something happens and you feel all the terrible anger and bad feelings for them all over again. That’s normal. It makes me angry when someone hurts me and especially when they don’t even care or never apologize. But when I don’t forgive, my mind starts thinking of all the terrible things I wish would happen to them. I don’t want them to change. I want them to be bad so that they can be punished forever. That’s what happens in my brain when I am unforgiving. But when I am forgiving, I start to understand that I do want them to change. I don’t want them to keep being bad just so that I can have my revenge against them. I want them to change to be good so that they won’t hurt anyone else and so that the world will be a better place. I want the people who have hurt me, to stop hurting others too. If they never change, then how many other people will they hurt? Satan wins when that happens. I want God to win. I want God to take the people who have hurt me the most and to change them into the kinds of people who are sorry for all the bad they have done, and help people instead. When we forgive them, and we don’t get even, we get out of their way and it makes it easier for God to reach them and change them.

There are people who did that for me, even though I didn’t understand it at the time. They didn’t get back at me when I hurt them—if they had, I would have just gotten back at them even worse because sometimes I didn’t think I had done anything wrong in the first place. But they were patient with me because God was patient with them. They showed me a different way and as they were kind even when I was mean, I started to feel bad when I would hurt them. God was using their forgiveness to teach me how to start loving others as they were loving me. I wanted people to forgive me. I needed people to forgive me. Sometimes, I needed people to walk away from me so I could understand that I can go too far. Without forgiveness—the forgiveness of God and other people in my life—I would still be who I was twenty-five years ago and the world would be a worse place than it is now, at least for the people who know me.

People didn’t keep me in a jail by not forgiving me, and when they were wrong they said they were sorry. That showed me a different and better way. I liked how it felt when they said they were sorry when they had hurt me. I wanted other people to feel that way when I hurt them and knew I was wrong. And the more I did that, the more God could trust me and show me the other things I was doing that hurt people. And He showed me how to make things better. I still hurt people sometimes, but I know that making things right again is an easy way to help someone else’s heart heal. And I give people space when they don’t know how to forgive me yet. I can’t force them to forgive me. I also can’t force them to apologize. That’s God’s job. It’s good to learn to say sorry, but no one can make us mean it. God wants us to say it and to mean it. And He wants us to be able to learn how to forgive too.

Next week, we are going to start learning how to be more like Jesus and I am very excited about this. Before we move on to more of the life story of Abraham and Sarah, and then to Isaac and Jacob and his sons, we need to look at Jesus so we can see the difference between being perfect and being really messed up and in need of Jesus!

I love you. I am praying for you. And I know that you can change your life and the world around you by learning to forgive.

We are about halfway through the story of Abraham in the Bible. His life story in Genesis is traditionally divided into two “Torah Portions”–Lech Lecha and Vayera. As we just finished Lech Lecha, I wanted to toss out all the context and just enjoy myself telling the first part of Abraham’s story the way that extra-biblical Jewish writers did to tell the story more creatively.

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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.

This week, we’ll be doing something that we haven’t done in a long while, which is telling the story of what we have learned so far about Abraham’s life with God. This is a very ancient Jewish way of dealing with the Bible in such a way that we can use the Bible to tell the stories we want to tell. Let’s face it: the Bible doesn’t have much in the way of what people are thinking on the inside or how they feel about what is happening, and there are just huge gaps. Ancient Jewish sages (even before the time of Jesus) would rewrite these stories—making them more fictional, which means that there’s a lot of made-up stuff added in. Sometimes, the made-up stuff was pretty wild and even silly, but mostly it was just normal stuff added in to help teach morality lessons. A morality lesson helps people to understand what is and is not good, acceptable, and healthy. If you have heard the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, then you know that it wasn’t ever meant to be an accurate story about a real boy who liked to prank the people of his town into thinking that there was really a dangerous wolf nearby, but a morality story about the foolishness of lying and how it can get people into a lot of trouble. The boy who kept yelling that there was a wolf in town was in big trouble when there actually was one—he got gobbled up because no one would believe him when he was finally telling the truth. Jesus told stories like that, called parables, about things that hadn’t ever really happened but taught people the truth about how things are in the Kingdom of Heaven. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is also a true story, in a way, even though it is made up. It tells the truth about what happens and what can happen when we lie so much that no one believes us anymore. But it is still fiction.

What I am going to do this week is tell the story of how Abram and Sarai left their home to follow God until they were renamed Abraham and Sarah and became a set-apart household for God at the end of chapter seventeen. So, we will start at the end of chapter eleven, and let’s see how our understanding of the story has changed based on what we have learned together over the past year (and I just checked, it was a year ago that we started with “A Man Called Abram”). Let’s start the story:

God had been looking over the whole earth. He had a plan to save the people whom He had created to be His image-bearers. Not just some, but all. Things had been messed up ever since Adam and Eve decided that being their own gods was a good idea, but after the flood, God promised that He wasn’t interested in trying to kill everyone just to try and make things better again. God knew that as long as people’s hearts and minds were selfish and cruel, they would always come up with terrible things to do to each other and to the whole planet. God had been waiting, and God found a man named Abram who wasn’t perfect but who had the right kind of heart and mind to begin a new family on the earth that could learn to do things differently than everyone else.

Abram was an old man—seventy-five years old, actually—and he lived with his wife Sarai, his brother Nahor, and his father Terah in Haran until their father died. They had started out in Ur, in the land that would one day be a part of the mighty Babylonian Empire but had left many years ago and ended up settling down in good pastureland near the Euphrates River. Because they were a family that took care of animals, called shepherds, they needed a lot of space with enough grass to feed their sheep, goats, cattle, and also the animals who carried heavy loads for them. It was a good life, and they were a rich family—they even owned a great many slaves whom they had bought all the way back in Babylon, as well as on their journeys, and many who had been born into slavery. In ancient times, owning slaves was like having electricity. It was how you got a lot of things done, and they believed that slaves deserved to be slaves and their owners deserved to be owners, even though that’s strange to us now. But that’s what made sense to Abram and Sarai because that was normal where they came from, as well as everywhere they would go until they died. God had to start somewhere, and there were no perfect people who thought all the right things. Abram and Sarai would do—especially since they weren’t the goal of God’s story. They were just the beginning. The goal was Jesus.

God shocked Abram one day while he was sitting beneath a tree talking to his shepherds about the things that needed to be done with the flocks and herds before sundown. At first, Abram thought he was just imagining it, but then he heard someone calling his name, and there was no one else around who seemed to notice. Suddenly, the voice was clear in his head, and his heart and entire body felt like it was prickly and more alive than ever before. The voice was impossible to ignore, and Abram found that he didn’t want to ignore it.

“Go, leave this place. Leave your relatives behind and follow Me to a new place. I will make you into a great nation of people. I will be with you, and I will make your name famous and respected. Because of you, other people will be blessed. I will do good for everyone who is good to you, and I will make sure the people who are against you won’t succeed in their plans to harm you.”

Abram had never heard a god speak before. His father’s idols sure hadn’t said anything to anyone in his family. Now that his father was gone, there was really nothing keeping Abram in Haran—after all, they only ended up there because his father, Terah, had wanted to go to the Land of Canaan. They had settled down in Haran when Terah got too old to travel anymore and they had made a comfortable life for themselves but Haran had never been their final destination. This voice that was so strong and clear, Abram wanted to follow it even though it would take him away from the protection of his family. That was a tough decision to make because he and Sarai had no children and she was now too old to have any. He had been counting on his family to care for them as they got older, as they had all done for Terah at the end of his life. His nephew Lot was restless and wasn’t satisfied with the land they were living in, and so when Abram began to pack up to leave, Lot asked to go with them. The voice had told Abram to leave behind his family but he couldn’t stop Lot from traveling with them, and they could use a young man around just in case. When they had all gathered up their possessions, their flocks and herds and their people, they set out following the voice which led them south to the Land of Canaan.

Canaan was the home of many tribes of people and quite a few rich cities. As a wealthy man with large flocks and herds, the local people were happy to have him dwelling nearby. As Abram wasn’t warlike, the wealth he brought to their region and the opportunities to trade and do business with him were good for everyone. They could trade their crops, pottery, baskets, and metalworking for wool and other animal products. In time, Abram made friends with an Amorite named Mamre and his brothers. They knew they were stronger together than apart when bandits and robbers or soldiers came through the area, and so they made an agreement to help each other in case of attack. But there was nothing they could do to help each other the year that the rain didn’t fall, and hail damaged the crops.

