Last year, we talked about the stories of Esther and Vashti but this year we are going to focus on irresponsible King Ahasuerus, Esther’s cousin Mordecai who didn’t follow his own wise advice, and the wicked Haman.

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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 is the Jewish Festival of Purim, when the Jewish people celebrate being saved from the schemes of the wicked villain Haman, who wanted every Jew in the world dead. But how did Haman even get the chance to kill every Jew in the Persian Empire? He wasn’t a king or anything, so it wasn’t like he could just wave his hand and make it happen. And why did he even want to do that in the first place? It’s a very complicated story and one of the only books on the Bible where God is never mentioned even though we can tell He is there because of how everything worked together to save His people from being totally destroyed. Although this isn’t one of the Feasts commanded by the Lord, the Jewish people still celebrate the great victory over evil in the Book of Esther by celebrating Purim as a tribute to God and so that they will always remember that God is working to save His people even when they can’t see Him.

But why did they need saving in the first place? Because of one foolish man who had a lot of power but was also easily manipulated and drank way too much wine, and one very proud wicked man who knew how to get exactly what he wanted, and a third man who took a terrible risk that almost got his people murdered. Last year we talked about the two brave Queens who had to deal with the consequences of what these three men were doing, even though they had no power, and this year we are going to talk about the other side of the situation—which will teach us a lot about how we should always make our decisions very carefully, choose our friends wisely, and make sure that we don’t get into situations where we are easy to trick.

The Book of Esther opens up with a huge party going on in the Fortress of Susa. And the Bible rarely describes how buildings look, and especially on the inside, but the description of this one is pretty amazing. The story begins at the end of a six-month-long party just for the rich and powerful, but then they added on a last week and opened the party to everyone. There were gold and silver couches and beautiful fabrics hanging from silver rods and the wine goblets were made out of gold! That’s not what my couches and water glasses are made out of! Even the floors were fancy. And by order of the new King, Ahasuerus, everyone at the party could drink as much as they wanted of whatever they wanted. For a whole week! They definitely weren’t drinking water, and the Bible is telling us this to let us know that the King and everyone with him were drunk from drinking way too much wine and they shouldn’t be making any decisions at all and especially not important ones. It’s always very foolish to be making decisions when a person is drunk. And that’s where all the problems started because after seven days of this, the king ordered his eunuchs to bring the Queen wearing her crown. Would you want to go to a place where everyone had been drinking too much for seven whole days? I sure wouldn’t. I would be scared, and angry, and really disappointed if my husband did that to me. A husband should protect his wife and not expose her to danger and shame—but King Ahaseurus was drunk and so he wasn’t thinking straight. We don’t know how he got the idea to show her off because the Bible doesn’t say, but we do know he was very drunk and so was everyone else at his party. In those days, that was no safe place for a woman to be. And it wouldn’t be safe now either. Vashti had been trained since she was a little girl to protect herself from shame. And so, she refused to go to the King. Nowadays, we would tell her she was really smart but then, her husband could have her killed and no one would even try to stop him. It was a very wicked world.

Because he was so drunk, he got really angry and took some bad advice and got rid of Queen Vashti right away without even thinking about the consequences, just because his advisors said that if he didn’t, women wouldn’t be scared enough of their husbands to obey them no matter what they told them to do. The King had her sent away and made it a law that she couldn’t ever see him again, because that’s what his advisors told him to do. But once he wasn’t drunk anymore, he remembered what had happened. His closest personal attendants launched a plan to get him a new queen which involved kidnapping beautiful girls from all over the Persian Empire and bringing them to the palace, where they would spend the rest of their lives. Instead of reconsidering his life choices, he took their advice because it sounded good to him. I mean, come on, there’s a good chance that the advice came from the same people who told him to get rid of Queen Vashti when he was too drunk to think clearly. As we are going to find out, the King is very foolish and surrounds himself with people who tell him to do terrible things (the things they want him to do for their own benefit) and he is way too trusting—either that or he maybe thinks that because he is king, no one would dare try to get him to do things he will regret later. Ahasuerus was the worst sort of King, because he had no wisdom and trusted the wrong people and didn’t spend much time doing his own thinking.

Out of all the girls who were taken from their homes, it was a Jewish girl named Hadassah who became queen. She was an orphan whose parents had died and her older cousin Mordecai adopted her as his own daughter. Mordecai knew what had happened to Vashti and told her to hide who she was, so that no one would find out she was a Jew. So, she went by the name of Esther instead. Mordecai was very wise to do this, because probably everyone knew that it was dangerous to get the King angry and if he got angry at Esther, he might turn around and hurt her family to get even. And no one could stop him. So Esther did what Mordecai told her to do and no one knew who she really was or who her people were. The King loved her best of all the young women and made her the Queen and threw a feast in her honor. Because she was hiding who she was, her family wasn’t at her own wedding banquet! But that didn’t stop Mordecai from doing everything he could to make sure she was okay. He even protected the King’s life from people who were plotting to kill him. Even though Mordecai couldn’t see Esther, he was still looking out for her like a good father should.

But Mordecai decided to do something, or not do something, that put his people in terrible danger. The King decided to make a man named Haman very important—in fact, he made Haman second in command of his whole empire, over all the other important officials. Haman had power like Joseph in Egypt, but Haman wasn’t anything like Joseph! But Haman was more than just some random guy that the King liked—Haman was an Agagite, which made him an ancient enemy of the Jews. He was an Amalekite, and we will talk about them more when we learn about Moses and the Exodus. The King commanded that everyone bow down to Haman as he went by but Mordecai decided not to. And the other people at the King’s gate (the place where business was done and decisions were made), warned him over and over again but Mordecai wouldn’t budge. Finally, all those people went and told Haman about Mordecai disrespecting him by not bowing down—and Haman was furious. Haman was even more furious because Mordecai had told them that he was a Jew, his ancient enemies.

Isn’t that strange? Mordecai told Esther not to make any trouble and not tell anyone who she was so that her people would be protected, and then Mordecai did the exact opposite! Mordecai was wise in what he told Esther to do but when the time came for him to do something much simpler, he refused to do it. Haman wouldn’t have ever noticed Mordecai if he had just bowed down like everyone else, and if Mordecai hadn’t told everyone he was a Jew, then maybe Haman would have just been angry at Mordecai and that would be that. But Mordecai did exactly what he told Esther not to do and because Haman was second-in-command of the entire Persian Empire, there was almost no limit to what he could do to get revenge. And so the wicked Haman decided to do the worst—not only to punish Mordecai or kill him, but to kill every single Jew in the world. The Persian Empire was made up of 127 provinces from Egypt to Greece and Turkey all the way east to the border of India. At that point, all the Jews in the entire world would have lived in that Empire and Haman decided to use his power to kill them all. Things couldn’t possibly be any worse. Haman did some of his pagan rituals and came up with a date but unfortunately for him the date was almost a year away.

But that didn’t seem to bother Haman, and he got right to work setting his evil plan into action. He went right over to the King and made up some really terrible stories about “a certain ethnic group” not obeying the laws of the kingdom (I mean, one guy not bowing down before Haman isn’t exactly the same thing as not obeying the laws—it was just one guy disobeying one law over and over again). Haman also said that they had their own laws, which was true but none of those laws would cause any problems for the King or their neighbors. Plus, he said, they were scattered throughout the Empire—which was also true but that was because they had been exiled all over the place from Egypt to Susa. The truth is that Haman was incredibly vague, on purpose. He didn’t say, “The Jews are a problem” because if he had then maybe the King would go out and fact check him. But we know now from experience that King Ahasuerus was a very irresponsible man who trusted the wrong people over and over again—getting himself and others into deep trouble. And just in case that wasn’t enough to convince the King, he offered him 375 tons of silver—that’s 750,000 lbs and would be worth 267 million dollars today. It looks like Haman has been getting rich serving the King and he is willing to just about anything to get his revenge. The King was even richer than that so he didn’t want the money but told Haman to do whatever he wanted to do and then he did something even more foolish—he took off his signet ring and just handed it to Haman.

Now, you have to know about signet rings, okay? How important they were and what you could do with one. In those days, people didn’t sign contracts or agreements with ink and a pen. In places like Babylon and Susa, if a king wanted to make an announcement or make a new law, the scribes would write it out and then the king would press his ring into each one like a signature. His ring was unique, so anyone who saw the imprint would know that it came directly from the King. That meant that whatever it said was like the King was saying it himself and you had better obey it or else. That also means that whoever has the signet ring can do whatever they want—and the King just handed his ring over to Haman. For all intents and purposes, Haman is the king now. The royal scribes made at least 127 copies telling the people that on the 13^th day of Adar, that the officials and soldiers had to kill every Jewish man, woman, and child and as an added bonus, they could steal everything they owned. Haman thought of everything—not only did the most powerful people have to obey the command to kill the Jews, they would become rich doing it. Pretty soon, even the regular neighbors of the Jews in the Persian Empire wanted to kill them and take all their stuff. Giving Haman the signet ring was like handing another person all your credit cards and telling them to buy whatever they want, no questions asked.

Haman wasn’t a nice guy, but neither was the King. He was willing to have an entire ethnic group slaughtered without asking even a single question about who they were and what they’d specifically done. It actually gives us a good idea of what the kings during Bible times were like and what kind of power they had. It’s really scary and I am glad we don’t live in that kind of world anymore. No one was going to stop Haman and no one could because the order had come from the ring of the King and the laws of ancient Persia were permanent. That means you couldn’t just take them back if you made a bad decision. In America, we have had all sorts of terribly wicked laws but we can also get rid of them if we want to. Slavery was legal once, as horrible as it was, and people even used the Bible to say it was okay. Brave men and women fought against slavery in a lot of different ways and now it is illegal—you can’t own someone and call it okay anymore. But when King Ahasuerus ruled over the entire Persian Empire, no one could stop his laws—not even him. That should have made him realize that giving the ring that could make laws to anyone else was unbelievably foolish, because it couldn’t be taken back. But for the third time in this story, the King listened to all the wrong people and made really bad decisions without really taking the time to think about it. Other people kept paying a terrible price for his bad decisions and bad advisors. Ahasuerus just kept on proving he was a really bad king.

When the law was published, all of the Jews were in a panic. What could they do? Where could they go? They were stuck and they were going to die in eleven months. They couldn’t even escape to Israel or Egypt because the Jews there were going to be killed by their neighbors too! Mordecai must have realized right away the terrible cost of his decision not to bow down before Haman. I wonder if he thought about the fact that he had done exactly what he told Esther not to do. As a man, Haman wore tassels on his clothes that told the world he was a Jew, and so whatever he did in the open reflected on every single Jew. He wanted Esther to hide her true identity, probably to protect her people from harm if the king got angry at her the way he did with Queen Vashti. Queen Vashti was probably raised as a princess and couldn’t be killed without starting a war but Esther was a nobody with no one to protect her. She had to be careful for her own sake and for the sake of every Jew. When Esther found out that Mordecai was dressed in rags and crying out and covered in ashes, she was very worried and sent people to him to find out what was wrong. As Queen, Esther was pretty much a prisoner in the Palace and couldn’t get any news that wasn’t brought to her. Because no one knew she was a Jew, probably no one even thought to tell her about the new law sentencing all Jews to death. Mordecai told Esther everything that had happened and told her that it was her job as Queen to save her people, even if it got her killed.

Esther wasn’t allowed to go and visit her husband, the King, and if she went without being invited he could have her killed on the spot. Just think about that for a minute and how messed up that is—a woman can’t see her husband unless it is his idea. Just because he is the king. Can you imagine like maybe your grandma going into the living room to see your grandpa and your grandpa getting angry and killing her right then and there. That is silly to think of now, of course, but it wasn’t silly for Esther—it was scary and she didn’t want to do it. But three days later, she went to see the King anyway, and he didn’t kill her. She invited the King and Haman to a great feast and of course, Haman was thrilled to go eat with the Queen. Most people never even got to see her. At the end of the feast, she asked them to come back the next day for another feast. Even though she had gotten away with coming to see him, she was being very careful.

Obviously, the wicked villain Haman was having the best day ever but when Mordecai still refused to bow down to him, he couldn’t stand to wait any longer. I mean, think about it, what reason did Mordecai have to bow down now? He literally had nothing to lose because no one could undo the law. Haman probably should have thought about that. It was ridiculous for him to still be angry. But he was angry enough to go home and complain about it to his family and friends, and they told him to have a gallows built so that Mordecai could be killed right away. Haman thought that was a great idea—he just had to get permission from the King first. I want you to think about how ridiculous Haman is—he is the second most powerful man in the world and he has gotten absolutely everything he wants, but he is so upset about one person refusing to bow to him that he wants to go wake up the King in the middle of the night.

But the King couldn’t sleep—I wonder if Esther fed him too much sweet rich foods. Maybe he was awake wondering what Esther wanted—she had promised to tell him tomorrow. And he came up with a really good idea, he wanted someone to read boring stuff to him. But what was read to him wasn’t boring at all, it was about Esther’s cousin Mordecai saving his life! And then the King figured out that no one had done anything to reward Mordecai so he needed to come up with some ideas. When he found out that Haman was in the palace, he told him that he wanted to honor someone. Haman was so proud that he assumed the King was talking about him! So, he like got out his bucket list of everything he could ever want complete with a parade and the King said, “Awesome, do all that for Mordecai—handle it yourself.”

Oh no. This was the WORST. Haman had to dress Mordecai in the King’s robes and put him on the King’s horse and give him a parade through the city telling everyone how awesome Mordecai is. It was the worst day ever. He barely got home in time to get back to Queen Esther’s feast. And then his day got even worse. Esther told her husband, the King, that she was a Jew and that Haman was going to kill her and her cousin Mordecai and everyone else. The King was so angry at Haman (I wonder if he realized it was mostly his own fault for giving him that ring and not asking any questions before agreeing to genocide—which is when you kill everyone in a group of people)–he was so angry that he stormed out and then Haman did something really, really dumb. He begged Queen Esther for mercy but when he did that, he fell on top of her and when the King came back, he assumed she was being attacked and ordered that Haman be killed right away. I guess if there was a story just about Haman we could call it Haman and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Haman went from being the second most powerful man in the whole world to being dead. All because he was so touchy about one guy in the entire Kingdom not bowing to him. Haman would have been better off just ignoring Mordecai.

Well, the King finally took his ring back from Haman and gave it to Mordecai instead, and gave Esther everything that belonged to Haman. I mean, it was a good move to give Mordecai the ring but he still doesn’t seem to have given it a lot of thought. He’s very impulsive, doing whatever makes sense in the moment. And we are definitely supposed to notice that, just like we are supposed to notice Haman’s wickedness and pride, and that Mordecai didn’t follow his own wise advice to Esther. Haman didn’t live long enough to learn his lesson, and the King seems to not be learning anything either, and Esther even had to go to him again and remind him that, yes, her people were still going to be slaughtered. Because it seems like he forgot. The King told them that he couldn’t undo the law but that they were free to make whatever new law they wanted. He still didn’t even want to check out what they were doing. I mean, what if they made a law to kill the king, right? Or to burn every tree in the Kingdom? People could do some messed up stuff with that ring. Fortunately, all Mordecai and Esther wanted to do was to save their people and so they wrote up a very simple law—the Jews were all allowed to fight back and kill whoever tried to kill them. Before this, they weren’t allowed to fight back.

By the time the twelfth month came along, Mordecai had become so powerful that many people joined the Jews in fighting back against the people who were still trying to kill them because the other law told them to. But the Jews won all their battles and were finally safe. And even though God is never mentioned in the entire story, how could any of this have turned out okay if He wasn’t behind the scenes making all the wrong things go right? Esther and Mordecai even created a holiday to celebrate and called it Purim. To this day, Jews celebrate how God worked to make sure His people survived. And if you ever celebrate it, remember that without Purim, there would be no Jesus because there would be no Jewish parents for him to be born to.

For Yom Kippur this year, the Day of Atonement when the Temple would be cleansed from the sins of the people of Israel, I want to talk about invisible sins and how they mess everything up.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler, and welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you 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 reading an entire chapter every week!)

Yom Kippur, which happens next week, is the holiest day of the year on the Biblical calendar that we find in Leviticus 23. It was the most complicated day at the Temple for the priests and especially for the High Priest because that was the only day of the year that he was allowed to go into the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant was. The special sacrifices and rituals performed on that day cleaned all of Israel’s sin out of God’s Temple. If you think of our sins as like red dye in the laundry—a little bit might not really show up much, but a whole lot makes everything bright pink or maybe even red! That’s what Israel’s sins did to the Temple, as little by little the Temple got dirtier and dirtier with bad stuff getting nearer and nearer to God’s throne. If it didn’t get cleaned out once a year, then God would leave. Just think of a bag of garbage in your living room, and then another and another; the first bag has gotten really stinky the longer it sits there. And it isn’t just the smell but the germs and mold—before you know it, the curtains, furniture, and even your pillow smells terrible. The garbage needs to go. Of course, if you are only taking out the garbage once a year, there are going be terrible problems! But sin that stains God’s house was almost always invisible. Only God could see it, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. Right before God left His Temple forever in 586 BC, the sin wasn’t invisible anymore, and there were even terrible things carved into the walls, plus idols set up all over the place. They weren’t even trying to hide their sin anymore, and God had to leave.

Now, today, I want to talk about a sin that God hates, which sometimes seems invisible but is actually like that red dye in the white laundry. And do not try that at home. I will not be on your side if that happens. It would be really mean. This sin is one of the Ten Commandments, and it is the easiest sin of all to commit, I think. That sin is false witness—sometimes called lying even though lying can be a bit different. Lying to and about people ruins everything and everyone. Now, there are different kinds of lies, for sure. Let me tell you about a lie that I told a couple of weeks ago to protect my favorite cashier at my favorite place to shop.

My friend T works at my favorite store. She loves to wear sparkly clothes, and it is always fun to talk to her when there isn’t a line at the cash register. She is very friendly and helpful, but two weeks ago, she looked scared, and I had never seen her scared before. She whispered to me, “There is a man here at the store who won’t leave me alone. He knows where I live because he followed me home one day. He has been coming here more and more and is harassing me. The manager has been sending me into the back when he comes around, but she is in the bathroom right now, and I am up here on my own.”

Well, I was shocked! I had no idea this was going on, but I tell you that as soon as she went to the cash register and started checking me out, he showed up. He was a big guy. T is small—taller than me but a lot thinner. And so, I did something I try never to do. I started lying. I pretended to have some problems with my purchases and kept asking questions she had to answer. She understood what I was doing right away, and she played along until the manager came up front and made him check out at the front service desk. He was angry. He wanted to wait. But the manager made him go to the front desk. I talked to T the other day, and he has stopped coming in now that he knows everyone is protecting her, but you know what? That was really scary. And I lied. I didn’t tell a lie to hurt anyone, or to get myself out of trouble, or to get a friend off the hook for something they had done. I lied to protect someone from a guy who was bigger and stronger and wasn’t being respectful to her as a human being. Sometimes, lying is the right thing to do. If you have ever read or seen a movie about Corrie Ten Boom or Irena Sendler or any of the other people who protected people who were Jewish, special needs, black, or gypsies from the Nazis during World War II then you know they pretty much all lied to keep those people from being wrongly arrested and killed. Now, if we read one of the versions of the Ten Commandments where the commandment says, “You shall not lie,” then protecting those people or protecting my friend might look like a sin, but what does the Bible actually tell us that we can’t do?

