The truth is that we know more about angels on TV and in Christian art than we do about angels in the Bible, and so before we dive into our first real encounter with angels in Genesis 19 we’re going to see what the Bible does and doesn’t say about Angels. And we’ll talk about the three most famous angels of all!

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.

Since two angels showed up with God on Abraham’s doorstep (okay, he didn’t have a doorstep), before we get into Genesis 19 we need to talk about angels and messengers and men because sometimes it can be hard to know what we are dealing with in the Bible and the same word is used to describe messengers who are human and messengers who are angels! Hebrew isn’t like English where we have a ton of different words, and a lot of Hebrew and Greek words can’t be translated or understood by just using a dictionary definition. We have to look at the whole verse and sometimes even the whole chapter to know what they mean this time—and the next time we see the word, it might mean something entirely different. If you are confused, then you are not alone because grownups have to figure this stuff out too. And different Bibles use different English words too—which is why some Bibles say angels and others say messengers. It sure isn’t easy translating Bibles—not just anyone can do it. Maybe someday you will be a language expert and you can do it but not me, nope, I couldn’t translate anything if my life depended on it. We all have different parts to play in serving God, and I am so grateful that some people are really good at understanding other languages because otherwise I wouldn’t know what the heck is going on.

The Bible has a lot to say about angels, but it’s very mysterious and confusing. It’s not like there is a chapter totally devoted to angels just talking about them like a high school biology book. We have to filter through the entire Bible for clues—which means that unless someone knows the Bible really well, they probably have a lot of wrong ideas about angels. And to make things even worse, outside of the Bible there are even more beliefs about angels that have nothing at all to do with the Bible. Maybe you’ve heard that people become angels after they die, or that angels all have wings, or that there are angels who look like little babies who fly around in February, shooting people with mini-arrows and making them fall in love. When I was younger, but still a grownup, there were TV series like Touched by an Angel and Highway to Heaven, making it even more confusing. It’s hard to separate what the Bible says from what we see on TV, in movies, from legends, or in books. And that wouldn’t be such a big deal, but it makes what we see in the Bible confusing. And sometimes we picture things in our minds that have nothing to do with what the Bible says. Genesis 19 is the first time we see angels in the Bible actually called angels, and we see them as normal-looking men who have messenger jobs—which means that they are doing jobs for God here on earth, either delivering messages or checking things out. We will see angels doing other things too—like fighting battles and saving people. Really, an angel’s job is whatever God tells them to do. Sometimes angels are in disguise, and sometimes they aren’t—and when they aren’t, they are really scary-looking, and we have to be told not to be afraid. And when we look at some of the things people wrote about angels outside of the Bible, we can see some pretty wacky ideas that came from their time in exile in Babylon!

First of all, I want you to know that we aren’t going to talk about the Angel of the Lord because that’s different from ordinary angels—the Angel of the Lord is God somehow, but I really don’t understand it totally. Regular angels are heavenly beings, meaning they live where God is and they can see God and talk to Him and get orders from Him and all that jazz. We know from the Bible that angels were created to be angels by God. When people die, they don’t become angels. People who are dead are still people and when Jesus comes back and they come alive again, they will still be humans but with perfect bodies that can’t get sick and die anymore. Although Jesus said that we will be like angels when we die, because we won’t be getting married, being like something isn’t the same as being that thing. For example, I am like Taylor Swift because I am a woman, but that’s where it ends. So, we are like but not like angels. In fact, angels are superior to us—they live forever once God creates them unless God ends their lives and so they are smarter and wiser and know a whole lot more than we ever will. The word angel is really just a job description for these heavenly creatures. We get the word angel from the Greek word angelos, and the Hebrew word is malakim, but those words both mean the same thing—messenger. That’s where it can get confusing because angelos and malakim, messengers, can also be human beings, so we have to read what the Bible says to know when we are dealing with an angel from Heaven or a human being carrying a message as a messenger or a priest or a prophet. In the book of Revelation, at the end of the Bible, the writer is sending messages to the “angels” of seven churches in modern-day Turkey. Are those angels humans or from God? It doesn’t say but it could be both, although since they are seven letters, it sounds like they should be humans—not like angels need letters from humans, right? And angels deliver messages from God and not from people.

Depending on where we are in the Bible, there are different names given to God’s angelic messengers. Sometimes they are called ministers, or Daniel calls them watchers, or hosts and mighty ones when they are fighting angels, and mediators. But in the end, no matter what they are called, they all have the same job—which is to do whatever God tells them to do. But angels aren’t robots—they have what we call free will which means that they can decide to say no. And there are stories in the Bible about angels who said no and who even went to war against God and got chucked out of heaven. We’ll talk about that more later. Angels aren’t as much trouble as we are but they can still be rebellious and get themselves into trouble. Not so much like in the movies—those angels can be kinda hopeless and silly like in It’s a Wonderful Life. Angels have very important jobs other than carrying around messages—some are part of God’s heavenly council, and they listen to God make plans and even offer suggestions for what He can do. Sometimes, God even asks for volunteers for jobs—like when He needed someone to trick an evil king by telling his false prophets what the King wanted to hear instead of what His true prophet was saying—because the king wasn’t listening to him! Sometimes, God needs an army to protect His people from invading armies and He sends angels. And because human soldiers can’t kill angels, that’s a super bad deal for the human soldiers. If you ever saw the last movie of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, they had a ghost army in it that no one could fight because they were already dead, but angel soldiers aren’t dead. Which is good because that would be totally gross and scary if that could actually happen—which it can’t. Sometimes, though, we see angel armies fighting against the armies of Satan—mysterious creatures called demons. That makes the fighting very difficult—the angel in charge of God’s armies is named Michael. The angel who seems to be in charge of the super important messages is named Gabriel. And that’s another important thing because not all angels are the same—some seem to be bosses over the others.

Although angels don’t have human bodies, the Bible shows us times when they disguise themselves as human beings—like in Genesis 18 when the two angels were traveling with God, and they were all pretending to be human travelers. Lot’s not even going to notice that they aren’t human until things get really ugly and dangerous. And they are very fast—because the first thing we will notice about the angels in chapter 19 is that they traveled somewhere between eighteen and forty miles from Abraham’s camp in Hebron all the way down to Sodom in just a few hours. That’s super-fast.

Not everything we would call an angel is actually the same thing—we are mostly used to angels disguised as people in the Bible and sometimes they are wearing white robes when people see them in visions but there are also other created beings in heaven. Cherubim and Seraphim are created beings that we find around God’s throne and protecting Eden from invaders. And they are scary looking, lemme tell you. The Cherubim aren’t those chubby little baby angels with bows and arrows shooting cartoon characters in the butt to make them fall in love. Nope, you wouldn’t ever want to see one because you’d be scared to death. I mean, they are guarding God’s special places and so you wouldn’t want them to not be scary, right? They have two or four wings with hands under their wings and the sound they make when they are flapping their wings is just deafening and they also have cow hooves for feet. And they have eyeballs all over their bodies and four faces—a human face, an eagle face, a lion face and the face of an ox, which is like a bull (a male cow) but bigger and used for pulling plows and heavy farming stuff. You see one of these guys and you will definitely need to change your underwear. Ain’t nobody trying to get past them and especially when they have swords, okay? But I don’t think they actually need swords if they look like that. If you are brave enough to mess with those guys then a sword isn’t going to scare you either.

We don’t know nearly as much about the Seraphim, except that they have six wings and seem to maybe be on fire—but that’s debatable. They used two wings for flying, two for covering their faces (because God is so holy that they can’t look at Him), and two covering their feet but sometimes in the Bible when it talks about covering or uncovering your feet it means putting on or taking off whatever is covering your private parts. Covering your feet was a funny way of saying you were going to the bathroom! Because, otherwise, I have no idea why they would need to cover their actual feet with their wings unless they had super gnarly, dirty toenails. One thing that angels, cherubim, and seraphim all have in common is that they all praise God, a lot. They sing about how wonderful God is and they don’t seem to ever get tired of it and because their bodies aren’t like ours their throats probably don’t even get sore. Do you like to sing? I love to sing. Singing to God forever sounds like a great job to me. I bet that none of them are tone deaf or sing flat or sharp.

When we get to the Psalms and even in Deuteronomy, we find out that when God made all the different languages at the Tower of Babel to keep the people in Shinar from building that huge thing that was so small that God couldn’t see it without going down to look at it—which is just one of many hilarious jokes hidden all over the Bible—well, Moses and the people who wrote the Psalms said that God gave seventy angels the responsibility to guide and watch all of those new nations. They were supposed to watch over the people because God wanted to save them all but when the people started worshiping those angels as gods, the angels didn’t do anything to stop them. Which is, you know, really bad but that is just one of the ways where angels are like us—we can all decide to do the right thing or the wrong thing. And these guys were just not thinking straight. No way was this going to work out okay! Daniel talked about how the archangel Michael was busy trying to fight one of these angels just to get a message through to Daniel after he prayed! Daniel called that angel the Prince of the Kingdom of Persia. And it took Michael, the head of all God’s armies, three weeks to get through so you know this wasn’t a person who was a prince but a very powerful angel. You know, it’s hard to understand why anyone who was that close to God could do such a thing, right? But it is easy to want to be worshiped.

But as for normal angels, in addition to the jobs we have already talked about, we see that they also patrol the earth like policemen, looking for things to report back to God. And we might ask ourselves, “but doesn’t God know everything?” And although I think He does, He also likes to have others make themselves useful. I mean really, God doesn’t actually need us to do anything because He could just do everything Himself but He doesn’t. And we don’t know why. There isn’t anything that we can do or the angels can do that God can’t do Himself but part of how He likes to work seems to be involving others. God is very social, and He likes to do things as a community. I think that’s really cool that God, who is so powerful, likes for all of us to be useful and to feel needed. That makes us a lot different from the animals because we can do things that really matter, even though we can also choose to do things that are very terrible. God values what we do and that’s why He gives us specific gifts—and the same with angels. And there are probably types of angels that aren’t even mentioned in the Bible because humans don’t come in contact with them. The universe, after all, is a huge place—which brings me to how Jewish beliefs about angels changed over time and especially after the exile.

When we see angels in the Old Testament, they look like men and they work carrying messages, fighting God’s battles, praising Him, and all that. But after the Jewish people came back from their exile in Babylon, some of them began to write fiction—and fiction is stories that aren’t true but are entertaining and tell us what people were thinking at a certain time about different things. Many of these stories are about angels and they are really imaginative. It seems as though they took what the Bible says about angels and mixed it together with the beliefs of the Babylonians and the Persians and the Greeks—just everyone who was boss over their people for five hundred years. You see, whenever you are part of a culture—and that’s our context—ideas rub off on you. If you go into a Christian bookstore in most of America, you will see art and figurines of angels who are mostly white with long blonde hair and blue eyes—which is odd because why would angels have recessive genes? Hey, high schoolers, figure that one out for me please.  And they have huge wings, and they are mostly women. That’s how our culture sees angels here in America and it is very different from what we see in the Bible where they all look like guys without wings, and I am betting they were all brown-skinned with brown hair and brown eyes so that they looked normal to the Bible people. Lemme tell you that blonde, white, blue-eyed angels walking around would have been super freaky. And yes, people were usually scared when angels appeared to them, but no one talks about how they looked so we have to assume that apart from being spectacular as angels, they would have been considered normal.

Ancient Israelites had some kinda wacky beliefs about God before the exile—which is why they worshiped other gods and goddesses too. Even though God told them not to they did it anyway. It seems like they figured God was the boss of all the gods and it was okay with him if they also worshiped the mother goddess Asherah, and Ba’al whom they thought was responsible for giving them rain, and Dagan who they figured gave them lots of wheat and barley to eat. Now, after they came back from Babylon, they never did that again and they knew there was only one God but some of them found another way to believe the almost exact same thing—and they wrote stories about how angels were doing all those jobs instead and because they were angels, they didn’t need to be worshipped and couldn’t be worshiped. And so, in these stories that were written in Greek and Aramaic, they came up with ideas about what they thought Heaven was like and what things looked like wherever God is at with the angels working behind the scenes. So, you have angels who are in charge of these warehouses where they store up the snow, the rain, and the wind. And they gave them fancy names like Uriel, Samlazaz, Araklba, Rameel, Kokablel, Tamlel, Ramlel, Danel, Ezeqeel, Baraqijal, Asael, Armaros, Batarel, Ananel, Zaqiel, Samsapeel, Satarel, Turel, Jomjael, Sariel, and many, many others. Of course, different people wrote the different stories at different times and in different places and so the list of names they gave to the angels never matched up with each other, or their jobs either. But it was okay because people understood they were writing “what if” stories.