Egypt was the best place on earth to get food—everyone knew that. They didn’t need rain because they had the Nile. Egypt was also famous for welcoming foreigners and being willing to sell food to them, so Abram and Sarai packed up and headed to the south and then to the west until they came to the border of Egypt. But Abram became more and more frightened as they drew near because his wife was incredibly beautiful. Up till now, they had been with family or united with other households for safety and few people would even see Sarai but that was about to change. They would be under the watchful eye of the mighty Egyptian Empire and Sarai would definitely be noticed. But they had to eat, so what could Abram do?

“Sarai, look, you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. You know this. Up till now, not many powerful men have gotten to see you. But we are strangers here without friends, and I can’t hide you anymore. If a man wants to take you for his wife, and he is powerful enough, he’ll just kill me and take you and then what will happen to all of our slaves? I need you to take one for the team and just go along with me telling everyone you are my sister. Worst comes to worst, it will go better for everyone this way. Our only alternative is to go back and starve to death.”

Sarai frowned. Abram had told her about the promises of the voice but he didn’t sound like he was believing them anymore. Maybe it was all in his imagination, after all, and they should have never left Haran. But she knew their household would be starving before too long, and their animals as well. They needed the food that they could only get in Egypt. Lot and his family had decided to go east toward the Jordan River, but Abram wasn’t willing to live that close to the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Egyptians had a good reputation for being hospitable but the rumors about how the men of Sodom treated foreigners was enough to keep him away. Yes, Sarai knew they needed to eat and so she agreed, but she kept her scarf as close around her face as she possibly could.

But she was seen at the border, and the Pharaoh’s men knew that if they brought him such a beautiful woman, that they would be rewarded greatly. Abram was given great riches in exchange for her, and she was taken to the palace where she was made the wife of the King of Egypt. She was dressed in fine clothing and jewelry, her head was shaved and a beautiful wig was placed on her head. She was also given a young girl named Hagar as a personal slave. But then bad things started happening to the people living in the house of the Pharaoh. Everything was going wrong and so Pharaoh prayed to his gods and all his priests and household did the same. When he found out that the problems began the very day Sarai was brought to him, he was angry and demanded to talk with Abram.

“You sinned against me and my whole house and my country! You lied to me and told me that she was your sister. I gave you money and animals and slaves in exchange for her. I did what was right even though I could have easily taken her, but you did what was wrong. Take your wife and get out of here! I would kill you if I could, but these curses came on us because of you so I must send you away instead so that your gods won’t be angry with me.”

When Abram and Lot were together again, they had both gotten a lot richer and they had so many animals and tents and people that they didn’t fit in the same place anymore. Abram told Lot that they needed to separate forever, so that their people would stop fighting. Abram gave Lot first choice and so Lot looked around and took the best land around the Jordan River for himself and left the rocks and hills to his uncle Abram. Lot was heading back to the area of Sodom, where he camped right outside of the city. He was able to do good business with the rich asphalt miners and became even richer, while Abram lived near Mamre and his brothers in the hill country. God was very happy that Abram wasn’t with Lot anymore, because Lot made really bad and selfish decisions, and so God told Abram that He would be giving Abram all the land as far as his eyes could see—including the very best of the land that Lot selfishly took for himself. God told Abram to walk through all of the land, that it belonged to him and his descendants. And Abram did just that before settling down again near his friend Mamre the Amorite.

But just because Lot was gone didn’t mean that Abram was off the hook for bringing him along when God said to leave him back in Haran. A marauding group of kings—the great king Chedorlaomer of Elam and the three kings who did whatever he told them to do—came to get revenge against the five kings who lived near Lot. They were kings of very wicked cities, where the men hurt any visitors who came to their cities. They must have liked Lot because not only did he successfully camp beside Sodom, but now he had moved into a house in Sodom. Those five wicked kings had once made a covenant to do everything that the great king wanted but then they decided to join together and fight against him instead. They wanted the money from their asphalt mining all to themselves and didn’t want to give a bunch of it to a king who lived so far away. Maybe they thought they were so far away that the great king wouldn’t want the hassle of doing anything about them but they were wrong. King Chedorlaomer, the big cheese, not only beat the snot out of the five kings and robbed their cities of everything and took the people who lived there as slaves, but he was fighting everyone else in the Land of Canaan too. Those five wicked kings got everyone in a ton of trouble.

But when someone told Abram about what had happened, and that Lot had been taken along with everyone else, he must have groaned and rolled his eyes. Lot was family, so Abram had to help or no one would respect him anymore. Lot was only there in the first place because Abram let him come, and now Abram could definitely see why God said to leave his family behind. Lot was a handful of trouble, for sure. Abram took Mamre and his two brothers and all of the men in their households and went after the four kings, who were traveling slowly because they had a ton of people walking with them and lots of loot. Amazingly, all those shepherds were able to kick those kings and their men to the curb—in fact, they chased them all the way out of the Land of Canaan. Abram must have been thinking to himself, “Wow, God kept His promise—He really did bless everyone on my side because we were able to beat the snot out of these kings and all their fighting men!”

On his way back home, Abram met King Melchizedek, who said he was a worshiper of the Most High God, the creator of Heaven and Earth. Melchizedek had brought out bread and wine for them, and Abram was so happy about it that he gave Melchizedek 10% of everything they got from the kings. The King of Sodom (who had been hiding in the empty asphalt pits when his people were kidnapped), told Abram that he could keep all the money as long as he gave all the people to the king of Sodom. That wicked king just wanted all the people for slave labor so he could get rich again. Abram was totally disgusted and told him that he didn’t want anything from Sodom.

When he got back home to his camp in Hebron, God came to Abram in a vision (a dream he had while he was awake) and said to him, “Don’t be afraid! I am your protector! This will all be worth it because I will reward you!” But Abram sadly said, “No reward matters because I don’t have any children—I have to give everything to one of the slaves that was born in my household!” God disagreed and replied, “No, you are going to have a baby—go outside and look at the stars, that’s how many descendants you will have, and they will be too many for anyone but me to count.” Abram remembered that God had safely brought him to the Land of Canaan and had blessed everything he had, and he believed God. God was very happy that Abram did the right thing and trusted His promise, “I am the God who has been with you since you left Ur with your father so that you could have this land for your own.”

Abram asked, “How can I know that I will have the Land?” God replied, “Go and get a three-year-old cow, a three-year-old goat, a three-year-old ram, and a dove and a pigeon.”

Abram knew exactly what that meant as he had seen this done many times in Canaan and back in Ur where he grew up. Abram got the animals (he was still dreaming), killed them quickly, and then cut each of them in half. He made two rows of them, with a path down the middle. And he waited and waited and waited. The birds came and he shooed them away, until it became very dark and Abram couldn’t stay awake. The darkness swallowed Abram up and he was very afraid. But then he heard the voice of God speaking to him, “I am telling you the truth. Your descendants are going to live in a country as foreigners for four hundred years, and they will be treated harshly and taken as slaves. But I will judge the people holding them as slaves and your descendants will leave that country very wealthy. But you will die here after a good, long life. The Amorites who are coming to live here will grow powerful and very wicked, and they have to be judged before your descendants return. But it isn’t time yet.”

Abram was waiting for God to show up so that they could walk the path together between the animals, so he would know that there was a forever agreement between them. But instead, fire and smoke appeared on the path and went through without Abram, while God made the promise to give him the Land again. That told Abram that God was making this promise not just to Abram but to Himself and that He would do anything He had to do to make it happen. That was the greatest guarantee in the world because it meant that Abram couldn’t do anything to mess it up. What a relief that was!

But then ten more years went by and there was still no child for Abram. Sarai was very concerned, but it was also very normal in her world for a woman to give her slave to her husband as another wife if she couldn’t have a baby. Abram figured that this must be the way God wanted them to make things happen, and according to the laws of the land, Sarai had every right to do this. No one asked Hagar’s permission, and they never even called her by her name, but she became Abram’s second wife and it wasn’t very long before they found out she was having a baby. But Sarai still expected her to work as a slave and Hagar believed she was too important to do that. After all, she was having the baby that everyone wanted. Sarai couldn’t have a baby, which made her look cursed to all the other women. Hagar started to resent Sarai because she saw herself as more than a slave, but that’s all Sarai thought she was. And Sarai made it clear that Hagar’s baby belonged to Sarai. That must not have seemed reasonable to Hagar. And so Hagar disrespected Sarai so much that Sarai complained to Abram.