In Exodus 20:16, in Hebrew (which is the language it was originally written in), we are commanded not to tell a lie that will hurt another person. Obviously, telling the Nazis that you aren’t hiding any Jews in your house isn’t going to hurt anyone, plus it will keep people from getting hurt and also protect the soldiers from sinning. Pretending to have questions so that T wouldn’t have to be alone with that scary guy also wasn’t hurting anyone. We have to always be wise and honest about what we are doing and why. It’s easy to do the wrong thing so that something good will happen to us and say that it’s okay, but the wrong thing is always the wrong thing. If your friend robs a bank and is hiding in your house, and the police come and ask if he is there, then lying isn’t the right thing to do because it isn’t for the right reason. He stole money from people and that means people got hurt, and the people in the bank were really scared. When someone does something like that, they aren’t being picked on–they need to be caught and stopped and punished. The Bible tells us not to steal right before it tells us not to hurt people with lies.

And people have always understood this. During the 1800’s here in America, brave men and women helped people who were enslaved to escape. They were called the Underground Railroad. They risked everything to protect the people who were escaping, and they lied to keep people from being captured and sent back down south again. Were they wrong? Of course not! Did you know there is a commandment in the Bible that says that if a slave runs away, you can’t send them back but you have to let them live with you! “Do not give a slave back to his master if he has escaped from his master and come to you. Let him live among you wherever he wants within your city gates. Do not hurt him in any way.” (Deut 23:15-16) Sounds like those Underground Railroad people knew the Bible a whole lot better than the people who thought it was okay to own other people!

In the Ten Commandments, the Hebrew version says that you will not tell lies that will hurt your neighbor. Jesus said that when we say something, whether we say yes or no, we need to mean what we say (Matt 5:37). In the Book of Revelation, people who lie are lumped in with murderers and idol worshipers and all sorts of terrible sins. But why are lies about people and lies that protect people who have done bad things so terrible? Well, it’s all about the difference between the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of the Evil One—which is also called the Beast Kingdom. When I talk about the Kingdom of Heaven, I don’t want you to think of “going to Heaven” because that isn’t what Jesus was talking about. When Jesus came and began teaching, preaching, healing people, and working miracles, He said that the Kingdom of Heaven was already here on Earth. In fact, the Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth began with a tiny mustard seed—a baby named Jesus who grew up to teach us how God wants us to live. And everything God wants us to do is the opposite of the things that the evil empires of the world want us to do. The world says, “take everything you can get, no matter who gets hurt, and do whatever you need to do to get what you want!” But God says, “Share what you have with the poor, and don’t hurt the people who are working for you or anyone else either. God will give you what you need even though you can’t always get what you want.”

The world around us doesn’t act like lying is a big deal, and you will watch movies and tv shows where people lie to each other all the time; then they all act like nothing happened. Real life isn’t like TV, and the things we do and don’t do hurt real people. When we lie to someone about something small and they don’t find out, we will probably tell a bigger lie next time. After a while, lying will be normal for us. But when someone finds out that we lied about one thing, they will begin to wonder if we have lied about everything! They will be hurt that we didn’t love them and tried to trick them. They will be angry and embarrassed—just like you would be if they did it to you. After a while, no one knows for sure when you are telling the truth and when you are lying. People can’t live in a world safely when they don’t know who they can trust. And especially when the person lying to you is a member of your family.

I grew up in a house with a terrible liar. He would lie about important things, and he would lie about ridiculously stupid things. He would tell lies if he wanted people to be impressed with him, and he would lie about people he didn’t like or if he just wanted to make them look bad. Lying never bothered him because he didn’t believe people deserved to be treated honestly and fairly. He only ever thought about himself and what he wanted and what he wanted people to think about himself and others, and so, for him, that meant it was okay to say whatever he wanted whenever he wanted for whatever reason he wanted. He was living as though he was the only real person in the whole world and that it was okay to hurt everyone else. It was hard growing up like that, and I learned to lie too—not as badly, but when I began to believe Jesus and accepted Him as my King and Savior, lying was one of the first things He dealt with. Oh man, I had to go back and apologize to people I had lied to and admit the truth. It wasn’t long before I wished I had never lied once in my entire life. And it is hard to just stop lying when you are used to doing it. I would just up and lie and catch myself and have to say, “I am sorry, that was a lie; that isn’t true.” The people in my life were glad they could start to trust me because whenever I lied, I would immediately have to admit it. God wasn’t putting up with my lies anymore; He was changing me from the inside out. But the person who taught me to lie? He is still a liar, and I don’t even think he knows it anymore. I think he fools himself into thinking that these wild lies of his are actually true or maybe that everyone else is just too foolish to realize exactly what he is doing. But we all know.

I wish God would stop him like He stopped me, but I am happy He dealt with me. Do you know anyone who tells a lot of lies? What do you think about them when you hear them lie? Are you angry, frustrated, or hurt? What do they do when they get caught lying? Do they admit it? Or do they just make up another lie? Do people trust them, or are they laughing at them behind their backs? Our lies hurt other people, but they also hurt us—lies make us look absolutely ridiculous. A liar makes a bad friend. A liar can’t be trusted with anything. When a liar says something that is true, they make what is true look like a lie! Liars make life messy, complicated, and even scary. And the Kingdom of Heaven isn’t messy or complicated or scary. Imagine living in a family where everyone lied and no one could be trusted—who would you even go to when you needed to know the truth?

The worst thing about lying is that if we lie a lot, when we tell people about Jesus and the Kingdom of Heaven, who will want to believe us? I want you to think about it. It is already hard for most people to believe that God’s Son lived in a human body, did miracles, was killed in a terrible way, and then came back to life in a perfect body a few days later. Alright? Most people in the world think that’s nonsense. They don’t want a god who can be killed, even though Jesus died so that we could be new kinds of people and live like the Kingdom of Heaven is wherever we are. And I know it is true because God has changed me, and He talks to me and answers my prayers and I have seen miracles happen and I can feel Him with me. I have always known He was there since I was little, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with Him because I was so angry at Him. And there are a lot of angry and hurting people out there. They are tired of being hurt and lied to. They need love and they need truth and they need mercy and compassion and gentleness so that God can heal their hearts. And what they need most of all is for someone they can trust to tell them about Jesus. That means we have to live in ways that tell people we are different from everyone who has hurt them. They need to know we won’t lie about them or to them. They need to know that when they are with us that they can relax and know they are safe. But if we lie to them or about them or tell lies about other people or even about ourselves, then they will see that they can’t listen to us and believe what we say about the big things in life—like Jesus.

God hates lies because lies poison His Kingdom like sin stained His Temple and red dye stains the white laundry. God wants everyone on Earth to love and trust Him and to be able to love and trust one another. For that to happen, it has to start with us. That means we need to be truthful when it is hard and even when it is embarrassing because we have to admit we were wrong. It means that we can’t cover up the wrong things we do and hope no one will figure out it was us. And there are a lot of ways we can lie and especially on the internet. What if you post something with someone’s name on it because you think it is true, but a bunch of people tell you that it isn’t true, and they even give you proof? What does an honest person do? An honest person apologizes and makes sure everyone knows the truth, even though it is embarrassing. What does a liar do? A liar makes a bunch of excuses and just doesn’t care if they are lying about someone. Moses and Jesus both said that we are supposed to love our neighbors as if they were us—and anything that we would hate we absolutely can’t do to anyone else. And our neighbors are everyone, not just the people next door that we like.

I know what it is like to have someone lie about me and never take it back. It makes me angry, scared, and embarrassed (even if I didn’t do anything wrong). Everyone hates that. No one likes to be lied about because you usually can’t even prove that a lie is a lie. How can you prove that you didn’t do something that no one was around to see???? Even if you say you didn’t do it, there are always people who will believe the lies. That’s a terrible thing to do to someone else. But I see it all the time from people who say they love God and Jesus and the Bible. They spread lies, but they believe they are still good people. That’s because when we lie, our brains change, and we begin to believe our own lies. That’s why it took God a long time to get me to stop lying. But let me tell you that there is no quicker cure than God poking at you to admit your lies right after you tell them! It makes you not want to lie at all!

God and His Kingdom have to be about what is true and good because Jesus is true and good. Jesus didn’t go around lying about anyone and not even to or about the people who wanted to kill Him. Jesus could have saved His own life if He was willing to lie. He could have lied about what He said and what He did. He could have made up nasty stories about people. He could have lied about who He was and what He was doing! If anyone in the world ever had a good reason to lie, it is Jesus, but He didn’t. He told the truth, and so the leaders of the Jews and Romans had Him killed. People lied about Jesus, but He didn’t lie about them. If Jesus had lied, no one would believe the stories about all the amazing things He said and did. If His followers were liars, then no one would believe them either. Peter lied when he was scared; he said three times that he didn’t know who Jesus was after He was arrested. I sometimes wonder if he ever lied again—but when Peter told his story to Mark, he made sure to include the fact that he had lied about being a disciple of Jesus. Lying isn’t the end of the world; we can always start telling the truth and no matter how many people we have to tell about our lies, no one in the world is a better-known liar than Peter! But Peter became a truth-teller with God’s help. We all can.

Why do people lie? I mean, apart from the people who only lie to protect innocent people from those who want to hurt them for no reason. Sometimes, people want to be respected and look good when they haven’t earned it, and the only way they can do that is to lie about themselves and what they really have done and not done. I once watched a movie about a man who was a con artist—which means that he spent his life fooling people about who he was and what he was doing. He pretended to be an airline pilot even though he couldn’t fly a plane, a doctor even though he hadn’t gone to medical school, and a whole lot of other things. Con artists make money by stealing it—not from a bank but by fooling people into believing what they are saying. They are professional liars.

Other people lie to keep themselves out of trouble for the wrong things they do. Sometimes, they will even let an innocent person go to jail instead. It was just a little while ago that someone was proved innocent of a crime they hadn’t committed almost fifty years ago. They went to jail for seven years for it. I couldn’t imagine allowing someone else to go to jail for something I did wrong, but a liar can always come up with a reason why it doesn’t matter. Sometimes, people will lie about folks they don’t like. I always say that if you have to lie about a person you hate, then maybe you don’t have any real reason to hate them because the truth should be enough!

What I see most often—because most people aren’t criminals or con artists—is when people really want something to be true or to get others to believe that something is true. Sometimes, they are willing to tell lies (no matter how terrible or unbelievable) to manipulate other people into being on their side. Manipulation is an ugly word—it means that someone is tricking you into doing or believing something that you probably wouldn’t do or believe if they told you the truth. People can even have good intentions—maybe they really want to stop something they believe is evil—but to try to stop it, they lie about it and make it worse than it is. And they will say terrible things about the people who disagree with them. They stop caring about what is true and what is a lie because of what they want to believe, and they might think that a lie is a good way of telling the truth. But God never tells us to do that.

What if I wanted everyone in the world to stop stealing? Maybe I could make up a story to tell children that if they steal something, their hands will rot and fall off. Should people take things that belong to someone else? Of course not! But should I tell such a terrible lie to try and get people to stop? Absolutely not! At some point, the kids are going to find out it isn’t true, and then they won’t believe anything I tell them ever again. That would be a seriously big lie, and a really stupid one because it wouldn’t take long to prove me wrong.

Sometimes, people are embarrassed and so they lie to make themselves look better. When I was twelve years old, one of the little children I was babysitting died in a terrible way. But his mother lied to me about what happened. The lie she told me made me terrified of being in a car for a very long time, and I still think about the lies she told me every time I buckle my seatbelt over forty years later. Her son had died because they had made some terrible decisions, and everyone knew it, but I suppose she wanted me to think it wasn’t her fault. So, we have to be careful because our lies can hurt us, other people, and also the Kingdom of Heaven.

I love you. I am praying for you. And that’s no lie.

What’s Pentecost? Why do we study Exodus and Ruth this weekend? And how does the story of Ruth change God’s mind about the Moabites?

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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. (Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible modified a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context).

This weekend is a special weekend on the Bible Calendar because we’re celebrating a festival day called Shavuot, or maybe you have heard it called Pentecost! We talked about this back in Jesus and the Omer. This is the day that we celebrate God giving Moses the Ten Commandments at Mt Sinai. This is the day that the Holy Spirit came down on all of the believers in Jesus after He came out of that tomb totally alive and with a perfect body which can never die ever again! Forty days later, before He went up to be with the Father to sit beside Him, He told His 120 closest followers that they needed to wait and stay in Jerusalem for ten more days. He told them that they would receive something very special from God and that it would make them be able to go out all over the world to teach them the good news about Jesus. But what exactly would happen? John the Baptist said that Jesus would baptize people with the Holy Spirit and with fire! What on earth did that mean? John baptized people in the Jordan River, in water, but how could anyone be baptized in fire? They knew about the Holy Spirit that came upon the prophets and the people who built the Tabernacle—the Spirit allowed people to do all sorts of things and know all sorts of things. But fire? That sounded dangerous no matter how you thought about it. Sometimes in the Bible, fire meant that there was going to be trouble and bullying and sometimes even being killed. In the wilderness, their ancestors had been bitten by fiery snakes. And the whole burning bush thing was really cool but also kinda scary. Would they be on fire without burning up? No one knew but no one wanted to leave town before it happened either.

One thing was sure—they all trusted Jesus and now they knew for sure that He was from God and that He wasn’t just a human being the way they were. They had walked and eaten and slept and talked with him for years and they knew that in a lot of ways he was just a normal human being who needed to do everything that they had to do to stay alive. But Jesus was also very different—He could work miracles that were even greater than Moses or Elijah! And when He talked it was just impossible not to listen to Him. And now His mother was even talking about how Jesus didn’t have a human father and his brothers were admitting how hard it was to live with a big brother who really never did anything wrong and how they thought His claims to be the Messiah were embarrassing and ridiculous. But now they had all seen Him. There was no doubt He had been dead and that He was buried in that rock tomb. And there was no doubt that He was alive again because they had touched Him and eaten with Him and talked with Him just like they used to. Except now He didn’t need to use the door to get into a room anymore. They didn’t entirely understand everything that had happened, but they knew that Jesus was exactly who He always said He was, and a whole lot more. Jesus changed everything.

And so, when the festival of Shavuot came, they were all in town together praying. They didn’t know exactly what to expect, or even when to expect it! But just when the priests in the Temple were making their regular morning offering, the first of twenty-six offerings on that special day, there was a huge sound like a violent wind and it went to where the disciples were all praying and filled the house. And that was when they all saw the fire! Each one of them had fire resting on top of their head and they felt the Holy Spirit fill them up—but that’s not all. Each one of them could speak in languages they didn’t even know and they started talking about Jesus! The people who had followed the noise came near to them and even people from very far away could hear the disciples teaching about Jesus—men and women just like the prophet Joel had said long ago. Even Jesus’s mother and brothers! And when all of those people from Asia and Africa and Europe who had come to the festival heard the story of Jesus they were very upset about what had happened. They asked, “What do we do???” Peter told them that they had to turn away from their sins and be baptized and believe that Jesus is the Messiah. And just that day, three thousand people did just that! Now that’s a reason to celebrate, but it was only the beginning!

But how do you think that Jesus and His disciples celebrated this festival before the resurrection? People who had land to grow crops had to present a basket of their very best fruit at the Temple for God. Kinda like what Cain did but I don’t think He gave the best of the best. For people without land, they could still study the Torah and the stories about God giving the Ten Commandments to Moses—that was always a very exciting story because it made God their king! But there is also another Bible story that the Jews would have all read and celebrated as well. So, today I am going to tell you the story of Ruth—the great-grandmother of King David. But she wasn’t a Hebrew or anyone else who had escaped Egypt—she was a Moabite. And no one was supposed to marry a Moabite, so how did she become not only a grandmother of David, Solomon, and Hezekiah but also Jesus? It’s an amazing story about how kindness changes everything.

First, let’s look at why no one was supposed to marry anyone from the country of Moab. Moses said, “No one from the countries of Ammon or Moab can be one of God’s people; not their kids either, not even their great-(x7) grandchildren can join God’s people. That’s because they didn’t give you anything to eat or drink when you had escaped Egypt and worse, they hired that dude Balaam to curse you.”  (Deut 23:3-4) You see, the Moabites and Ammonites and the children of Israel were all cousins. The Israelites came from Abram and the children of Moab and Ammon came from Lot! And we’ve been talking about Lot, a lot, lately in our Genesis lessons. God had given them special land because Lot was Abram’s nephew but they weren’t generous when the children of Israel wanted to pass through their lands on the way to the Holy Land. We know from all through the Bible how important it is to God that we feed the hungry and give a drink to people who are thirsty. But what if someone could change God’s mind about that?

Long ago, during the time of the Judges of Israel, there was a terrible famine and a family moved to the land of Moab, where there was plenty of food. Their names were Elimelech, Naomi, Mahlon, and Chilion. They stayed long enough that the two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, got married to two Moabite women named Orpah and Ruth. But within ten years, all of the men in the family had died! In a world where women couldn’t be educated or get good jobs, a house with three widows in it wasn’t a good place to be. Orpah and Ruth loved Naomi but Naomi sent them home to their families so that they could marry again and have families. Naomi told them that she was going back home to Bethlehem. It took a lot to convince Orpah to go back home but Naomi never could get Ruth to leave her. Ruth, who had been raised with foreign gods like Chemosh (who was called an abomination in the Bible and that’s really bad), said something amazing to Naomi which finally made her give up trying to send Ruth home:

“Don’t ask me to abandon you and leave you all alone, or to go back to my family instead of following after you. Wherever you go, I am going too, and wherever you live, I will live; your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Wherever you die, I will die there too, and that’s where I will be buried. May the Lord punish me very harshly if anything but death separates me from you.” (Ruth 1:16-17)

Wow, that’s amazing. Ruth was telling Naomi that no matter what, she would take care of her for the rest of her life and would even watch over her grave when Naomi died. Ruth was telling Naomi that she was her daughter and that would never change. She would give up her own family, and her own country, and her own people, and the gods they worshiped, forever. Ruth was going to give up everything she had ever known just so that she could make sure that Naomi wouldn’t starve to death or freeze in the winter. She didn’t even have the money to farm her family’s land so she didn’t have anything much more than a simple house to go back to. Not only that, but it would take them at least a week to walk back to where Naomi used to live. It was only about thirty miles but it was a very difficult path to follow. A walk like that could kill Naomi if she was alone, between needing to find water and food but there were also a lot of wild animals who would attack an old woman without thinking twice about it.

Finally, they made it back to Bethlehem and everyone was surprised to see Naomi—it was a very, very small town. It was the beginning of spring when everyone was harvesting their barley—around the time of the Passover. Now, one of the things the Bible says is that anyone who grows things in Israel has to make sure that they leave food behind for the people who are poor. And so, to feed herself and Naomi, Ruth went out into the fields to do something called gleaning. Gleaning is when you pick up the grain or the fruit or the olives or nuts or grapes or whatever that the harvesters have left behind. Ruth went to the fields of a very rich man named Boaz, who was a relative of Naomi’s husband who had died in Moab. He was a very good man who was well respected, and one day he came to the fields to check on the progress of the harvesters and he saw Ruth working in the fields so he asked one of his men about her.

“She is the young woman from Moab who came with Naomi—she’s a hard worker and except for a short break, she’s been on her feet collecting barley all day! She asked permission before she started working, even though she didn’t have to.” Boaz was impressed and walked over to her, he said, “Young lady, I want you to stay here in my fields where it is safe. I have told the men to leave you alone and so no one will bother you. Follow the women around, and when you get thirsty, you can drink from the water jars.” Ruth was surprised and thanked him and asked why he was being so kind to her since she wasn’t an Israelite. He told her that everyone in town knew what she had done in leaving her family and taking care of Naomi even though she didn’t have to. He knew how brave and loving she was and could see that she was a hard worker. He even asked God to bless her for everything she was doing to help Naomi survive.