But these make-believe stories were incredibly popular—like the Left Behind series of books when I was in my twenties, and so they influenced the way people saw things and thought about angels even when those stories didn’t line up with the Bible and usually didn’t. But they weren’t written to go into the Bible. It was a form of story-telling about things that were important to them, and nothing was more important to them than the Bible. All people from all times have come up with imaginative stories—not everything the Jews wrote about ended up in the Bible because they came up with fun stories just like everyone else does. I remember once I was talking to someone who believed these were stories that were inspired by God, and I had to tell them that they were meant to be fiction and that Jews sometimes wrote fiction and the person asked me, “why would they do that” and I answered, “why wouldn’t they write fiction? It’s what all humans enjoy!” The important thing was that they knew the difference between their stories and their Bible and didn’t confuse the two.

If you talked to Americans today about what angels are like, they would probably give answers based on what they see in books, movies, TV, and art. Because that’s our culture. If they are my age, they probably watched the TV shows Highway to Heaven and Touched by an Angel, and hopefully, they would know that there is a difference between the Bible and entertainment. But if they don’t, when they read the Bible, they might be adding things into what they see in their head that just aren’t there in the story. We’ve talked a lot about that sort of thing going on with stories about Nimrod and Melchizedek that have nothing to do with the Bible or with history! And the stories mostly disagree with one another anyway. Angels have always been incredibly popular in stories all over the world because we are all fascinated by the idea that there are invisible helpers all around us and sometimes things happen that we can’t explain without angels. Angels make us feel better, and safer, and especially when Jesus goes around telling the grownups that the angels who watch over little children are always very close to God!

And here’s where we get to something confusing. The Old Testament, the Hebrew part of the Bible, doesn’t talk about demons. But by the time of Jesus, they are getting talked about a lot. What are demons and where do they come from? Are they angels who went bad? And what about Satan? Is he really a fallen angel? There are as many stories out there about Satan and demons as angels—they just aren’t as popular in wall art for nurseries and bedtime stories. Like angels, we don’t have a whole lot of information and so just like everything else in the Bible from Nimrod to Melchizedek, when there isn’t a lot of information, people like to make things up for fun. So, we don’t know for sure if they were actually angels. But there is a very famous angel that we hear a lot about once Jesus starts to preach—and that is Satan. In fact, Jesus says that He was watching when Satan was cast down from heaven and that, as the devil, he is the father of lies because all lies come from him. The word Satan comes from the Hebrew word that means accuser—someone who is always a tattletale, only worse—and devil comes from the Greek word diabolos which means slanderer—someone who is always taking smack about other people and disrespecting them.

And so we have to think that Satan, the devil, was once one of the angels guarding the Garden in Eden and not really a snake at all. Which is why he could talk which makes much more sense. And he was in the Garden and that didn’t worry the man or the woman and so maybe he belonged there. The prophet Ezekiel (Chapter 28) talks about a guardian cherub who was in the Garden who became wicked and even violent so he was tossed out. That sounds like what Jesus was talking about, right? And, of course, He saw it because He has always been with God and part of God and God and all that theological stuff. But that’s good news for us because it means that Satan isn’t like God. Satan was just another created angel and so he can die just like any other angel. And he can also be beaten, which is what Jesus did when He died and went after him.

I love you. I am praying for you. Angels are super interesting but understanding them takes a lot of study and research and a lot of getting rid of the ideas in our heads from tv, movies, books, and the art down at the Christian bookstore!

Sorry parents, but in order to teach Genesis 17, we can’t avoid talking about circumcision—a subject that was absolutely normal and not at all embarrassing in the ancient world. It’s actually incredibly interesting! And not only that, but we have to talk about what holiness is and about the nine special signs in the Old Testament. I will also be posting an episode on my grown-up show, Character in Context, helping adults to understand circumcision if you want to teach it yourself.

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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!) And parents, we have to talk about circumcision this week so if that is too sensitive a subject for you then a lot of Genesis 17 is going to be a mystery. Don’t worry, I won’t be too graphic but you might want to listen to this or read this on my website before your kids listen. I will also be doing a special episode on my grown-up channel about this subject.

Okay, we’re about to get into the part of the Bible where God is going to start making big changes in Abram’s family compared to all the other families on the earth. Some of them can be really confusing and hard to understand. Some seem cruel and maybe even a bit crazy, but they were all necessary—but why? Well, that’s what we are going to talk about today because Genesis 17 is going to seem really bizarre if we don’t take the time to understand why God is telling Abram about the need to be different and set apart. First, I think we need to talk about what “set apart” or “holy” means and what it doesn’t mean. And I am going to cheat and just read you two chapters from my curriculum book The Ten Commandments and the Covenants of Promise.

Adam and Eve had it all, really, they had it all – except for two things. They weren’t God, and so they weren’t allowed to eat of the fruit of one of the trees in the garden, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. You know, it was in the Garden sanctuary, so it had to be holy – everything within the garden was special. Holy is a very misunderstood Hebrew word, kadosh, but it is incredibly important to understand holiness, at least a little bit, if you are going to understand the importance of God’s Covenants and why they are there. I used to think that holy just meant “super good” but that isn’t it at all. Holy is a unique word that means something is special, set aside for an important function. To make it as simple as possible, something is holy, or kadosh, if it has restrictions set up by God in the areas of time, space, things, and activities. And of course, that made no sense at all, so now I will make it simple. Restrictions mean limitations – in other words, there are things that are forbidden, or not allowed, when something is holy.

A group of people are kadosh/holy if they have restrictions on their behavior set up by God. If they have no restrictions, then they are called common or profane instead. Whoa! That sounded kinda insulting right? But it really isn’t. Profane doesn’t really mean what we say it means now – in modern language, profane automatically means something is bad but originally it just meant “secular” and secular is a word that simply means something that is not set apart by God. After all, out in the world, people have restrictions on their behavior that change over time – what was wrong when I was born isn’t always considered to be wrong anymore. When I was born, everyone believed it was wrong to be gay, but I am in my fifties now, and now more and more people think it is right and natural. Abortion was also wrong when I was born but now people think it is right. That’s how the secular, common, or profane world works. They don’t have any permanent, binding restrictions placed on their lives by God setting boundaries around their behavior. What isn’t allowed today might be expected tomorrow.

You want to hear something unbelievable? Not one person in the scriptures is ever called holy. Not Noah, or Abraham, or Moses or anyone. There is one passage where it looks like the prophet Elisha is being called holy, in 2 Kings 4:8-9 where the passage is usually translated as describing Elisha as a “holy man of God” but it seems really strange that something like that would only happen once in the entire Bible! One of my teachers once told me that it is possible to translate the verse as “the man of a holy God” instead. That would line up with the rest of the Bible perfectly. God is holy, Israel the nation is holy, but individuals are never called holy – not even the High Priest! Individually then, we are not holy persons, we are a holy nation, under God! The people of Israel as a whole were called holy at Mount Sinai because God personally set boundaries on their behavior.

Over and over again throughout Scripture, certain places are called kadosh. In fact, the second time the word is used in Scripture is to describe the land around the burning bush! The first is in Genesis 2 when the Sabbath is called kadosh. The next place described as holy is Mount Sinai itself and then the Tabernacle because God set them apart for His own purposes. Each time a place is made holy (and, of course, only God can do that – we can’t declare anything holy ourselves as much as we might like to) there are things that are and are not allowed to be done there.

The ground around the burning bush was holy and so Moses was commanded to remove his shoes when he walked there (and the priests had to minister at the Tabernacle and Temple barefoot). Mount Sinai was holy when the presence of God was upon it, and the Israelites had to set up barriers around it to keep people from touching it. The Tabernacle/Temple grounds were holy and the closer you got to the holy of holies, the more restrictions there were based on behavior, cleanliness, and which tribe you were born into. Only the sons of Aaron through Phineas and Zadok were permitted to come near – even Jesus never dared to come into the Priest-only areas because He would never disobey His Father’s commandments. Specific areas are called holy by God because there are serious restrictions upon who can approach them, how they can be approached and when they can be approached.

There are also things that are holy, special things. Things that God specifically commanded to be created, in order to be used at His kadosh times, in His kadosh places, by specific people, and exactly how He says they are to be used. Once something has been used for a kadosh purpose, it can never be used for anything profane. Did you know that the priest’s linen garments, once they were worn out, couldn’t be used for rags? They were too holy for that, it would be an insult to God and so they remained in the Tabernacle/Temple forever and were used as wicks for the seven menorah lamps when they finally wore out. Even things like ash shovels were considered to be so holy that they would never leave the Temple grounds. In fact, the Temple altar was defiled on Kislev 25, 168 BCE, by the sacrifice of a pig on it by Antiochus Epiphanies and even after the Temple was liberated, and the altar stones taken down, they still had to store them on the Temple Mount because they could not risk them being used for anything common or profane!

The Ark of the Covenant was so holy that a man died just from touching it. It was so holy that even the High Priest could only come near it once a year unless the Tabernacle was being transported.

The Feast tithes were so holy that they could only be eaten within the walls of Jerusalem during the Feasts. The Passover Lamb was so holy that it could not be eaten by anyone uncircumcised.

The tribe of the Levites, which includes the Priesthood, are kadosh like the rest of Israel, but they are also kadosh in a different way. The Levites couldn’t live the same way that normal Israelites could – they couldn’t have a Land inheritance and they had restrictions on where they could live and what they could do. The Priests, the descendants of Aaron, had even more restrictions – for example, they had limits on who they could marry because of the holiness or kedushah, of their position. The High Priest had more restrictions than anyone but going into the Holy of Holies once a year made everything worth it! Now all that might sound like a drag but the benefits of being kadosh are the perks of having a Covenant relationship with the Creator of Heaven and Earth and all that is in them. It means that we aren’t the boss of ourselves – but because we have a blessed and honored status, we don’t need to be our own bosses. And none of the restrictions are terrible; none of them deprive anyone of anything we need in order to live. God has always wanted what is best for us.

Now, time can also be made holy – by restrictions on what can be done during certain times and in fact, time was the very first thing to be declared holy! There are six days in which we do our work and the seventh is kadosh. But what does that mean? That means God sets the rules about what will and will not be done on certain days that He says are kadosh and we cannot do what we want on those days if we are in Covenant with Him. In the Ten Commandments, there is an instruction for absolutely everyone to stop working, and it doesn’t matter if you are the highest king or the lowliest pauper, or even an animal! No one works on God’s kadosh day – no one is a slave on the Sabbath. Everyone gets a day off to celebrate God’s rest – do you remember what rest means? God’s enthronement on the seventh day of Creation, the Sabbath day. That is the day when all of Creation was meant to celebrate God as the King of kings, from the very beginning. Six days a week we have to work at profane jobs, doing profane work, practicing for sports teams, achieving this or that (do you remember the definition of profane?) – and the work is good but it isn’t kadosh. Work is something we all must do, but we shouldn’t ever allow it to invade a kadosh day if we have a choice.