“It’s your job to tell everyone where they belong and who’s the boss and what the pecking order is. That slave girl of mine thinks she is more important than me because she is pregnant, and it is all your fault!” Sarai yelled. Abram sighed and shrugged. He was happy that a baby was on the way but wasn’t happy about all the drama. Instead of handling it himself, he said, “She’s your slave, do whatever you want to her.” Sarai went back to the tent where Hagar was reclining and beat her so badly that Hagar was afraid her baby would die—she ran away, heading south to go back home to Egypt.

But the Angel of the Lord found her at a spring of water on the way and called her by her name and asked where she was going. Hagar explained her terrible situation to the angel, and the angel told her, “You need to go back, it isn’t safe here. Make Sarai happy and do whatever she tells you because you are going to have a baby boy and you will name him Ishmael (which means “God hears”). You will have more descendants than you can imagine and your son will be a mighty man, clever and resourceful and he will be a thorn in everyone’s side.” Hagar named God “El-Roi” because she saw God and He saw her.

Hagar went back and did what she was told, and she had a baby boy. She named him Ishmael, and Sarai didn’t claim him as her son. God was right when He said that the child would belong to Hagar and not to Sarai.

Thirteen years later, God returned to Abram and made him another promise, “I am El Shadai (God Almighty). I want you to be my representative on the earth and to live the way I command you. I am going to make our covenant official, and you will have more descendants than you can possibly imagine. Your children will become many nations, and the kings of those nations. Your name will be Abraham, because you will be the father of all these people groups. And my covenant will be with your children too. I will make it all happen, and your part is to become circumcised so that the people from the nations around you will see you as my priests and your household as devoted to me. So, every man in your entire camp needs to be circumcised. It’s a forever thing for all your children until the end of time. It’s a sign of the agreement between us. And never call your wife Sarai ever again. Her name is Sarah. She is a princess and nations and kings will come from her as well. She’s going to have a son!”

Abram laughed at the thought of old Sarah having a baby when she was ninety, but he was also sad, “But what about Ishmael? Can’t he be my heir?? I love him!”

God said, “No, but I will bless him. Ishmael will be a great man, but it has always been my plan for Sarah to have a baby in her old age—It will be an amazing miracle and a sign that your family is special. Sarah will have her baby around this time next year, and he will be called Isaac (which means laughter) and my promises to you will also be to him and his children.” God left before Abram could ask anything else and Abram obeyed God on that very day and circumcised every man in the camp. Everything was different now. The whole world had changed. God had taken another step toward Jesus by moving the people He chose into the place He chose and teaching them how to trust Him more and more. Exciting and sad times are ahead for Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, and Isaac. The next Torah portion is called Vayera and stretches from Genesis 18 to the end of Genesis 22.

I love you. I am praying for you. I hope you are excited to hear the next chapter of the story. You know so much about the first three Torah portions of the Bible—Bereshith, Noach, and Lech Lecha. Just think of how much more you will know a year from now!

Special episode: Many kids feel (or are made to feel) that they are mistakes for this or that reason. It’s an issue near and dear to my heart so we are going to tackle it.

Oh no! God has made it clear that it was always His plan to give a miracle baby through Sarah and now Abraham realizes that his beloved thirteen-year-old son Ishmael won’t be his heir. From now on, what was once just a mess is now heartbreaking and it will only get worse.

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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. (Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context without having to read an entire chapter every week!)

This week, we have to talk about something very important. Sarah and Abraham have now been promised a baby boy, but Abraham already has a thirteen-year-old son named Ishmael, whose mother is Sarah’s slave Hagar, whom she gave to Abraham as another wife so that they could have the son they needed to inherit everything and take care of them in their old age. God had promised Abraham a son but never said anything about how it would happen. After ten years of waiting, Sarah had decided to make it happen her own way. She did what anyone would do in those days, and we know this from reading cuneiform tablets from around the time when she was alive. She made another woman have a baby for her, and that baby was supposed to be Sarah’s son, but God had other ideas. He told Hagar that the child would be hers and not Sarah’s. It was only fair because Hagar was a slave, and she was forced to become Abraham’s wife—and she still had to work as a slave even though her son was a very important person in the household of Abraham!

Now that God is promising that eighty-nine year old Sarah will have a son, Abraham has to be both happy and sad at the same time. Let’s look at this week’s verses, Gen 17:17-22–

Abraham fell down with his face on the ground. Then he laughed and said to himself, “Can a child be born to a hundred-year-old man? Can Sarah, a ninety-year-old woman, actually have a baby?” So, Abraham said to God, “I wish that Ishmael could be your choice!” But God said, “No. Your wife Sarah will have a baby boy, and you will name him Isaac. My covenant will be with Isaac as a permanent covenant for his future descendants. As for Ishmael, I do hear what you are saying. I will certainly bless him; I will make him fruitful and will multiply him greatly. He will be the father of twelve tribal leaders, and I will make him into a great nation. But my covenant with you is going to continue on with Isaac. Sarah will give birth to him around this time next year.” When he finished talking with him, God went away from Abraham.

Let’s talk about Ishmael. Was he a mistake? Well, Abraham and Sarah sure made a mistake in not being patient and Ishmael wasn’t God’s choice. God wanted a child who would be a 100% miracle—a child that showed the world that he was a God who could make impossible things happen. The other nations of people worshiped fertility gods and goddesses. They believed that goddesses like Atargatis and gods like Ba’al Hammon and Tammuz were responsible for making sure they had plenty of babies, lots of food, and many critters. But Atargatis couldn’t make a ninety-year-old woman have a baby. None of the gods of the nations around them could do that—all they could do was take credit for what our God was actually doing. Throughout the Bible, a big theme (and a theme is a main point that we see all the way through) is God showing His people that they don’t need anyone else because He is the God of everything and not just one or two things like the pathetic gods of the nations around them. We’ve talked about that a lot. Our God doesn’t need helpers! And He likes to prove it! God wants to start out His special people with a bang! Abraham and Sarah wanted to start it all out with something ordinary—with a young woman having a baby. And there isn’t anything strange about that! That’s normal.

But just because Abraham and Sarah did what was wrong, it doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with Ishmael. He’s an ordinary thirteen-year-old boy. What Abraham and Sarah did was a mistake but Ishmael wasn’t a mistake. People aren’t mistakes. Choices are mistakes. I hope that you can understand that. Sarah doesn’t love Ishmael, but that’s her problem. We don’t see it now but in a few more chapters, we will. That’s her mistake. Ishmael hasn’t done anything wrong but he is alive because Sarah did what was wrong, and then everything got messed up. Sometimes we hate people who remind us of our mistakes but that is a terrible thing to do to someone else. Ishmael, like every human being, is fearfully and wonderfully made. Sometimes, people get told that they are a mistake, but that is a lie. No person is a mistake. Every person is created to be the image of God—every single one. The only mistakes are when we don’t live like God wants us to live. But that’s about choices, and not about who we are. People who don’t live the way God wants today might start living in ways that please Him tomorrow. We humans are amazing creatures, the most amazing creatures in the world. You are amazing too. You weren’t a mistake, no matter what. In fact, if anyone tells you that you are a mistake, then they are making a huge mistake!

For a long time, I really believed that I was a mistake and that everyone would be better off without me. I sometimes wish that I could go back and give me a big hug and tell my younger self that the things I feel about myself aren’t always true. My feelings are real, when I am feeling sad or angry or happy, but what I believe about myself isn’t always the truth. They just feel like the truth! Sometimes those lies feel like the truth because that’s what people are telling us. It’s what they want us to believe. And how they say it and how they treat us makes us believe that they must be right. And sometimes the people telling us those lies have a group around them telling them how awesome they are even when they are being just awful. That’s a good time to learn how to be critical thinkers. Is a mean person actually as good as everyone tells them they are? Does that make sense? Or is the world upside down? I can tell you that the world is definitely upside down and what is wrong seems right and what is right can seem wrong. And we will see that all through the Bible, all the way to the end! I wish that I had understood that when I was a kid.