For the rest of the day, Ruth did exactly as Boaz had had told her. She followed his female servants and the men didn’t bother her. She drank cool water from the filled jugs and was invited to eat with them at mealtimes. They gave her bread with vinegar sauce and roasted grain and she ate her fill and had some left over to take home to Naomi. Boaz secretly talked to his own workers and told them to leave a lot for Ruth to pick up and by the end of the day she had almost a whole ephah of barley! That’s enough to fit into six and a half gallon jugs. When she went home, Naomi was amazed and asked whose field she was in. Ruth told her all about Boaz and Naomi said that he was a kind man to remember her husband and sons, even though they were already dead, and herself as well. When Ruth told Naomi that Boaz had invited her to harvest with them every single day, Naomi told her it was a good thing since they knew she would be safe. She might not be safe in another field without someone protecting her. Ruth worked in Boaz’s fields all the way from the Passover to Shavuot (Pentecost), gathering barley and wheat so that she and her mother-in-law would be able to survive the winter.

Ruth was kind and hard-working, but Naomi was very clever and she realized that Boaz must really like Ruth a lot to help them like this. And so, she hatched a plan. “Ruth, you’ve taken such good care of me and so now I will take care of you. Take a bath and use some of this perfumed oil, wear your most beautiful clothes and late tonight, I want you to go to the threshing floor where Boaz has been removing the chaff from his grain. They will be celebrating tonight and drinking and eating because the harvest is over and when he is asleep, I want you to very quietly sneak in. Lie down on the floor at his feet and remove the cloak that will be covering his feet. He will wake up because his feet are cold and when he does and he sees you, I want you to listen carefully to what he tells you. As always, Ruth obeyed Naomi and did everything she asked.

Boaz woke up in the middle of the night and when he went to cover his feet back up, he was startled because there was someone else laying by his feet. That wasn’t something most people would want to do. Boaz had been working hard all day and his feet would have been pretty danged stinky. He asked, “Who are you?” Ruth answered, “it’s me, Ruth, and you are a close relative so I am asking you to be our kinsman redeemer.” Boaz was surprised! A threshing floor in the middle of the night was no place for a woman but she was asking him to be a kinsman redeemer! That was a very important thing to be asked. She has asking him to buy the land from Naomi so that she would have the money she needed to keep her alive and he could farm the land until the year of the jubilee. But more than that, she was asking him to marry her because she needed to have a son who could inherit the land. This was one of the ways that God took care of widows in those times. Boaz thought Ruth was just wonderful and he was very flattered because she was young and beautiful and could have her pick of any man she wanted but she had chosen him instead.

Boaz whispered to her, “Don’t go home, it is too dangerous this time of night. Stay here where it is safe until morning and I will do anything you tell me to do, but the land is not mine to buy for you because someone else has first dibs on it. If they want to buy it, then I can’t do anything to help you but I will try! Everyone knows what you have done and everyone in town respects you—they don’t even care that you are from Moab because of everything you have done to provide for Naomi. Ruth laid back down at his feet and I bet both of them were way too excited to sleep much at all. As soon as the sky began to turn light, Ruth got up and Boaz warned her to never tell anyone she was there. He poured a large portion of the grain he had worked on the day before into her shawl as a gift to Naomi and sent her home.

Naomi was very excited to see her and asked about everything. Ruth told her what had happened and Naomi jumped for joy, “You can bet that he’ll take care of this first thing this morning and that we will hear from him before the end of the day!” And that’s just what Boaz did! He got right up and went to the city gate where all of the wealthy and older men of the town hung out during the day to talk and to make decisions. Before too long, the man who had dibs on the land that belonged to Naomi’s husband came walking along and Boaz began to talk to him in front of ten men he had chosen as witnesses. He told the man about the land and asked if he would buy it from Naomi because if he didn’t want to, then Boaz sure did and he was next in line. The relative said that he definitely would—it was an honorable thing to do, and it would make him very respected. But then Boaz told him the catch—the Land couldn’t be bought back unless the person who did it was willing to take Ruth as a wife so that she could have a baby who could inherit the family land for himself when he got old enough. And the relative shook his head.

“Sorry,” he replied, “but that would mess up my own inheritance. You go ahead and redeem the land and marry Naomi’s daughter-in-law, Ruth.” Boaz was very happy, and he announced to everyone at the city gate, “You are all my witnesses that I am buying the land from Naomi and that I will be marrying Ruth so that when we have a son, he will inherit the property in the name of her dead husband.” And all the men at the city gate congratulated him and blessed him and blessed Ruth as well. They didn’t care that she was a Moabite because she did what was right even though her ancestors did what was wrong. Her ancestors wouldn’t give food or water to the children of Israel but Ruth did all of that for Naomi and then some! That’s why I call this story “Ruth and the Reverse of the Curse” when I teach it to grownups. Ruth showed that God is always willing to accept the people who are loyal to Him and do what is right. Ruth had shown everyone that she was a child of God and not a child of the abominable god Chemosh!

Boaz and Ruth were married and she had a son and they named him Obed. Naomi was so happy because it was as though she had a son again after her sons had died. The women of Bethlehem celebrated with her and told her that God was so faithful for giving her this child and that her daughter-in-law Ruth was better than any seven sons! Ruth gave Obed to Naomi, who helped to raise him as if he were her very own son. But that’s not the end of the story! When Obed grew up and got married, his wife had a son who they named Jesse. And when Jesse grew up and got married, he had Eliab, Abinadab, Shimea, Nethanel, Raddai, Ozem, Zeruiah, Abigail, and the youngest of all was King David. But that’s not the end of the story because about a thousand years after David lived, one of David’s descendants who was named Mary gave birth to Jesus, the Son of God!

Not bad huh? For someone who was born in Moab and worshipped a god so terrible that the Bible won’t even tell us why he was called an abomination, and whose ancestors weren’t kind to the Israelites even when they offered to give them money in exchange for food and water and a safe path to the Holy Land, she was the opposite of everything that everyone expected from the Moabites. Ruth was good and kind and generous and never took the easy path. She didn’t go home. She didn’t abandon Naomi. She made sure that Naomi had food and made it to Israel safely. Ruth worked hard because Naomi was old and her heart was broken because she had lost everyone she loved. Ruth is a good lesson for everyone who thinks that there are people who are all bad just because of where they come from or their religion. That’s what the children of Israel thought about the Ammonites and Moabites. If Elimelech and Naomi hadn’t been so desperate to escape the terrible famine, they wouldn’t have ended up in Moab and their sons wouldn’t have married Moabite women. And even though Orpah did go back home eventually, she obviously loved her mother-in-law too.

Ruth was a Gentile, which means that she wasn’t a Hebrew like Boaz and Naomi. But that didn’t mean that God wasn’t very interested in her. God chose her to be in the family tree of the most important person ever born in the history of the world—Jesus! God wanted to show us that He doesn’t really care about the sorts of things that people care about. Ruth was exactly the kind of person that God wanted His people to be. Ruth didn’t give up doing what was right just because things were extremely difficult. Because she was full of love, God made her life into something beautiful.

I love you. I am praying for you. I want you to think about Ruth, and how God used her to prove that absolutely anyone can choose to follow God and become one of His people.

Today we are going to talk about the most exciting fifty days in the history of all the world! And also about why the strangest day on the entire Biblical calendar turned out to be the most important of all. If you have never heard of the counting of the omer, hold on to your hats because that’s what we will be learning about today.

If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.

Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another 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. (Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible modified a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context).

Did you celebrate Passover last week? Did you celebrate Jesus’s resurrection from the dead last weekend? We sure did! We’ll learn more about Passover next year and also when we are learning about Exodus, but right now I want to tell you about the fifty most exciting days in the history of the entire world so far! More exciting than when the children of Israel were freed from slavery in Egypt! More exciting than when Noah and his family got out of the ark! More exciting than when Joseph told his brothers and his father who he was after many years away from home! More exciting than coming into the Promised Land and more exciting than when the walls of Jericho fell! In fact, nothing like this had ever happened before and nothing has happened like it ever since.  In fact, the only thing more amazing than those fifty days will be when Jesus comes back to be King over all the earth. So, what fifty days am I talking about? The fifty days that God commanded His people to count the omer from the day after the Passover Sabbath until the Festival of Pentecost. What? That really doesn’t sound very exciting at all—counting days? What the heck? Can’t we just program it into our smart phones or watches or put it on the calendar? Why would God tell His people to count up a bunch of days? Well, that is what we are going to talk about this week before getting back to Genesis and the life of Abram next week.

You see, when God delivered His people from slavery in Egypt, He gave them a whole bunch of parties to celebrate forever. These parties, which happened during three different months in the year, were full of secret clues about Jesus the Messiah, our Savior! But until He lived among us, died, rose from the dead and poured out His Holy Spirit on everyone who believes Him—no one could see any of those clues that God had given Moses in the wilderness. The Bible is like that, you know. God puts clues in there that no one can understand until after they have already happened! Like God told the prophet Isaiah, He kinda does that to show off and prove how much better He is than all of the fake gods of the rest of the world. Their gods couldn’t ever predict the future because they didn’t even know what was going to happen to themselves the next day. God sees everything from beginning to end and so He can tell us all about it but that doesn’t mean He is going to make it understandable. God told Isaiah that He gives us clues about what will happen but not so that we can figure things out ahead of time—but so that after things happen we can say, “Oh man, there it is right in the Bible! I can’t believe it! God told us this would happen thousands of years ago! I never thought it would happen like that!”

And that’s how all of the promises in the Bible about Jesus worked. People had figured out from studying the Scriptures that there would be a Messiah who would be their king, or maybe their high priest, but they were confused because different Scriptures said different things that they didn’t think could all be true. Some people thought there would be two completely different Messiahs coming to save them in entirely different ways. They didn’t understand how some verses in the Bible said that Messiah would be a mighty king forever while others said that he would suffer and die! That’s how God likes to keep us on our toes—if we could just read the Bible and predict the future, we wouldn’t have to depend on Him anymore. Jesus is the best example in the world of that. Now we look at what Moses and David and the Prophets all said and we just say, “Oh yeah, duh, that’s all totally about Jesus,” but that’s only because we live in a time after He came. But we are waiting for Him to return now as King of the world and although we may think we have all that figured out—how it will happen and when—we probably don’t because no one has ever been able to do it before and why would now be any different? God is going to do what He is going to do and what He will do will be the absolute best and we will be shocked and excited and we will look at the Bible and say, “Oh duh, why didn’t we see all that ahead of time? Why did we think all those other things?” Just like many, many Jews like Peter, James, John, and Paul did—but only after everything had already happened. Before that, even when Jesus told them to their faces what was going to happen, they still didn’t understand. The Bible is a special book—not here to tell us the future but to tell us after things happen that God was in control all along and nothing takes Him by surprise. God knew what wicked people were going to do to Jesus and they used it to trick Satan and set people free from all of his evil ways.

The name that Moses gave us for the fifty most exciting days in history was the counting of the omer. Wait—the what? Miss Tyler, you said this was exciting and I don’t even know what an omer is and I doubt I want to count one. And you probably haven’t even heard of it and especially since people mostly ignore this now. The omer was very important in ancient Israel because it was the beginning of the new harvest season. All winter the Jewish people were eating what they had stored away during the year before. Old barley. Old wheat. Dried fruit. And if they had a bad year? Then they might not be able to eat much at all by the time spring came around. But all that changed on the first day of the counting of the omer. You see, the barley that was planted in the fall, right after the big festivals in Jerusalem and right before the early rains fell, was always ripe at the time of the Passover celebration during the first month of their festival year. But no matter how ripe it was, they weren’t allowed to eat any until the week after the Passover. On the day after the weekly Sabbath, when no one was working and everyone was resting and celebrating and learning about the Bible in the synagogues, the priests would go to their special barley fields that they grew themselves especially for the Temple, and they would cut a sheaf—which is a big bundle of barley stalks—and they would take it to the Temple and present it to the Lord and only after that happened could everyone sell and buy and eat the new crop of barley. God gets his share first. Since the Land of Israel is His special place, everything that grows there belongs to Him and they had to give Him the very best before they took anything for themselves.

And the week Jesus died was no different. Just like everyone else, Jesus rested in the grave on the Sabbath and on the very next day, He rose up from being dead and was alive again. A bunch of women had come to take care of His body but when they got there, the stone had been moved away from the opening to the tomb and there was no one inside! They were incredibly upset because they thought someone had stolen His body, but then they got the surprise of their lives! Jesus was alive, and they were told to go and tell the rest of the disciples that He was alive! Because those women never abandoned Jesus like the men who followed Him, they were the very first to spread the good news that God had proved Jesus was good and innocent and the Messiah by raising Him from the dead. The wicked leaders of the world were wrong to kill Him and God wanted everyone to know that Jesus being dead forever wasn’t okay with Him. And Jesus told the women not to touch Him because He still had to go up to His Father. But why would He even say that? The answer is one of the mysteries of Scripture answered—Jesus was the first to be dead and to come alive again in a perfect body to live forever and never die again. All the people who Jesus raised from the dead died again later—like Lazarus, and the widow’s son and the synagogue leader’s daughter. But Jesus is different. When He came back from the dead, He never died again. Because of that, Jesus is called the firstfruits of the Harvest. And I will explain what that means.

Whenever the children of Israel grew anything in the Land God gave them, they had to give the firstfruits to God—which means the first and very best of what they grew. The biggest and juiciest dates, olives, pomegranates, barley, wheat, etc. You might even remember that Cain did that and God wasn’t happy at all with what Cain gave Him. Cain must have not given his very best to God but God wasn’t fooled. Think of giving God a bunch of brown, moldy old bananas that aren’t even good for banana bread anymore! Or apples with worms in them. Or wheat flour from the bottom of the batch that had dirt in it! God is going to be, like, “Dude, I wish you hadn’t even given me anything at all instead of THAT. Who is it that you are trying to fool because if it was me? No, it didn’t work.” In fact, when the Bible describes what Cain gave to God, it just said that it was “some of the land’s produce.” Wow, that’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the quality, right? If, on your birthday, you walked up to a dessert table and you saw fig newtons and jolly ranchers and huge chocolate cakes and cheesecake and fancy donuts and chocolate truffles and crème brulee, and someone brought you a plate and all it had was a broken fig newton, half-eaten black licorice and a brussel sprout flavored jolly rancher then you would not only be disappointed but you might even be angry. That’s what Cain did to God, probably, although it doesn’t say that for sure.

But the priests, when they cut that new sheaf of barley each year, they made sure that it was beautiful and that all the grain heads were perfect and beautiful and ripe with no mold on them or bite marks from bugs. They found the best of the best from their very own fields and brought it to the Temple and waved that beautiful grain so that God could see it and be honored that they remembered that everything they had and everything that grew in the Land was because of Him. And after everyone presented their sheaves of barley, the people could eat it. They could roast the kernels over the fire and eat them whole, or they could grind them into flour and make bread or whatever else they wanted to do. And that sheaf of barley was called the omer. And that day was called the first day of the counting of the omer. It was also the day that Jesus was raised up from the dead and appeared to the women in the garden outside the tomb He had been placed in after He died. And when Jesus said that they couldn’t touch Him before He went to His Father, He was saying that He was just like that omer of barley, the best and first of the entire harvest that needed to be given first to God before anyone else.

But what is the harvest? Jesus wasn’t a plant, right? Well, the harvest is a way that the Bible talks about God gathering up His own people and rescuing them from Satan. Jesus is saying that He is the first and best that the world has to offer because He is God’s own Son and He is just the first because everyone who believes Jesus and everyone before Him who ever served and loved God will come back from the dead in a perfect body just like Jesus someday. After Jesus told them that He had to go to the Father, He left them and when He came back and talked to His disciples and all His other followers, they were allowed to touch Him and He ate meals with them and taught them the most amazing things over the next forty days. So, the first forty days of the counting of the omer were spent actually with Jesus, back from the dead, and teaching them all the places in the Hebrew Bible that talked about Him and exactly what He was going to do. I bet they were just amazed at all the Bible verses they knew that were talking about Jesus but they just never realized it! Moses had talked about Jesus. David had talked about Jesus. The Prophets had all talked about Jesus! Why hadn’t they put all the pieces together???

Because if they could figure it out then so could everyone else and especially Satan. Same with Jesus coming back again—if we could figure it out, we’d do a whole lot of messed up stuff with that information. And people have been doing just that for almost two thousand years—setting dates and very sure that Jesus was going to come back right away and they could even prove it by comparing Bible verses to what they saw happening all around them and people do it today too! But everyone has always been wrong even though they were absolutely sure that they were right. Jesus told everyone to just ignore what was going on around them because there are always strange things happening but that believers in Him had to just keep on doing what was right and telling people all about Him and what He did and the Kingdom of God. We don’t have to worry about when Jesus is coming back, we just have to live our lives in ways that make Him happy and help others. If we do that then we don’t need to worry or care about when He is coming back. Who knows, maybe He will come back when you have great-great grandchildren and I will have been dead a very long time by then! I am not worried at all because I trust God. Because He has everything figured out, I don’t have to. He can get it done without me! In fact, it will probably be easier for Him to get things done if I don’t know anything about it. We humans have a way of messing everything up when we know what’s going to happen and when, right? And every single year, people write books proving that Jesus will come back this year or that year and a ton of people buy those books and they make some bad decisions because they think they can make plans, and then when it doesn’t happen, they can be in some pretty big trouble.

And during those first forty days of the counting of the omer, Jesus’s disciples were probably very confused at how the great Bible scholars had all been so wrong too. But I also imagine that they were learning so much from Jesus and were so glad to have Him alive again that they weren’t upset about it at all. Can you imagine getting your Bible studies from Jesus? Man, I am wrong sometimes but He was never wrong about anything. And He went through the entire Bible with them showing all the parts that talk about Him. Don’t you wish that someone had written all of it down for us to read??? But I guess that we just weren’t ever meant to know everything. And even the disciples were wrong about things later and Jesus had to correct their wrong ideas—like when Peter didn’t understand that it was okay for him to eat at the same table with people who aren’t Jewish. During those first forty days, a lot of things changed. Jesus’s brothers started to believe that He really was the Messiah and not just crazy like they had thought before. All the people who ran away came back to Him, and I bet they were very embarrassed, but Jesus forgave them and didn’t yell at them or send them away. Jesus was very generous. Most regular people would be so angry that they would never trust those people again but Jesus knew that they were going to run away before it even happened and He also knew that they wouldn’t be so prideful anymore and they would be willing to die for Him, which they mostly all did many years later.

On the fortieth day of the counting of the omer, Jesus told them not to go anywhere—and to stay in Jerusalem for ten more days because something amazing was going to happen. He told them that God, the Father was going to keep His promise to send them the Holy Spirit. And that was really special because in the Hebrew Scriptures, people rarely were filled with the Holy Spirit. Prophets, Kings, High Priests, Moses and the seventy elders, and the two men who were responsible for making the Tabernacle in the wilderness—they were but the people around them weren’t. And so, this was different because now God was going to pour out His Holy Spirit into just regular people who followed Jesus. Not just artists or prophets or leaders but poor fishermen and former tax collectors and normal men and women. That was exactly what John the Baptist had said years before, and the prophet Joel as well. Joel said that the spirit of God would be poured out on ordinary girls and boys, young people and old people, men and women, servants as well as free people—everyone who believes Jesus. Not just people the world thought were important. And it wouldn’t just be Jews either, although for about ten years that’s the only people who believed Jesus. Soldiers and slaves and rich people who used to worship idols, they would be included too—but right now the disciples didn’t know that. And now there weren’t just twelve, or even seventy-two, but a hundred and twenty of them.