In Leviticus 23, we see other holy times–they are called Feasts, or moedim in Hebrew. There are restrictions on those days as well. God’s people don’t work on those specific days, seven days in the year that are special kadosh Sabbaths – two days in the spring at the beginning and end of Passover week, a day in the late spring called Shavuot (Pentecost), and four days in the fall, Yom Teruah, Yom Kippur and two days at the beginning and end of the eight days of the Feast of Tabernacles. Those are kadosh days and certain people need to be doing certain things and not doing certain other things. Some holy times,

like feasts, have limitations as well as obligations. The men living in Israel were required to go to the Tabernacle or Temple three times a year to celebrate with God and pay tribute to Him. They couldn’t just do whatever they wanted wherever they wanted because the time was kadosh. Working was permitted during the days between the special Sabbaths, but the men of Israel were required to be there to honor God and celebrate. They were joyous times! Certain times were called holy by God, both at Creation and then again at Sinai because God set boundaries on what would and could not be done on those days.

Okay, back to this week’s lesson. God is going to make rules about what Abram and his family can and can’t do, and what they have to do and don’t have to do. Some of these rules that He will give later are about going to certain parties—those are fun rules! Another rule is about only working six days a week—and when you have worked hard there is nothing better than having a rest day as a vacation. They won’t be allowed to eat certain animals or behave in the same ways the people around them do. They won’t be allowed to worship any god except Abram’s God, who Hagar called El Roi (the name she gave Him) and who Moses will call Yahweh (not because Moses gave Him that name but because God introduced Himself by that name). They will have to dress differently, and some of the ways they will worship will be different than all the people around them. But not everything in their lives will be different from the people around them. In fact, most things will be the same.

Why does God tell His people to live differently? Well, there are a few reasons. Sometimes, He wants His people to know that they need to be different from everyone else around them. That’s what chapter seventeen of Genesis is about. Sometimes, God wants to make sure they won’t be too friendly with the people around them who worship other gods, so He will make it impossible for them to eat meals with them or marry them. When King Solomon began to worship false gods at the end of his life it was because he married women from every country under the sun and built them temples for their gods and then worshiped those gods with them. That was a huge mistake from beginning to end, and from then on, it was just a matter of time before the nation of Israel was completely destroyed. Solomon stopped remembering that God’s people have to be only God’s people and not every god’s people. In chapter seventeen, God is going to tell Abram to do something that would make his entire family special in the eyes of the world and in their own eyes. That special thing is called circumcision. And again, parents, if this isn’t something you want your kids to learn about then this would be a good time to stop listening together and just go look at my transcript to pre-approve (or not) what I am about to teach.

In the ancient world, men who had special jobs were sometimes circumcised. In Egypt, the priests were circumcised. Circumcision is an operation that cuts away some of the skin around the end of a boy’s or man’s penis. If any of you boys are circumcised, it probably happened when you were a newborn baby and you don’t remember. In fact, you probably didn’t even remember a few hours later. Circumcision in the ancient world could be about many things. Sometimes, it was something called a “rite of passage,” which is a ritual that changes your status in your community or in the world. Different cultures do different things to show the world that someone is a man or a woman now and “part of the tribe.” In some cultures, they use tattoos, cuts in the skin, rings around the neck, earrings, bracelets, and even small plates inserted into the lip. When people get married, there are all sorts of things done around the world to show that they aren’t single anymore. Wedding rings are what we mostly use here in the US, but in other countries they have women wear a covering over their head (like in ancient Rome) or aprons (in Tibet). Sometimes, married men are the only ones allowed to grow a beard or wear a prayer shawl. Doing these things shows the members of the community that you are “one of them” and about your life. In ancient Rome, a head-covering on a woman was a status symbol for free married women; Paul wanted all the women to wear them in church, so that no one would look superior to anyone else—even if they weren’t allowed to wear them outside the church.

But God wanted all of His people to be a nation of priests—meaning they would all have access to God. That means they could pray to Him without needing to go through a priest, and He would hear them. So for the men, it meant they needed to be treated like priests in the ancient world, from the time they were only eight days old. It doesn’t mean that every man was an actual priest but that the entire nation, men and women, were all set apart for God and they were supposed to live their lives in such a way that everyone could see what God is like. Of course, you know how we all are, so it wasn’t always a big success. In fact, it usually wasn’t. But that was the idea and that’s what God was telling Abram. Every man or baby boy who was born into Abram’s household or bought by Abram, including Ishmael and Abram, had to be circumcised as a sign of God’s covenant with Abram. I don’t know about you, but it would be way better to have that done as a baby than when you are eighty-nine years old, like Abram, or thirteen, like Ishmael.

God told Abram that everyone in His household must do this as a sign of the Covenant God was making with Abram to inherit the Land of Canaan. And so every man who would ever inherit that land would have to be circumcised too. If they didn’t, it meant that they were rejecting God’s land and that they were rejecting God too. This was really serious business. Circumcision is one of about nine things that are called “signs” in the Bible. This was the second—do you remember what the first sign was? The rainbow! God called that a sign that would remind Him of His promise to all the people and animals and all the earth that He would never flood the world again—that He was done fighting with people and was going to save them instead.

There will be other signs too: (1) when they are about to leave Egypt, God will tell the children of Israel that throwing away all their leavened flour and eating flat bread for a week once a year after Passover was a sign (Ex 13:3-10), (2) there was a special ceremony where the firstborn child in a family was set apart to God (Ex 13:15-17), (3) the Sabbath (Ex 31:13-17), (4) the destruction of the bronze censors at the Tabernacle to make a covering for the altar (Num 16), (5) Aaron’s rod in the wilderness (Num 17), (6) the memorial stones that Joshua set up in the Land of Israel (Joshua 8), and maybe (7) phylacteries (Deut 6:8). Of course, these aren’t the only signs in the Bible but they are special signs that show the world that the people of Israel were separated from the rest of the world by God, and so was the Land God gave them, and so was Aaron as priest. All of these signs were to remind people about God’s choices. Of course, Jesus gave us some even better signs because His signs were for the whole world and not just the people of Israel.

The Gospel of John tells us about the wonderful things Jesus did to prove that He was sent by God to save the world. First, he took a bunch of water jars and made the water in them into wine! Then, He told the leaders that He would be raised from the dead in three days—but they didn’t understand Him and thought he was talking about the Temple in Jerusalem—and it happened just as He promised it would! He totally healed a child who was about to die without even touching him. He made it so that a man who hadn’t walked in thirty-eight years got right up and walked around in front of everyone. He fed five thousand people with just a few small loaves of bread and some fishes. And then He walked on the water out in the middle of the sea of Galilee. There was a man who was born blind—he had never seen anything in his entire life. Jesus made mud with his spit and told the man to go wash his eyes in one of the city pools in Jerusalem and the man came back seeing perfectly! But that was nothing compared to the time that He raised a man named Lazarus who had been dead for four whole days! Then Jesus kept telling them that He was about to be killed by the leaders of the Jews and Romans but He would live again after three days.

But Jesus said that there would be bad signs too. He said if people were always looking for signs then they were going to get tricked by people who could do amazing things. But not everyone who does amazing things is sent by God. If we are always looking for miracles and signs in the sky and stars and in the world then we are making a terrible mistake. And I have seen a whole lot of people in my life tricked by people who wanted them to believe that the end of the world is very soon because they could recognize “the signs” but they have all been wrong. What we are supposed to do instead is follow Jesus and do the things He did so that everyone in the world will believe Him as their King.

I love you. I am praying for you. Did you know that we have already seen all the signs we will ever need to believe that Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords? Now we just have to live life the way He taught us.

This is an episode designed to address a serious issue for both adults and kids—what does it mean to honor mother and father, and how does one obey their parents “in the Lord” as per Eph 6:1? There isn’t anyone in Christian or Jewish leadership who hasn’t been asked these questions—generally by adults suffering under the weight of abusive and irresponsible parents. So, I thought it would be a good idea to talk to kids about what it does and doesn’t mean–we certainly don’t want kids to be obeying every adult they come across, right? Warning: this could be triggering for your kids if you are a bank-robbing mom wanting them to drive the getaway car, as that was the over-the-top example I used. Any resemblance to any real person is completely accidental, obviously.

If you want to watch me recording a slightly longer version of this live on YouTube, check this out! If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.

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!)

 The Bible is a big book about love and obedience—about when it is a good idea to obey, a bad idea to obey, who is good to obey and who is bad to obey. We also find that there are times when to obey a certain thing is good and times when it is bad. Learning to obey isn’t like one plus one equals two. Learning who and how and when to obey is all about wisdom. And wisdom is something that God will always give us more of when we ask Him and when we are responsible about how we use it. The Bible has some obedience situations that don’t really exist for most of us anymore—like slavery. When a person is fighting a war, other kinds of obedience are important. In school, your teacher does have a right to ask you to do certain things and expect you to get them done—like homework, treating your classmates with kindness, and being honest instead of cheating. Growing up is about thinking about what we are being asked to do and why we are being asked to do it, asking questions when we need to, paying close attention to who has asked us, and then deciding if what they are asking is pleasing to God or not. Sometimes, what we are asked to do doesn’t seem to matter to God in the slightest—like if someone asks us to get them a cup of water, and we should probably always say yes to something like that, right? It doesn’t hurt them, and it doesn’t hurt us, and it is a kind thing to do. But those are the sort of good deeds that honor God in little ways and cause Him to be able to trust us to do bigger things later. Let’s talk about obedience in the Bible and our lives today—what does and doesn’t count as pleasing to God and/or good for us.

One of the really sad things we see in the ancient world of Abram and Sarai is slavery. And slavery was absolutely normal to them. Before electricity and water pipes and pumps and ovens and dishwashers and clothes washers and dryers and panini makers, life was a lot of work day after day. It was very hard to get things done, and especially if you had a lot of kids or a lot of land and animals to care for. Sometimes, people came to be slaves for one reason or another, and another person would buy them. Once they were bought, they weren’t free people anymore, and they had to do everything the person who bought them told them to do. And if they had children, they were owned as well—they weren’t born free. Some others were captured as part of a war and sold or kept by the person who captured them. The slave owners, who were called their masters, had to take care of their slaves so that they could do their jobs and make their masters more wealthy. Sometimes, the slaves were forced to do terrible things, and they had no choice because they could be beaten or killed, and their families could be hurt too. A slave who ran away would just end up captured by someone else—and that might even be worse! Sometimes slaves could be set free for good service or could buy their freedom. Slaves were often branded by their owners because otherwise, slaves looked just like everyone else. But slaves could also be educated and have specialty jobs, which made it possible for them to earn their own money, especially by the time Jesus was born. Slaves, when Jesus was born, could even be high-ranking government officials and much better educated than free people.

Next week, we will look at the story of a slave named Hagar—we don’t know how she was enslaved or why; we only know some of what her life was like because she was a slave. How people were allowed to treat her, and what they could do without her permission. Enslaved people are a special group when we talk about obedience—because only God should have that kind of power over a human being’s life. It was absolutely normal all through the days of the Bible, but it doesn’t mean that God wasn’t teaching them how to eventually get rid of it. Paul even told his congregations that there is no such thing as a free person or a slave in the eyes of God. And we should definitely look at everyone the same way that God does. We are commanded to love others as ourselves, and if we wouldn’t want to be slaves, then we can know that slavery is a great evil. We can be very thankful that God made rules about how slaves could be treated, which led to eventually seeing that it wasn’t the way the Kingdom is supposed to be.

What about obedience to God? Well, we always have to obey God—totally. And if God tells us personally to do something, then we need to do it. I can think of many times in my life that God asked me to do something that I was scared to do, and He just kept on poking me and bugging me until I did it. But He has never asked me to do anything wrong, sinful, or cruel. He was telling me to do things that I didn’t want to do, that’s all. What He told me to do was a blessing, a good thing, for someone who needed help. And when they found out that I did it because God wanted it done for them, it meant a lot to them to know that God wasn’t ignoring them and they weren’t alone. If I had disobeyed, their lives would have been worse and not better. Sometimes I am embarrassed to do something God asks me to do, and other times I am just straight-up scared. Sometimes I think, “Is this my imagination, or is God really asking me to do this?” BUT, if it is a kind thing to do, then it is better to take the chance that it really is God, right? God isn’t ever going to waste His time telling you to do the things you already plan on doing—why would He? But sometimes, we fool ourselves into thinking He has given us permission to do what we want and pretend like we are obeying Him!