So, now that I have that out of the way, so that we know Ishmael isn’t a mistake as a person even though Sarah and Abraham did what was wrong to get him, let’s look at what happens in this week’s verses: Abraham fell down with his face on the ground. Then he laughed and said to himself, “Can a child be born to a hundred-year-old man? Can Sarah, a ninety-year-old woman, actually have a baby?” Next chapter, we will see Sarah do the exact same thing—only her face won’t be in the dirt. And like Abraham, she will only be saying it in her own mind. Not out loud because what God was telling him wasn’t something he had ever even dreamed would happen. When they were young, yes, they always hoped but when Sarah stopped being able to have babies, that was that. Women can’t always have babies. When we are teenagers, we become able to have babies but when we are older, our body parts just up and say, “Nope, we’re done.” And it’s very obvious when those things happen. I am at the age where my body said, “Nope!” a few years ago. Sarah was probably about my age when that happened too, because when we meet her she is sixty-five and it’s already too late for her to have babies. But when Sarah finally did have a baby, she wasn’t just grandma-aged but great grandma-aged!

I mean, God just told Abraham something crazier than in Genesis 12 when He said, “Follow me and I will lead you to a different place, but you will have no idea where you are going.” I mean, that’s just weird, but this is even weirder. They knew when a woman could and couldn’t have a baby in those days even if they didn’t understand the science behind it—remember that they believed in baby seeds that were just planted in the mom like a wheat seed in a field—they knew when it was and was not possible for a woman to have a baby and it hadn’t been possible with Sarah for at least thirty years. Of all the ways that Abraham thought he might have a son since he came to the Land of Canaan, this was actually the one that probably had never occurred to him. And Abraham didn’t know God well enough yet to understand that He can do absolutely anything. Abraham is just like we are—God proves Himself to us because He wants us to learn that we can trust Him. But Abraham laughed probably before he even asked himself if it was a good idea. Have you ever done that? Have you ever been in a quiet situation and all of a sudden something occurred to you and you busted out laughing?

Oh my gosh, when I was a teenager, my mom and I went to a Christmas concert down at the Murphys Diggins. And they wanted everyone to have a solemn and respectful moment where we would all hum Silent Night. But my lips started buzzing and I looked at my mom and my mom looked at me and all of a sudden we couldn’t stop laughing and I was trying so hard not to that I thought I might pee my pants right then and there. To this day, I can’t hum without thinking about it. So, I have a lot of compassion for Abraham here and Sarah in the next chapter. Sometimes, laughing is the furthest thing from our minds and it just comes right out anyway. Abraham was shocked. And he laughed. This is definitely one of those, “Let the one who has not sinned throw the first stone” moments for sure. Oops.

And so, after Abraham laughed, he thought about Ishmael, who he loves. The news was amazing—an answer to so many prayers for so long but those prayers had been forgotten because there was just no need to pray about it anymore. But what about their plans over the last fourteen years? Ishmael had been told that he would inherit everything. Abraham was teaching him everything he needed to know to carry on in his father’s footsteps as the patriarch of the family. Ishmael was a very important person in everyone’s eyes but now Abraham realizes that he and his wife have made a terrible mistake. He is going to have to break his promises to Ishmael. Ishmael will have to be second to his much younger brother. Abraham cried out to God and asked, “but what about Ishmael, can’t you accept him as my firstborn?” Have you ever made a promise that you had to break? It’s a hard thing to do. I have never had to break a promise this big and especially not to my kids. I hurt inside just thinking about how sad this would have made Abraham. I bet he was sick to his stomach.

But God said, “No. Your wife Sarah will have a baby boy, and you will name him Isaac. My covenant will be with Isaac as a permanent covenant for his future descendants.”

God was telling Abraham that Isaac was always God’s plan and that hadn’t changed. Even the people who are chosen by God don’t just get to change God’s plans by doing things their own way or by taking shortcuts when they are not patient and trusting. Everything that God had promised Abraham—a great name and a great nation and kings and more descendants than anyone could ever hope to count and the Land of Canaan for their home—would happen through Isaac and his children and not through Ishmael and his descendants. It was what Abraham had wanted for Ishmael, and since God had been quiet for thirteen years, Abraham probably believed that they had made the right decision. God doesn’t send a lightning bolt to zap our butts when we do wrong. Usually, He doesn’t say anything and He lets us face the consequences. Just because God is quiet doesn’t mean that He approves of everything we’ve been up to. But I know a lot of people who really believe that God will always stop us from doing messed up things. That’s not God’s job. He lets us choose. It doesn’t change His plans but it does change our lives.

So, what about Ishmael? God knew that even though Abraham and Sarah had done something terribly wrong, it wasn’t Ishmael’s fault. So, God told Abraham that He had big plans to bless Ishmael: “As for Ishmael, I do hear what you are saying. I will certainly bless him; I will make him fruitful and will multiply him greatly. He will be the father of twelve tribal leaders, and I will make him into a great nation. But my covenant with you is going to continue on with Isaac.” Wow! God is promising even more to Ishmael than He did back when He was telling Hagar about what a great man her son would be. Not only would Ishmael be a mighty man but his kids would be too. God is promising to bless Ishmael, which means that He will continue to look out for him and won’t forget him. God will also do that for Lot’s sons and for Isaac’s son Esau later on in Genesis. He gave them land that the children of Israel weren’t allowed to take away from them. God is very trustworthy and generous. And he is going to give Ishmael just as many tribes as He will give to Abraham’s grandson Jacob. The covenant promises may belong to Isaac’s descendants but Ishmael’s future isn’t anything to sneeze at! Why? Because Ishmael isn’t to blame for Abraham’s and Sarah’s mistake. God proves that by blessing him. We can make mistakes and we will make mistakes, but we can’t be mistakes.

But God wasn’t finished, “…my covenant with you is going to continue on with Isaac. Sarah will give birth to him around this time next year.” When He finished talking with him, God went away from Abraham. Wow! After all this time—only another year to wait. That means that Sarah will be pregnant in just about three months and that’s not long at all. But what should Abraham do? Should he tell Sarah or would she think he was crazy or would it be cruel to get her hopes up after all this time? Before he had a chance to ask any more questions, God took off. God had said all He needed to say and He had said a lot! God will do that to Abraham in the next chapter as well. I suppose it is amazing that God talks to people at all and we should be grateful when He does but we can’t expect Him to stick around forever answering all our questions. I would probably never shut up if I had the chance. Just ask anyone who knows me in real life and they will tell you! I would never run out of questions.

In the Bible, all the way through, God reacts differently to the questions of different people. With prophets and normal people like me, He talks though dreams and visions and gives us riddles. But with Abraham and Moses, He would just flat out have a conversation with them without all the puzzles. Abraham and Moses both had the special job of starting a family and beginning a new kind of nation in the world. They weren’t just getting answers for themselves but for everyone. Especially Moses. But it is when Jesus gets asked questions that we learn the most about what it is like to have a conversation with God.  A lot of people talked to Jesus about a lot of things but they all had different reasons for doing it. Some wanted answers—and some of the people asking their questions were honest and others were sneaky and trying to trick Him and trap Him into giving an answer that would get Him into trouble. Sometimes people asked Him what they thought the right question was but instead of answering that question, He answered the question they really should have asked instead. The Bible said that He knew what was in their hearts when they asked and that means He knew what they were really thinking and He also knew the real reason they were asking. I wish I could do that!

Have you ever been asked a question that wasn’t really a question? I have, and my problem is that I take almost all questions seriously and so I give honest answers when people don’t actually want them. I mean, when someone asks me if their hat looks dumb and I know they like their hat, I tell them what they want to hear because I know there is a difference between my opinion and what is actually true. If they feel good about their hat, why should I make them feel bad just because I don’t like it? But sometimes, on social media especially, someone will ask what looks like a real question and I will think they are looking for a real answer. But they don’t want a real answer because what they are looking for is a chance to give everyone their answer and to disagree with everyone who says something they don’t like. I hate it when people do that. It’s hard to trust people when they aren’t really asking a question but are setting up a trap that they want a person to fall into.

And I totally fall for it because I only ask those kinds of questions when I actually want answers. If I ask you something about the Bible, it is because I don’t know the answer to the question and not because I want to show off what I know and make people feel like they aren’t smart. If I want opinions, I will say, “what do you think about such and such.” I usually ask questions like that when we can’t actually know what is true.