But they were still confused. Wanna know what they actually asked Him? They asked Him if He was going to “restore the Kingdom to Israel” right away. That means they were still wanting Him to be that fighting Messiah who would go to war with the Romans so that they could be their own Kingdom again. But Jesus had different plans, plans that His disciples still couldn’t understand yet. They wanted the Romans who had been hurting them for so long gone and dead but Jesus wanted the Romans to be saved. After all they had gone through with Him and learned from Him, they still didn’t understand all that He came to do. And we’re the same way still, to this very day. But Jesus just said to them, “You know what? That stuff isn’t for you to know—not how or if or when—that’s the Father’s business and not yours. Here’s what you need to be concerned with—the Holy Spirit will come just as I promised and when that happens, you will get the power to do amazing things and you will use that power to tell everyone about me. You will tell everyone in Jerusalem about me, and in Judea, and you will even tell the Samaritans about me even though you hate them. And then you will keep going until absolutely everyone knows about me.”

You know, we can spend a lot of time with Jesus and still get a lot of things about Him and about the Bible and about God and the Holy Spirit all wrong. Sometimes that happens because we want something really bad and we spend too much time thinking about it. All their lives, they had suffered because of the pagans around them and especially the Romans and the Greeks. They were tired of it and nobody wants for their terrible enemies to be forgiven and to be part of the family and the Kingdom of God unless God really changes them a lot first. I know that has been very true in my own life and it will almost certainly be true with you as well. We humans are more interested in hurting the people who hurt us than we are in forgiving them and praying for them and even wanting God to help them, right? God just makes us weird when we start believing Jesus and following Him.

But then Jesus left them. A cloud swallowed Him up and then He was gone. As they were looking up in the sky, two angels started speaking to them and asked why they were looking up in the sky—and told them that Jesus would return in the same way that He disappeared. But they didn’t say when or even where or anything like that. Jesus had given them their orders and it was time to get to work. Their first job was to count the next ten days leading up to the Spring Festival of Pentecost—a Greek word that means “fifty days” or really “fifty count” Imagine the long conversations they had, well into the night and early the next morning and all through the days that followed. They probably ate meals with Lazarus, Mary and Martha, who lived just two miles away. Jesus would have returned to God the Father on a Thursday, and Pentecost always happened on a Sunday. People would be coming, like a huge parade, from all over Judea and the Galilee with offerings of their best produce—veggies and fruits and nuts. They would march their baskets full of food up to the Temple; they would give it to the priest and say, “My father was a wandering Aramean. He went down to Egypt with just a handful of people and lived there as a foreigner with no land of his own. There he became a great and powerful nation with many people. But the Egyptians abused us and treated us badly because we had no power or way to defend ourselves, and forced us to work very hard as slaves. So, we called out to the Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the Lord heard all of our crying and saw how miserable we were, how hard they forced us to work, and how they did whatever they wanted to do to us just because they could. Then the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, with terrifying power, and with signs and wonders. He led us here and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. I have now brought the first of the land’s produce that you, Lord, have given me.”

And while they were doing all of that, all 120 of His disciples were gathered together and praying. They didn’t own any land and so didn’t have baskets of food to present at the Temple, but they had something much better. They were about to be filled with the Spirit and when that happened, they would be able to tell everyone about Jesus. But we’ll talk about that in another six or seven weeks.

I love you. I am praying for you. I want you to think as you count the days leading up to Pentecost, about those wonderful times Jesus had with His friends, His followers, His brothers, and especially His mom.

There are terrible times in our lives when everything seems to have gone so wrong that nothing will ever be right again. When Jesus died, the disciples must have felt like their whole world ended. They had given up their jobs, their families, and everything to follow Him. They had hoped to be rich, famous, and powerful when Jesus became King and suddenly, they probably wished that none of it had ever happened. But God always has other plans, even when things seem darkest and most terrible.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another 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. (Parents, Scripture this week comes from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible).

Passover is almost here and so I want to talk about something that we can all relate to—having the worst day ever. And there are a lot of reasons we can have bad days—maybe our pet dies, that’s really horrible, or we move away from our friends, or we get bullied at school, or we just can’t figure out fractions no matter how hard we try, or we can’t go on that family vacation because there was a blizzard. And all of those are sad and some of them are really sad but I want to talk about Jesus’s disciples and their worst day ever. And not just the Twelve main disciples either. I am also talking about Jesus’s mom, and the women who stayed with Him at the Cross and Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha. In fact, there were somewhere between seventy-two and one-hundred and twenty disciples at that point. We know this because He sent out seventy-two disciples all over the Galilee to prepare the way for Him. And on that exciting Pentecost when all of His disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit, there were one-hundred and twenty. Some of the new disciples were his brothers James and Jude, who only came to believe Him after He rose from the dead.

For every single one of those people, the saddest and worst days of their lives were probably when Jesus, their teacher, was arrested and crucified and died and was lying in the Tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. Not only were they heartbroken because they loved Jesus and had been following Him for years, learning from Him, watching Him heal people and make miracles happen, but also because they thought He was the Messiah that the Jews had been waiting for over hundreds of years. The Jews had been suffering for about six hundred years. The Babylonians came and destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple, and forced almost all of them to walk to Babylon where they were forced to live for seventy years, and then the Babylonians got wrecked by the Persians. The Persian King Cyrus the Great told the Jews that they could go back home to Israel but most of them didn’t and even the ones who did were still just a small part of the huge Medo-Persian empire. And then the Greeks came and took over, and after a short time on their own, the Romans took charge. So, the Jews never had their own Kingdom again like they did when David and Solomon were king. They might have a king, like Herod the Great, but it was kind of a joke because he really just worked for the Romans. They weren’t their own bosses. They didn’t have a real king and their own laws, and they couldn’t entirely do what they wanted because a foreign government was bossing them around. It’s a lot like when Africa, South America and India and other places were controlled by countries in Europe like England, Spain, and Belgium. They easily took over countries that didn’t have guns and ships. The people who were born there couldn’t rule themselves and so they were generally treated badly. Same with North America when the Europeans and the Americans did that to the Native Americans who had been living here.

Living in a situation where someone else from the outside is the boss is not ever fun. And so, the Jews had been living like this for about six hundred years when Jesus was born, and they were waiting for someone called the Messiah. Messiah is a word that comes from the Hebrew Mashiach, and it means anointed one; in Greek the word is Christos, where we get Christ. The kings and priests of Israel were anointed, which means that they were officially God’s representatives. It means they had special jobs, and their boss was God. But the Messiah was special, and unique. The Messiah was supposed to come and make it so that they would never live under the thumb of evil outsiders again. They believed that the Messiah would destroy the Roman Empire and get revenge for all the horrible things that the Jews had suffered since they lost their kingdom. When Messiah came, they believed that they would be a mighty empire again, like when Solomon was king. And He would fix what was wrong with the Temple so that crooked people wouldn’t be in charge of it anymore. People had been whispering and wondering if Jesus was that Messiah; if He would raise an army and drive out the Romans for good, retake all the land that had been lost, and regather all the exiles who had left but had never come back home.

Jesus taught like no one else ever had—or ever would again! When He spoke, it felt like He was the final authority and like no one could say anything to trip him up and the people who disagreed with him regretted it because they just couldn’t compete with His wisdom. And the miracles! Oh my—He fed thousands from a few barley loaves and some small fishes. He was throwing demons out of people easier than we can take out the trash! The people who were paralyzed, who couldn’t move—they got up and walked just because He told them to. Blind people could see. Deaf people could hear music for the first time. He made sick people healthy, and he even raised a few from the dead. It was like Jesus was fighting a one-man war against all the forces of darkness; except, He wasn’t going after their human enemies—the Romans who were starving them to death with taxes that took most of their food, the executions and crucifixions without even a fair trial, and the bullying of the foreign soldiers who often hated them and resented having to be there. Everyone believed that God was going to punish the Roman Empire, and they were hoping that Jesus was going to be the man to make it happen.

But the leaders had never liked Him. At every step, they tried to trick Him, trap Him or trip Him up with a clever question but they had given up because every time they tried, they just ended up humiliated, embarrassed, and shamed for everyone to see. He had a reason for doing everything that they hated, and try as they might, He wasn’t ever caught doing anything that was actually illegal. And the people loved Him, but the leaders were afraid of what would happen if He got more popular and raised an army and failed to defeat the Romans—things would be even worse than they already were—or if He just became so famous that no one would listen to them anymore. They had worked hard to get to where they were, and they weren’t about to let a guy from Galilee take it all from them. So, when they got the chance (when Judas betrayed Jesus), they arrested Him and decided to have Him put to death because He said that someday, He would judge the High Priest for his wickedness. They believed that judgment was the job of God and that judging the High Priest was the same thing as blaspheming God. Blasphemy is a Greek word that means to slander or insult or to lie about someone. For example, if I accuse you of doing something that you didn’t do, that would be blaspheming you. Blasphemy is very serious to God and so we aren’t supposed to say anything about someone else unless we absolutely know for sure that it is true. And even then, it has to be very important and appropriate to talk about. We can’t just go around blurting out stuff against people just because we want to.

But that’s what they did to Jesus. They blasphemed Him and they had Him killed because they wanted Him out of the picture and not because He was actually evil or deserved to die. Even the Romans knew He didn’t deserve to be crucified. But they did it anyway, during the Passover, when all the Jewish people were in Jerusalem celebrating the freedom of their ancestors from slavery in Egypt. Everyone whom Jesus had ever known was there in town; everyone He had healed or fed or cast a demon out of or taught. Everyone who was hoping that He was the Messiah was there. But when they saw Him on the Cross, they decided that He wasn’t the Messiah after all and were very cruel to Him as they walked by. But I don’t want to talk about all the strangers. I want to talk about what was going on with His disciples and His family. Because right now? –Their lives couldn’t possibly seem any worse.

All of their hopes and dreams for Jesus becoming their king had gone down the drain. Not only wasn’t He going to fight the Romans and kill them, they were killing Him instead. And to even admit that they were His followers now was embarrassing and dangerous. Just one week earlier, Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem on the colt of a donkey and the people of Jerusalem had cut down palm branches and were singing and celebrating Him like He was already their king. They were saying, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord! Hosanna in the Highest Heaven!” (Matt 21:9, CSB) Hosanna means “save us now!” and they were saying that because they wanted someone to save them from the Romans. When they called Him the “Son of David” that’s the same as calling Him their rightful king! When they said “Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord” they were quoting from Psalm 118, which is about the Messiah, who is also called the Right Hand of the Lord. And when they said, “Hosanna in the Highest Heaven!” that requires a bit more explanation. You see, they had a lot of ways to describe God because they wouldn’t say His Name. So, they might use Adonai (which we translate as Lord), or Heaven, or Most High, or those kinds of things. So, when they said, “Hosanna in the Highest Heaven!” it meant, “Save us now, God!” They were excited and they were wondering if this was finally the day when everything would change and a new Moses and a new Joshua and a new David would save them from all of their troubles. Can you even imagine what that would feel like? Maybe you can. Some people today have experienced that in their own life. Many people are still waiting to be freed from the people who are hurting them.

But once Jesus was arrested by the Temple guards, and taken away in chains and beaten, all of His disciples ran away and left Him alone. Peter followed a long way behind but when he was asked if He was a follower of Jesus, Peter lied and said he didn’t even know who Jesus was. The only people we know for sure stuck with Him were his mother and the other women who had supported them with money, and maybe Lazarus but we don’t know the name of the one man who was there when Jesus was dying. The rest went into hiding. They must have been very scared. If Jesus could be killed that way, they could too. They would be recognized as people who were following a new king and the Romans would be angry about that because they believed that their king, Tiberius Caesar, was a god or at least the son of a god. And no one else was allowed to call themselves a king unless Caesar said they could. To even claim to be the rightful heir of King David would be extremely dangerous. And now they were caught up in all of that danger. They would have felt so many things, like guilt over abandoning Him, guilt for lying about knowing Him, a lot of confusion about what had even happened, and questions about what was going to happen to them now. Matthew had given up his tax collection business. Peter, Andrew, James, and John had all walked away from their family fishing businesses. How could they even go back home? Everyone would laugh at them and maybe even stone them to death. They had no place to go, and no hope for the future. Every dream of being important and sitting next to the king when He came into His kingdom were crushed to pieces and their lives were worse than if they had never even met Him. Or so they thought.

And what about Mary, His mother? Can you imagine how heartbroken and confused she was? What about what the angel Gabriel had told her about Jesus? How could she explain how she even got pregnant in the first place when she wasn’t even married? What about Anna and Simeon and what they said in the Temple after Jesus was born? What about the shepherds and the wise men from the east? What about all the miracles? What about the angel who spoke to Joseph? He was told to name her son Jesus because He was supposed to save His people but now, He was dead. Her other sons hadn’t believed that Jesus was the Messiah, they thought He was crazy, and now she couldn’t help but wonder how on earth everything could have gone so terribly wrong. One thing she knew for sure—He couldn’t save anyone now. But more than that, He was her son and she loved Him and He had died in the most horrible way imaginable while she had watched.

Everyone was hopeless at this point. But what does hopeless mean? Hopeless is a word that means we can’t see anything ever being good again, that there is no chance for things to be right. Hope is the opposite of all that. Hope is what we feel when things all around us are either good or bad, but we believe that it will all be alright, that God will make things work out. We don’t know who wrote the Book of Hebrews in the Bible, but the author had something interesting to say about faith and hope, “Now faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen.” (Heb 11:1) Hope is important because we can only really hope for better things when we trust God. Trust is another word for faith. When everything around us seems to be going wrong and life is a total disaster, what saves us from giving up entirely? Hope does. You see, when we have our eyes and attention on God and all the things He has done for us and for others, we remember that no matter how terrible things seem, He is going to win in the end and that means that we will too. It doesn’t mean that we will always get what we want or that we will always be happy, but it does mean that God hasn’t forgotten about us. I mean, He can make amazing things happen. He can turn a slave and a prisoner into the second most powerful man in the world in less than a day. He can save people who are trapped between an army and the sea by splitting the sea in two and making a way for the people to walk to the other side in safety.

But death is another thing, right? Dead is dead. That’s what the disciples and Jesus’s mom were all thinking during those terrible days when everything they had hoped for seemed ruined and lost. How could even God fix this? The one man they had ever met who could raise the dead was dead. And when we focus on what people can do—and at this point they were all looking at Jesus like He was just a man, a very anointed and powerful and good man but still just a man—well, men (meaning humans in general) will always fail and can’t be trusted like we can trust God. For God, the impossible is always possible and death is nothing but a technicality—something to be brushed out of the way like we would swat at a fly. And oftentimes, what seems like the most impossible problem to us is actually God’s solution for an even bigger problem. Over your lives, if you are paying attention, you will notice that sometimes when everything seems lost it is because God is getting ready to show off and do something amazing. Because such and such a bad thing happened, a good thing happens to make everything even better. Not always, of course, and not in ways that we can always see. God is able to take every bad thing that the world throws at us and make it into something good.

It doesn’t mean that He caused the bad thing to happen. People make bad choices every day. People get into cars after drinking beer or wine and they can kill other people on the road, or maybe they were on their phone or texting and ran into someone. There is nothing good about that, or when an innocent person goes to jail, or someone gets robbed. Or when someone gets crucified, like Jesus did. God didn’t invent injustice, which is what we call something that is seriously unfair in a huge way. God does everything He can to turn us into the kind of people who won’t put up with that and will do something to change it. But sometimes He will use something like that to make something amazing happen. Like Joseph saving his entire family, and the whole world, from starvation after his brothers sold him into slavery and he was put into prison for doing what was right. Right now in the story of the people who loved Jesus, they must have all felt like they were in the deepest, darkest, and most hopeless prison ever created. That’s what sadness and fear and confusion and anger are like when something terrible happens. This is the place where we can’t see anything good in the world and we can’t imagine a way out of trouble. I mean, dead is dead, right? And when the bad guys win, they win, right?

Not always, and certainly not forever. All of His loved ones knew they would see Him again at the resurrection of the dead (far in the future) and that they would be reunited in the world to come, but that never changes the pain and heartbreak and difficult emotions that we feel when someone dies—and not just then but for a long time afterward. Even Jesus cried when His friend Lazarus died! Even though Jesus knew that He was about to raise him from the dead. Wow, if that isn’t permission to cry and feel our real feelings then I don’t know what is! So, we shouldn’t ever look down on them for how badly they felt—God made us and He made our emotions and gave us love for each other. And the hardest thing in the world, when we are hurting that badly, is to hope that it will all be okay in the end. We are too distracted by pain to even think like that. And so, they all lived out the next couple of days believing that everything having to do with Jesus and His mission was totally lost. The new Kingdom they had been hoping for was lost too. And you know what? Without God, that all would have been totally true.

They didn’t know what Jesus had done, what he had accomplished on the Cross. They had no idea that there was a war going on and Jesus had already won it and was still winning it. They had no idea that Satan and all his demons were being defeated and that things were about to change in the world. It was like all of the evil in the world was poured into the bottomless pit of the goodness of Jesus and didn’t even make a dent. Sure, His outside body was killed in a terrible way but there wasn’t enough evil or death or sin in the world to keep Him dead. Jesus was too alive because, like God, He is too good to be beaten by evil. Not human evil, not demon evil, not sickness evil, not sin evil, and especially not death evil. All of the evil in the universe and it wasn’t enough to defeat Jesus. And Jesus knew it. Jesus knew God’s plan to destroy Satan’s kingdoms and to weaken him to the point where he is still dying and doing everything he can to keep his kingdoms alive. But more and more people turn to Jesus every single day and that means that every day Satan loses more and more people. Did you know that more people become Christians every single day than are born? Especially in places like Africa and the Middle East and in East Asia.

Of course, Mary and the other disciples couldn’t understand that they had a reason to hope. And if they had ever been told that a third of the people in the whole world would call themselves Christians—they wouldn’t have probably been able to believe it could be true. They had no idea that Jesus would be alive again before they knew it and that they would all see Him, and that because He came back from the dead, that people all over the world would stop being afraid of dying, or of the Roman Empire, or the Nazis or whoever else wanted to kill them. They couldn’t see that the Gentiles would give up their pagan gods and would follow the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They couldn’t even imagine a world where Jesus would make us realize that slaves are equal to their masters, and women equal to men, and gentiles equal to Jews; or a world that would one day start the fight to get rid of slavery. They would have been amazed to know that someday, the people who used to just walk by when they saw babies abandoned on the sides of the roads would take them in and adopt them. Or that people who used to only care about their own families would build the world’s first hospitals where the poor could be helped. The only world that Mary and the disciples knew was about to change forever, but it only happened because Jesus had died. They hadn’t learned yet that God will have His way no matter what we humans do to mess it up.

And that’s why we can always have hope. Not because things are always good—they aren’t always good. But because we know, in the end, that God always wins and someday He will wipe the tears from our eyes and the sadness from our hearts and the pain from our bodies and the world will be as it always should have been. Jesus will be here, and He will be the King of the earth and just like He hears our prayers now, He will hear us then too. And we will see Him, and we will go to Jerusalem and celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles with Him every year–a party with Jesus and for Jesus. Wow, if that doesn’t fill us up with hope then I don’t know what will!

I love you. I am praying for you. And I can’t wait to meet you at that party!

This weekend, Jewish people from all over the world will be celebrating Purim, a holiday which honors God for saving His people from the wicked Haman during the time of the Medo-Persian Empire. We can learn a lot about courage and bravery from this story about two Queens who stood up for what was right.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another 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.
Parents, just FYI, the story of Esther involves the use of alcohol and so if you do not want your kids to hear this, then you might want to turn off the radio and listen to the podcast or read the transcript before you let the kids listen. As always, my goal is to equip and not to override parental oversight.