What about doing what the Bible says? Well, we have to be careful with that too. Sometimes, God says a certain thing to a certain person, and they were supposed to do that—but if we read it like it was written to us, then that isn’t the same thing as obeying God. Like, when Paul told Timothy to go to Troas and pick up his cloak and scrolls. When we hear a verse, it’s always important for us to know who it was said to and why. There are all sorts of people out there as you grow up who will use Bible verses to get you to do what they want you to do—either by not giving you the whole story and making the verse mean something it was never supposed to mean, or by telling us that something they were doing back in the Old Testament is something that Jesus would want us doing now. Like when Jesus said, and then Paul said, that men should only have one wife and especially if they want to be elders in the church. And at that time, some men were looking at what the Bible says about divorce, and they were twisting it all up so that a man could abandon his family for any reason he wanted to—even if his wife burned one dinner or got old and he found someone prettier. They said it was okay according to the Bible, but if they had just looked at the commandment to love their neighbor and realized that their wives were their best and closest neighbors, they would never do that. We always have to ask ourselves if what we are being asked to do is kind, loving, and healthy. I want you guys to know your Bibles not so that you can win trivia contests but so that you will come to understand what God will and will not ask you to do. People will sometimes try to trick you, and they will make you feel really smart and important when you do what they want. But really, they are just looking for people they can control and get them to do whatever they want.

Whenever someone says the Bible says something is okay or good but it seems a bit strange, I want you to ask them where it says that. And then I want you to take that verse to someone you can trust, look at it together, and everything around it to make sure that what they are saying is correct. And then I want you to pray about it. But I want you to make sure that you never believe that it is a good thing to have secrets that you keep from the people who love you. If someone says that they are serving God, or a pastor or teacher or whatever, and tells you that what they are telling you is special and only for you, then they might be trying to trick you. Find another grownup who loves you. You don’t have to do what someone says just because they are older–there are times when you just need to get away from them! There is a huge difference between an adult telling you not to play in their yard (which they have a right to do) or in the street (because that is dangerous) or asking you to turn down your music because their baby is sleeping (because that is the kind and polite thing to do), and an adult telling you to do something that is wrong or risky–like if they tell you that they want you to come with them to help them. Strangers who are adults never ask kids for help.

The Bible tells us to honor our moms and dads, and that is a good commandment. The Bible also tells children to obey their parents in the Lord. That’s also a good commandment, but what does it mean? What does it mean to honor your mom and dad? When the Bible was written, giving someone honor was about not making them look bad with shameful behavior. If you go out and get drunk, steal a car, crash it, and then dance naked in the street—not only would that be incredibly foolish, stupid, and embarrassing, but it would bring terrible shame to your whole family. Doing your best in school—the best that YOU can do—doesn’t always mean that you will get straight A’s, but it does mean they can be proud of how seriously you are taking your classes. When we are kind to others and look for opportunities to help people, we make our parents look good. Now sometimes people will kinda twist this very good commandment to honor our parents into something really bad. What happens if your parent is a bank robber? Or tells you to be a bully and smack down all the weak kids in the neighborhood to show them who’s the boss? Well, that’s where the second commandment I mentioned comes into play.

In Ephesians 6:1, Paul says, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” And then, he goes on to remind them that the reward for honoring their moms and dads is that their lives will go a lot better. And it is easy to see how a person behaving in such a way as to not make their parents look bad will have a better life than someone who goes around acting like a punk. But we can’t honor our moms and dads by doing what is wrong just because they tell us to. What if you have a mom who robs banks and tells you to drive the getaway car. You would be obeying your mom but not God, who tells us not to steal. That’s why Paul said to obey your parents “in the Lord,” which means that what your parents are telling you to do mustn’t break any of God’s big commandments. And if you aren’t supposed to help your parents break God’s commandments, then that goes double for any other adults!

If a grownup wants to touch you in a way that only your husband or wife is allowed to do once you get married, you don’t obey them no matter what. They aren’t asking you to do that “in the Lord” at all, and they need to go to jail. And if they tell you that it is all your fault, they are liars too. If a grownup does something really bad and you know about it, and they tell you that you have to keep it a secret, then you need to find another grownup you trust and talk to them about it. You don’t have to keep that secret just because a grownup told you to. You need help because doing what is right can be confusing.

It is important to remember that all humans are made to be God’s image-bearers. We were all created to show the world what God is like. All colors, all shapes and sizes, men and women, and even little babies. No one is made more in God’s image than anyone else. No one can tell you that they get special messages from God for you that you have to obey, or else. Only Jesus could do that! God wants to know you and to have you know Him–and He doesn’t need anyone else there. You have grownups who love you and will help you to know and hear Him, like I try to do. But none of us are greater than God, and none of us love you as much as He does. Sometimes, we grownups can be kinda sketchy because we are thinking about ourselves when we should be thinking more about what you need, but God doesn’t do that. God has one goal—and that goal is to make you more like Himself. He wants you to have a lot of joy, and to be able to love people and feel their love in return. He doesn’t want you to be feisty, picking fights, getting angry, and losing your temper all the time. He wants you to learn to be as patient with other people as He is with you—after all, He hasn’t killed you for anything you have done, right? He wants the people around you to be able to feel His kindness, generosity, and gentleness. And He wants people to trust Him because they can trust you. God knows that the more you are like Him, the better the world and your life will be. A person like that brings honor to their parents! Even to bank robber parents in jail!

What happens when we obey someone whom we shouldn’t obey? Let’s look at the stories of David and Jonathan and see what happened to them when they were obedient and disobedient. Sometimes, obedience is bad and disobedience is good, and we see that all over the Bible! If only there was always an easy answer!!!

David was the youngest of like seven or eight boys, and one day the prophet Samuel poured out oil on his head and made him the King of all of Israel. But there was a problem—Israel already had a king named Saul, and Saul had a son named Jonathan, whom everyone supposed would be the next King once Saul died. Now, David could have gone and been really foolish and walked up to Saul’s home and said, “Hey dude, move out! I am the King now!” He would have likely either died or almost died. But David trusted God and went back to the fields to care for the sheep and the goats. Through an amazing series of events, David ends up working as a musician, playing a harp in the court of King Saul. And then, later, David kills the Philistine giant Goliath. David ends up marrying King Saul’s daughter Michal and becomes the King’s son, and he becomes best friends with Jonathan. So, they are brothers now and best friends. But Saul was incredibly dangerous and jealous of David because he could see that the people wanted David to be the King after Saul or even instead of Saul. So Saul sent him on missions over and over again, which should have killed David, but because David was God’s choice, he survived every time.

But then, one day, Saul had had enough, and he started trying to kill David himself. He tossed a spear at David, tried to get his soldiers to arrest and kill him, and David was forced to begin disobeying the King’s commands in order to stay alive. No one was supposed to disobey the King–especially not his own sons and sons-in-law! David ran from the house of Saul and spent many years hiding in caves and fighting the enemies of Israel. David even had two chances to kill Saul but didn’t. David could obey God, but he could no longer obey Saul in the Lord. Saul’s commandments were wicked, and he wasn’t hearing from the Lord anymore, so his commands were bad ones. Although David disobeyed Saul and lived, Saul’s son Jonathan, even though he was a good man who loved David, continued to obey his father, and it got him killed. Jonathan and everyone else in the Kingdom could see that Saul had become too wicked to be King, but they kept serving and obeying him. Jonathan even knew that his father was making dangerous and disastrous decisions. That was a tough situation for Jonathan, but a good rule of thumb is that if one of your parents chucks a spear at your best friend’s head at dinner then it’s definitely time to call 911!!! And I am sure you will never have to face that situation! It’s really nice not to be a member of any of the Bible families, right? I mean, who needs that kind of drama anyway? Saul needed an intervention.

What about times when kids should have obeyed their parents in the Lord but didn’t? High Priest Eli had two sons named Hophni and Phineas. Although Eli was careful to do a good job caring for the Lord’s Tabernacle in Shiloh, his sons were both evil. They were doing some really messed up stuff that I won’t even tell you about. They were also messing around with the sacrifices and not obeying God’s commands. And those goober-heads decided it would be a great idea to take the Ark of the Covenant out of the Holy of Holies to scare the Philistines with it—without asking God first. In fact, God had stopped talking to anyone except the little boy Samuel because Hophni and Phineas were so wicked, and their father wasn’t doing anything to really stop them. He told them what to do and what not to do, and they just ignored him. And so, God told Samuel that the family would die so that Israel would have an obedient and good priesthood again. Phineas and Hophni died when the Philistines stole the ark and put it into Dagon’s temple! And then their father died of shock! The kids didn’t obey their father, but their father wasn’t obeying God because he kept allowing his wicked sons to continue to be priests.

Let’s talk about an obedience story from when Jesus was a boy. Now, we probably think that Jesus always did exactly what his parents wanted him to do without even being told, right? Nope. Oh my gosh, there was this one time when his whole family—his mom and dad and brothers and sisters—all went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover at the Temple. The city was packed with visitors who had come to worship God and celebrate being freed from slavery in Egypt. It was a very joyous and fun celebration that lasted a whole week. But on their way back to their home in Nazareth, Joseph and Mary suddenly realized that their twelve-year-old son Jesus was nowhere to be found. They searched and searched among their relatives, and no one had even seen him, so they had to go back. After three days, they found him in the Temple, and he was sitting with the Torah teachers—he was listening to them and asking them questions that amazed them. They were also amazed at the answers he gave them to their questions! Where had he been sleeping? What had he been eating? Do you think his parents were worried or angry? I can tell you that they were definitely both! They asked him, “Why did you do this to us? We’ve been so worried about you and looking for you everywhere in the city!”

What do you think Jesus said to them? Did he say sorry and ask them to forgive him? Well, you would think he’d do that because if you or I did something like that, we’d be in super huge trouble, right? But he didn’t! Instead, he gave them a confused look and said, “Where else did you expect me to be? Didn’t you know that I need to be in my Father’s House?” The House, the Beit HaMikdash, was what the Temple in Jerusalem was called—God’s House. And the Bible says, in Luke 2, that his parents were totally confused by that and didn’t know what to think. But his parents weren’t wrong to be upset that he hadn’t stayed with the family. If it was my kids, they would be SO grounded for a month. But the Bible says that he did go home with them and obeyed them after that. You see, Jesus needed to learn things too—like how not to give his parents a heart attack. He hadn’t been purposefully mean or spiteful, but he hadn’t stayed with the family like he was expected to. He wasn’t sinning against them, but he wasn’t thinking about how what he did would affect them either! He was probably thinking about how awesome it was to be surrounded by people who knew so much about the Hebrew Bible because he came from a small town, and there probably wasn’t much of anyone to talk to. I am betting that he had a lot of dinner invitations from those Torah teachers, so he didn’t go hungry.

You will make a lot of mistakes when you are twelve too, and remember that when it happens, Jesus will totally understand. He was so excited to be at the Temple, that he just stopped thinking about anything else. He wasn’t hurting his parents on purpose. He knew that obedience is important, and I suppose that after that, his parents always told him to stick close to them whenever they went to Jerusalem for the Passover, and he obeyed them.

I love you. I am praying for you. And growing up means learning to understand who to obey and who not to obey. And it can be confusing, but as long as you have people who love you, they can help you know what is wise and what would be a big mistake.

Every once in a while, something is going on with Christians or the world and I think it is important to explore it with the kids so that they understand better what everyone is talking about. This week we’re going to learn about revivals and outpourings of the Holy Spirit and what we can learn about them from looking at Ezekiel, Acts, and the ministry of 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 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).

Everybody is talking about something amazing going on at a Christian University in Kentucky called Asbury. Now, there are two different schools in that town by that name, one is a Theological Seminary where people study to become ministers, but the school I am talking about is just a four minute walk down the road. On Wednesday morning two weeks ago, all the students of the University were gathered for chapel to hear a message from God’s word. In fact, they all go to chapel on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and then have church services on Sunday. These kids seriously love God! And by kids, I mean that most of them are under 25. To me, that’s kids even if they sound like old people to you. They are definitely grown ups but they are also kids compared to me because when I was their age, they weren’t even born yet. But I am going to tell you something important—God doesn’t care how old you are when He wants to do something amazing in your life or when He wants to use you to do something for Him.