But when Jesus asked questions, you had better know the answer when you said something. Jesus was wanting to teach you something—Jesus didn’t have to ask questions to find things out the way we do. Sometimes Jesus asked questions to see if people would tell Him the truth—like He did with the Samaritan woman. Other times, He asked questions when people were trying to trap Him so that they would trap themselves instead. But Jesus was never showing off, like the people who were trying to trick Him. Jesus wanted people to see who He was so that when He rose from the dead, that they would remember and follow Him. Sometimes that meant He had to make the people who were trying to trick Him look bad so that no one would want to believe what they had to say about Him. But what Jesus really wanted was for people to see the truth. That’s why, if they asked the wrong question, He answered the question they really should have asked. He knew He wasn’t wasting His time by talking to people who wanted to know about Him. But like God with Abraham, He had other places to go and other people to talk to.

He didn’t stay in one town talking to the same people forever—He went to all the different towns in Galilee, where He healed people and tossed demons out of them and fed them and taught them what God wanted them to hear. Jesus once said that He only ever did what He saw God doing. Jesus is the only one who ever knew or saw God and so Jesus always knew exactly what God would do, no matter what, and He did it. And so, we can trust Jesus like we trust God and we can trust God like we trust Jesus. Jesus wouldn’t ever lie about God and God would never lie about Jesus. Jesus went around teaching everyone not because He wanted everyone to see how smart He is but because God wanted everyone to know how wonderful He is and how different He is from the gods of the Romans who had invaded them and took over their country. When Jesus was done, He left and went somewhere else. That doesn’t mean that people didn’t want to ask Him any more questions or talk to Him longer, but that they had what they needed and Jesus could leave for another place. But, of course, sometimes the huge crowds kept following Him wherever He went!

God was like that with Abraham too. I am sure Abraham would have kept talking with God forever but God had said what He had come to say and it was time for their talk to end. God probably didn’t want Abraham to keep asking questions about things that were already decided. Like, “When exactly is Sarah going to have the baby?” Or, “Can’t Ishmael and Isaac both work together to run the family?” Maybe, “How on earth is Sarah going to have a baby? That’s just crazy talk!” We always want all the details, right? I am sure Abraham has had a lot of questions since that first day when God told Him to leave Haran and leave his entire family behind. And sometimes He prayed and asked and sometimes he just went and made decisions for himself about what God meant and what God wanted to happened and when He wanted it to happen. We usually think that sooner is better than later but God seems to prefer to wait until we can handle His promises or when it is obvious that it was a miracle—like baby Isaac!

So, if you have questions and God isn’t answering them, that’s okay. He doesn’t hate you. Sometimes, getting answers just makes everything worse and when we really need those answers, we will get them. The timing will be perfect.

I love you. I am praying for you. You know, I don’t care what anyone ever tells you when they are being angry or spiteful. You aren’t a mistake. God knows your name. You will make mistakes just like everyone else, but you are not a mistake.

This week we will be talking about one of the themes of Scripture—miracle babies! Sarai’s will be the very first of seven and that calls for a new name, new promises, and new problems for Abraham.

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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 now post slightly longer video versions. (Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context without having to read an entire chapter every week!)

Last week, all the focus was on the guys in Abraham’s household—which consisted of Abraham, Ishmael, and all of the people who travel with them taking care of the critters and the camp. But this week, the focus is on Abraham’s wife, Sarai—remember Sarai? She’s eighty-nine years old, still beautiful, but barren—I am thinking like Lena Horne, who was almost ninety-three when she died and still gorgeous and she could sing. But Sarai was barren which means that she can’t have any babies. I mean, it’s normal for an eighty-nine-year-old woman not to be able to have babies, thank goodness, but Sarai couldn’t even have babies when she was young. Once it became obvious that there was no hope, about thirteen or fourteen years earlier, she decided to give her female slave, Hagar, to her husband as another wife, while still keeping control over her as a slave and claiming the child as her own. Hagar had a son named Ishmael, but God told Hagar that the child belonged to her and not to Sarai, because Hagar would name him. So, Abraham has a child now but Sarai doesn’t. Of course, if you have been listening all along then you know the story is much more complicated than this, but this is what my generation (and I am Gen X, thank you very much and not a Boomer) calls the ”Reader’s Digest Version.” It’s a very short summary where I only talk about the things that matter to the story we are talking about today. And now, we can read this week’s verses:

 God said to Abraham, “As for your wife Sarai, do not call her Sarai, for Sarah will be her name. I will bless her; in fact, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she will produce nations; kings of peoples will come from her.”

Okay, can you imagine what it was even like for Abraham to hear this news? It is impossible. Eighty-nine-year-old women can’t have babies. They just can’t. Not then and not now. I don’t even care about the advances of medical science in our modern world. It is still impossible today and even if it wasn’t, what eight-nine-year-old woman would even want to have a baby. I am fifty-four and my back and knees aren’t what they used to be. Even though I am barren and can’t have babies, just like Sarah, I wouldn’t want to have a baby now—no way, no how. When the twins were born and we adopted them, I was almost thirty-two years old, and I was so exhausted all the time. I was watching the news one day when they were just a few months old and there was a story about how doctors had made it so a woman in her early 60s had babies and I was like, “That woman gonna die because I am half her age and sooo tired that I sleep whenever the babies are sleeping and wish I was sleeping even when they are awake.” And doctors can do some amazing things now that weren’t possible in the past, but no one has ever had a baby in their 80s and Sarai is almost ninety at this point. In fact, she will be ninety when she has her baby. And that’s just crazy. You know what I call that? I call that God showing off!

Sure, God could have given Sarai a baby when she was twenty, or thirty, or even fifty—but ninety? That’s just how God is sometimes, He wants to make sure that everyone knows that the only explanation is a miracle—like parting the Red Sea. There are women my age who have babies, sometimes, but dang. It isn’t normal. A lot of times, when there are miracles now, people will come up with excuses for how it really wasn’t a miracle at all. We will talk about that when we get to the book of Exodus and the plagues. People have some really interesting ideas about what they think really happened. But the simplest explanation is that God made a total ruckus in Egypt so that the slaves would be freed and the people keeping them captive would see that their gods couldn’t protect them from the God of Israel, our God. But I don’t even think anyone could come up with a good story to explain how Sarai would have a baby when she was that old. Having a baby is hard work and a lot of things can go wrong even when women are young and strong. Not only was it a miracle that Sarah could even be pregnant, but every day she lived was also a miracle. Sarai should have died because no one’s ninety-year-old body can handle something like that. God was going to make a miracle and then He would have to keep making new ones every single day. Sarai being pregnant was like a sign—just like circumcision was a sign—and a sign shows us that God is doing a new thing because there is simply no other explanation.

Oh, and let’s talk about one of my favorite verses from the prophet Isaiah. In Isaiah 43 and 48, God is telling His people who have been taken away to Babylon, far from home, that He will be doing something that they can’t give the idols they were worshiping any credit for. They were doing that, you know. For hundreds of years they were supposed to give God credit for the rain, the babies they had, the food they grew, the size of their flocks and herds of animals, and the fish they ate. But instead, they gave credit for the rain to Tammuz and Ba’al Hadad, the grain to Dagan, and the babies to Asherah. But now God is promising to do something that no one has ever done before. The people are in exile, which means they have been taken from their homes and aren’t allowed to go back. Just like Adam and Eve were exiled from their Garden home and weren’t ever able to go there again. Exile is always a sad thing. The Jews living in Babylon who were faithful to God and loved Him and loved Jerusalem weren’t allowed to just pack up and go back. Only a king could give them permission. And God was going to make the Persian King Cyrus send them back and even pay to rebuild the city and the Temple. Wow. After God tells them this, He says:

“Don’t focus on what happened in the past; don’t pay attention to it. Look, I am about to do something new; it’s coming soon. Don’t you see it? I will make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert to bring you home.” (Is 43:18-19)

“You have heard everything I said to you through my prophets. Aren’t you going to admit that it all happened just like they said it would? But from now on, I will be telling you new things; things that I have hidden from you up till now.” (Is 48:6)

You know why I love these verses and why they remind me of Sarah? Because, as we go through the Bible, God is always doing something new and unexpected to save His people. God is going to take a crazy, bad, and hopeless situation and turn it upside down to use Joseph to save His people from starvation. In the Exodus out of Egypt, God parted the sea and His people escaped from the Egyptian army on dry land while He held back the Egyptians with a wall of fire too scary for the soldiers to try and go through! And Jesus was sure unexpected—no one knew for sure what had happened until it was all over! But really, the first big unexpected, impossible miracle that God created was giving a baby to a ninety-year-old woman. It was something that everyone knew could never happen. In fact, everyone would laugh if they heard it—and they did! It was a sign that God was doing something brand new in the world in making a brand-new impossible family.