Have you guys ever heard of the Feast of Purim? You won’t find it in Exodus, Leviticus or Deuteronomy. Nope, Moses never celebrated it or King David or Abraham because the reason for this celebration happened hundreds of years after they were all dead! In fact, we learn about this celebration in the only book of the Old Testament that was written about someone who didn’t ever live in Israel at all. The name of this book of the Bible is called Esther, and it is one of two books in the Bible written entirely about a woman and named after a woman. The name of the other book is Ruth. Ruth was born in the foreign land of Moab, which was Israel’s next-door neighbor, but Esther was born in Susa in the land of what the Bible calls Elam. Instead of being in modern day Iraq like Babylonia and Assyria, Susa was even farther away in modern day Iran. When Nehemiah traveled from Susa to Jerusalem, it took him three whole months to get there.  That’s one long way away from home! But for most Jews who were alive when Esther was born, Susa or one of the other cities of the Persians was the only home they had ever known. Of course, they had been told stories about Jerusalem but who had even been there in the last hundred years? The Jews, except the poorest, had been forced to walk from Jerusalem about 1300 miles to Babylon. The Prophet Ezekiel told them that they would be there for seventy years and that they needed to settle down, plant gardens, have families and work and pray for the good of the cities they had been moved to. Esther’s grandfather had been one of the men forced to walk all that way and when her parents died, her cousin Mordecai took care of her.

But they lived a strange life as Jews in a foreign land. Their religion was nothing like the religion of the people around them. They worshiped one and only one God: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They didn’t go near the pagan temples or eat the meat from their sacrifices. They didn’t have idols in their homes. They followed the commandments that Moses had given them at Mt Sinai after God had freed His people from slavery. But their grandparents and great-grandparents actually did worship idols and some of them even did it in God’s very own Temple. Their grandmothers cried in the Temple for Tammuz in the hot months of summer, praying for him to come back from the underworld so that the rain would fall again. And they baked unleavened bread not for God but for the Queen of Heaven whom they thought was God’s wife! And the men were bowing down to the sun and when they did that, they were sticking their rear ends in the air toward God’s Temple. So not cool. And they had carved pictures of every creepy crawly thing on the walls of the Temple and were worshiping them too! They even brought idols of other gods into the Temple. One day, after God had warned them for hundreds and hundreds of years, His glory that had always lived in the Holy of Holies just picked up and left and never came back and once He was gone, they were easy pickings for the Babylonian army to come and destroy. And so, they came to live in Babylon, and then in places like Susa and many other cities. When King Cyrus told them that they could go back home to Israel, most stayed right where they were—like Esther and Mordecai’s families. It was very comfortable in Susa and much safer than it was back in Israel, where people struggled to rebuild the walls and the city and the Temple in Jerusalem.

Esther and Mordecai were related to the very first King of Israel—a man named Saul. And God told Saul to go to war with people called the Amalekites, who were very evil and cruel and were always trying to kill them. But when Saul had the chance, he tried to let a King named Agag live. Because God had told him that Agag had to die and Saul had disobeyed, God took His Holy Spirit away from Saul and made someone else king. But without the Holy Spirit, Saul became insane and very dangerous. Although the prophet Samuel obeyed God and killed the wicked king, Agag must have had a son who got away because Esther and Mordecai are going to meet a terrible enemy who is an Agagite, and that means he is a descendant of that wicked King of Amalek, the hated enemies of Israel since they came out of Egypt.

Of course, none of that is Esther or Mordecai’s fault but it’s going to create some very bad problems.

But Esther isn’t the first brave queen that we meet in the book of Esther. The first Queen is not a Jew at all, but a very beautiful woman named Vashti. We don’t really know much of anything about Vashti except for what happened to her when her husband the King threw one big party. You see, the King had been showing off to everyone in all of the Persian Empire, from Africa to India, how rich and powerful and amazing he was for six whole months—half a year. And when he was done with that, he threw a huge party (in his own honor) for everyone who lived in Susa, where his palace was. Rich people, poor people, powerful people, and people who had no power at all. Everyone was invited and they were allowed to eat whatever they wanted to and drink as much wine as they wanted. The party was at his palace and it lasted for seven straight days. And if you don’t know what happens when people drink all the wine they want for seven days, lemme tell you that some people get silly and other people get really mean and other people are falling down. It is not a pretty sight. And people throw up and when they stop drinking they get terrible headaches. So, I want you to think about everyone in the entire city being like this. It’s kind of my nightmare. And they were all invited into the palace, so I would seriously hate to be working there during this party.

And this brave queen, Vashti, was having her own party with just the women who were in the palace. Vashti was special, and pretty, but very few people ever got to see her. She couldn’t go outside the palace to go shopping or get her hair and nails done or buy a new dress or shoes, nor could she have a job or go to school. Nope, everyone came to her. She was protected because it was a very dangerous world and besides, the King believed that only he and the people who worked in the palace should be able to be around her and very few people could actually touch her. Was she a mom? We don’t know if they had any children. Was she a princess from far away or was she born right there in Susa? We don’t know that either. In fact, we don’t know anything about her thoughts or beliefs or how she spent her time. Did she have hobbies, or did she sit around all day being pampered? Could she play musical instruments? Did she have a nice singing voice? What was her favorite color? The Bible doesn’t tell us those kinds of things about, well, just about anyone. That’s not what the Bible is for. The Bible is for us to teach us about God and not about the everyday lives of the people mentioned in it. We learn about God based on how He reacts when people do certain things—whether He is patient or angry or whatever. Mostly, He is just really patient which is a really good thing, or He would have zapped me with a bolt of lightning a long time ago.

Well, she was having her private dinner party with the other ladies while, somewhere else, everyone is totally messed up from drinking wine for seven days straight and her husband, the King, decided that he wanted everyone to see how beautiful she was and so he told her to come to them in her crown so he could show her off. I don’t know about you, but if I were her I would be really scared to do something like that because when people have been drinking too much wine, you never know what they are going to do because people who are drunk are very unpredictable. They aren’t their normal selves because they can’t control themselves like they normally do. Unpredictable is a word that means you just don’t know for sure how they are going to act or exactly what they are going to do. When I was a kid, I had someone in my life like that and I never really felt safe. It’s important for us to always be safe people and to be able to control the things we do. Jesus had wine to drink too, but we never see him acting badly. A little wine is fine, but seven days’ worth of wine is a really bad idea!

So, what did Vashti do when she was told to come to her husband’s party where everyone in the whole city was drunk? She had a very hard decision to make, because no one was allowed to say no to the King but showing up at a party where everyone was drunk was very shameful and she had been taught since she was a small child the importance of never being shamed. Being shamed was very dangerous for a woman, and although her husband wasn’t thinking straight because he was drunk, Vashti knew that what he was asking her to do could ruin her reputation. It was a terrible choice to have to make, but Vashti couldn’t allow herself to be shamed just so her husband could show off. When he wasn’t drunk, he would remember that, and Vashti had to trust that he would be happy that she had disobeyed him because shame to her was also shame to him. In the ancient world, nothing was more important to people than having everyone respect you. And a man’s reputation, even if he was embarrassed for a while, could be fixed again, but not if you were a woman. So, Vashti trusted her husband and said no.

But her husband was a very proud and impulsive man—which will get many people into a lot of trouble as the story continues. To be impulsive means that he often did things without really thinking about the consequences. He was also very easily manipulated and influenced by others—which means that his councilors could get him to do what they wanted him to do. He was angry, and so it was easy for his councilors to convince him that he needed to get rid of Queen Vashti because, if he didn’t, then it would be ruining family life for everyone because every man’s wife would believe that she could say no to him and they didn’t think that a woman should ever be able to say no to a man. About anything! And so, they used what Vashti did to make it so that all women were required to obey their husbands no matter what and that Vashti couldn’t be Queen anymore and could never see the King again. The King was so drunk and angry that he agreed, but after the party was over, he remembered her and regretted it. Unfortunately, any law of Persia couldn’t be undone, and so bad laws were laws forever—which is a really terrible idea. I would really be scared to live in a country where you could never change the laws. I wouldn’t even be able to vote! But there are much worse laws than that which we have had to get rid of and I am grateful they are gone.

But his councilors came up with a plan to get a new queen for the King. It involved sending officers out into all of the 127 provinces, from Africa to India, and taking the beautiful, unmarried young women (teenagers), away from their families and taking them to the harem for the rest of their lives. They would get to live in a fancy place and would have plenty of food and nice clothing but they would never see their families again or have families of their own with a husband or children. And all this so that the King could choose a new queen but the ones who weren’t chosen weren’t ever sent home again. After four years, the King finally chose a young woman named Hadassah, who was also called Esther.

And we’ve already talked a bit about Esther and her cousin Mordecai. Esther was very beautiful and the people who ran the harem where she lived were very impressed with her and they gave her the best room and seven servants and the best food and the best everything. So, she lived there for four years before becoming Queen of Persia. But even after she became queen, she didn’t live a normal life. She couldn’t visit her husband, he had to decide to see her! Did she like her husband? We have no idea. Esther didn’t really have a choice, and he could have her killed anytime he wanted to, so she had to be very careful. Esther’s cousin Mordecai had told her not to let them know that she was Jewish. And that was very wise because if she made the King angry, he might take it out on the Jews in some way. By hiding her identity, Esther protected her people from a king who could be very dangerous.

But because of the hatred between her cousin Mordecai and a powerful man named Haman, a time came when Esther would have to make a difficult choice, just like Vashti.  You see, her cousin had refused to bow down before Haman as he passed through the streets of Susa and although Haman never noticed, someone told him and when he found out that Mordecai was a Jew, a member of the same people who had killed his ancestors, well that made Haman furious and he decided to get revenge. But he didn’t just want Mordecai dead, he wanted every Jew in the Persian Empire—from Africa to India—dead. Some scholars, that’s people who study the historical context of the Bible, think that there were about 750,000 Jews spread out all over the place. Just think about someone who is so ridiculous that he would want to kill that many people just because someone disrespected him! That’s someone who should have never been given power because he is way too touchy and prideful to be trusted with it.

And so, Haman tricked the King with lies about the Jews not being good citizens and being dangerous to his kingdom and the King didn’t even ask who they were or fact check anything but gave Haman permission to just have them all murdered by their neighbors, who would also be allowed to rob their houses and businesses afterward. But God had other plans because when Haman cast lots to figure out when the gods wanted him to do it, he was forced to wait almost an entire year, until the end of winter. Haman was given permission to write a law that gave people the legal power to kill all of their Jewish neighbors and take their stuff. And if you remember, once something was a law in Persia, it couldn’t ever be taken back no matter what. But the King was a very foolish man who chose to trust wicked people and who didn’t stop to think before making terrible decisions. When the law was read in the 127 provinces of Persia, the Jews were terrified and they put on sackcloth and wailed in the streets. This is how people in the ancient world responded when something terrible was happening and especially when someone had died. But now they were all going to die. But God had different plans.

When Esther was told that her cousin was dressed in sackcloth and had covered his head in ashes and was wailing in the streets and at the King’s Gate, she had her servants send him nice clothes and ask what was wrong—because she didn’t know. Remember that she couldn’t leave the palace and was kept away from everything the king was doing. She was shocked and terrified when she found out that in eleven months, her people were all going to be killed! Mordecai told Esther that she had to do something to stop it, and that this must be why she was made Queen of Persia. But Esther was scared because her husband the king was gathering more young girls and he hadn’t seen her in a month—Esther knew that he was probably thinking of replacing her with someone else. Maybe Esther couldn’t have any babies. They had been married for quite a few years now but he had already gotten rid of one queen and Esther knew that she might be next. Also, she wasn’t allowed to go see the king just anytime she wanted to. If she went to him and he got angry, he could have her killed on the spot. He had to take his scepter and hold it out to her to welcome her. But he wasn’t interested in seeing her anymore, so she knew he would probably just have her killed. But she asked Mordecai to have all of the Jews fast for three days—no food and no water. Fasting is a way of humbling ourselves before God, it is a form of prayer, showing God that we are completely in His hands. And so, all of the Jews in Susa did this for three days.

On the third day, Esther had her servants prepare a great feast for three people and she put on her best clothes and went before the king. It was the first time she had seen him in a month so she didn’t know how he felt about her anymore. She was surprised when he held out his scepter to her and welcomed her to come closer. He asked her what she wanted and told her that he would give her up to half the Kingdom. Wow, when God wants to give someone favor, which means that He makes it so that people like us and want to do things to help us or even just so that they will listen to us, He really knows how to give us favor in a big way. But Esther didn’t ask for anything for herself. She only asked that the King would join her for a feast in his honor and that he would bring Haman as well. Now, that might shock you that she asked for the enemy of her people to come but she had a very smart plan. So, they came to her quarters and ate and drank with her and her husband the King asked again what she wanted, that he would give her just about anything. And she surprised him by asking him to come again tomorrow, and then she would tell him what it was that she wanted.

It was like the best day ever for Haman because in those days, inviting someone to eat with you meant that you were honoring them and showing them that you think they are important. It was an incredible honor—he worked for the King, but the Queen chose him to have a feast with when she was almost never around men at all unless they were servants. And so he went home and bragged about it to everyone. But then something happened that made Haman very angry and that’s when things started going very wrong for him—and it is a funny story that I will teach you next year—but he showed up at Esther’s second feast the next day as planned, even though he had been having the worst day ever—but it was about to get a lot worse. As they were feasting, the King asked Esther what she wanted, and again promised her up to half the Kingdom. And that was when Esther begged the King not to have her killed. The King was surprised and angry when she told him that there was a law that was written that gave everyone in the Kingdom permission to kill every Jew in all of the territories of Persia. Shockingly, the King was clueless about who had done this even though he had been the one who gave permission for Haman to write that law and even gave Haman his signet ring so he could make the law official—as if the King had written it himself. This shows us how careless and thoughtless the King was that he didn’t even remember what he had agreed to!

And so, he demanded that Esther tell him who on earth had come up with such an evil plan—and she pointed at Haman and said it was him. The King was so angry that he had been tricked into a plan that would kill his own wife, and the man who had saved his life years earlier—her cousin Mordecai, that he stormed out into her gardens and when he did, Haman was so panicked that he went to Esther and begged her to have mercy and spare his life but he made a terrible mistake. He flopped himself down on the couch where Esther was reclining and that was a huge no-no. No man could touch the Queen unless that man was a special type of servant who was sworn to protect and serve her. Any other man who touched the Queen was guilty of treason and when the King came back and saw Haman with the Queen, he accused him of trying to harm her. And then it got even worse because Harbona, one of the servants of the King, told him that Haman had built a gallows so that he could hang her cousin Mordecai, who had saved the Kings life. The King told Harbona to hang Haman on his own gallows.

When the King calmed down, he gave Esther everything that had belonged to Haman and he gave her cousin Mordecai Haman’s job. But the problem wasn’t over yet because there was still a law giving everyone in the Kingdom permission to kill the Jews and rob them. And the law couldn’t be taken back. So Esther and Mordecai worked together to come up with a plan that gave the Jews permission to fight back against anyone who wanted to hurt them, and that they could do to those people what would have been done to the Jews. And on the day that they would have been destroyed, the 13^th of the month of Adar, they instead were able to defeat all of their enemies—but they didn’t take anything that belonged to them. The Jews were saved and so there is a great celebration on the 15^th of Adar to celebrate what God did for them, and they called it Purim.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to remember that Esther’s God is your God too, and He loves you a whole lot more than I do.

Everyone is talking about Baby Jesus now, all over the world, but what you may not know is that God just loves to do things through “impossible” babies who couldn’t have even been born without God working incredible miracles. So, this week we are going to look at Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Samson, Samuel, and John the Baptist to see how God makes impossible things possible and especially through the greatest miracle baby of all—Jesus!

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another 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.

(Parents, all Scripture comes from the Miss Tyler Version (MTV) which is the Christian Standard Bible rephrased so that it is easier for kids to understand).

This time of year, people all over the world are talking about baby Jesus, right? And, of course, Jesus was a miracle baby but even though He is absolutely the greatest miracle ever born in the history of—well, everything. He isn’t the first miracle baby but every single miracle baby in the Bible points us closer and closer to Jesus in one way or another. According to the Bible, Isaac was a miracle, and so was his son Jacob, and Jacob’s son Joseph, and Samson the strong man, Samuel the Prophet, John the Baptist, and Jesus—for a grand total of seven miracle babies who all went on to do great things for God and for all of us. Of course, every baby is a miracle, but some babies are miracles because their births are just flat out and downright impossible but happened anyway. They happened because nothing is impossible for God, and He loves to do things to just get our attention when he’s about to do something wonderful.

We will be getting back to the story of Abram and Sarai next week but this week we are going to take a sneak peek at the story of their son Isaac when Abraham was one hundred years old and Sarah was ninety! Dude, just no! When we adopted our twins, I was almost thirty-two and my husband was thirty-four and we thought we were gonna die from being so tired. If I was ninety, I definitely would have. Now, we have already seen that Abram and Sarai have a terrible problem—Sarah can’t have babies and they are super old, even older than me. Without a son they will be in big trouble as they get really older, and so they are kinda depending on their nephew Lot to take care of them but that’s not going to work out, and then they try to adopt Eliezer of Damascus, one of the slaves born into their household, but then God puts the stop to that and says, “Nope, Abram, you are going to have a kid so stop trying to make all of this work out by yourself. Seriously man, I do not need your help because you will just mess it up.” And then Abram and Sarai messed it up, but we will talk about that some other time. One day, three angels came to visit them and as Abram was feeding them meat and curds and bread, one of them told Abraham that when they would come back again next year, Sarah would have a baby. God had given them both new names at this point because it was part of His promise to make them parents.

Well, imagine if you will, a ninety-year-old lady in her tent making food for visitors and hearing that she was finally going to have a baby. She was laughing to herself and thinking, like, “Oh yeah sure, I couldn’t even have a baby when I was young enough to have a baby and it’s going to happen this year? Sure, whatever there, guys.” Imagine her shock when God, who was speaking through the Angel of the Lord, responded to what she was thinking in secret and asked why she was laughing and why she didn’t think God could make something like that happen! And she panicked and denied it but God was like, “Oh yeah, you were totally laughing.” And what’s even more amazing is that God had appeared to Abraham a few days before and told him that their son would be named Isaac, which actually means laughter. Isaac was the very first “son of promise” in the Bible and he was born so that God would be able to say that He made Israel out of absolutely nothing because Isaac shouldn’t have even been born in real life but with God all things are possible!

But Isaac’s wife, Rebekah, couldn’t have babies either. Not for twenty whole years! Isaac prayed and God finally remembered Rebekah and she became pregnant not with one miracle baby but with two! And like two other twin boys that I could mention, they were fighting like cats and dogs inside her and she was like, “What the heck is even going on here?” Because she was a prophetess, she asked God what was happening with these kids, and He told her that she didn’t just have two babies inside her but two babies who were so different that they would become entirely different nations! And that wouldn’t really have been positive news, plus the younger one would be greater than the older one, which is not how things used to work in the ancient world. Nope, oldest brother gets to be the boss of everyone but we’re going to begin to see that even though humans cared about who the oldest son was, God pretty much didn’t. He would choose the youngest or middle son all the time just because He chooses who He wants to choose. Esau was born first, before Jacob, but that didn’t mean God had to choose him for the special job of being the father of the Twelve tribes.