Anyway, like I was saying, they were all gathered for Chapel (so, if you don’t like going to church four times a week then this is not the school for you!) and the leader for that day gave a sermon from Romans on the sins that keep us from truly loving each other. I thought it was a really good sermon and that he did a great job. It wasn’t a flashy sermon, and he seems just like a normal person like you and me. But then after the sermon, the choir sang and after they stopped, people just kept on singing and never stopped—and they are still singing even as I am typing this on Monday morning, twelve days later. They had to fill extra buildings, and there are people lined up all over the place wanting to join in worshiping God. And the people in line are worshiping, and people have flown in from all over North America and from all over the world to come and see what is going on. I haven’t been there but I do know two people who have been there the entire time—one teaches French at the University and the other teaches New Testament at the Theological Seminary down the road. They are husband and wife and he comes from America and she comes from the Republic of the Congo where she escaped as a war refugee and the story of how they came to be married is a really great one!

We know from the Bible that worship is very important to God, and we are supposed to be worshiping Him all the time, with the things we do and the choices we make and even how we treat our bodies and especially in how we treat each other. In Bible times, everything was religious. Going to the market to buy food was religious, farming was religious, which means that everything in their lives was about God or about the gods—depending on who you were and how you believed. In ancient Israel, they saw God as part of absolutely everything they did, from sleeping and eating to what they wore and what stories they told. Just everything was about God and His relationship with them. They believed that God was involved in every part of their lives and the people who didn’t? They were called wicked and foolish because they actually thought they could hide things from God and He wouldn’t see what they were doing and so they could be hurtful to others. But God does see us and sees everything and knows everything. It’s actually nice because we can be absolutely honest with Him and nothing we say can surprise Him. Like, we could say, “Lord, I was being a real jerk to my baby sister yesterday,” and He’s never going to respond with, “What? I can’t believe you did that! I never would have guessed!” Nope, but He might say something like, “Oh yeah, I noticed. You need to go make it up to her and make things right again. And then come back to talk with me about it!”

Now, I have to share with you why I believe God chose young people and not older people like me. These people are at the beginning of their grown up lives and they love God so much that they go to a college where they are surrounded by people who also love Him and who worship together at least every other day. Do you think that makes God happy? That young people are doing this on purpose instead of going to a school with a lot of parties and drugs and really bad stuff going on? This school doesn’t allow any of that and they kick out people who behave that way—they send them back home so they can go to the kind of school that lets their students do absolutely anything they want to do. Like the school I went to—and some messed up stuff happened to people I know and especially the girls. But when I was the age of these young people, I didn’t love God. I knew He was there and sometimes He would talk to me but I just really didn’t like Him very much, didn’t trust Him, and was very angry at Him. He didn’t hate me because of that. He knew why I felt that way and He did a lot of work to change me enough that I could love Him and not be so sad and angry all the time. If the me from today went back to college, I would definitely want to be in a place where I go to church four times a week!

A lot of older people like me are just stubborn and set in their ways and very judgmental. They don’t like it when something is happening to anyone who isn’t exactly the same as they are. They think that if people don’t believe this or that, then God doesn’t want to use them or bless them like this. Others believe that God shouldn’t do something like this with young people at all, that it should be older people who have been Christians longer. But God doesn’t care what we think and who we think deserves to be a part of something like this. In fact, none of us can say we deserve something so wonderful because that is very prideful and we are not supposed to be like that. We aren’t supposed to be bragging, or even thinking that we are all that and a bag of chips, or that we have everything figured out so God should use us instead of someone else. Jesus told His disciples that everyone who exalts themselves would be humbled but whoever humbles themselves would be exalted. But what does that mean? That means that people who brag and think they are really awesome will be sorry because they are going to be very embarrassed, and that God will make the people who are quiet about themselves very great in His Kingdom! Next week, we’re going to look at the Book of Esther and how Esther was very humble but the evil Haman was very prideful and exalted himself. She ended up as Queen and he ended up dead. After being really embarrassed in front of everyone.

And some people call this a revival and others call it an outpouring of the Holy Spirit so I want you guys to understand what those words mean. First of all, the word revival is not a Bible word—it’s a word that people have made up to describe when certain things happen. Now, we do see words like revive in the Bible a lot. Dang, there is this one spot where God is talking to Ezekiel the prophet and something totally freaky happens: “The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by his Spirit and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. (can you even imagine God picking you up and putting you down into a valley full of bones??!!) He led me all around those bones. There were so many of them laying right on the ground of the valley, and they were very dry. Then God said to me, “Son of Man (which means “human being” here), can these bones live?” I replied, “Lord God, only you know.” (which means, I have no clue and I don’t even want to try to guess) God said to me, “Prophesy about these bones and say to them: Dry bones, you pay attention to the word of the Lord! This is what the Lord God says to these bones: I will make it so you are breathing again, and you will be alive. I will put tendons on you, make muscles grow on you, and cover you with skin. I will make you breathe again so that you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.” So, I told the bones everything I had been commanded to say. While I was talking to the bones about God and His promises, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. As I looked, tendons appeared on them (to hold them together), muscles grew, and skin covered them, but they still weren’t breathing. God said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man. Say to it: This is what the Lord God says: Breath, come from the four winds and breathe into these dead people so that they will be alive!” So, I told the bones what God told me; the breath entered them, and they came to life and stood on their feet, a huge army.” (Ez 37:1-10)

Well, dang, I bet you didn’t know there was anything like that in the Bible! But God did that to show Ezekiel that he was going to bring His people to life again. You see, they had been conquered and were living in a foreign country where everyone around them was an idol worshiper. The people wondered if their lives as Jews were over, and if they would ever be able to go back to Jerusalem or be at the Temple ever again. It was a sad and scary time to be alive and they didn’t know if things would ever change, but God was showing Ezekiel that not only can He make a huge pile of dead bones into a living group of humans again, He could also bring all of his people back home again and make them a country again and rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple. But this is where we get the idea of revival—that word I promised to explain to you. Revival can mean when someone or something that is asleep, or very sick or dead, wakes up, or gets better, or comes back to life. In Church life, we call something a revival when God does something amazing to the people who worship Him. One day, everything is normal and then BOOM out of nowhere it is like God has breathed into them and they become more alive than they were before. In the Bible and especially in the book of Acts, which tells the story of the Apostles traveling around preaching about Jesus, this is called an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. This is what happened fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus, when He came out of the tomb that they had laid Him in after He died on the Cross. Three days later, He was revived—not dead anymore but alive and more alive than He had ever been before!

On Pentecost that year, all of Jesus’s followers (120 of them) were gathered together and were worshiping God and all of a sudden they heard a huge noise and the Holy Spirit entered the place they were in and filled them up inside and they even had flames over their heads! And they started speaking strange languages that none of them knew and they were all telling people about God—and the people visiting Jerusalem from all over the Roman and Scythian Empires were just shocked that they were hearing about God in their own language from back home. And they were so amazed that three thousand people became believers in Jesus that day and they took the message of Jesus back to their homes after the festival! Now that’s definitely what I call a revival. These people were all Jewish and they accepted Jesus as their King, and when that happened, they were filled with God’s spirit too! Just like all those dead bones. Without Jesus, we are a lot like those dead bones that Ezekiel talked to about God’s promises. Some parts of us are just as dead as those dried out bones. But God revives us, gives us life in His Spirit, so that we can be His people.

What happened in Acts 2 was just huge and affected a lot of people all at once and there were also miracles so that is called an outpouring of the Spirit, because God took His Spirit and poured it into everyone who believed Jesus. Just remember that to be revived is to change someone from being dead or almost dead, to being filled with life. And an outpouring of the Spirit is just a pouring out of the Spirit into people. But there are also times in the Bible where God makes it so that everyone around can feel that He is there, really strongly. And that’s just an amazing feeling. For me, it’s like I can feel every little cell in my body. I feel like a bottle of fizzy soda. And I know He is right there with me. I feel it most often when I am really sick. That’s really nice, it’s like a hug from God and I know that He is helping me to get better. But what about when God does that with an entire place? That’s kinda what has happened at Asbury University. It started with a few people continuing to sing after the choir ended their song and then it spread and spread and people could feel that God was there right with them, enjoying their company and the songs they were singing to Him. He has special angels who do nothing but sing to Him, that’s what they were created for, but when we worship Him—when we can’t even see Him—that’s extra special. Humans choose to love God and to worship Him and to obey Him and serve Him and trust Him. We also choose to do really messed up stuff! But when we all come together, and when we don’t care which Church we go to or what we look like or what language we speak or how much money anyone has or where we all come from, then it is an amazing thing. It’s what God wants, and at the very end of the Bible, that’s what God’s city looks like. People of all kinds, all shapes and sizes and colors and languages, all gathered together—loving each other and loving God. We will all sing, so happy to be together like we were always supposed to be, worshiping God together the way we were created to do. When people do that here, it looks a lot like the Kingdom of Jesus will when He rules over all of us as King. No wonder God would want to come down in a special way to be part of it.

And the people I know who are there tell me that the ministers of all the churches there are talking to the crowds in line and people who didn’t used to believe that Jesus was even real are believing in Him. Sick people are being healed and miracles are happening. The professors at the schools are praying with the people who want prayer but no one gets up in front of the people to talk unless they are a student. God visited young people who were doing this and the adults decided that they needed to just let them keep doing it because God seems to be really happy about it. Isn’t that cool? A lot of times, adults really mess up a good thing by stepping in and trying to take control over it. They decide to do it a better way and everything falls apart. And so, all these grownups decided to let God do what He wants to do for as long as He wants to do it. Big time preachers and singers have asked if they can come and preach and sing in front of the church and the University people said, “NO!” No one is getting famous. No one can even see who is up in front of everyone singing or reading Bible verses. No one is allowed to do anything except worship God and Jesus. Everyone is praying and singing. No one there is better than anyone else. Only Jesus is better than anyone else. Only Jesus is perfect. Only Jesus deserves all of the attention.

Just like in the book of Acts when all of those Jews who believed Jesus went back to their countries and preached about Jesus, the same thing is happening with the students who have been visiting Asbury—they are going back to their schools and the same thing is happening there too! You can think of it like the churches and schools are catching on fire because they got close to someone who came back. Or like a virus that everyone needs to catch. But just like in the Bible, not everyone is happy about it. In the Bible, although everyone who believed in Jesus at this point was Jewish, all the enemies of Jesus were Jewish too and they didn’t like what was happening. Even before Jesus died some of them were saying, “All the world is going to Him!” And they weren’t happy about that because it meant that Jesus was becoming more popular and important than they were. There were so many Pharisees, and Scribes and Priests, and normal, everyday Jews who started believing Jesus but there were also very powerful people who didn’t and especially the Chief Priests and the High Priest. And they had been spreading rumors and telling lies even before Jesus died because they were jealous of all the attention that Jesus was getting and because of all the miracles He could do when they couldn’t do any. It would have totally been okay if they were concerned and they were asking Him questions, like Nicodemus did, but they hated what was happening and wanted to stop it.

Jealousy is a terrible thing. It can turn even nice people into monsters and the Sadducees, who were the head honchos of the Temple, weren’t nice people to begin with. They were greedy, liars, cruel, and corrupt—which means that they weren’t doing their jobs honestly. And if the High Priest was supposed to be anything, it would certainly be honest in serving God and the people, right? But all they could see was that Jesus was stealing the honor that they thought belonged to them. They thought, even with what low down dirty skunks they were (and we know that about them because all of the Jewish writers who wrote about them just hated how awful they were)—well, they thought that they deserved to be respected and admired by all the other Jews. They thought they were the best and that what they believed was the best and how they did things was the best and more than that, they figured that being rich and powerful was just proof that they deserved it and God loved them more than anyone else. How come it is always those types of people who think that the awful things they do are okay to God???