And talking about signs, God renames Sarai and calls her Sarah. She’s the only woman in the entire Bible who gets her name changed. Sarai, the name she was given by her parents, is a name that archaeologists have found among the Amorites and Hittites and there is some debate about what it means. In Hebrew, the word sar means prince—and Jesus is called Sar Shalom, Prince of Peace. And so, Sarah means princess. But what was wrong with Sarai? What did her name mean? Well, we really don’t know for sure, and people have been debating about it for a long time because Sarai sure isn’t a Hebrew word. But there are words like it among the Hittites, and possibly the name of one of their gods. Remember that Abraham and Sarah were born into an idol worshiping family, according to Joshua. It wasn’t strange to name a child after one of their gods or goddesses. It was considered to be lucky because it honored their gods. And they hoped that a certain god would protect a child named after them. But it doesn’t work out in real life.

I suppose that normal names just wouldn’t be appropriate for the two people responsible for creating a nation of people unlike anything that had ever happened before. And so we have Abraham, the father of nations and Sarah the princess. Of course, my name doesn’t mean anything in Hebrew! None of my names do. Maybe you have a name from the Bible and if so, you can find out what it means. Of course, Abraham and Sarah weren’t really responsible for creating a new nation of people. They couldn’t. They were too old. God had to create that family. No one else could take any credit. It had to be Him and everyone had to know it. We haven’t talked for quite a while about Moses telling these stories to the children of Israel and the mixed multitude hundreds of years later. But these were their family stories of how God had created a family when it was impossible—making them children of promise, just like Abraham and Sarah’s son. And we are all children of promise too. We are all adopted into the family of God through Jesus. And that’s the best promise of all, that we would be included in God’s family and that He would solve the problem of sin and death and that we will all live here with Jesus in the world to come when He reigns over us as King of kings and Lord of lords. And every year, we will go to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles with Him. Just imagine that party! It’s eight days long! Do you think there will be fireworks? And your favorite foods? It will be more amazing than our imaginations, for sure. And when we are there, celebrating together, we will laugh when we think back to how it all started—with a one-hundred-year-old man and a ninety-year-old woman having an impossible baby!

But remember that just because Abraham and Sarah have been chosen for a special role in the world, starting this new family, doesn’t mean that they are perfect and that they do everything right. And we can be honest and talk about it when they do things that are wrong, which just makes them like us. If God only used perfect people, then only Jesus would have gotten anything done. People in the Bible did things that would get them sent to jail now, but the ancient world operated by different rules. God was starting with Abraham and Sarah, who were from Babylon. Babylon was a wicked place where the strong were cruel to the weak, and the rich took advantage of the poor—and they got away with it because no one who could stop them was willing to. God removed them from all that and sent them to the Land of Canaan, and we can see from the fact that Abraham travels all around without people messing with him that at this point, the Canaanites are peaceful. But, we know from history that there were people, called the Amorites, who were coming into the Land and they would be changing things as they got more and more powerful. By the time the children of Israel returned from Egypt, things would be very different. We’ll talk more about that later.

Something interesting that I never noticed before was that God told Abraham, “Your name isn’t going to be Abram anymore; your name will be Abraham, for I will make you the father of many nations.” That’s pretty straightforward and obvious, right? Abram is getting a new name and people will start calling him Abraham. But with Sarai, what happens is very different, “As for your wife Sarai, do not call her Sarai, for Sarah will be her name.” God is giving Abraham an order. Do not call your wife Sarai. Was it because she was named after another god? Or did her name mean something terrible in Hittite or Amorite or some other language? Some books say that Sarai means “my princess” but we really don’t know that. It’s a guess. For some reason that God never tells us, He doesn’t ever want to hear her called Sarai ever again. Sarah is now royalty, just as Abraham is going to be the father of many nations. And that’s as far from reality as they can possibly imagine right now.

God tells Abraham that not only is Sarah going to have a baby, but that baby will be a boy. As we will see next week, that’s a problem for Abraham and Ishmael. In fact, it means that everything they did was for nothing. Sarah was Abraham’s first wife and a free woman. Any child she would have, even if that child wasn’t a miracle like Isaac will be, would inherit at least twice as much as any other child. This baby would grow up to lead the entire household—not Ishmael, even though he is older and has been trained and educated all his life to be a great man and leader. Ishmael will still be a great leader and a great man, as God promised Hagar in the wilderness, but he will do it somewhere else. Imagine how happy and how sad Abraham is right now. When we are patient and do things God’s way, His promises are good news; when we try to make things happen ourselves and take matters into our own hands, His promises can be bad news. For Abraham, this is great news and terrible news all at the same time. He loves his son very much. Ishmael had been expecting one sort of life but from now on, he will be living an entirely different life. He’s the son of Sarah’s slave, who Sarah and Abraham never even call by her name. And that’s a lot different than being the son of the matriarch, the head woman in charge of the household. How will Abraham react to this news? We’ll find out next week.

And it is easy to miss something even more important than Sarah’s new name. God has just made Sarah part of His covenant with Abraham! He hasn’t even mentioned her before now, even though He did save her from Pharaoh. That doesn’t mean that God hadn’t noticed her, but that He doesn’t tell His full promises all at once. God doesn’t tell everyone His entire plan, and how it will all happen. He gives us a little bit of information and expects us to trust that He has all the details worked out. And when Moses told this story to the children of Israel, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, he was teaching them that even though they were still in the wilderness and far from the promised Land, that God had it all figured out and all they had to do was obey Him day by day and not try to do things their own way. Did they learn that lesson? Not really. They are not much different than we are. Except they didn’t have cell phones because if they did they would have all been taking selfies of themselves walking through the Red Sea, right? I totally would have! I would have posted it on social media and said, “Ha! Didn’t even get my feet wet!” #byebyeEgypt

Just like God promised in His covenant with Abraham, God is saying that Sarah will produce many nations and that kings will come from her. God is giving her the same promises as Abraham. God promised Hagar a great many descendants, but not kings. Of course, there are going to be many kings who come from Abraham and Sarah—some of them will be the kings of Israel, like Saul, David and Solomon and others would be over the north and south after the land got split up when Solomon died. And there would be other kings too—ones from Edom like Herod the Great who lived when Jesus was born, as well as his sons who were mostly named Herod as well. And so, Sarai had to become Sarah the princess. She was like the Queen of a new people. She was royalty. I think she was called princess because when Pharaoh married her, she was a Queen of Egypt and I don’t think God wanted her to remember that because it wasn’t her fault at all and it must have been a very scary time for her. If people went around calling her Malkah, which means queen in Hebrew, it would have been disrespectful and a painful reminder of what she went through and how embarrassing that would have been for her. And anyway, it is better to be a princess serving God than to be the Queen of Egypt any day!

Abraham has to start looking at his wife differently than he has been up to now. Even though she couldn’t have a baby up to this point, they have been together all their lives and he must love her a lot. He could have sent her away and no one in that world would have blamed him or even cared. They would have seen Sarah as cursed or something. In fact, they probably wondered why he never did get rid of her or at least get another wife. Abraham did some really wrong things when he was scared and unsure but something he never did was divorce his wife. By the time Isaac was born, they had probably been married for seventy-five years. That’s a long time to be with someone and to never give up on them no matter what. I want you to know something very important.

God is like that with us too. I mean, without all the mistakes and sins of Abraham. Remember that the Bible is God’s story—not Abraham’s story, Moses’s, David’s, or Paul’s. It is because of how God deals with these people, no matter what they do, that we learn about how perfect, trustworthy, and merciful He is. Abraham was seventy-five years old when God called on him, Moses was eighty. David was younger and so was Paul but the important thing to remember is that God waits until the time is right and isn’t really concerned with how old a person is. It wasn’t so long ago that a guy on the news said that a certain woman couldn’t be President because she was “past her prime” meaning she was too old. And she is younger than me!!! And the current President of the United States is thirty years older than she is. It was a silly thing to say because God uses men and women both of all ages and in all sorts of jobs and He really seems to enjoy picking the people that no one takes seriously.