And when Jacob grew up, he married a woman named Rachel, and she couldn’t have any babies either and things got pretty desperate. When she finally did have a baby, things got messy because they treated Joseph better than all of Jacob’s other sons put together from his other wife, who were all a heck of a lot older. But even though his parents played favorites and made the other kids jealous and angry enough to want to kill him (for real), Joseph really was very special, and God helped him no matter what terrible things happened to him. His brothers threw him into a pit and were going to either kill him or leave him for dead, and some Ishmaelite traders just happened to pass by in the middle of nowhere and they sold Joseph into slavery in Egypt, and then Joseph ended up in jail when someone lied about him, but then one day he ended up as the second in command of all of Egypt, the mightiest empire of all in those days! Joseph was the second most powerful man in the world and God used him to save not only his own family when there was a terrible famine, but all of Egypt as well.

Many hundreds of years later, there was a boy born to a childless couple in Israel and his name was Samson and although God used Samson to help the people of Israel against their enemies, that boy was a mess and he was always doing the worst sorts of things. Samson was not a great example but when we look at his story it can surprise us when God uses even people who are super messed up and disobedient if He wants to. And Samson was incredibly strong, and God used him to get back at the Philistines for being so cruel to His people. Just think of what Samson could have accomplished if he hadn’t been such a gooberhead, right? Samson is proof that God doesn’t necessarily approve of people just because they are doing stuff for Him.

One of my favorite miracle babies is the prophet Samuel. Mostly because I just love his mom Hannah, but he also totally rocks. Samuel’s mom was married to a guy who had two wives and the other wife had a ton of kids and she was really mean to Hannah, who had been married for a long time but had no kids at all. So not only was Hannah really sad, but the woman who had what she wanted more than anything else in the world was constantly bullying her about it and saying awful things. But that woman didn’t know that God was responsible for Hannah not having any babies and not because He hated her! Hannah went to Shiloh during a festival and was praying so hard and so quietly that the High Priest thought that she wasn’t quite in her right mind at the time and yelled at her. But she had been praying very quietly for a baby and she had promised God that if He would give her a son that she would dedicate him to God’s service for his entire life—and that he would never cut his hair! When she told him that she was just praying, Eli asked God to give her what it was she was asking for.

When Hannah had a baby, she sang a song to the Lord about how happy she was and I bet her husband’s other wife didn’t really enjoy any of it or start dancing. Hannah kept her promise and when Samuel was just a small boy he lived in Shiloh, even sleeping in the Holy Place where the Lamp of God was. God called out to him one night and Samuel thought it was the High Priest Eli calling him, because he was old and blind. After Eli had told him to go back to bed a couple of times, he realized that God was calling Samuel and told him to answer, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’ Samuel did as he was told and, that very night, God made him a prophet and told him things about the future of Israel. The Bible tells us that everything Samuel said in the Name of the Lord happened just as he said it would, and that God kept appearing at Shiloh to Samuel and that everyone knew Samuel was a prophet who spoke faithfully everything that God told him to say. Samuel was the first person whom God told about Saul becoming king, and David too. He was the very last of the judges that God sent to Israel and he served God all his life. Not only that but unlike the other miracle babies, he has two books of the Bible named after him! Pretty impressive! But after Samuel, God didn’t give the nation of Israel a miracle baby for a very long time. Israel had a lot of kings, some good and some bad, and a lot of priests, some good and some bad, and a lot of prophets—but no more miracle babies given as a sign from God. Not for about a thousand years, actually, and that’s a super long time to go without that kind of a special sign from God!

But that all changed when the wicked Herod the Great was the King over all of Israel, set over the Jews by the Romans to keep them in line. Herod was kinda Jewish. His grandfather had been forced to become a Jew along with all of the other people who lived in Edom, but he also killed three of his own kids and his favorite wife. Dang, if that’s how you treat your favorite wife then what is going to happen to all the other ones? He had ten wives in all and so they probably went to sleep with one eye open hoping that he wouldn’t kill them or their kids! The Emperor of Rome was a man named Caesar Augustus, who was called “the son of god”—oh yeah, they went there and they did that and people said that he brought peace to the entire world (by killing people who got in his way), and that he was the savior and that he was “good news” to the world! If you have read Luke chapter 2 where it talks about what the angel told the shepherds about Jesus? Yeah, that’s what the Romans said about their Emperor, their king. Of course, God couldn’t just let them do something like that, right? Nope.

So, He made not one, but two miracle babies in one year! Wow, God really meant business and wanted to prove that He, and not Rome, was in charge of peace and good news for the world. So first, He sent His angel Gabriel to an old priest named Zechariah who was serving at the Temple and had been chosen for the very special job of placing incense (which is like perfume, only it isn’t a liquid) on the Golden Altar inside the Temple. It was such a special job that you were only allowed to do it once in your life and they chose the people through a kind of a lottery—which I explained on my radio show for grownups this week. But while he was in there, all of a sudden, a man in white appears beside the altar and Zechariah just freaks out, like anyone would, and the man says, “Don’t be afraid, Zechariah, God has been listening and he has heard your prayers so your wife Elizabeth is finally going to have a baby and you will name him John. He’s going to be a prophet even before he is born, and he will be like Elijah because he’s going to make people ready for the Lord!” Instead of saying, “YES! Finally!” or “Thank You God!” He asked for a sign to prove it—which is what, “How can I know this?” means. And Gabriel was not amused and replied (and parents, just FYI, I am taking a lot of artistic liberties with the conversation), “Maybe you missed it but I am Gabriel, the Gabriel from the book of Daniel, that Gabriel. I actually stand in the presence of God and He sent me to tell you all of this—that’s how you know and why this should have just been good news. So, listen, because you asked for a sign, you won’t be able to talk about this to anyone until it’s all a done deal, and you won’t be able to even hear anyone asking you about it.”

And so that was the last thing Zechariah heard until the day his son got named when he was eight days old. Gave him a long time to think about it, right? So, he couldn’t tell anyone what had happened even though they figured that he must have had a vision from God while he was in the Temple, but he went home and a miracle happened! Elizabeth, who was also very old, found out that she was going to have a baby! And she hid herself away in her house for five whole months, not wanting anyone to know yet. And around that same time, God decided it was the perfect time to make His last and greatest miracle baby. So, again He sent Gabriel with the news to a young teenage girl who was engaged to be married. Would she ask for a sign? Or would she just be happy? Gabriel appeared to her and said, “Hello! God is really happy with you and wants to do something amazing in your life! Don’t be afraid of me, God sent me to tell you that you are going to have a son and you will name him Jesus! He will be the greatest man to ever live and will be called the Son of God and He will a king just like your ancestor David, except He will be King forever!”

What would Mary say? “I don’t understand how this is going to happen because I am not married yet.” Mary didn’t ask for a sign, she was just curious! She was probably just fourteen or fifteen years old but she gave a much better answer than Zechariah, who had been serving God forever and was a very righteous man. Gabriel must have liked her question because he answered it and angels don’t always answer questions in the Bible. He said that God was going to send His Holy Spirit and that she would have a baby who wasn’t like any other baby ever born, because that baby would come from the power of God. “Your relative Elizabeth, right now she is six months pregnant, but she hasn’t told anyone yet! See? God can do anything!”

Mary was excited and happy and said, “I will do whatever God wants me to do, let this happen just as you have promised.” Gabriel left her and Mary traveled to see her relative Elizabeth in Judea, it was a long trip from Galilee, but she was very excited and since Elizabeth was old and having a baby (she was probably about the same age as me), she would need all the help she could get until the baby was born. It wouldn’t have been hard to convince her parents to send her, after all, Zechariah and Elizabeth were righteous people, and they would take good care of her while she was there. When Mary arrived at their home, she shouted a happy hello to Elizabeth and the baby inside Elizabeth started jumping around. All of a sudden, the Holy Spirit of God gave Elizabeth so many things to say to young Mary, who wasn’t going to look like she was having a baby for quite a few more months. “You are the most blessed woman who has ever lived, and your child is the most blessed! I can’t believe that the mother of my Lord has come to visit me! When I heard you say hello, this baby jumped inside me! You are so blessed that you believed everything God said He would do for you!”

And Mary, she started singing about how generous and merciful and wonderful God is to remember His people and to use her even though she was just a nobody in the eyes of all the world, just a poor girl from a tiny village in the Galilee. Mary stayed and helped Elizabeth until after she had her baby, which Elizabeth was probably thrilled about because Zechariah wasn’t all that good for conversation anymore, but he was a good listener these days and never argued with her. When John was eight days old, and another priest was performing his circumcision ceremony, all their friends and relatives tried to name the child Zechariah, after his father, but Elizabeth said, “Nope, his name is John!” So, they said to her, “Um, no, none of our relatives have John for a name, so you can’t do that!” And so, they tried to get Zechariah to change her mind by motioning to him and playing something like charades, I suppose, but Zechariah got a wax writing tablet and carved the words, “No. His Name is John.” And as he showed them the tablet, all of a sudden, he could hear again and his mouth opened and he started speaking amazing words about his son John and all the things that God had planned for him—everything he had been wanting to say for nine long months, I suppose! He had a lot on his mind, for sure! He said things not only about his son but also about Jesus, that the Messiah would come at last and save all of Israel! And that John would be God’s prophet who would teach the people about how to get right with God, how to repent for their sins, so that when the Messiah came to them, the long-awaited King (they had been waiting almost six hundred years actually!), that they would be ready for Him. And everyone all over Israel heard of it and they were all asking one another, “What kind of man will this child become??”

When Mary went home, it became obvious to her fiancé Joseph that she was pregnant, and he wasn’t happy about it. He didn’t understand what had happened and after praying about it a long time, he decided not to be married to her but didn’t want to make trouble for her either. He was a very good man. And an angel of the Lord came to him and told him not to be worried about it because Mary’s baby was direct from God and that Joseph was supposed to name Him Jesus (Yeshua in Hebrew, which means “God saves”). Joseph was a righteous and wonderful man and married Mary right away and brought her home, but then a call came out from the government for everyone to travel to where their family-owned land so that they could be counted. They did this so that the Romans would know how much tax money they thought they deserved to get out of them. Mary was very pregnant, but the Romans didn’t care, and she and Joseph traveled to Bethlehem, the city of David, near Jerusalem. No relatives would take them in and so they were forced to spend the night where the animals were kept and when Jesus was born, Mary wrapped him in cloths like all newborns had always been wrapped in—whether they were born in a palace or in a tent.

As that was happening, there were shepherds out in the fields with their flocks and it was nighttime. Suddenly, an angel appeared to them and told them about the birth of Jesus! And they were about blinded by God’s glory shining all around them, which just made them so afraid. The very happy angel comforted them and said, “Don’t be afraid! Listen to me! I have come to tell you good news of great joy for all the people on earth:Today in the city of David a Savior was born for you. He is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be the sign for you: You will find a baby wrapped tightly in cloth and lying in a feeding trough.” And the angels all gathered and began to sing in celebration, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and peace on earth to the people He is showing His love and mercy to!” They shepherds might have even said, “Did you hear that? The angel of God said all those things about this baby that the Romans say about Caesar, but we know that there is no good news for us with Caesar as our king! Let’s go straight to Bethlehem and find this child who was born around the animals and not in a palace in Jerusalem!”

And so they went and found Mary and Joseph and Jesus just as the angel said. And they told them everything that happened. The Bible tells us that Mary stored everything they said in her heart and thought about it a lot, while the shepherds went back to their jobs, celebrating all the way back and praising God that the Messiah had finally arrived! I hope you enjoyed hearing about all the miracle babies. I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope you learned a lot today about our God and how He just loves to make impossible things possible.

What if the Maccabees never stood up to Antiochus Epiphanes? What if they had lost the war? What if Mary and Joseph had never been born or they had been raised as pagans? Thousands of things could have gone wrong, but fortunately, Hannukah is the story of how things happened in such a way as to make sure that Jesus, our Savior, was born!

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another 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.

(Parents, all Scripture comes from the Miss Tyler Version (MTV) which is from the Christian Standard Bible rephrased so that it is easier for kids to understand).

I’ve told you before that without Abraham and Sarah, there would be no Jesus but what you might not know is that without Hannukah there wouldn’t be a Jesus either! About a hundred and sixty years before he was born, there were terrible things going on and any one of them could have make Jesus’s birth impossible but thank God, the Jewish people were delivered from their troubles so that Jesus, the true light of the world, could be born. Last week I told you some of what happened and why it is so important for us to always be loyal to God and not to any wicked person who wants us to follow him (or her) instead. This week, we are going to tell two “what if” stories about how things could have gone wrong in ways that would have meant that either Jesus was never born or that, if He was, his family would have been idol worshipers, or maybe he just wouldn’t have been able to preach about our God at all. Many of the sages who studied the Bible were believing that the time of the Messiah was coming soon and that He would overthrow their enemies, and if they knew then I believe that Satan knew it too and would do whatever it took so that the Messiah would never come.

Let’s try our first “what if” story: A long time ago, in the Land of Judea, the Jews were living rather peacefully in their homeland, which had been given to their ancestors by God. It was His special holy land, and in the middle of it there was the great city of Jerusalem and above Jerusalem stood a beautiful platform on a mountain, surrounded by tall walls and atop the platform was a magnificent Temple. People traveled from all over the known world to worship God in this place and celebrate His festivals, from as far away as Babylonia in the east, Alexandria to the South, and Rome in the west. Wherever they ended up in the world, the Jews would dream of visiting the Temple at least once in their lifetimes.

But these people, although they loved God as their king, were ruled by a Greek king named Antiochus Epiphanes. He was a very wicked and greedy man, and so when the brother of the high priest offered him a lot of money so that he could be the High Priest, King Antiochus gladly took the money and made that man Jason the priest instead. And Jason immediately started changing Jerusalem to a city that was more and more Greek. He put in a gymnasium where men played games and worked out and competed in sports completely naked—and I can’t even imagine why. Whenever I think about it, I get the giggles and I can hardly stop laughing. But I guess they thought it was cool. Just no. And Jason made changes to how the city was being run so that it could be a lot more like a Greek city politically and a lot less like a Jewish city. And the odd thing is that people didn’t seem to complain very much but then, when a man named Menelaus decided he wanted to be the High Priest, he gave king Antiochus even more money. And that’s when things got really bad, as we saw last week. But Antiochus Epiphanes thought the changes were great—he liked it that pigs were being sacrificed to his gods (and especially Zeus) instead of the God of the Jews on the altar of His beautiful temple.

The king sent representatives to all the towns and cities of Judea in order to force the Jews to make sacrifices to the Greek gods instead of to the one true God. Menelaus had already sacrificed a pig on the altar of God, ruining it forever, but now they were building new altars all over God’s holy land and trying to force the Jews to serve other gods. Now, you know that the commandments say that we can’t have any other gods and that we can’t make idols or serve any other gods or make sacrifices to them. Some other commandments sometimes we have to make exceptions, like we would all work on the Sabbath to save someone who had fallen into a well, right? Of course, we would. But there is never a good reason to serve other gods, no matter what. But that’s exactly what the king was trying to force them to do. Plus, he didn’t want them keeping God’s other commandments either! And the king’s officers were killing people whom they were catching serving God, and even killing little babies—just like Pharaoh. Now, here’s where the story is going to change to a ”what if.” You know, as if all that wasn’t quite bad enough!

And the king’s officers went to the town of Modein, and they built an altar in town and then brought an old priest named Mattathias in front of everyone and promised him money and power if he would just offer up a pig to the Greek gods on the altar they had built. Now, Mattathias knew that they had killed everyone who said no, and he thought about his wife and his five sons and his grandchildren and all the people in the town. He didn’t want them to suffer and die and what difference would it really make if he went ahead and made the sacrifice anyway? He was sad but he went ahead and took his slaughtering knife and cut the pig’s throat, put the blood on the sides of the altar and burnt the body as a sacrifice to the gods of the Greeks. And then his sons and everyone else in town did too because they respected Mattathias—after all, he was a priest and their leader, one of their elders who decided what to do when people had problems.

As the story got out, more and more of the people in the small towns made offerings on the pagan altars and the ones who didn’t were killed. Pretty soon, people were just too scared to resist anything the Greek king wanted and they found that it was easier to live in the Greek ways of life than to live as Jews. The Greeks built amphitheaters and hippodromes in the cities, gymnasiums and temples to every god and goddess that they worshiped. They learned to like pork and because the pigs grew big and fat quick and would eat absolutely anything, that they could have meat a lot more often, and found that they could make more money if they worked on the Sabbath. After about fifty years, no one could even tell that they used to be Jews because everyone who kept God’s commandments was dead or hiding, and those who weren’t, felt safe and thought that living as Greeks was absolutely normal. Most of the Jewish families were allowing their sons and daughters to marry the pagans around them too. All the Torah scrolls had been burned, the priests were all either dead, or hiding, or serving at the Temple of Zeus up on Mt Zion. There was no war to drive out the Greeks, the Temple was never cleansed, and when the Romans came to power a hundred years later and they took over Judea and Galilee, there weren’t any more faithful Jewish families. Maybe Mary’s family had all been killed, and Joseph’s too, or maybe they were just ordinary people living as Greeks in their Greek towns. Jesus couldn’t be born into a pagan family and so Jesus couldn’t be born there and then at all.

What if Joseph and Mary’s families both went into hiding and remained faithful to God. Well, that would be great but then who would Jesus have to preach to? The Romans would probably still be in charge by the time Jesus was born, but Jesus’s ministry was almost entirely about teaching the Jews about the Kingdom of God and how it would be different than the sages had thought it would be. If they didn’t know the Torah, then what Jesus was saying wouldn’t have made all that much sense to them. Things wouldn’t have been the same, that’s for sure. Jesus might have gone from hiding place to hiding place preaching about the Kingdom of Heaven, but would the Jews have really wanted to hear about a God who wanted to forgive the Greeks and the Romans who had forced them into hiding for two hundred years? Probably not because they didn’t even want that when Jesus really did preach two thousand years ago. Most people, no matter who they are, don’t really like to hear that God loves the people who have been mean to them and wants them to be His people too. That’s just how we are and so God needs to change our hearts.

What if Mattathias hadn’t made the sacrifice but his sons and the other people in the village didn’t run off into the wilderness with him? What if they had all died in battle? What if they had never gotten Jerusalem or the Temple back from the Greeks? You know what? There are probably a thousand “what ifs” that could have happened and if they had, there would be no Jesus, no Cross, and we would all be in huge trouble. Now, of course, we can also say that God would have made sure that Jesus happened some way or another and maybe the Jews from Babylon or Alexandria or elsewhere would have returned and God could have used them—but Hannukah is part of the story about how God did make it happen with the Jews who had faithfully returned to the Land when God told them to after King Cyrus of the Persians let them leave Babylon. Without Hannukah, our Jesus story in the Gospels would be very different. Hannukah is the celebration of rebuilding that altar and dedicating the Temple back to God and relighting the Menorah. That Menorah was always lit, day and night, so you could always see the Temple on Mt Zion as the light from the seven lamps on the Menorah flowed through the high windows, so that the Temple could be the light of the world. Josephus tells us that Hannukah was called the Festival of Lights, because when all seemed to be lost, God’s salvation of the Jewish people shined like a light in the darkness. And Jesus knew about Hannukah, as we will see in the Gospel of John, Chapter 10:22-30:

Then the Festival of Hannukah took place in Jerusalem, and it was winter. Jesus was walking in the temple in Solomon’s Colonnade. The Jews surrounded him and asked, “How long are you going to keep us hanging? If you are the Messiah, just tell us already.” “I did tell you and you didn’t believe me,” Jesus replied. “The things that I do in my Father’s name tell you absolutely everything you need to know about me. But you don’t believe what you see because you are not my sheep. My sheep hear my voice, I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, so that they will live forever. No one can take them from me. My Father has given them to me, and He is greater than anyone or anything else. No one is able to take them out of the Father’s hand. My Father and I are one.”