So, they were lying about Jesus before He died and after He rose again. And today, the exact same thing happens—even with Christians. It wasn’t long after they began worshiping God all day every day at Asbury that some religious leaders started spreading nasty rumors about the student leaders, rumors that have been proven to be false but lies spread faster than the truth. But the people I know who are there are very trustworthy and good people. They have even helped me with this radio show! They have said that none of the bad rumors are true and that the people saying those things haven’t even bothered to come and see for themselves. I have been playing their worship on YouTube all day and there is nothing fancy going on and there is nothing crazy going on. God is just being worshiped and people are being blessed.

Some grownups are saying, “Unless these people do this or that (the same way that I do) then this isn’t a real revival!” Or another person said, “Those women aren’t wearing skirts so God is not a part of this!” And how about, “They let women teach there, and God hates that!” It seems like a lot of people think that their churches are the only ones that have everything right and that God should have chosen them for this but God chooses who He chooses and doesn’t have to tell us why. I am going to be really honest, I think that God would rather do something like this with people whom everyone else thinks doesn’t deserve it because they will accept it as a gift that they don’t deserve. Grownups, when something like this happens to us, we tend to decide that it happened because God wants everyone to be like us and that He is putting His great big stamp of approval on us. And that is the worst attitude in the world but I have heard it from a lot of grownups. Of course, they don’t think that’s what they are saying but everyone who is listening to them knows the truth. It isn’t God’s job to make everyone like us. He wants everyone to be like Him and to do that we have to be like Jesus. We have to do things like forgiving the people who have hurt us, even when we have to stay far away from them, and not taking revenge or getting even when someone hurts us, even when we have to call the police. We are supposed to treat other people like they are better than we are and not like we are better than they are.

But when grownups say things like, “They aren’t the right sort of people,” what they are really saying is, “that should have happened to people like me instead!” When they say, “God wouldn’t do anything that way,” they are telling God what He can and cannot do. When they make up lies and are quick to believe gossip and rumors, they are showing that they have evil thoughts and envy and jealousy in their hearts toward anyone whom God wants to bless and use. We need to have a different attitude. When something amazing happens and God is being praised and praised and praised and people are coming to know Jesus and miracles are happening, we just need to be glad it happens. It doesn’t matter who it happens to, only that it is happening and that God and people are being blessed and lives are being changed. We still don’t know all of what will happen but deciding that something is bad right away can get us into a lot of trouble with God. I am sure you have heard of the young man named Saul, who went out arresting and hurting the Jews who were following Jesus. He decided that Jesus couldn’t be the Messiah and that his followers were criminals and that God would never use Jesus or them for anything. But then, on his way to the great city of Damascus to arrest Jesus’s followers there, he suddenly became blind and he heard a voice from Heaven. That voice belonged to Jesus, and Jesus said that when you hurt His followers, you are hurting Him. It’s something we need to think about.

I love you. I am praying for you. Next week we are going to talk about Queen Esther.

The Bible really changes when we get to Genesis 12 and so I wanted to take a week to talk to the kids about what the Bible is and isn’t and why there are so many different kinds of writings by so many different people in it, and why we can trust it.

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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 I use comes from the Miss Tyler Version (the MTV) which is the Christian Standard Bible reworded and expanded a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the meaning.

Our Bible lessons are really about to change, big time. You guys have now learned more about the first eleven chapters of the Bible than most adults know about the entire Bible. These chapters are some of the hardest to understand, easiest to misunderstand, and hardest to teach in the whole Bible and we only just scratched the surface. When you grow up, you can use what I have taught you and you can go out and study for yourselves. There are so many wonderful scholars and theologians and teachers writing amazing books about the beginning of the Bible. But before we move on, we need to answer a very important question—what exactly is the Bible? Can you give me a good definition? Can you give me an answer besides “God’s word?” It isn’t as easy as we think and sometimes, when we really think about it, that question isn’t as easy to answer as we first thought.

First of all, let’s talk about what the Bible isn’t. The Bible isn’t just a book. The Bible is actually a whole library of books—sixty-six books, to be exact! If the Bible was one book, it would have one author and it would all sound like it was written by the exact same person. However, when we open up our Bibles and begin reading, it doesn’t take too long before we notice that the books of the Bible are often wildly different from each other. One book will be filled with a whole lot of good advice, and another has beautiful songs and poetry. Keep turning pages and you will find stories about people’s lives and other books filled with confusing and even scary symbols and dragons and disasters. One of the authors wrote a whole bunch of personal letters to different groups and others just to people. Some books record the warnings and the promises that the prophets spoke to Israel. Then there are books with lists and lists of people’s family trees—we’ve already seen some of those. What about the book with all the blueprints for making a Tabernacle? Or the detailed instructions for the priests who serve in the Tabernacle. Have you noticed the legal sayings, given to the judges of Israel so that they can make wise decisions when people bring problems to them? And Jesus, some of the stuff from Him includes sermons like you would hear in Church (only a lot better) or teaching stories called parables.

Sounds like a library and not just one book, right? There isn’t another book in the world that has all of that and more in it. The word Bible comes from Biblos, a Greek word meaning scroll. Byblos was a Phoenician city along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea north of Israel. They were very famous for importing something called papyrus from Egypt. Papyrus is a very strong piece of paper for writing and painting on, and actually we get the word paper from the word papyrus. I went and found a really cool video for you guys to show you how they make papyrus sheets today—it is really amazing, how they took plants and cut them up and laid them out in patterns to make writing materials. And people have been making papyrus since long before Abraham was born! They didn’t really make books for a very long time because only a very few people could read and write, but they did write receipts for sales and contracts between people, and sometimes priests and doctors would write out directions for what they were doing. When the Bible “books” or scrolls or “biblos” began to be written down during the time of the kings in Israel, and after, they used things like parchment (made from animal skins) and papyrus to make huge scrolls of the books. No one could carry around a whole Bible because it was made up of many scrolls, and they didn’t last forever either. Mostly, scrolls were made to be stored away. The Bible was spoken by Moses and the people who came after him for many hundreds of years before they wrote it all down.

Is that hard to believe? I know it shocked me. I thought that writing things down was always the best but in the days of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses and even in the days of Jesus, people trusted what they heard more than what was written down. And the stories they heard from Moses and memorized generation after generation were the most important stories of all to the people of Israel. If a story came from Moses then they trusted it. And storytelling was a very important job. If you have a movie or a show you like, maybe you can understand. Maybe you have watched something so many times that if someone took out a scene or some words that you would totally notice and yell, “Hey, what the heck is going on here! This is supposed to be when Wesley tells Buttercup that ROUS’s aren’t real!” Or when Ralphie gets told he will shoot his eye out if he gets that Red Ryder BB gun. We remember what is important to us and to the children of Israel in the wilderness listening to Moses, nothing was more important to them than what Moses told them year after year. So, when the time came to tell their children, they knew it by heart. They didn’t need it written down. Goodness, hardly any of them knew how to read and why would they even need to read? What they needed in those days was to have a whole lot of knowledge about growing plants and animals and about what God wants from them. God told them to remember His words and to talk about them all the time and to teach their children day and night.

Those people didn’t have Bibles to carry around—they were walking, talking Bibles! Not every single person would have every little thing memorized, but as a community—a large group of people living and working together—together they knew the Bible and the best storytellers would be the ones performing it around campfires and while they watched their flocks and taught their children. Even if they could have read it, they would much rather hear it. If you have ever read the Bible, then it is not hard to see why it would be better if it was told out loud from memory than written down. The Bible is full of songs that the people knew the tunes to, but we don’t know because we only have it written down. When the storytellers would speak the words of God or Moses or Abraham, they knew just how to say them. Have you ever read something in the Bible and said to yourself, “I wish I knew if this person was angry or sad or whatever—the Bible doesn’t give me any directions for how this person is feeling!” That happens a lot, but when these stories got told over and over again, they came from Moses, who knew exactly how they should sound because he was there. Some of them were things he said, or heard, and others were things that God said. Nowadays, we have to do way too much guessing! The Bible, our library of books about God, isn’t written like our books are now. We are always told how the people should sound when they say things, and not just sometimes! It might be a good thing to ask someone to read a book to you without any of the information that talks about the tone of voice or the mood of the person talking.

You might ask how they knew people weren’t just making things up but when you have thousands of people who know a story and who heard it from their parents, who heard it from their parents, then the people telling the story have to be very careful because people will get all angry and complain to the manager if too much gets changed. They knew what Moses said and they knew how He said it but they still loved to hear a good storyteller speak about it. It would be very much like watching a movie or a tv show because they didn’t have any of that. Entertainment for them was stories and the Bible has the most exciting stories of all. And because those stories were their own history, and their relatives got mentioned, that made it even better. People love hearing interesting stories about their families and they always have. But there came a time when things started to go wrong, during the times when there were kings, and when they had a big city with a palace and a Temple, they could start writing some of the stories down and storing them away in libraries—which were places where writings were stored and not places where you could go and check out books! They did this so that the stories wouldn’t get lost and it was a very good idea because some of the kings were very terrible people who didn’t worship God and when the kings didn’t worship God then the people didn’t either. It was probably up to the priests and to the good kings to start recording what Moses had said and Joshua and the stories from the time of the Judges and the prophet Samuel. These stories would have taken up a lot of room but having a library allowed them to be stored away and saved so that they couldn’t be destroyed. And they would have been glad to have them hidden away when the Assyrians and Babylonians began to attack them. Of course, we don’t know exactly when they were first all written down. We do know that Moses wrote down some things, like what God said at Mt Sinai. But what the Bible tells everyone, over and over again was to talk about it and tell people about it and to speak.

I don’t know about you but if I could understand ancient Hebrew, I would love to hear how the stories that we read today sounded coming from the mouths of the people who knew exactly how to say every little word and knew the answers to the children’s questions about the stories. Have you ever been to a story time hour at the library? I mean with someone who really knows how to tell a story. Not everyone is good at it. But you can bet that the people in the wilderness who were teaching Moses’s words (because Moses couldn’t be at every camp every night, right?) had their favorites—people with the best memories and the best voices. “Tell us the story of when God saved us from Pharaoh by parting the Red Sea!” or maybe a child would ask, “Did the prophet Moses really get to live in a palace? Did he really spend forty years in the wilderness working as a shepherd? Did his mom really hide him in an ark on the Nile?” You might go to church and hear these things, but when they were resting at night or on the Sabbath, they were hearing stories about their own families. So, those stories were probably much more important to them than they are to us.

But when the people stopped listening or caring and decided to worship other gods and to hurt people who were poor and weak and wouldn’t free their slaves, God stopped protecting them from the other nations. And first, the people in the north had to go to Assyria and the people in the south got taken away to Babylon. In Babylon, something wonderful happened. The people started to care about God and how He always saved their ancestors and blessed them and cared for them. And people called scribes gathered up all the stories, and the histories, and the songs, and the wise advice, and the records of their kings and all the wars they fought, and they put all those stories together in scrolls. Some scrolls, like Ruth and Esther, were shorter, and some, like Isaiah and Jeremiah, were very long. Some of the books of our Bibles that are separated now, were together then. Ezra and Nehemiah were just one scroll, I and II Samuel were one, I and II Kings, I and II Chronicles. Jeremiah and Lamentations were together. In fact, our Bibles have thirty-nine books that were written in Hebrew but they only had twenty-two. It’s the same stuff we have now, but some big books were made into two smaller books.

But the really great thing about those days is that when the Jewish people who put all the books together really started worshiping God again and loving Him and not having anything to do with any of those false gods again. They became very interested in everything Moses ever told them and they were also interested to see what God had told the prophets about when they might get to go home again to Israel. The people who came back to Israel were very different than the people who left seventy years earlier. But the funny thing is that even though they had combined all of the stories together and had them written down, when they got together to talk about God, they didn’t have personal Bibles at home that they would read alone. A very big synagogue might have a lot of scrolls to read from but most people still couldn’t read and they would listen while someone else read from the scrolls or just told them the stories. They didn’t care about what was written down yet, they really just cared about what Moses had said. They were very different from how we are now, for sure. And we might say, “That’s just silly, stuff that is written down is much more accurate than what people say!” But just think if you lived in a world where only maybe one or two out of a hundred people could read and everything you knew was what you had heard. Would you care what was written down somewhere? Something you couldn’t read? Something that for all you know is just silly scribbles that don’t mean anything at all? If you lived in a world like that, you would have to have a very excellent memory. If someone gave you instructions then you couldn’t write notes to help you remember. You would become the kind of person who paid close attention whenever anyone told you anything so that you could remember every single word. You might even have the memory of a genius. The people who could tell all those stories would have to be incredibly smart, right? To have all those Bible stories stored carefully away in their brains?