No one took Sarah seriously. Not as a mom, anyway. It was totally impossible and had never happened before. Everyone knew that Sarah was barren. She had never had any babies and never would have any. That’s what they were saying. She was too old. People would just laugh at Abraham and Sarah both if they told people what God had promised. It just couldn’t possibly happen. But impossible things become possible when God makes a covenant promise. In fact, in Paul’s letter to the church at Phillipi, he tells them that even if he is poor or rich, healthy or sick, hungry or full, he can still do everything that God wants him to do because he gets his strength from Jesus. Paul doesn’t have to worry about how to get the work of God done, He just has to keep doing it and watch God make it happen. Paul worked hard, but it was God clearing the way for him—just like Isaiah promised God would do for the exiles who would be returning from Babylon.

That reminds me of another story about a woman named Gladys Aylward. She was the missionary no one wanted. She was a housemaid, didn’t have an education, couldn’t learn to speak Chinese no matter how hard she tried, had no money, and none of the missionary societies would pay her way over to China. But she told God that she would go if He showed her what to do. The story of how she got there and what she did is amazing. She might be the bravest person I have ever heard of. There is a movie about her but a lot of it was made up but some of the most amazing things in it are true. I included a link in the transcript from YouTube where you can learn about her. Just like Sarah, she is proof that God can do absolutely anything He wants in our lives. That doesn’t mean we get to do whatever we want, but that anything He wants, we can do in His way and when He wants.

I love you. I am praying for you. I hope that you will watch the video about Gladys and know that God can use you just like He used Gladys.

God is going to tell Abraham to make a decision that can’t ever be taken back, by obeying a commandment that can’t ever be undone. And what does it tell us about how different our God is in how He feels about kids and slaves? And why weren’t women included??

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and 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 now post slightly longer video versions. (Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context without having to read an entire chapter every week!)

We have a much longer section of Scripture to read today because it is very repetitive. That means that something is said over and over again. But why on earth isn’t it enough to just say it once? That’s a terrific question and the answer goes back to how people taught and learned things in the ancient world when almost no one could read, and those who could read were not very likely to have scrolls at home (there were no books yet—the first books were called codices (co-dih-sees)) because they were very expensive and time-consuming to make and they needed a safe place to be stored. But people would listen to the stories of the Bible, most would never read anything.  When something was very important, they would say it over and over and over again so it would stick in people’s brains. Today we are going to read five verses and the word covenant (God’s forever promises) will be repeated six times and the word circumcise is repeated five times. We aren’t going to talk about circumcision today because we already talked about it back in Episode 116 of Context for Kids and Episode 180 of Character in Context for the grownups. What’s important this week is to learn about all the who’s and when’s and why’s about why God told Abraham to do this, as well as all his descendants. So, let’s read Genesis 17:9-14

God also said to Abraham, “As for you, you and your descendants after you, generation after generation need to keep my covenant. This is my covenant (between me and you and your descendants) after you, which you are to keep: Every one of your males must be circumcised. You must circumcise the flesh of your foreskin to serve as a sign of the covenant (between me and you). Throughout your generations, every baby boy in your household needs to be circumcised when he is eight days old—every baby boy born in your household or bought as a slave from foreigners. Whether the baby boy is born in your household or bought as a slave, he must be circumcised. My covenant will be cut into your body as a permanent covenant. If any man or boy is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that man will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.”

Wow, that’s a lot of just repeating the same thing over and over again in different ways just because God wanted them to understand what was going on and also to make sure that they did it. Not only that, but at the end of this chapter, in the last three verses, they will say it all over again. Although we might think that God’s half of the covenant, His promises to Abraham to give him many descendants and the Land of Canaan for their forever home, is the most important thing in this chapter, when we read it to see what gets mentioned the most, it’s Abraham’s responsibilities that gets talked about the most. God made and established His covenant (which means He made it permanent and not just a promise) with Abraham to do everything He had been promising since Genesis 12, because God knows that Abraham is ready to begin living in a new way and to trust God a lot more than he has been up to this point. But first, God has decided to make Abraham’s entire household a holy and set apart people so that the world will see how different He is from all the gods of the other nations. In the ancient world, the people who were circumcised were priests but it didn’t happen until they were much older—God is telling Abraham that all of the boys born into his household have to be circumcised when they are just eight days old. But everyone else? They had to be circumcised now, no matter how old they were. And it didn’t matter if they were free or slaves—God saw them all as equals in His covenant with Abraham. They would all be circumcised, just like the priests of other gods in Egypt. But remember from a few weeks ago when we talked about the fact that the Canaanites didn’t circumcise anyone. That made Abraham and his household very different. God calls circumcision a sign, because it is a one-way thing. There are things in life that can be undone and things that can’t. If I make a recipe and put twice as much salt in it, it’s going to be horrible unless I make twice as much and then it will be normal. You can undo that sort of thing, but when skin is cut off, or a finger or a toe or whatever, it is gone and will not grow back. God was telling Abraham, “Once you do this, you are committing yourself and all your descendants to be my people forever, no matter what. You can’t get away from me any more than you can grow that skin back after cutting it off.

Jesus once told a story about the importance of being very sure about the commitments we make and the things we say we will do. He told a story about a person who wanted to build a tower and how important it was for that person to make sure they have enough materials to get the job done, otherwise everyone would laugh at them when they failed. He also told a story about a king who was at war with another king, but he was wise and counted his soldiers and his weapons before he went to the battle, to find out whether he needed to surrender or could actually win. What God was telling Abraham was something really big to ask him to do, and Abraham would need to count the cost to himself and everyone in his household. Abraham could have said no and walked away. He always had the ability to do that, but what God was asking him to do was like the last step. It was like at a wedding when the couple says, “I do.” They are married now and can’t just change their mind without a whole lot of trouble. Once Abraham obeys and cuts all the men in his household, they will be the special property of God forever. They will be under His protection but they will also have to obey Him. Abraham must have decided that it was a good deal because he’s going to obey at the end of chapter 17.

You know, everything we do in life requires us to make decisions about what we will and will not be doing. No one has time to be the President and a restaurant chef at the same time. They are both full-time jobs. You have to decide to be one or the other. Although, you might be able to do both, just at different times in your life. But God keeps teaching Abraham and Abraham’s children that they can either be His people, or they can worship other gods but they can’t do both. Circumcision will set aside the entire nation of Israel as belonging to God and Him alone. They will keep His commandments. They will pray to Him and only to Him. They will be His unique people in all the earth, and they will have to act in ways that show the world how much wiser and more powerful God is than all of the fake gods of the people around them. That’s a big responsibility and it means that there are things they can’t do. It doesn’t mean that they won’t ever sin. Abraham is still going to mess up a few more times, in big ways, before his story in the Bible ends—but committing to God and deciding to be His people means that we are promising to do better and better as He teaches and changes us to be more like Him. That’s what God is telling Abraham with all that repetition of the words covenant and circumcision. But there is also another word—the word “keep.”

The Hebrew word for keep is shamar and it is one of those words that is hard to translate into English and other languages. It’s one word that means a sentence! If we shamar something, it means that we watch over it carefully and keep it safe and secure. We have to treat that thing with respect and not allow anything to happen to it. The first time we see this word in the Bible is in the Garden where the humans are commanded to shamar the Garden. They have to guard it and protect it and keep it holy—but then that Serpent got in and made a mess of everything. The next time we see that word is when God puts an angel at the Tree of Life with a huge flaming sword, to guard it from the humans getting back in and eating some of the fruit. And then, the worst time of all was when God asked Cain where his brother was and Cain got spicy with God and said, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Yeah, Cain used the word shamar. Cain hadn’t protected his younger brother—instead he killed him in the field. The humans did the opposite of guarding the Garden—they let a Serpent in and then they rebelled against God because they wanted to be able to make their own decisions about what is good and what is bad. And Cain also did the opposite of guarding his brother and keeping him safe. So far, the only one doing a good job is the angel guarding the Tree of Life.

God is telling Abraham that a big part of guarding their covenant was teaching people from the time they are babies to carefully think about God’s covenant with them and to make sure that they teach their children about it as well. But God does something really interesting with this—it isn’t just Abraham and Ishmael, like they are somehow better than everyone else. Every single man in the household is included. No one is left out. Whether they are free or slaves, they are all equal in God’s eyes and they are all being trusted with keeping this covenant. Even if it seems terrible and crazy to you, they might have seen this as a very special honor because only certain people with special jobs were circumcised.

Now, you might ask why nothing happens to girls or women. Well, we don’t have any parts of our bodies that can be cut off without doing terrible damage to us. Our whole bodies, from head to toe, are important and special and we don’t have any extra parts that can be gotten rid of. What Abraham was told to do would hurt like the dickens but he would heal up and be okay afterward. We women need all our parts! Also, women who were priestesses in the ancient world weren’t like men who were priests. Priests helped people communicate with gods in the ancient world, but religious things that involved women were very wicked and God respects women way too much to have it look like the women in Abraham’s household were being forced to do terrible things. A lot of things that people did to worship our God in ancient times looked almost exactly the same as the things the other nations were doing for their gods, but God had to make some changes so that He could show how different and wonderful He is. The women of His people were to be respected and they could be amazing leaders, like Miriam and Deborah and Huldah, but He didn’t want the world thinking badly about what they might be doing if they served at the Tabernacle and Temple. So, women weren’t left out, they were being honored, respected, and protected. Not only that, but the work the priests would do later on was heavy, backbreaking work, which was better suited to men. Women were expected to be wives, and mothers and they often ran businesses out of their homes along with their husbands. In fact, that’s how the whole world worked until the industrial revolution.

Now, the weird thing this week is actually a big mystery. It’s the Hebrew word karet and no one knows for sure what it means. Well, that’s not right—we know what the word means but we aren’t sure how exactly it worked out. Let me explain. Verse fourteen says: “If any man or boy is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that man will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant.” Where it says, “cut off”? That’s the Hebrew word karet. And no one seems to know what it means to be cut off from the people. There are a lot of theories. Some people wonder if they were supposed to get kicked out of the community, but how do you justify doing that to a kid just because his dad refused to obey God? That doesn’t seem quite right. Some think that maybe it meant that the people who disobeyed would be shunned—which means that everyone would ignore them until they obeyed. In the ancient world, where people depended on one another, that would be a good motivation to start being obedient. Others wonder if God would kill them or would make it so they couldn’t have any babies. No one knows for sure. And there are different sorts of things in the Bible that, when you do them or don’t do them, that’s supposed to be the punishment. And no one knows what on earth it means. So, it sounds like it was probably something that never ended up happening or I guess we would know. There are commandments like that in the Bible, where people are very confused because they aren’t clear or don’t make any sense to us. I suppose that when God told this to Abraham, either he knew exactly what it meant or he didn’t and he just never found out because he made sure to do it. There are so many mysteries in the Bible, and that’s okay. Personally, I think that God was telling Abraham and the children of Israel who came after him that the people who didn’t want to be a part of God’s people, didn’t have to be. If they decided not to follow God, they would just stop obeying and circumcising their sons and they would be just the same as foreigners and strangers and they wouldn’t be a part of God’s great and amazing plan to save the world through Jesus, the Messiah. As we will see as we go through the Bible, not everyone related to Abraham will be the people of God. Only the people who stuck with Him. I don’t think that God was making them drop dead—that isn’t what we see in the Bible—but we do see people turning their backs on God and getting into all sorts of trouble. Goodness sakes, out of the twelve tribes that made up the children of Israel (thirteen if we count the Levites), ten of them abandoned God and disappeared.

Let’s look at the verses again and see where all our special words for this week are and how they change the way we read it: After making all of those amazing promises to bless Abraham and his descendants with the Land of Canaan, God also said to Abraham, “As for you, you and your descendants after you, generation after generation need to keep (carefully watch over, guard, protect, and obey) my covenant of forever promises. This is my covenant (my promise between me and you and your descendants) after you, which you are to make sure to carefully keep: Every one of your men and boys must be circumcised. You must circumcise the flesh of your foreskin to serve as a sign of the covenant (between me and you) so that people know you belong to me and so that you know you belong to me. Throughout all of your generations, every baby boy in your household needs to be circumcised when he is eight days old—every baby boy born in your household or any man bought as a slave from foreigners. Whether the baby boy is born in your household or is older and bought as a slave, he must be circumcised. My covenant will be cut into your body as a permanent covenant. If any man or boy is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that man will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant and doesn’t want his family to be part of my special people.”

Do you understand how faith works? How God walks with us in bigger and better ways as we get to know Him and trust Him more and more? So many people are afraid of God because they are scared He will ask them to do something that they can’t handle but He never does. When we come to believe in God and decide to follow Him, He never responds by immediately sending us to a far off country to preach and teach and work miracles. Even the disciples of Jesus, who knew their Bibles (just the Hebrew parts, of course, because the stuff about Jesus obviously hadn’t been written yet!)—well, even they were with Jesus for a few years learning from Him and learning to trust Him before they were sent out into the world to do amazing things. Paul knew the Bible backward and forward before Jesus spoke to him on the road to Damascus—and when he started to preach about Jesus, he figured out right away that he needed to get away for a few years, learn about Jesus, and get prepared.  He was a Bible expert who was taught by one of the greatest Jewish sages who ever lived! And God still didn’t force him into anything he wasn’t ready to do.

God waited for twenty-four years before asking Abraham to take this very big step for himself and his household. God had proved Himself over and over again. God hadn’t ever let Abraham down and even saved him when he messed things up bad—and God will have to do it again in a few chapters! Abraham’s problem was Abraham, but God was working on Abraham’s “heart” which actually means his mind and his ways of thinking. Abraham came from Babylon, from a family of idol worshipers, but God was patient and spent twenty-four years getting Abraham ready for this next big step. Becoming circumcised would change Abraham’s body forever, and it would remind Abraham that he was different and special not because Abraham was the greatest man alive but because God chose him to begin a new family in the world who lived in a new sort of way. It was a huge responsibility, and God wanted Abraham to succeed. Succeeding doesn’t mean never failing or getting things wrong—that’s impossible for us—but it does mean that we keep trying and learning and doing better. That’s all God has ever asked from us—to trust Him and cooperate with Him and to become different people. He will change us, and all we have to do is cooperate (which can be super hard, I know). Or at least try to cooperate because sometimes we can be very confused about what He wants. Sometimes He has to tweak what we think we know because we just aren’t right about everything.

God has been patiently working to turn Abraham into the kind of person who would do anything God asks. God is going to ask Abraham to do something, in about another forty years, that would be so incredibly difficult that I don’t think I could ever do it. Fortunately, it was something God only told one person in all of history to do—and then He didn’t let Abraham do it, thank goodness. God wants us to become the sorts of people who are willing to do whatever He asks us to do, no matter how difficult, but what He never does is ask us to do something that He hasn’t gotten us ready to do first. God isn’t going to ask you to go someplace until He knows you are ready to go there. He isn’t going to tell you to do something without making sure that you can do it. It may even take sixty-five more years but He will make sure you are ready. God isn’t in any hurry. He wants you to do what He created you to do. He made you to do something that I can’t do, and not anyone else either. I will never know all the people you know. You and I don’t have all the same talents and skills. You can help people that I can’t because I won’t ever meet them, and they don’t know me or trust me. But they will know and trust you.

Abraham’s children are often called “seeds” in the Bible. Seeds are baby plants. They aren’t the full-grown crops or flowers or fruit or vegetables or grain that can feed the world and everything in it. Abraham is just the first step in God’s plan to save the world from sin and death. Abraham is the beginning and so he doesn’t have to worry about the whole plan depending on himself. He was just a part of the plan to bring Jesus into the world. Jesus was always the plan. When God chose Abraham, it was because God had to create a certain family in a certain place, the land of Canaan. And Abraham had many sons before he died, but his son Isaac will be the next step, and then Isaac’s son Jacob. Jacob’s son Joseph will rescue his entire family from starvation by bringing them to Egypt. And when God brings them out of Egypt, He will take the miraculous family of Abraham and make them into a people whose only King is God Himself. And He will teach them a new way of living as people with their own country—something Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob never had. And so, they will need new kinds of laws, first for living in the wilderness and worshiping at a Tabernacle, something their ancestors never had, and then for living in the Land of Canaan without a human king. And over the course of hundreds of years many good things and bad things happened but God never gave up making the way for Jesus to be born, because Jesus was the plan. But even Jesus didn’t have to be ready until he was thirty years old. If God was that determined to make sure His own son was ready for the work Jesus had to do, and only Jesus could do, how much more do you think He will make sure that you are ready for what He wants you to do? You don’t need to be scared or to worry about what God has in store for you because when He wants you to do it, you will be more than ready. He wants you to succeed.

I love you. I am praying for you. I want you to think about how much God loves His Kingdom and how much He wants you to do good things to help build it up. God wants you to do a good job. So it is His job to get you ready. All you have to do is trust Him and cooperate and become the type of person on the inside who can do whatever it is He wants on the outside.