So, we see that Jesus is in Jerusalem celebrating the Festival of Hannukah with many other Jews. And they had really been wondering about who He was and if He was the Messiah—and of course He was! But especially at Hannukah, they wondered about the Messiah because even though their ancestors had kicked the Greeks to the curb, now they were ruled by the Roman Empire—which was a lot better in some ways but still, they wanted their own government and to be able to just live according to the Bible. Rome mostly left them alone, but when Rome got mean, they got really mean. Pontius Pilate was a terrible bully and a very cruel man. No one really likes to have someone ruling over them from a long way away and especially when they don’t share the same religion or values. The Roman Empire thought that Roman citizens were the best, and that everyone else was not as important. Roman citizens had special rights and privileges that no one else had. If you weren’t a Roman citizen then you were in big trouble if something bad happened because they wouldn’t even remotely care about treating you fairly. In a lot of ways, it was like living in America during the days of Jim Crow laws and segregation where white people were pretty much allowed to do anything they wanted to people who were black. It was a dangerous time for Jesus to be alive, for sure.

Because the Jews hated the Roman Empire so much (can you really blame them?), they were waiting for and dreaming about a Messiah who would kill all the Romans, kick them out of Israel, and make Israel a great Kingdom like in the days of Solomon or John Hyrcanus. Many were hoping that Jesus was that man, and if He was, they wanted to know it as soon as possible. And so, at Hannukah, when they were celebrating their victory over the Greeks by kicking them out of the Temple and the city of Jerusalem and driving them out of the country, they all had one thing on their mind—when would they be able to get rid of the Romans like their ancestors got rid of the Greeks? There were probably a lot of people talking about Jesus the miracle worker, and wondering if maybe He was the one. John the Baptist, before he died, sure made it sound like Jesus was the Messiah. Why was Jesus going around preaching and casting out demons but not saying anything about the Romans? Who was He, really, and what were His plans for the future? Did you know that they couldn’t even openly celebrate Hannukah because the Romans didn’t like them having a festival that was about the Jews rebelling against a foreign Empire. The Romans were very paranoid and they didn’t even like large groups gathering together at all, so they had to be sneaky and not admit why they were celebrating. If the Romans knew the true cause of the celebration, they might figure the Jews were planning another rebellion.

And so, they gathered around Jesus and asked, “How long are you going to keep us hanging? If you are the Messiah, just tell us already.” and it was a very good question. They were so tired of the Romans and all the trouble they had brought with them. They were tired of the soldiers in their cities and the soldiers in the Tower that attached to the corner of the Temple Mount, the fortress Antonia—can you imagine soldiers from another country hanging around just outside your church? Wouldn’t it make you feel weird and not very safe? They were tired of wondering and now, at the festival that celebrated the overthrow of their enemies, they were going to get an answer. What would Jesus tell them? “I did tell you and you didn’t believe me,” wow, how do you think they would respond to that answer? He hadn’t said anything about being the Messiah, never came right out and said, “Yep, I’m the Messiah, all right. I’m here.” He told them something that they didn’t want to hear—that who He was and what He was, well, He was already showing them by absolutely everything He did.

And that made them angry and they wanted to hurt him—Jesus wasn’t who they wanted Him to be. And when Jesus said that He and God were one, boy howdy that made them really angry and they went and got rocks to throw them at Him and try to kill Him. Jesus asked them exactly what He had done to make them want to kill Him. He asked, “I have done so many good things for you that my Father wanted me to do, which ones are you wanting to kill me for?” And they said, “We aren’t trying to kill you for anything good you have done! You just made yourself equal with God! You’re nothing but a normal man and that’s blasphemy!” That might be a new word for you—blasphemy—so we’re going to talk about it. Blasphemy comes from a Greek word that means slander—and there are a few different ways to slander someone. One way is to say things about someone that are wrong and mean, or being disrespectful, or saying something terrible about God or something that belongs to God. One time, God told the Edomites that they were blaspheming the mountains of Israel by saying that they were going to they were going to take them for themselves. They thought that God’s Holy Land was just theirs if they wanted it but God took that as an insult. Nobody does anything with His Land unless He allows it and He wasn’t letting them have it and He didn’t want them to have it. The Jews at the Festival of Hannukah were angry because Jesus was making it sound like He was God and that made them furious. But Jesus was pretty much saying, “Could I do all of these good things if they didn’t come straight from God?” Fortunately, Jesus escaped before they could kill Him because they were really angry.

Why was Jesus at the Temple at Hannukah? Why was Jesus at the Temple for Passover, Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles? He was there because whenever anything tells us about Jesus or points to Him, He is always there. But sometimes people think that Jesus shouldn’t have been at Hannukah but I think that Jesus is especially there at that time because I believe that was when the angel Gabriel came to His mother Mary to tell her that she was going to have a very special baby:

When Elizabeth had been pregnant for six months, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man named Joseph, who was descended from all the kings of the House of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And the angel came to her and said, “Greetings, favored woman! The Lord is with you.” But she was very confused about what he was saying, wondering why he said that to her and what it meant. Then the angel told her, “Don’t be scared, Mary, because God is pleased with you and has chosen you for something special. Now listen carefully to me: You will be pregnant and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will make Him a King just like His ancestor David. He will be the King of the Jews forever, and the whole world will be His Kingdom.”

Mary asked the angel, “How can this happen, since I am not married yet?” The angel replied to her, “The Holy Spirit will come to you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So, your holy child will be called the Son of God. Just think about your relative Elizabeth—she is very old but even she is having a son, and even though she has never been able to have a baby, she is six months pregnant. Nothing is impossible with God.” Mary answered, “I am willing to do this, I am the Lord’s servant. I want this to happen to me just as you said it would!” Then the angel left her. (Luke 1:26-38 )

Wow! Maybe this is why Jesus told the people that He was the light of the world when He was celebrating the Feast of Tabernacles in the Fall. A lot of people think that Jesus was born in the fall even though most people in the world celebrate His birthday in December or January. The truth is that we really don’t know for certain what day He was born because the Bible doesn’t say anything about it. All we know is that when He was born, all of the angels came and sang and praised God because they were so happy. Up to that point in the whole history of the world, Jesus being born was the most important thing that had ever happened. All of the prophets had been talking about a child who would be born who would be called Immanuel, God with us, and that’s who Jesus is. Jesus is God walking on earth with us and so everything that Jesus said and did was showing us exactly what God is like—that’s why Jesus said at the Festival of Hannukah that He and the Father were one, the same. And they got angry because they didn’t understand. Honestly, it is hard to understand! And so, when the angels saw that the promises of the prophets were beginning to come true, and they knew that the curses in the Garden were all about to be undone, they were more excited than we can possibly imagine. But the angels weren’t the only ones at that party:

In that same area, shepherds were staying out in the fields and watching over the sheep all night. Then an angel of the Lord stood in front of them, and the glory of the Lord was shining all around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Don’t be afraid, because I am bringing you good news of great joy that will be for everyone in the world: Today in Bethlehem a Savior was born for you. He is the Messiah, the Lord. This is how you will know it is Him: You will find a baby wrapped tightly in cloth and lying in a manger.” Suddenly there was a multitude of God’s angels along with the angel, praising God and saying: Glory to God in the highest heaven, and peace on earth to people he favors.” (Luke 2:8-14)

I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope you have a wonderful Festival of Lights and that learning about Hannukah has taught you a lot more about Jesus.

We are taking a break for the next two weeks to talk about the celebration that made the birth of Jesus possible! That’s right—the Feast of Dedication aka Hannukah. This week we’ll talk about the importance of being loyal to God no matter what! Next week, I will explain why there is no Jesus without Hannukah!

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another 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.

(Parents, all Scripture comes from the Miss Tyler Version (MTV) which is from the Christian Standard Bible or from the KJV Apocrypha rephrased so that it is easier for kids to understand).

Now, I did a video series about Hannukah years ago, so I am not going to do a lot of history on it. But I do want to talk about the lessons of Hannukah and the first lesson is loyalty. You see, the only reason Hannukah ever happened in the first place was because the Jewish people living in the Land of Israel were being told to change their loyalty from God to a wicked Emperor named Antiochus Epiphanes. But I do need to go back a bit to give you some context. In 586 BCE, the city of Jerusalem and the Temple that Solomon built were both finally destroyed, and all of the treasures of the city and Temple were taken away to a place called Babylon. Not only that, but all except the very poorest of the people were too—they were left behind to keep doing the farming. Lucky them, eh? They got to stay home while all the rich and educated people were forced to walk from Judah to Babylon. That probably took at least three months—can you even imagine? And it wasn’t like they got to take their stuff because they were exiles and refugees. They were people who no longer had a home.

About fifty years later, the king Cyrus the Great took over the Babylonian Empire, which became a part of the Medo-Persian Empire and Cyrus allowed whoever among the Jews who wanted to go back home, the opportunity to leave. Not many did though, which is very sad because it made it much harder for the ones who did go home to rebuild the walls and the city and the Temple and to grow enough food. The people who were living in the land since they left made it really hard for them to do those things. Then, about two hundred years later, Alexander the Great took over the Holy Land without even firing a shot. In fact, he was welcomed at the city gates of Jerusalem by the most prominent men among the Jews. They were tired of being ruled by the Persians and figured that they had nothing to lose—besides, if they tried to resist they would have mostly ended up dead. Because they surrendered and welcomed him, Alexander was very happy and treated them well and allowed them to just live as they wanted. But then something bad happened. Alexander died a short time later and his Kingdom was divided between his four generals who all set themselves up as kings. For a long time, two of those Kingdoms, the Seleucids and the Ptolemies, fought over who would have control over the Holy Land.

Of course, they didn’t want it because it was holy, they wanted it because no one could do business between Africa and Asia unless they went through the Holy Land and that meant there was a lot of money to be made. Whoever controlled what is now called “the sacred bridge” (aka the Land of Israel) controlled almost all trade in the world as they knew it. Trade is a word that means the business that countries do with one another. Remember that Egypt made papyrus and grew wheat, and everyone wanted it. Some countries mined gold, silver and jewels and others bred cows and sheep and goats. Others specialized in spices. But anyone who wanted to do business in Egypt, or if Egypt wanted to do business with Asia or Europe—they needed control of that land or they would be taxed like crazy (made to pay extra money to get their goods sold). Also, if someone wanted to go to war, they also had to pass through there. It was what we call hot property. Or as real estate agents say, “Location, Location, Location!” Israel was very small but also very important to everyone.

Before we talk about what happened, I want to explain what loyalty is because it will be important. If you are loyal to someone or something then you stick by them no matter what. Like maybe you have a friend and you would never do anything to hurt them—that’s loyalty. Through the Bible, God told His people not to worship other gods and if they did then they were not loyal. Saul tried over and over again to kill David because he was not loyal to him, even though David hadn’t ever done anything to hurt him. David was loyal to King Saul but King Saul tried everything he could think of to get rid of David. That’s just messed up. In a few weeks, in the story of Abraham, we will see that Abraham is loyal to Lot and will even take an army to save Lot when he gets himself into trouble. And that won’t be the last time that Abraham shows loyalty to Lot by saving his life. We show our loyalty to God by following Jesus and keeping the commandments. So just remember, loyalty is sticking with someone else no matter what happens.

And so, the Jews had a lot of troubles in those days when the Ptolemies and the Seleucids were fighting over who got their land—for about one hundred and fifty years actually, and then a dude named Antiochus Epiphanies became the Emperor over the Seleucid Empire. And he wasn’t as reasonable as Alexander the Great, not by a long shot. Not as smart either. And here’s where things got really complicated in a hurry because there were some Jews who decided that they weren’t really very keen on living lives faithful to God. Instead, they really loved Greek culture—which wasn’t all bad don’t get me wrong—and they wanted things like Gymnasiums where men exercised and wrestled with no clothes on. I would personally never wrestle with anyone who wasn’t wearing clothes—that’s just nasty as heck. And then there was another man named Jason who wanted to be the High Priest because he wasn’t loyal to the one they already had—who was actually his own brother. I know, super awkward, right? Jason decided to buy his brother’s job and so he gave this Antiochus guy a ton of money to have it and his brother had to leave the country. But then three years later, another dude paid even more money and then he got the job.

Well, one thing led to another and before you know it, because of some disastrous decisions and a terrible misunderstanding—caused by that disloyal brother Jason, AGAIN, the Emperor ended up going through Jerusalem and the Temple of God and stealing a ton of money and so many people were killed! And then, the Jews who wanted to be Greek didn’t want to have to follow the commandments anymore. People started doing messed up things in the Temple, like offering up pigs on God’s altar—which God said they must never do. All of a sudden, it became illegal to keep the commandments and they were forced to eat pork, which the Bible says is a big no-no. In fact, they began killing people who were keeping God’s rules. You see, there were a lot of people who were loyal to God even though they knew that it could get them killed but they didn’t think their lives were worth anything if they weren’t staying loyal to God. Do you agree with them? I sure do. We must always listen to what God says, no matter what. There are people in other countries who get hurt very badly because they are so loyal to Jesus. Following Jesus is against the law in many places and people who worship other gods will kill anyone who doesn’t. But this was only the second time in history that people were being killed for being Jews, and the first time they were being killed for keeping God’s commandments.

That’s really sad, isn’t it? But Jesus told His followers that, “If anyone wants to follow me (which means to obey Him and to do what He does), they need to stop living just for themselves, take up their cross (which means they have to be willing to give up everything else), and follow me. Whoever is just determined to live no matter what the cost, won’t really be living at all, but whoever gives up their life because of me will truly be alive (not just right now but for forever!). What good does it do anyone if they get everything that they want but aren’t really alive, now and forever? What could you ever really trade anyone for your life? The Son of Man (that’s Jesus) is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will reward every person for what and for how much they have done.” (Matt 16:24-27)

I know that might have sounded kind of scary but that’s what loyalty to God through His Son Jesus looks like. God wanted Israel to know how He felt about them, “I want you to be totally loyal and devoted to me! I want you to love me like I love you! I want you to look at everything in the world that people want, even their own lives, and see it as a poopy diaper compared to me.” Our life isn’t just what we have before we are dead, okay? Our life is also the way that we choose to live. You guys are kids right now and so you can’t just make any choice you want but as you get older, you are going to be making choices about what kind of human being you are going to become. God tells us, “I want you to be like me so that people can see how much I love them and care for them.” In a way, when we say yes to that and do that, we are giving up our rights to live however we want—when we become more like Him, we are becoming less like the bad parts of us. So, we end up giving up our lives or parts of our lives when they don’t look anything like how wonderful God is. I was twenty-nine years old when I started to live for God and believe me, if you wait that long there is going to be a lot to change. You guys are very lucky that you are getting to learn to live for Him right now. It means that you get to know what it is to really be alive right now, isn’t that amazing?

That’s what loyalty looks like. When we are loyal to God, we do everything we can to make Him happy by looking more and more like Him. We want Him to be loved, and not hated, because of the things we do to others. Looking like Him doesn’t mean that we turn invisible—it means that the things we do look like the things that God does. The good news is that we don’t have to just do it on our own or figure out how. As we follow Him, He whispers to us about what He wants to change and when we cooperate, He can do amazing things. Sometimes, I have gone to bed thinking one way and woke up thinking in an entirely different way. But every single change makes me love people more and not less, makes me kinder and gentler and less angry and mean, more able to forgive others and less likely to try to get back at the people who have hurt me.

You know, those Jews who were living when all that bad stuff was happening were a whole lot more like you than like me. They knew God from the time they were born and had been following His commandments since they were little. They grew up understanding that if they were serving God, they couldn’t always do things the way Antiochus Epiphanes or the rest of the world wanted them to. What if someone came around and told you that you can’t love Jesus anymore—that you had to say terrible things about him or burn down a church or a synagogue or stop celebrating His holy days or had to give up your Bible? That’s what happens to people right now in places like Iran, North Korea, Asia, and some parts of Africa. I am very lucky that I have never had to make that kind of choice but if I did, I hope I would choose the right thing. I want to be loyal to God, and He has been very kind to me always. Sometimes I know I disappoint Him but what I never want to do is to choose anything instead of Him. And that’s the choice that the Jews were forced to make. Like the good priest Mattathias, we should learn how important it is to do what’s right.

Almost 170 years before Jesus was born, in the town of Modein, lived a priest named Mattathias and his five sons: Judah, Jonathan. Eleazar, Simon, and John. They lived in that town with their families and at the three festivals and two other weeks of the year, they served God at the Temple in Jerusalem. Their family was called the Hasmoneans. I imagine they were very happy to be priests, serving God and helping the Jews. You see, not everyone could be a priest. To be a priest, you had to be a descendant of Aaron, the brother of Moses and Miriam. Aaron’s family was given the honor of being priests because Aaron served God faithfully and loyally by going with Moses to Pharaoh and speaking the words of God right in his face. And they were not happy words. And it was dangerous work, telling the Pharaoh what he didn’t want to hear. God wanted His people freed from slavery. God hates it when people oppress one another and no one should own anyone else. But because Aaron was so loyal to God, his family was set apart as holy for the priesthood and no one else could just decide to be a priest. It was their job to help the Israelites make their sacrifices at the Temple and to light the menorah and bake the shew bread. In fact, they did a lot of cooking because they had to eat some of every sacrifice so that God would accept it. Not much though, it would have made them super sick.

And so, Mattathias and his sons, if you looked at the family tree of all the priests, it would start with Aaron at the top. This was a very big tree by this point. But when things got messed up in Jerusalem and the Temple, Mattathias and his sons left and went home and didn’t want to go back. They weren’t going to sacrifice pigs on the altar because God said He didn’t want them there and to put them there would make the altar defiled. Defiled means that something isn’t pure anymore—it’s contaminated, messed up, ruined, or whatever. Things that are defiled can’t just be given a bath and made okay again. Like, if someone put poison in your soup, there is no way to remove the poison so that you can eat the soup again. You need to get something else to eat, right? Well, an altar is the same way, because once it is ruined, they couldn’t make offerings to God on it anymore. Altars and soup aren’t anything like people. When we sin, we can defile ourselves—we can wreck our lives big time. But when we ask God for forgiveness and change our lives so that we are not doing those things anymore, the blood of Jesus cleans us inside and out.

So, the altar was defiled—which means that the priests had nothing they could do at the Temple anymore and so they went home to the country. But, you know, just because we leave a bad place doesn’t mean it won’t follow us all the way home and that’s exactly what happened to Mattathias and his sons. The evil king Antiochus Epiphanes had made all of these laws that told the Jews that they couldn’t be loyal to God anymore—they could only be loyal to Antiochus! They had to prove it by doing things his way and not God’s way. Of course, the king didn’t come himself, but he sent some of his important men, his officers, and they went to Modein to meet with Mattathias because the old priest was very respected by the Jews. They made him an offer that they didn’t think he could refuse. They said something like this, “Hey, Mattathias, we know that you are a really great guy and everyone around here really trusts and respects you and we know that whatever you do and whatever you are okay with, everyone else will be too. And the king, if you do the right thing and just offer this pig on the altar to our gods, he is going to make you and your family very important people, and he will give you money and power and stuff and all that. How about it? Do you want to be called the king’s friend?”

Mattathias knew that, according to the laws of the Greeks, to say no would be to die but he was a good and faithful servant to God and so he told them, “No way!” The Greeks were killing moms and babies and burning Bibles, so it isn’t like killing an old priest was going to really upset them. Mattathias was very brave, and He trusted God. He knew that when he died, he would be resurrected again in the world to come and that he would be with God forever in paradise because God is loyal to the people who are loyal to him. There was nothing that the Greeks could give him that was as good as that. It would have been ridiculous to take money and stuff and miss out on life forever with God, right? Even though some people make that choice every day, Mattathias believed God and loved Him and so he wasn’t even tempted.