See? Just because someone can’t read or write doesn’t mean that they aren’t super intelligent—it just means that they haven’t been taught. When I was a kid, we didn’t have cell phones. Heck, when I was first an adult we didn’t have them either. So we didn’t have any phone numbers stored away that we could look up. But what we did have was really good memories. We had so many phone numbers stored in our heads. We had them memorized because that was what people had to do. You will find in your life that if you really need to be able to do something or remember it that you will be able to. We just think it is hard to remember stuff because it is so easy to look it up that we don’t even bother memorizing it but we definitely could if we had to. If someone asked me for my friend’s phone number and I told it to them, they wouldn’t say, “I don’t believe you because it isn’t written down.” They would believe me because they knew that I knew the number. And it is the same way with how the Bible used to be the words of Moses and Joshua and Samuel and others, that people remembered just because of how important they are.

But there are other stories that weren’t as important. They weren’t spoken, they were written down as records while things were happening. Sometimes we will see a verse that says, “Isn’t such and such recorded in the book of Jashar” or the ten other records mentioned in the Bible that we don’t have. People didn’t memorize them and they were probably destroyed when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem—if something is only written down and not memorized by anyone, then it is really easy to get rid of it. See how important it was that the communities memorized everything we have written down in our Bibles today? To get rid of the Bible today, even if they burned every single copy and destroyed every single computer with the Bible on it, unless they killed every single person who knows the Bible—we would still have it safely tucked away in people’s heads. There is actually a movie about that where a blind man has a Braille Bible, which means the letters are written in bumps on the paper, and even though all the books in the world were being destroyed, he had the entire Bible memorized even when they took his away. And as long as he was alive, the Bible was too and at the end of the movie he was telling it to someone else and they were writing it down. No one can get rid of the Bible as long as even one person remembers it! That’s why they put their trust in people and not in paper back in the time of Moses. Isn’t that cool?

So, by the time Jesus was born, they had Torah scrolls in the big city synagogues or other parts of scrolls, and so Jesus was able to read from the Isaiah scroll when He went home to Nazareth. He might have walked with his family the four miles to Sepphoris and their big synagogue to read from Isaiah 61. But when He preached to the people, we don’t see scribes recording every word He says and we sure don’t see Him telling anyone to write it down. Jesus would have traveled from town to town with His disciples, preaching the exact same sermon and telling them the same parables over and over again until his disciples had them memorized and then He sent them out in two’s to start teaching what they had heard Him teach over and over again. It really wouldn’t take long for them to memorize the message of the Gospel, that the Kingdom of Heaven was here at last and invading earth to destroy the powers of Satan. The people had been waiting for a Messiah to come and destroy the Roman armies and so they had been waiting for the Kingdom of Heaven but boy were they surprised when Jesus wanted to forgive the Romans instead of kill them. They weren’t keen on that! When they heard the Scriptures in the synagogues, that’s how they interpreted what they were hearing. And interpretation is a funny sort of thing. We have the verse written down, right? And we might decide that it means such and such—that’s our interpretation. But sometimes our interpretation is wrong, wrong, wrong! And someone else looks at that same verse and thinks it says something else and maybe that person is right or maybe they are wrong too. Sometimes, God means this and we make the mistake of thinking something else entirely because we can’t read His mind or anything. Good thing too because if we did our brains would likely explode. Which would be almost as messy as Legos in the carpet.

And so, after Jesus rose from the dead and explained to His disciples how all those Hebrew Bible verses in the first thirty-nine books of the Bible, all were telling everyone about Him (they were just interpreting it wrong—they thought it said this when it really said that), they went all over the place teaching what Jesus taught and sharing all of their memories about Him. And they did that for many, many years until someone decided to gather the stories they knew together and those became the Gospel of Mark, and then some others did the same and we got Matthew and Luke as well and finally, the last story about Jesus was the Gospel of John. And they are all different stories because Jesus is too awesome and amazing to only have one story told about Him. Mark tells us the story of Jesus who is the warrior of God from the prophet of Isaiah, leading the greater exodus and destroying the forces of evil. Matthew tells the story differently—he focused on Jesus as being a greater teacher than Moses! Luke is filled with all of the little parables and stories that Jesus told as He traveled from town to town. And John, John is the hardest of all to understand because John tells the story about Jesus being the creative spoken, out loud and personal word of God, the Logos that we could all see and hear. I mean, not us, I am not quite that old but you guys know what I mean.

And as the church spread out all over Europe and Asia and Africa, Paul had to write letters to the different cities who were having problems because of the local cultures, teaching them how to solve those problems. That’s part of why Paul was hard to understand because he knew the problems, and the questions, and we don’t. It’s like we are snooping at someone’s email but we can’t see the messages before it! But Paul knew them and they knew Paul so they didn’t have to be incredibly detailed. Over the next two centuries, the believers in Jesus were reading these aloud to their congregations and the ones that all the congregations accepted as being inspired from God were gathered together into the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. All together, we have sixty-six books telling us the story of God doing the work of saving His people from sin.  

I will tell you a few secrets though, did you know that there were no chapters in the Bible until like eight hundred years after Jesus came. Can you even imagine trying to find anything in the Bible without chapters? And there were no page numbers in the old scrolls either! They really had to know where stuff was at. And there were no verses until about six hundred years ago when a Rabbi finally divided up the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, into verses. It wasn’t until about a hundred years later that the New Testament, the Greek Scriptures, were divided up and published that way in Bibles. I am telling you that we are super spoiled. And now we can go on the computer and enter a few words into biblegateway.com or google search or biblehub and it will give us the rest of the verse which is craaay-zeee. I couldn’t even imagine that when I was a kid, or for most of my adult life either. A lot of people have gone to a lot of work for many thousands of years—remembering, writing, organizing, and getting the Bible to us so that we can have it in our own homes and not just at the church or synagogue, and even on our computers and phones!

I love you and I am praying for you. I hope that you enjoy listening to the Bible as much as they did in the wilderness when Moses shared the stories of everything God had done for them.

I wanted to take some time to talk the kids about the trauma they experience after losing a beloved pet. My favorite cat Monty died unexpectedly last week and I took some time when the grief was still raw to write up this broadcast so that I could help kids to be comfortable with their emotions and to know that love is still a wonderful thing even though it can also cause us a lot of pain. I also talked a bit about how to be sensitive and kind when others are hurting. It is my hope that this will encourage conversations with parents and kids not only about pets but also when relatives pass on.

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, any scripture this week will be from the Miss Tyler Version (the MTV) which is the Christian Standard Bible reworded and expanded a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the meaning.

Parents, today we are going to talk about some sensitive issues related to losing a family pet. So, if this broadcast isn’t appropriate for your kids, this is the time to turn off the broadcast. However, I am hoping that this will reach the ears of kids who need to understand about the decisions we make for our furry, finned, or feathered family members and coping with the intense feelings of losing them.

So, I am super sad today. I am writing this about a week before I will record this broadcast because it is important to me to talk to you when real things happen that are sad for families. Last Friday, my tomcat Monty and his sister Sunflower were getting their yearly checkups and I showed the Veterinarian, the animal doctor, a lump on his back that was a few weeks old but wasn’t hurting him and I couldn’t get them in right away so I had to wait, which wasn’t a big deal. Well, the doctor didn’t like the feel of it and so she tried to see if it was just a cyst since it wasn’t hurting him. Well, it wasn’t a cyst and so she checked it for something really bad called cancer and that’s what it was. But still, as long as it was just under his skin it wasn’t a very bad deal because they could remove it plus the two other smaller lumps beside it that I hadn’t noticed. Yesterday he was supposed to get an operation but first they needed to look inside his body to make sure there weren’t any other problems. So, I waited at the store across the street for a couple of hours and organized the shirts that people had kinda messed up to keep myself occupied.

When she called me, the doctor wasn’t happy at all because Monty had lesions, which is cancer, all inside his liver and spleen and from there, it had spread everywhere in his body, and he had lost weight even in the few days between our visit and the day he was supposed to have surgery. She told me that we could keep Monty alive if we really wanted to, but that we had probably caught it just in time before he really started hurting very badly. It was very sad for me because Monty is my cat and his sister will miss him because they came from the same litter, which means their momma cat had them at the same time. So they have been together every single day of their entire lives and they love each other and snuggle and lick each other and play together all the time. Monty is my favorite out of all the cats I have ever had in my life. He was twelve years old and he was a total cuddle bunny, always purring and loving on me. I knew I would be incredibly sad without him. But I also knew that it wouldn’t be too many days before being petted by me would hurt him terribly, and he was already not wanting to eat very much in the past few days.

So, what we did was very hard but since there was no way to make him better ever again, and even though I would miss him very badly, I decided to call my sons Andrew and Matthew who rescued them from an abandoned house when they were only three weeks old and dying, and Andrew and his girlfriend Jackie were able to come and say goodbye. I brought his favorite treats because he hadn’t eaten all day because we thought he would have an operation, and he ate them like he was a wild lion eating an antelope. And then he walked around the room and butted his head against all of us and then the doctor came in and gave him a shot so that he would fall asleep. He never stopped purring and I had him wrapped in my bathrobe from home so that he wouldn’t get cold or feel scared, and it took about five minutes and he fell asleep and couldn’t feel anything anymore—like when a person has surgery and they make them go to sleep and they wake up later like nothing happened and didn’t feel anything that had happened to them.  That’s what it is like for cats and dogs because we don’t want them to be scared or to hurt anymore. We want them to still be happy and not suffering. After he went to sleep, the doctor gave him another shot and used her stethoscope to check his heart until it just wasn’t beating anymore.

Although I was really sad yesterday and today I am even sadder, I know that it was good for Monty to not be hurting just because I wanted him to still be with me. But it isn’t an easy decision to make and no matter what we do, we always wonder “what if” so we just have to make the best decision based on what they need and we have to trust God to take care of the rest. Pets aren’t like people. People can be really sick and in a lot of pain but they understand what is going on and so there is still a reason to be alive. But that isn’t true with animals. They don’t understand what is happening to them—all they know is how bad they feel all the time. We don’t do this with people because people are created in the image of God. No matter how much we love our pets, they just aren’t the same as people and so when they are going to be miserable, we can help them out. Knowing that they won’t hurt anymore makes is easier but it doesn’t make it easy.

So, that was how I spent my day yesterday, and now I am very sad and his sister is very sad too. She knows something is wrong and she started to figure out last night that Monty might be gone forever. She is just laying on the couch not looking very good and just wanting to be near me. So, I turned on the heater because it was in the 30’s this morning, so it was really cold, and sometimes when we are crying and sad we get cold and can’t warm ourselves back up.

Have you ever lost a pet? Pets are very special to us because they love us with their whole hearts, and even if they get angry because we clipped their claws or shooed them off the table (no poo-poo paws on my table, I always say) or if they don’t like the new food you gave them to eat or, worst of all, if you have to give a cat a bath, they forgive us and want to be with us again pretty quick. They forget what we do to make them mad—not like humans because we can be angry at someone for a long time. Dogs are especially forgiving, even if cats might take a while. My dog Bandit died in the spring, he was very old, and our other old dog died the year before. My dogs were always glad to see me and didn’t care what I looked like or anything about me—they just loved me and wanted to do everything with me. It’s very nice to have a friend like that, who wants to be with you even when no one else does and pretty much thinks you are the best thing ever! Sometimes they even sleep with us at night, or maybe they can do tricks and play with us. It’s great having a companion, a friend, who is always there when we need them. When they are gone, we can’t just get a new puppy or kitten or bird or hamster because they all have different personalities.