But there was another man in town who didn’t love God as much and he jumped up and was ready to sacrifice to the false gods of the Greeks and Mattathias had had enough. He wasn’t going to let anyone in his town do such a terrible thing to God and especially not in the Land God had given their ancestors. That was a terrible insult to God! Maybe this man was afraid to die or maybe having all that money and power sounded good to him; we will just never know. Mattathias killed him to stop him from doing such a horrible thing. He killed him right on the altar of the Greek gods so that no one else could use it either. And then Mattathias killed the man whom the king had sent and he tore up the altar too. For an old guy, he was pretty spry and strong when he was defending God and protecting the people of his town from making a terrible mistake. But, of course, now he was in big trouble with the king so he had to do something fast. He shouted to the town that everyone who loves God and His commandments should follow him and they all ran and hid in the mountains. They had to leave everything behind except for their families and their animals. They were very brave and loyal to God but sometimes it can cost us a lot to be true to Him. They were willing to lose everything they had just so that they could follow God, even if it meant dying because they knew that if they saved their lives by giving in to Antiochus, it would be a terrible trade because they would be giving up their lives with God.

Life was very hard living in the wilderness, and what Mattathias did led to a war that lasted for many years. But all through that war, his army was faithful to God and when he died, his son Judah led the troops. And it took a long time, but they went through the land destroying the altars that had been built for the false gods and they made sure that people started obeying God again. Because they were so loyal to God, God was loyal to them and they were able to drive their enemies out of Jerusalem and out of God’s Temple and they rebuilt the altar that had been ruined, and they relit the menorah lamps in the Temple and made the shew bread. And the people were so happy because they were able to serve God safely again in the areas where the Maccabean rebels (that’s what they called the followers of Judah Maccabeus) had driven out the Greeks. It took many more years before the Greeks gave up and went home, but on the 25^th of the month of Kislev, in the winter, when the altar had been rebuilt and the menorah relit and the bread baked, the people celebrated the very first Hannukah. The word Hannukah comes from the word meaning “dedication” and because they had removed everything that was dedicated to the Greek gods and had made everything new again, they rededicated the Temple to God and celebrated for eight days.

Why did they celebrate for eight days? Well, because they hadn’t been able to celebrate God’s festivals for years and they suddenly could again! God’s parties are all about honoring God and celebrating the wonderful things He has done and so instead of waiting, they decided that they needed to do something right then and there to show God how thankful they were that His house had been given back to Him, cleaned up, and all of his enemies driven away. And they did that not only because they were so happy but because of their loyalty to God. Why do we celebrate the Passover and the Lord’s Supper? Because we are so grateful for our salvation! We celebrate the release of the children of Israel from slavery because of God’s mighty miracles, and we celebrate what Jesus did for us at the Cross. Why do we celebrate First Fruits and the Resurrection? Because the world changed forever when Jesus rose from the dead! Why do we celebrate Shavuot/Pentecost? Because that was the day that the children of Israel worshiped God at Mt Sinai and also the day that God sent His Holy Spirit to everyone who was loyal to Him. And He still does that today! Why do we celebrate the Fall Festivals? Because we are happy that God is king of the universe and that He made Jesus the King of kings over all of us and that someday when He returns we will celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles with Him in Jerusalem! What a party that will be!

But, you know what? We can also celebrate other things. Any time that God does something amazing for us, we can have a celebration. July 2 is Rosenquist Day at our house. It’s the day when we were finally able to adopt our twins, Matthew and Andrew—that was one of the happiest days of my life. And God made it happen. When we are being grateful, we are also being loyal. I love you. I am praying for you. How do you show your loyalty and gratitude to God and to Jesus in your life? It’s a good thing to think about.

This is the last of three special teachings on the Fall Festivals of the Bible that will all come out this week before they air on the radio because it’s important to understand the festivals before they happen so that we can celebrate them. Sukkot, or the Feast of Tabernacles, was the biggest party of the year in the Bible. The hard work of the harvest was all done and they could rest for the winter, knowing that they had enough food to eat. So why did God tell them to go camping? And what does any of this have to do with Jesus?

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another 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. Parents, most scripture this week will be from the Miss Tyler Version (the MTV) which is the Christian Standard Bible reworded a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the meaning.

What would you say if God told you to go camping for a week, with absolutely everyone? Would that sound good to you? Or would you be like, “Um, ick, I hate bugs and the last time we went camping, it rained all week and we never came out of our tents.”? What if you knew that the camping trip was supposed to be full of singing, dancing, and eating the best food you have eaten all year? Does it sound better now? You betcha! Well, that’s exactly what God commanded His people when they were in the wilderness after being freed from slavery in Egypt. They were living in tents, called Sukkot. A tent is a Sukkah and more than one tent is Sukkot, tents! Let’s see what the Miss Tyler Version of the Bible has to say about this big camping trip for everyone:

The Lord said to Moses: “Tell the Israelites: The Festival of Sukkot (the festival of tents), to the Lord begins on the fifteenth day of this seventh month (that’s five days after Yom Kippur, which we talked about last week) and keeps on going for seven days. Everyone has to gather together on the first day; and you can’t do your normal jobs, at all (except you can cook, it says that in another place). The priests need to present animal offerings to the Lord for seven days. On the eighth day, after the festival of tents has ended, you will all gather together again and present another animal offering to the Lord. It is a very special gathering (called a high holy day, just like the first day of the festival of tents); you can’t do your normal jobs…

…“You will celebrate the Lord’s festival (his big yearly party) on the fifteenth day of the seventh month for seven days after you have gathered the produce of the land (the harvest is over and all their hard work is done, yay!). There will be complete rest (from working) on the first day and complete rest on the eighth day. On the first day you are to take the branches of majestic trees—palm fronds, branches of leafy trees, and the willows that grow around the rivers—and celebrate before the Lord your God for seven days. You need to celebrate it as a festival to the Lord seven days every single year. This is a forever commandment for you and for everyone who comes after you; celebrate it in the seventh month (which means, don’t move it around). You are to live in tents for seven days. All the native-born of Israel must live in shelters, so that your children and their children forever will know that I made the Israelites live in tents (out in the wilderness) when I brought them out of the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.” (Lev 23:33-36, 39-43, MTV)

Wow, a week-long party! But what does this all mean, anyway? How do we do it now when there is no Tabernacle or Temple to go to so that we can “celebrate before the Lord?” Celebrating before the Lord, in the Bible, meant to go to where His presence was and to worship Him there and have a party in His honor together. That meant traveling to where the Tabernacle was, once they weren’t all gathered around it in the camp in the wilderness anymore, or to Jerusalem, when the Temple was there. And did you know that God told them that they could just leave their houses and no one would come to steal anything while they were gone? Pretty cool, eh? Well, there is no place that we can travel now to celebrate in the Presence of God—if you have listened to the last two programs, you know that the Presence of God lives with us now. The Holy Spirit is in every believer, making us a living Temple—because that’s what a Temple was, the place where the spirit of a god lived. All of us together make up the Temple of God now. And so anytime we are together, we are in the presence of God but also, even when we are alone. When the native-born Israelites celebrated the Festival of Sukkot, they went to where God’s Presence was and they lived there in tents for eight days and had the biggest party of the whole year. But what do we do when we are not native-born Israelites? Is the party for us too or just for them?

Well, I can tell you that it is for us too because now, according to the Gospel of John, we have an even better reason for celebrating the Festival of tents. John said, “The Word (that’s Jesus, God’s final word to us) became a human and tented (lived) among us. We saw how glorious He was, the glory that He has because He is the one and only Son of God, the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14) Great googly moogly! Even though you can’t see it in English translations of the Bible, the Greek words say that he lived with us in a tent—a tent of human skin—the body of Jesus. Why do you think John said that? I think John was saying that because the Festival of Tents was when Jesus was born! I believe that the angel Gabriel visited his mother Mary around the time of Hannukah, which happens close to when Christmas is celebrated, and that he was born during the festival nine months later. I mean, we know that He couldn’t really have been born in December because it was way too cold for the shepherds to be out with their sheep at night that time of year, but during the Festival of tents, it was perfectly fine outside and people would actually be dancing and singing all night long.

So, my family, although you might do something different because the Bible isn’t really specific about when He was born because in the ancient world, they would tell you when a person died but not then they were born and the Bible is no different. My family celebrates Jesus’s birthday all week long! We can’t live in tents here because we get winds that week that are often 60 miles per hour and anything left out in the yard gets blown far, far away. One year while we were celebrating, we heard a huge boom. It was our next-door neighbor’s trampoline coming down in our yard, over the six-foot fence. And they were on vacation in California so we had to leave it there until they came back because it would have just blown over again. It was pretty funny and after that, they chained the trampoline to the big willow tree in their backyard. We call trampolines “Idaho Kites”. And those big yard umbrellas too.

Now, we can’t do this anymore, but did you know that all the nations in the world were represented at the Festival of Sukkot (you know it means tents now so I will stop reminding you)? They offered seventy bulls to the Lord as whole burnt offerings! That means that the whole city of Jerusalem smelled like one huge barbeque for a whole week. They sacrificed thirteen bulls on the first day, twelve on the second day, and each day there was one less until the last day of the Festival when they burned seven bulls—and it all added up to seventy bulls. Now, it doesn’t say this in the Bible, although the Bible talks about the seventy nations that came from Noah and his sons, but the Rabbis think that those might have been offerings for everyone who wasn’t Jewish, so that we could worship God too, even if we didn’t know it. Pretty cool, eh? But we can’t do this now, and we shouldn’t because no one is allowed to sacrifice anywhere except in Jerusalem in the place where God told them was the only place they were allowed to. In fact, God told them that if they sacrificed animals anywhere else they would be giving those animals to goat demons. Not sure about you, but I try to avoid that.

But what do the bulls for the seventy nations have to do with Jesus? Did you know that one of the last things He told His disciples was that they were supposed to go preach to all the nations of the world? “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. So go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to do everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am always with you, to the end of the age.” (Matt 28:18-20) Do you think that God was showing us in this Festival that, in the future, all the nations would be gathered around God’s presence? I sure think so.

And they did other amazing things too! Like parading around with leafy branches and singing—and you can do that! They do a ceremony called the water pouring festival again now and it is very interesting. It would happen every night during the Festival of Sukkot. The priests would go down from the Temple to the Gihon Spring in the old City of David (which is way smaller that Jerusalem is now, I mean teenie tiny). They would take a silver flask, which looks like a very fancy vase made for pouring water, and the priest would fill it with water from the spring and the priests would blow their silver trumpets and people would blow on the shofar, the animal horns we talked about two weeks ago that they blew a hundred times for the festival of the blowing of the trumpets. And they prayed and played music and they sang songs as they paraded the water all the way up to the Temple while waving their palm fronds. The priest held the water up above his head so that everyone could see it and follow him. When they got to the Temple, one priest went to the altar with the water and another priest went with wine, and they would blow the trumpets and pray and then, at the same time, the priests would pour the water and wine out, together, into two beautiful silver cups until the liquid ran over the sides. Then there were more prayers and singing and celebrations all night long. And this happened every night. I actually have a YouTube video in the transcript so you can see some of the ceremony, it’s about an 11 minute video but in real life it would have taken much longer and there were about a thousand people in the parade.

But what do water and wine being poured out have to do with Jesus? I am so glad you asked and we are going back to the Gospel of John for this, This time, I have two verses for you because it is important twice, for the same reason! ^“On the last and most important day of the festival, Jesus stood up and shouted, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me, and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, will have streams of living water flow from deep within them.” (John 7:37-38) Wow! Did He say this while the priests were pouring out the water and the wine? I sure think so. He was telling them that no matter how excited and happy they were about ordinary water and wine being poured out, that if they were really thirsty then they would only be satisfied by the Holy Spirit who would come to them through Jesus! The streams of living water can’t be gotten out of a spring that comes out of the ground but from trust in Jesus that He is who He says He is and that He is speaking the truth about God!

But that’s not all John had to say. After Jesus was dead, the soldiers came around to break everyone’s legs so they would die more quickly, but when they saw that Jesus was already dead, the soldier wanted to make sure He wasn’t faking it and so “…one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out.”  (John 19:35). If you remember when we studied the Passover with Jesus, He said that the wine they were drinking at dinner was His blood of the New Covenant, a better covenant because Jeremiah said that God’s commandments would be written on our hearts and not just in the Bible. So, when the soldier cut Him with a spear, it was like God was performing the water pouring ceremony Himself. Whenever the priests had been doing that for hundreds of years, God was showing them about Jesus being the living water and the blood poured out on God’s altar. Jesus was even crucified in an old stone quarry, the same kind of stone that the altar in the Temple was built out of. Jesus wasn’t a sacrifice though, He was just like a sacrifice. No sacrifice at the Temple or Tabernacle could save us from our sins, only Jesus could do that by dying to make it so that Satan isn’t the boss of anyone who loves Jesus, and we can’t stay dead because we are flowing with living water forever.

That’s why it is so important that we know about the festivals and celebrate them because they all tell us about Jesus. Passover tells us about when He died. The day of Firstfruits tells us about Him being the first to rise from the dead with a perfect glorified body that can never get sick or die ever again. Pentecost (Shavuot) tells us about the Holy Spirit of God filling up the believers in Jesus. Yom Teruah or Rosh Hashanah, the Day of Trumpets and the beginning of the new agricultural year, tells us to celebrate Jesus as our King because God has given Him rulership over everything in heaven and on earth. Yom Kippur teaches us that we need to carefully guard God’s reputation and His presence in our lives through how we represent the teachings of Jesus as the living stones of His worldwide Temple. And Sukkot, the Festival of Tabernacles (or tents), teaches us that Jesus came to live among us like a man in a tent when He left the right Hand of God and became human for us. It also teaches us that Jesus would gather all of the nations of the world to God! And finally, that Jesus is the living water and wine of God’s covenant with all of us. He went to a lot of trouble to make sure that the festival ceremonies would make it obvious, but only after it all happened, that Jesus is God’s one unique Son, the Messiah, our Savior and King. What better reason for a party???

I love to cook and this is the day I really cook all our favorite foods. Pastrami brisket that has been soaking in salt water for two weeks and has to cook for fourteen hours. I already have blueberry pies in the freezer, and I will make my mom’s famous Swedish Tea Ring that is SO YUMMY. And we will have so much fruit and grape juice and my husband and kids will drink wine because they are grownups now. And their girlfriends will be with us, sharing in the meal, and we will have something special every single day. Oh, and birthday cake—I am pretty sure that Jesus loves coconut so there will be a coconut cake for sure. I will put my favorite radio station on first thing in the morning and just listen to music about God all day long. And when I don’t have knives in my hands, I will dance but otherwise I will sing when I know the words of the songs. And I will make a huge platter of turkey sandwiches on croissants or maybe sourdough bread, and mine will have extra pickles and so much mustard. Lots of extra pickles. When people look at my sandwiches, they are like, “Do you want some sandwich to go with your pickles and mustard?” I will set the table with my fancy tablecloth and silver candlesticks and we will have the spices and the grape juice and wine on the table and I will light the candles and pray and my husband Mark will say the prayers over the challah bread and wine and he will pray for our sons and their girlfriends who we love very much. It will be a wonderful celebration and it is very different now than when they were kids.

We were only ever in a Sukkah outside one year—when we lived in Missouri and we built a fort in the woods on our property, with branches on top for a roof so that we could see the sky. And we would go out and eat in it and enjoy ourselves. When they were smaller, we almost always lived somewhere really cold and so we would build blanket and pillow forts in the basement if we didn’t have enough room, or a tent if we did have room. It was lots of fun and they would eat their meals in there and really enjoyed it and sometimes we weren’t able to take it down for a month because they enjoyed it so much. You don’t have to go to Jerusalem or have anything fancy to celebrate Jesus becoming a human and tabernacling with us, whatever you do, just remind yourself that it is a picture of Jesus as well as a picture of the Israelites out in the wilderness after God freed them from slavery. Jesus freed us from slavery too because Satan was holding us as captives and we served him because we were sinning and didn’t have the power to stop.

So, that’s God’s camping holiday. And if you are really lucky, you might live somewhere where people from all over get together to camp and have fun all week, but most people don’t. That’s okay, because you are people too and you can do it at home. A good thing to always remember is that we can’t really keep the Feasts the way it tells us to in the Bible because there is no Temple, but that’s okay. What’s important is that we understand them so that we can understand better about how they all point right at Jesus, our King of kings and Lord of lords. Whether He was born during Sukkot or some other time of the year, it is still a wonderful time to celebrate that He tented here with us so that He could show us exactly what God looks like in everything that He ever said and did. We do that by giving gifts to the poor so that they can have nice meals too—just like He fed the five thousand and four thousand with loaves and fishes in the wilderness and filled the nets of the disciples with fishes on the Sea of Galilee. We can visit the people we know who are lonely and sick, because Jesus went around helping the poor and healing the sick.

If this is your first time knowing about all these holidays, it’s okay to just do something small. God loves it when we worship Him in big and small ways and in new ways and in old ways. So, if this is new to you, you can have fun with it and try new things. I personally believe that God made coffee tables, couches and blankets so that we could turn them into indoor forts. Maybe it’s time to do some crafts and color, or make cookies together, or cut up fruit into a salad, or spend the day singing and dancing. I will have lots of links for ideas in my transcript. Maybe you have favorite movies that you enjoy. I love watching The Prince of Egypt, Joseph King of Dreams, and all the old Bible movies and even Veggie Tales—I still love Larry Boy and I even have a shirt with him on it and I can still sing the Cheeseburger song and the Belly Button song. It’s an amazing time of year! Oh, and I need to teach you some Hebrew, so you can know how to say happy holidays! During Sukkot, we say Chag Sameach! (haahg sa-may-ahh-ck) It actually does mean “Happy holiday!” If you want to learn more, I have some very very old videos on my Context for Kids YouTube channel too when I had longer hair and fewer wrinkles and much smaller glasses. 

Now really quick, let me tell you about the very last day of the Fall festivals, and it happens the day after Sukkot so some people call it the eighth day of the festival, or Shemini Atzeret. Everyone who had gone to Jerusalem for Sukkot would gather together at the Temple for one final service. Now why is this important? Weren’t they just all saying goodbye before going home? Although they would all do that, and say goodbye to extended family that they wouldn’t see again until the spring for Passover week, setting apart this day as a special and holy day is very important to the story of Jesus. You see, Jesus died on the Passover, and He was still in the grave on the Sabbath, which is the seventh day, but the day He rose from the grave with His glorified and immortal body that would never get sick or die (and could even go through walls) was the very next day, which we could call either the first day of the week or the eighth day. I call it the eighth day, Shemini Atzeret, because it was on that day that the whole world changed! It wasn’t only the beginning of a new week, but also the beginning of the New Creation, God’s Kingdom of Heaven on earth where we can live changed lives because Jesus is our King and the Holy Spirit guides and helps us to be more and more like Him.

I love you, I am praying for you, and Chag Sameach! Happy Holiday!

Fun links!
https://pjlibrary.org/beyond-books/pjblog/september-2017/build-a-sukkah-with-your-family

https://www.jewishboston.com/read/sukkot-crafts-roundup/

https://pjlibrary.org/beyond-books/pjblog/september-2017/7-no-waste-decorations-to-make-for-your-sukkah

https://pjlibrary.org/beyond-books/pjblog/september-2013/kid-friendly-snacks-for-the-sukkah