It’s very important to give ourselves time to be sad. Being sad is what always happens when we love someone and then they are gone. There’s nothing wrong with that. Even Jesus cried when His friend Lazarus died—even though He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead. In Bible days, when someone died, all the neighbors would come over and sit with the family and they would all cry and be as emotional as they wanted, and for a whole week no one did anything else. They knew it was important to be sad and that it takes as much time as it takes for people to stop being sad all the time. But just because they aren’t sad all the time doesn’t mean that they can’t get sad for a while again. That’s normal and good too. God gave us these wonderful emotions and gave us the ability to love others and a need to be loved back and He didn’t do that because it is terrible to be sad. Girls cry, boys cry, mommies cry, and so do daddies. We all cry because we are dealing with a loss.

A loss is when you had something important to you but now it is gone. It feels really bad to not have that animal or something or someone in your life anymore. God gave us our emotions to help us deal with that. Just imagine your best friend moving away to another place and you just don’t even care. Does that sound right? You’d be disappointed and lonely and sad, right? But some people are really weird when other people feel sad. Instead of just sitting and hugging and crying and just listening, they try to get us to cheer up because grief, when we are sad about someone dying, makes some people feel bad and strange and they think they can just joke with us or give us a donut or take us to the park and we will suddenly not hurt anymore or miss them. Well, that’s not how love works and we are sad for as long as we are sad and that’s that. God wouldn’t give us those kinds of feelings if they weren’t important.  

Or maybe you got mad because this happened to a pet you loved and didn’t understand why the adults in your life had to make the same decision I made. Maybe your pet looked okay but had things that were so wrong on the inside that they were going to start having very terrible lives. I know that it is hard, but remember that they loved your pet too and it was very, very difficult for them to do that and especially since they knew how much it would hurt you. They might not have cried in front of you, but they might have cried alone in the car on the way back home or later that night. They might feel terribly guilty even though they know they made the right choice to be kind. Sometimes, when we don’t understand and aren’t the people who have to make the hard decisions about what to do—it’s easy for us to be frustrated with and even mean to the person who had to do it. If that’s the case, I want you to pray to God about it and ask Him to show you what to do. You might need to forgive them and say you are sorry for being so angry at them. I know that what I sure needed was a big hug because I kept thinking that maybe there would be a miracle and he would get better. But I have to tell you that if I let him live and I was wrong, it would have been very bad for Monty in probably just another week and I would regret keeping him alive. And he wouldn’t want to be alive anymore. Sometimes, adults see problems that kids can’t because we have experienced more. An important part of being a grownup is knowing when our animal’s lives need to end.

And you might be angry at God, or just angry because you think it is unfair that your pet had to die. And you just want to be left alone to cry and sort things out but people bug us, trying to cheer us up and  think they are doing us a favor when we really just want them to go away and leave us alone, right? And some people say terrible awful things while trying to be helpful that only makes it a lot worse. And sometimes when that happens, we just want to clench our fists, stomp on the ground, and tell them to shut up! Because we were sad but then they came along and said something hurtful and now we are angry and sad and we are sorry we even know them, right? That’s normal too. Some people think they always have to say something when they shouldn’t say anything at all. Being hugged can be good but hearing a speech isn’t always what we need. It’s okay to ask politely to be left alone to pray or to sleep or to cry or however you need to handle it.

But, you know what? When people say mean or stupid things when they are trying to be helpful, it’s important that we pay attention to what things make us feel bad, or hurt even worse than we already do, or make us feel like we should be happy instead. Of course, you aren’t happy! Why should you be?? Maybe you are relieved that your pet doesn’t hurt anymore but that isn’t the same thing as being happy. It’s more than okay to be sad and the Bible tells us many stories where someone dies and everyone cries and even for a long time sometimes. But people can say some awful things trying to make you feel better.

They might say, “Well, at least it wasn’t your mom or dad or your brother or sister, at least it was just a pet.” And dude, that is so mean! Making you feel guilty and foolish for being sad when you have every right to be sad is bad enough, but making you think about your family members getting sick and dying is even worse. It isn’t helpful at all and it is just scary. Just like when I got told by someone that if I didn’t want what happened to Monty to happen to my other two cats, they would tell me what to feed them and that was right after I came home, very sad. And then all of a sudden, I was hurting more and upset about the thought of my other kitties dying. That person meant well because she was concerned about my other animals. The timing was just wrong. Or how about, “At least they won’t suffer anymore.” But that doesn’t help either because then you might feel like they are saying you are wrong to be so sad. Of course we don’t want them to hurt but we miss them so much. We don’t want them to suffer but we do want them with us and healthy so that we can love them. You know what? No one should ever say those two words to someone who is hurting, “at least” or “look on the bright side.”

What about when someone says that we should have made different choices and how awful we are for helping our animal to die? Well, they weren’t there and they don’t know and some people just think way too much about their own opinions and can’t even imagine that anyone knows more about a situation than they do, or that their opinions aren’t helpful, or even correct. There are always going to be people who talk without thinking about how it would make them feel to hear that when they are already feeling horrible.

Or they might ask, “Did you pray?” And that isn’t helpful either because that can make people feel guilty thinking that they didn’t pray enough or that maybe they should be angry at God for not saving their loved one when they did pray. When we are sad, we need God to be there as our comforter and friend and to know that He is sad because we are sad but when we get angry at Him, we push Him away when we need Him most and when He wants to be there for us the most. When bad things happen, people want there to be a reason, someone to blame, some way to keep it from happening in the future but you know what? Bad things happen because they happen. Everyone in the Bible, including Jesus and especially Jesus, had terrible things happen to them. Sometimes because they did something wrong themselves and sometimes because someone else chose to hurt them, but God doesn’t go around killing people because you didn’t pray enough. He doesn’t have this list that says, “Uh oh, Janie only prayed nine times and not ten so I am not going to help.” The truth is that everything and everyone dies, and if they didn’t then the world would get pretty bad really quick. We all have our time on earth and when we are really blessed, we get people and animals to love and who love us in return. But nothing lasts forever.

Some people might ask, “Why are you so sad? It’s only a pet!” And when they say that, you might feel dumb and embarrassed for crying. Or they might say, “Oh that’s nothing, when my dog died it was much worse because…” Or “I know exactly how you feel because…” but they are making your hurt all about themselves! It’s very nice to hear things instead like, “I am so sorry, that’s so hard. It is terrible when the pet you love dies. I know how hard it is because I have been there too and if you ever just want to talk, I can listen and I will understand. You aren’t alone, and you aren’t weird for being sad, and crying, and even being angry and feeling guilty. You didn’t do anything wrong. I know you loved them very much and made them very happy. They had a good life with you and now that has changed and it is good and right to be sad for as long as you are sad.”

I am a grownup and so I know that Monty didn’t die because I did anything wrong, or didn’t pray enough, and God didn’t kill Monty because He was angry with me. Monty died because something went wrong in an organ called his spleen and the cells went crazy and it spread to his liver and then it went all through the insides of his body. It’s something that happens sometimes no matter how good care we take of our pets. I have probably had twenty pets over my life, cats and dogs, and it is fun having them as puppies and kittens, and then as grown-up pets, and as they get older the time comes for them to die one day. And that day is hard and so are a lot of days afterward. But you know what? It was worth it. I would still do it all over again even though I am sad right now. Right now, I am having trouble remembering what it felt like to have him on my lap purring for the last twelve years because it hurts too much when I think about him. But I am only hurting right now because of all that love. I still had all those good times with him when I played with him as a kitten, and when he jumped in my bed for cuddles, or when he would follow me into the backyard when I would work in the garden. Sadness doesn’t make love bad because it was always good and it is still good. Monty dying doesn’t undo all of the wonderful times and hopefully it won’t be long before I can remember the silly things he did and smile or even laugh. Love is always good. Love is God’s gift to us. There will never be another cat exactly like Monty and I had to stop myself yesterday from going to get another kitten because that wouldn’t help right now, but that doesn’t mean that there won’t be other things in my life that are just as good even though they will never be the same.

In the book of Ecclesiastes chapter 3, the teacher says: “There is a time for everything, and a time here on earth to do everything: there is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant things and a time to pull them out, a time to kill and a time for healing, a time to tear things down and a time to build things up, a time to cry and a time to laugh, a time to mourn (which is what we do when someone dies) and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them up, a time for hugs and a time when we don’t want to be hugged, a time to search for things and a time to give up because they are lost forever, a time to keep things and a time to throw them away, a time to tear things apart and a time to fix things, a time to be quiet and a time to speak up and be heard, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.”

This is a very famous part of the Bible and there is even a song about this because this is some of the best poetry ever written by anyone ever. A lot of Hebrew poetry doesn’t sound very poetic when it is translated to English but this one does. We have to understand what people need when they need it and also what we need when we need it. If someone has died, then it is time to be sad. If a new baby is born, it’s time to dance and laugh and be happy. There is a time when medicine can make someone better again, and times when it can’t. Everyone who has even been born will die someday, usually because they get old and their bodies wear out, and that’s a good thing because just imagine if we got older and older and it was harder and harder to walk and we just never died? Dying can be a good thing then but the people who love that person are going to be incredibly sad and that is right too. It isn’t selfish to wish someone we love was still around. It just means that we love and miss them. And it is the time to cry. And so, I have been crying a lot and when I see my grown-up kids, I put out my arms because I need a hug and they do too. And I feel guilty because his sister Sunflower is incredibly sad and she doesn’t know why her brother isn’t here anymore. Those are normal feelings and God is helping me to feel them. He will always help you with your feelings too and you can be honest with Him even if you are really angry with Him. The people in the Bible do that a lot, because our relationship with God is very real and He knows what we are thinking anyway so why try to hide it from Him? He can take it. His love is bigger than anything you are feeling.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I am glad for my time with Monty. I bet you can say that you are very glad for the good things in your life too, even if they won’t be around forever. The Bible tells us that one day, God will wipe away all our tears and I can tell you that He does it here and now too. He heals us when we are sad because He loves us.

This week we are starting a series on both context and showing good fruit in Biblical discussions. Grown-ups on social media often use what they consider to be “sanctioned” insults, but not knowing the context, what they meant, who they were being spoken to and why. They just sound mean and so people use them and make them mean whatever they want. We are going to talk about self-control and what it meant in the ancient world when you “lost it” in a verbal battle and got angry. This teaching will be the longest of the series because we have to cover some basics about showing excess emotion in the Bible world. I will be giving a short lesson on the good and bad about Pharisees and teaching the kids the difference between harmless traditions and the dreaded “traditions of men.”

Social media and religious gatherings can be a scary place for kids when adults aren’t careful about their end time predictions. What should kids be focused on so they will be ready no matter what happens, and what should they ignore? This week I am having a heart to heart discussion with kids about focusing on growing up and becoming like Yeshua. I believe with my whole heart that our kids are going to grow up, have families, and do great things for the Kingdom–and I made sure to let them know just that. If you have trouble with the embedded video, CLICK HERE

So now we are getting into some cool context. The differences between Galilee, where Yeshua/Jesus grew up and lived as an adult, and Judea to the south, where Jerusalem and the Temple were, could be extreme. One of the biggest differences was in rulership. In the north, Galilee was ruled by Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, but in the south, Judea was ruled directly by Rome. This month, we are going to be talking about why Judea was ruled by foreigners, what powers they had, what kind of military force they had at their disposal, taxation – and Pontius Pilate!

Welcome to our second Biblical Geography lesson! I hope you caught the last episode on Bethlehem of Judea. This week we are going to do an overview of the entire Roman province of Judea and talk briefly about some of the cities we will be covering later. It’s so important to understand how different Judea and Judeans were from Galileans, Samaritans, Greeks, etc because when Yeshua/Jesus spoke to these people, they became his audience and depending on where they came from, it could change what we think we understand about the story.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the video, here are the links to the two maps from Bible History Online.

First Century Israel

First Century Judea

And here is this week’s video: