Genesis 2 says that God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and so we are going to take a look at the deep sleep of Abraham in Genesis 15 and burial practices in the ancient world to find out the original context of this strange account.

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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.

Last week, we talked about the word toledot, which is translated as generations and this week we are going to talk about the two people who all the generations in the Bible go back to—Adam and Eve! I hope that you guys have been reading Genesis 2 and 3 because it makes all this so much easier. When I am going to listen to a teaching and I know the subject beforehand, I read the entire text first. Then I listen to the teaching. Then I read the text again. I do this to see if my understanding changed. I also do it to make sure that the teacher didn’t run the Bible through a blender and mangle it. Listening to people teach different things is good and it teaches us how to think critically but only if we always go back to the Bible and history. People who teach don’t always know their Bibles very well, so just be careful. I am sure you guys all know people who just like to talk about stuff but maybe don’t really know what they are talking about and you need to know that the Bible is just another thing that some people pretend to know a lot about. So, don’t be intimidated—which means, don’t be scared to disagree with someone just because they sound very convincing. And you know what? You can disagree with me too. My goal in teaching you isn’t to get you to agree with me. My goals are (1) to teach you about why you can trust God by teaching you who He is, (2) to teach you about who you are in God and how He sees you and how you should live to please Him, and (3) to teach you to be excited about studying the Bible for yourself and how to study it. But I am not always going to be right about everything, and that’s okay because only Jesus was right about everything. But what I tell you is never going to disrespect God, or Jesus or teach you to trust me instead of your Bibles and your parents. We’re just going to have fun learning how wonderful God is.

We’re going to read some verses in Genesis 2 today but not all of them because I like to teach by topic, and then we go back when we have learned a bunch of different things and read the whole thing together so we can all understand it together. When I teach grownups, I do everything verse by verse and for some things that is better but not for this.

⁷ then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. ⁸ And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed…¹⁵ The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. ¹⁶ And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, ¹⁷ but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” ¹⁸ Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” ¹⁹ Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. ²⁰ The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. ²¹ So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. ²² And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. ²³ Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” ²⁴ Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. ²⁵ And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

What did we see here? We see that God made the man, and we will call him Adam even though the Bible doesn’t definitely call him that yet, outside the Garden and then brought him in it to live in it. Now, there are things that the Bible wants us to know and things the Bible doesn’t care about us knowing. One, it doesn’t tell us how long it was after God created Adam that He put him in the Garden. It doesn’t say how long it took God to plant His Garden—did He do it with the snap of His fingers or did He do it the old-fashioned way? It doesn’t say and so it must not be very important, and the Garden isn’t mentioned as being created in Genesis 1. That means there is a different message God is trying to teach Moses when He told him this story because, remember, no one was there to see the Creation of the Heavens and the Earth so this information had to be told to someone by God, who was the only witness. Moses spent a lot of time in his tent in the wilderness with God and I believe God was telling him all of this personally. The Bible doesn’t say that but that’s my opinion. You might have a different opinion and that’s okay because it doesn’t change who God is or our relationship to God—all these maybes and what-ifs.

The Bible says that ^“the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” And we all know what that says to us—it sounds like God took dust that was laying on the ground and made the shape of a human of the dust and breathed into it and Adam was like Pinocchio and came to life. But sometimes we forget what this would have sounded like to the people Moses was telling the story to in the wilderness. Let’s look at another Bible verse so we can see what they thought about dust. You probably already know that the story of Adam and Eve has a sad ending, but God says this to them when Adam receives his consequences for disobeying God, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Gen 3:19, ESV)

Now this next part is kinda gross and not what we do today. In the ancient world, when the Israelites buried their dead, they didn’t dig a hole in the ground and put the body in a coffin and leave it buried forever. They would put their dead loved ones in a cave, so really they didn’t “bury” them at all. They would wrap the body in cloth and place it on a stone bench that they would carve into the side of the cave. They would put a huge stone to block the surface so that animals couldn’t eat the body and would leave it there for a year and come back. When they came back there were only two things left—bones and dust. They would put the bones in a smaller box or move them to the side. So, the children of Israel knew that everyone ended up as dust sooner or later. For them, dust was a reminder that they were created mortal—dust means that everyone dies because we weren’t created to live forever. Not without eating something special, anyway, but we will talk about that next week.

So, telling them the story this way, just told them that they were mortal in the beginning. They came from dust and someday they would return to dust. This is normal. God was just speaking their language. So, we have Adam, and Adam was a real person. And we know He was created outside of the Garden and he was mortal when he was created and that God put Adam in His garden at some point in his life—maybe right away or maybe later. Doesn’t matter. It also doesn’t say that Adam was the only human being. God might have created many humans but we don’t know because this only tells us the story of one man, the one He decided to put into the Garden. If there were other people, he sure got lucky! But let’s just assume that Adam is the only one and, if so, then this creation of Adam happened on the sixth day of Creation because that is when God created humans. And remember, you don’t have to agree with me. I am probably telling you things you have never heard before. I didn’t get them out of nowhere, or make them up, of course—this is what some scholars believe. Scholars are people who study the Bible as their job. All they want to do is understand God’s word. And when we are used to reading the Bible in a way that makes sense to us, sometimes we totally miss what would have made sense to the people who originally heard it. Scholars try and figure out how they would have understood this back when Moses was reading all this to them, and what God wanted them to understand about Himself and who they were created to be. My favorite scholar to learn about Genesis from is named John Walton and he has a lot of books. I like what he says, that in the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth, and then in Genesis 2 and 3 He created food and family. So, now we’re talking about food and family. Last week, we talked about the Garden and how it had every tree that was good for food. So, we have food and God has put Adam in the Garden to work it and keep it—that means that Adam is a gardener and he will work six days a week growing and expanding the Garden. But we don’t have family because the man is all alone right now. Is it good that the man is all alone?

¹⁸ Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”

I guess it’s not good. Remember that everything in Genesis 1 was called good and very good. This is the first time we see that something is not good. Being all alone is not good. Adam needs a “helper fit for him.” In Hebrew that is ezer k’negdo—and it means a helper equal to him. Almost every time the word ezer is used in Scripture, it is talking about how God helps us. But God isn’t looking for a superior helper for Adam because Adam already has a superior helper in God. God knows that Adam needs a helper like himself. K’negdo means “like him” or, in modern Hebrew, equal to him. What Adam needs is another human being. But God is going to have to prove that to Adam first, and how He does that is really cool.

First of all, God had already created a ton of animals. And so, God paraded all the animals He had already made before Adam and God allowed Adam to rule over them by naming them. We’ll talk about that some other time but when someone gave someone else a name, it meant they were taking authority over that person and deciding what they would be. That’s why ancient names have meanings and sometimes our modern names don’t mean anything. But we aren’t going to talk about that this week. Adam saw each of the animals and gave it a name but he couldn’t find a single one that was a good companion for him the way he needed. Not even dogs or cats or horses or guinea pigs. They couldn’t help him the way we all need to be helped. They couldn’t talk with him and understand him. They couldn’t share his interests or his life. They weren’t smart enough to help him figure things out. They didn’t know when he was about to make a mistake so they couldn’t warn him. Adam needed someone who was like him. But sometimes we don’t know what we need until we figure out what we don’t need. Adam didn’t need a pet or transportation or a whole bunch of animals to rule over. And once he went through all the naming of the animals, I think he was probably feeling very lonely.

Now, here’s where it gets super interesting and where we need to know the story of Abraham. One time, God told Abraham to make a certain sacrifice and after he obeyed, God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Abraham. And Abraham saw a vision—a vision is like a movie God plays for us that isn’t really happening but we can see it and God uses that to give someone a special message. Because of that vision, Abraham knew that God would bless him with a son and told him the future about His descendants being slaves in Egypt. It was like a “good news/bad news” sort of deal. Well, that same word for deep sleep, tardemah, is what is used for what happened to Adam.

²¹ So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. ²² And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 

Now, to us, it looks like God put Adam under anesthesia and took one of his ribs and sewed him back up again, and made a woman. But this is one of those places in the Bible where a word that actually means one thing is translated as another. And the reason why is because of tradition. A tradition is where everyone agrees to do certain things certain ways and everyone understands that this is just the way things are done even if they don’t know why. Why do we have turkey on Thanksgiving? Because it’s a tradition. I have zero ideas why that even got started. Why do Jewish people have roasted chicken for Sabbath dinner? Because it’s a tradition. Why do people from Mexico take a siesta, a nap, in the middle of the day? Because it’s too stinking hot to do anything else, that’s why—but it’s also a tradition. Why is high school football on Friday nights and NFL football on Sundays and Monday nights? Why do we watch fireworks and eat barbeque on the Fourth of July? Tradition! Some traditions are good and others are bad but because they are traditions we mostly do them without even stopping to think about it.

Why do Bible translators translate a word that means “side” into one tiny little rib? It’s a tradition. But it usually means like the side of a building or something. So, why don’t we do our “what if” and translate the words like they are translated in other places, with the same context and meaning. Let’s see what is happening to Adam now.

“So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and while he was having a vision he saw the Lord God divide him into two parts. God healed him up and out of the other half of his body, God created a woman and showed her to Adam.”

²³ Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”

It’s like Adam said, “Aha! At last! Those animals were nothing like me but this one is just like me. We are both humans and we are part of each other.” And although Adam named all the animals, he only describes himself and Eve (who has no name yet). He is man and she is woman. In Hebrew that is ish and isha. Eve wasn’t an animal, so he wasn’t ruling over her and naming her. She wasn’t inferior to him. That’s really important because when we study other cultures in the world when the Bible was written, some of them wrote about women as though they weren’t much better than animals. In the ancient law codes of other cultures, the laws about men and women made it clear that women were lesser beings and poor people were inferior to, meaning not as good as, rich people. But in the beginning, God didn’t make people to rule over one another. In the Creation story, people were made to rule over nature and to subdue it, not to rule over one another. In fact, God’s people only ever had kings because they wanted to be like all the pagan nations. In the beginning, only God ruled over human beings and human beings were supposed to work together in love and harmony, in peace, to do the work of the Garden.

But you still might be asking yourself why God’s company wasn’t enough. Why did Adam need another human being for companionship and to help with the job of working and guarding the garden? You would think that we could live quite nicely in God’s Garden with Him, where we will see that He walks in the cool of the day. We would think that God is all we need and we can live our lives alone just so long as we have Him. That we don’t need anyone else. But the Bible says that being alone is “not good.” We need other human beings and we need to have a community. In fact, we can’t be Christians all alone. We can’t learn to be loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, self-controlled, humble, meek and generous when there is no one else in our lives. I mean, it’s easy to think we are good Christians when we are living alone on a deserted island surrounded by fruit trees. But we weren’t created to be alone. We were created to love and to be loved. To help and to be helped. To teach and be taught. We need to be useful and to make others useful too.

Why can’t we just be that way with God? Because God doesn’t need our, or anyone’s, help with anything. We aren’t equals or even opposites to Him. He is the Creator and we are the creations. He existed before us and created everything without help from us, thank you very much. And so, without other human beings, our lives would be half empty. God showed Adam in a vision that He was removing half of Adam and making a new person. He was only half a person if he was all alone in the world. God took that half and made Eve. In the same way, Eve is only half a person without having someone to need her. And without each other, there would be no other humans in the Garden ever. Imagine if God had made Adam a buddy to help him out, another guy. Life would have gotten pretty boring with nothing but gardening and snapping towels at each other. There would have been community between them, but it would have been incomplete with no children and no differences between them. Like Professor Walton said, in Genesis 2, God created food and family. God could have made a brother for Adam but He made a woman instead because a woman was what Adam needed.

Now that doesn’t mean that everyone will get married. Jesus wasn’t married and neither was Paul. We don’t see anything about Adam and Eve getting married in the Garden and we don’t see anything about children until after they have already been booted from the Garden. Not everyone will have children either. Abraham and Sarah didn’t have children until she was ninety years old! Isaac and Rebekah had no children for twenty years! Not being married and not having children is not a curse and it doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love unmarried people or that their lives aren’t good. God wasn’t saying that. God was saying that we were not created to be all by ourselves. Not everyone can get married but everyone has people. Families and friends and even a new person in town can go to church or to the synagogue and get a new community. We have people we work with and neighbors and schoolmates and we can take up hobbies where we meet others. God created us to be social, with other thinking human beings who can challenge us and help us and whom we can help in return. God created us to love others and to be loved by others.

What about Jesus? He was perfect and was always hearing from His Father, our God. What does it say about Jesus—did He need people?

And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach.  (Mark 3:14, ESV)

WOW! Jesus chose His twelve disciples so that they could be with Him! That’s amazing. What about when He was sad and upset? Like the night they were going to arrest Him. Didn’t He just want to be alone then?

Then he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with me.”  (Matt 26:38, ESV)

Jesus is the perfect reflection of our Father in Heaven and our Father said it is not good for man to be alone. So, Jesus wasn’t alone, He called others to be with Him and especially when He was just about at the saddest moment of His life. When Jesus sent them out to preach and heal people, He sent them out in groups of two and before He died, He told them that He wanted them to be united the way He and the Father are united. They weren’t supposed to go off and do it all alone. Elijah had Elisha with him to share in the work. Moses had Aaron. Paul had Barnabus. It is not good for people to be alone or to try and do everything alone. We were created to need people–not pets, not slaves, not employees. We need equals. We were never meant to rule over one another the way we do now. Jesus said that whoever would be the greatest in the Kingdom would serve everyone. And you can’t serve people when you are all by yourself. I pray that all of you will have at least one good friend in your life and that you will all be good friends. I pray that you will help people and that you will let people help you. Because we are here to be together.

I love you. I am praying for you. I pray you have a wonderful week studying the Bible with the people who love you—people like me.

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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 and you missed the six episodes about the Creation story, you can find those archived at <a href="http://“>contextforkids.podbean.com, which has the old episodes downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel. But now, this week, we are moving forward starting in Genesis 2, verse 4:

⁴ These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.

Do you remember what the Bible is? The Bible is God’s story where God tells us about who He is and why we can trust Him and why He deserves our absolute loyalty. Although the Bible talks about people and countries and events, the Bible isn’t about them but about God Himself. One of the ways God tells us who He is by how He deals with people. We learn about who God is by how He interacts with people and by seeing how patient and loving He is, and when people do what is wrong, that teaches us a lot about God too. Well, there is this Hebrew word that we are going to talk about today and that word is toledot. It’s a word that means “account” or “generations”—which means the ongoing story of something or someone. In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, toledot shows up eleven times and it usually tells us the story of a family. These are the generations of Adam. These are the generations of Noah. These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japeth. These are the generations of Shem, and Terah, and Ishmael, and Isaac, and Esau and Jacob. Goodness, in Genesis 4, we even read about the generations of Cain, who was cursed and a murderer. God cares about the people He made. All of them in all the countries on earth and not just the people who became the children of Israel. If He only cared about the children of Israel, we would only know the family history of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. “Generations” is about family.

But not this time—this time toledot tells us the story of the earth after the Creation week when everything was new and God planted a special Garden for Himself and two special people were brought to live and work in it.

Why is it important to talk about the story of, the history of, the earth after the Creation week? Well, because it is important for us to know that God never stops caring about His creation. God never stops paying attention. He doesn’t go off on vacation. He doesn’t forget. The earth was created and good but that doesn’t mean that God was done with it. Some religions, and especially Greek philosophy, said that if there was a god that he obviously created the world and then lost interest in it. And today people act like that is true, but the Bible tells us that nothing could be further from the truth. You need to know that God never has and never will lose interest in you or your family or any of His creation. He will never go away no matter how bad things seem. That’s what toledot, generations, teaches us. Toledot teaches us to trust that God never leaves and that He is faithful and trustworthy even when we are just acting like total gooberheads. He is always waiting for us to come to our senses, even when he has to let us suffer the consequences for what we have done. And of course, you know what consequences are. When your mom or dad or teacher tells you not to do something and you do it, there are consequences. If they tell you not to touch something hot and you don’t listen, you might get badly burned. If you take something that belongs to someone else, which is stealing, or break something you will get in big trouble and you have to be punished. If your dad tells you not to cut your meat with a chainsaw, and you do it, well there ain’t no good gonna come from that! And when we do things like that, our burned hand or having to pay for what we broke or go to jail or whatever, that’s our fault. But those bad things don’t mean that God isn’t interested in us anymore or has given up on us. He wants us to do right again. We’ll be talking about Adam and Eve for a lot of weeks and you will totally see what I am talking about here. And then we’ll be talking about Cain and Abel and you will see it again. In fact, we’ll see it over and over and over again because the Bible is true and the truth is that we just keep disobeying and messing up and God keeps blessing us anyway. But we always need to get right back up and do what is good again.

God didn’t just create the universe and then leave. God didn’t forget about Ishmael or Esau either, or Cain. Or Ham or Japheth. All of those people are mentioned in the Scriptures and some of them for bad reasons, but they were important enough to God to mention their family history even when the Bible wasn’t going to talk about them anymore. Why? Because God pays attention to what is going on with everyone. He isn’t like us where He can only keep track of a few people. Right now there are like 7 billion people on this planet and God knows all of their toledot, their family stories. If He can keep track of that many people all at the same time, even people who don’t believe in Him or obey Him, what kind of attention do you think He pays to you when you love Him and obey Him? He knows your toledot, your generations of family history, and nothing is hidden from Him. That means you can tell Him everything and don’t have to hide anything from Him. What did Jesus tell us about this?

One day, when Jesus was talking to His disciples, He told them this, “²⁹ When birds are sold, two small birds cost only a penny. But not even one of the little birds can die without your Father’s knowing it. ³⁰ God even knows how many hairs are on your head. ³¹ So don’t be afraid. You are worth much more than many birds.” (ICB, Matt 10:29-31)

Today we are going to talk about the toledot of the heavens and the earth and you may say, “Wait a cotton-pickin minute, Miss Tyler! The Heavens and the earth don’t have a family, they can’t have children or parents so how can they have any generations??” Well, that’s a good question. It kinda is still about family because just as you and I came out of our mothers, plants come up out of the earth, right? So, in a way, all the plant life on the planet can be called the generations of the earth! But toledot also means “a record” like if you are running a science experiment and you keep records of what happens, meaning you write down all the changes. Our story starts in a place that is not so nice. The Bible tells us that there is no rain and there were no humans to work the land—and so there weren’t a lot of the plants that require a lot of water to grow and there were no crops because crops are hard to grow and that takes humans. Have you ever tried to grow your own food? It’s a lot easier now than it used to be. We just drive to Home Depot and buy extra special gardening soil and dump it in a container or on the ground and we water it with hoses, but way back when, unless you lived near a river, you were out of luck unless it rained or the river flooded in the early summer, like the Nile in Egypt always did. Bibles usually say that a mist went up but the reason they say that is because they are trying to translate a word that is absolutely dead. It appears only two times in the Bible and we don’t know for sure what it means. So, does it really mean that the surface of the earth was watered by a mist, or is it talking about the first rainclouds, or is it talking about underground springs or about a river that flooded and watered the land around it? We just don’t know—all we do know is that water was getting on the ground somehow. It doesn’t really matter though, remember that we can spend our time thinking about these things just as long as we don’t stop focusing on the important things—like how the Bible tells us we can absolutely trust God.

So that solved the water problem but what about the rest of the problem? There is no one to work to make the earth a better place to live in. Next week we’ll talk about the creation of the man and the woman but not this week. This week we are going to talk about the special Garden that God planted for Himself in a place called Eden. Later He will put the people there but since that’s when all the ruckus starts we’ll just talk about the Garden right now.

Sometimes we think that the whole earth was beautiful with fruit trees and plants everywhere, but that wasn’t the case. The Bible says that’s what His Garden was like because He planted it special that way:

⁸ And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. ⁹ And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. ¹⁰ A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. ¹¹ The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. ¹² And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. ¹³ The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. ¹⁴ And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

So as Moses is telling this story to the children of Israel, in the middle of the wilderness in modern-day Saudi Arabia, this must sound so wonderful! And what do I mean when I say wilderness? Better yet, what does the Bible mean? Sometimes people think that a wilderness means there are no plants or water for hundreds of miles but that’s not what it means. In America, when we talk about the wilderness, we mean a forest far from the cities and that is closer but still not exactly right. In the Bible, the wilderness is everywhere that civilization is not. If there is no city and people aren’t working the land and planting crops there, it counts as the wilderness. The wilderness, therefore, can be a forest or a desert or something in between. The wilderness is a place that man has not subdued yet and made useful. People aren’t living there and building homes and growing things.

So, we see that there was a place called Eden and it was to the east of where He told the story, probably in Mesopotamia where we know the first people lived from archaeology. And God planted a garden next to Eden. We know it is next to Eden because the Bible says that there was a river that flowed out of Eden and it watered the Garden, so the Garden must be next to Eden. Now, this isn’t a vegetable or flower garden. When Moses told this story, he used the word gan, which doesn’t mean vegetable garden but more like a park or what we would call a Botanical Garden with many different types of trees and shrubs and grasses and flowers. But not just a botanical garden (which only has plants) because these sorts of parks were also filled with animals—like sheep and cattle but also more exotic animals like peacocks and tigers. That was how kings lived, in a palace surrounded by a beautiful garden which was also the home to different exotic animals—they called such a place a menagerie. In fact, kings in the ancient world were often gardeners! When they would conquer another country, they would take back plants and animals to put in their own garden! Isn’t that funny? One day they were fighting and the next day they were picking out plants to take home.

Of course, God didn’t have to fight any wars because all the plants were his, and the Bible says that He caused every beautiful tree and every tree that was good for food to grow! That must have been one big garden, big and very beautiful. Just close your eyes and imagine it—cherries and apples and pears and mulberries and peaches and oranges, and, and…! Did I miss your favorite? And next week we will see that He also brought animals into the garden, all the different types. And they weren’t eating each other yet so it was peaceful. Verse ten says that a river flowed out of Eden and watered the Garden. In the Garden, things were perfect but outside, not so much! Remember what the Bible said, that outside the garden there wasn’t a ton of plant life because it wasn’t raining yet and there weren’t people working the land—which means building irrigation ditches and preparing farmland and planting seeds. No one was subduing the land yet the way God created us to do.

But why did God create the Garden? That’s the big question. He didn’t create it for people. He created it for Himself but He doesn’t need fruit because He doesn’t eat. Hmmm…let me ask you something. If you were having a birthday and you bought a cake and put up streamers and made a bunch of hamburgers and hot dogs, would they all be for you? Or would you be doing those things so that you could celebrate your special day with other people? Of course, you would be preparing all that food for other people. You don’t need that much food, right? Well, in the same way, God was preparing the Garden so that He could enjoy it with something—His Creation. Next week, we will see God fill His garden with humans and animals—to be with those humans. The Garden tells us so much about who God is and why we can trust Him.

He didn’t need those trees, but the humans would need them. And the Garden was created as a place where He could be with them—not a place where they could be alone together and ignore Him and do whatever they wanted. God put them there so that they could work with Him to turn all the earth into a beautiful garden. God could do it Himself, He can always do things Himself. He can do absolutely everything Himself. But He created us with a purpose and a meaning. The earth doesn’t get better unless we make it better. He created it with perfect potential but we do the work to make it wonderful—or terrible. That’s our choice. But the Garden was a blueprint to what the earth could be like if only humans would cooperate and obey. He made it a lot easier. He gave them a starting place and all they had to do was make the garden bigger and bigger. But we aren’t there yet. We’ll talk about Adam and Eve starting next week.

What God planted, the Garden, was the very first Temple—the beginning of civilization and His Kingdom. If you remember the lesson about the ziggurats, Temples were created so that gods could live among the people who served and worshiped them—or that’s what people thought, anyway. The idol of the god lived in the Temple and the priests treated it better than a real person. They woke it up in the morning, gave it a bath, put perfumed oil on its head and feet, put clothing on it, fed it, and put it to bed at night. Of course, our God, the only God, doesn’t need any of that. God doesn’t need priests to feed Him and put His jammies on Him. God wants to be close to His people in order to get His important work done. His work is to make the whole earth know Him, to love one another, and to serve Him and one another. God wants our loyalty and our allegiance. That means we serve Him and no one else. In the Garden, people learned that there was only one God and they learned what was and was not allowed. His home, so His rules. I suppose that if the people had made the heavens and the earth and everything in them that they could decide what was right and what was wrong and they wouldn’t have to be loyal to God, but they didn’t so it doesn’t matter.

The story of the Bible is the story about God wanting to be close to His Creation, at any cost. No matter what He has to do, He is committed to being with us. When we learn about Jesus and the Gospel at the end of the Adam and Eve stories, you will see just how much He was willing to do in order to be with us forever. Because he was willing to pay so high of a price to be with us, we know that we can trust Him no matter what happens and when He asks us to do something, we know we can do it.

The Garden was the first place that God tried to be with us. It was a holy place because God was there. But you probably know that it isn’t going to end well. The next place He tried to be with people was in the Tabernacle in the wilderness but when the sons of the High Priest Eli became wicked, that went wrong too. King Solomon built a huge Temple and God even provided the blueprints, in writing, according to David. But when they began to worship false gods there, God had to leave and He let that Temple be destroyed by the Babylonians. God told the prophet Haggai to build the Temple again, but the spirit of God was never there like He was in the Garden, the Tabernacle, and the first Temple. God was waiting for His Spirit to be with His people in a brand new way—in Jesus while He lived on earth and later, when He sent His Holy Spirit to live inside everyone who is loyal to Him and puts their trust in Jesus as the victorious King ruling over all the universe. But that would take thousands of years. Right now we are learning about the very first Temple, the Garden of Eden, where God made everything beautiful and perfect for the two people He has chosen to live there with Him.

Have you ever thought of what it would be like in that Garden? What do you think you would do? Would you talk to God when He walked there in the cool of the day? What would you ask Him about? Would you be scared? Would you trust Him? Would you do whatever He said to do? Would you not do what He told you not to do?

Now what haven’t I talked about yet? Oh yeah! Two special trees that we will have to have a whole separate teaching about. In the middle of the huge garden is the Tree of Life. And there was also another tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But at the end of this passage—all we have is a Garden on the border of Eden, a river running through the Garden that waters it, every tree that is beautiful or provides food is in the Garden, one man is currently in the Garden, and two special trees. Sometimes it is good to really see what the Bible does and does not say.

I love you. I am praying for you. I pray you have a wonderful week studying the Bible with the people who love you.

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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. This is episode seven but if you have missed any of the other episodes, you can find those archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has the old episodes downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.

Now this episode is going to be entirely different and I am going to teach you a way of reading the Bible that you may have never heard of before. A lot of theologians and scholars read the Bible this way because it helps them to see what the Bible does and does not say—and it’s called experiential reading. That’s just a fancy way of saying that you read the Bible like you are really there. Sometimes we read the Bible and we’ve been taught the story so many times that we assume things are in the story that really aren’t. And when we talk about Adam and Eve starting next week, we will come across some of those things that we sometimes believe are in the Bible that aren’t really there. They aren’t usually things that matter much but sometimes children’s books especially will add to the stories with assumptions that the writers might think make the story more interesting but if you don’t know they are adding thigs, then you might not realize they aren’t in the Bible. My favorite thing is in those old books that I grew up with called “The Bible Story” and they still have them today in doctor’s offices. I always wondered how on earth all those people in the Bible could be whiter than I am with perfect complexion even though they spend all their time outside! They look like they are using sunblock 2000.

But when we experience the Bible like we are there—maybe imagining ourselves as a person in the crowd when Jesus is preaching and noticing what the Bible says we are doing and how we are responding to the Pharisees or scribes, or a disciple, or maybe even from the point of view of Jesus, the stories become real to us. They become more like what they are—history. Imagine being at the foot of Mt Sinai when the dark cloud covered the top and the Lord God was hidden in the cloud and the thunder of his voice was so loud that you begged Moses to ask Him to stop. Imagine being one of the seventy elders who climbed up and actually ate and drank in the presence of God! When the Bible becomes real to us, and stops being stories, that’s when the adventure of reading the Bible really begins. Today, we’re going to read the Creation account, now that we’ve spent the last five weeks discussing it. So, I want you to close your eyes and imagine nothing around you except darkness. You are floating in space but there are no stars around you, no sun and no moon. Somewhere below you, you can hear water but you can’t see it yet. What you are aware of, however, is that you are not alone. Below you, not only is there a massive ocean but there is also something hovering over it.

1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. ² The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

Can you see the Spirit of God? Hovering over the face of the waters? No, there is no light yet. Maybe though, you can feel the spirit as it hovers over the water, which is that the Bible means when it says “the deep.” Hover is the word that is used to describe how a mother eagle swoops and circles around her nest of eggs. She is protecting them when she hovers. Maybe you can’t see the Spirit doing this but perhaps you can hear and feel it, or maybe you are just aware that it’s there. But now I am going to take you down to the surface of the mighty waters that seem to go on forever. Let’s put you in an imaginary boat, even though they haven’t been invented yet and there aren’t any trees to make one out of. It’s still dark and you are on the surface of the water. Is the water still or are you bouncing around? The Bible doesn’t tell us. But now the Spirit of God is hovering above you like a mother eagle—what’s going to happen next?

³ And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 

Did you hear the voice? What did the voice sound like? The Gospel of John says that Jesus is that creative word of God so perhaps the voice sounds just like Jesus, who told us that He is the light of the world. And suddenly, you can see! There is light! You can’t see what is causing the light but it is there. What do you see? Nothing but water going on forever and ever. And you realize how useful and wonderful the light is.

⁴ And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 

But the light doesn’t last forever, and it gets darker and you become aware of something new—time is passing. You notice differences in the light and realize that you now have a way to move forward, to get older, and for things to start changing.

⁵ God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

As you sat in pitch darkness all night, did you miss the light? Did you want it to come back? Or were you spending your time wondering about the Spirit hovering above you? Or that wonderful voice that made the light appear? How would you feel when the light began to come back and you could see again? I bet it would be wonderful.

⁶ And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” ⁷ And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. ⁸ And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

Now, hold on to your boat, because things are about to get real. When the voice speaks, the sky appears above you—it hasn’t been there before. There was only light over the water. And although the light was wonderful compared to the darkness, now you see a sky. Is it blue without the sun? Or pink? Are there clouds or is it clear? That’s the big question because God just made a space for weather to happen. Weather can’t happen without the sky, and weather is good—later He will make it possible for snow and rain and sunshine, for it to be warm and cold but not yet. You spend the day looking at it and noticing how beautiful it is. Maybe you row around to see if it is everywhere over the surface of the water. And the darkness comes again. As you wait for the daylight, you are probably wondering what will be next! Well, the voice is about to speak again so you had better hold on to the sides of your boat or you are going to get tossed overboard.

⁹ And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. 

Great googly moogly, something is rising from the ocean and your boat got picked up and up and up and then went shooting off in one direction on a huge wave, and when you recover, you look back and see something that wasn’t there before. It’s not water. It’s taller than the water. It sticks up out of the water. You row your boat over and park it on a sandy beach, and you step down out of the boat for the first time. Can you feel the sand? As you look, do you see nothing but sand or can you see mountains in the distance? Of course, there are no plants, nothing but dirt and rocks, sand and mountains. And water, lots and lots of water.

¹⁰ God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

And you are thinking, boy that was a big change today—I wonder what God will do tomorrow? But wait, He isn’t finished yet. There is still a lot of work to do today.

¹¹ And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. 

Golly Bob Howdy. Your sandy beach or rocky shore, what’s happening to it? Does it feel like an earthquake with all the trees and grasses and flowers sprouting up? What kind of trees do you see? Is there anything good for food near you? It’s been a long time since you’ve eaten. One thing for sure, you see how useful the land and the plants are. Just what you needed.

¹² The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. ¹³ And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

Did you sleep in the boat last night or on shore? I am betting that the land was a much softer place to sleep once the plants appeared. One thing for sure, you’re thinking there is no way God could top all the work He did yesterday. It’s been a busy three days. God has filled his creation with light and darkness in order to give it time, He created a place for weather to happen, and He created the Land and separated it from the seas and grew plants. But what good are they? Did God create them just to have something to do or to look at?

¹⁴ And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, ¹⁵ and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. ¹⁶ And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. ¹⁷ And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, ¹⁸ to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. ¹⁹ And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

Imagine the sun appearing in the sky—and imagine how wonderfully warm it would make the earth. What would you think as you saw it cross the sky, as the sky got darker and darker but then you noticed another change. Night isn’t totally dark anymore, there is a light in the sky—and actually there are many tiny lights in the sky. And the world you have been standing in looks very different in this kind of light, very beautiful. You think to yourself how perfect it all is and wonder how you ever lived without these things.

²⁰ And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.” ²¹ So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 

The first thing you would see are the birds. What kinds of birds do you see? Seagulls? Eagles? Cardinals? Parrots? Robins or bluebirds? Pterodactyls? The Bible just says flying creatures and birds and so we can fill in the blanks from our imagination but we have to remember that it is our imagination and not what the Bible actually says. It can really be tricky!

Then, maybe you see something splashing in the ocean. Is it a fish, or a giant sea creature far offshore? Do you see a shark fin? Are those sea anemones and starfish in the tidal pools? Maybe. You know one thing for sure—this is a wonderful addition to the planet.

²² And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” ²³ And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

The earth is a very different place now. With the sun and the sky comes wind and you can hear it as it blows through the leaves on the trees and the grasses. The birds are noisy and some of them are even noisy at night. If you stayed on the seashore, you can hear the waves as they come in. I hope you found some fruit to eat. But you know what? As wonderful as everything is, you are getting very lonely. The fish are out in the sea and the birds are in the air. There is no one to be with you. You probably go to bed wondering what God is going to do tomorrow.

²⁴ And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. ²⁵ And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

Imagine waking up to the voice and seeing a cow staring you right in the eye. Or a snake. Or a lion or a tiger or a whatever!? Did you reach up and pet it or did you yell and run away and get back into the boat? Don’t worry, the Bible tells us in a few verses that they don’t eat meat yet. There is no violence. You aren’t on the menu. And neither are they. And you smile and think how wonderful it is that there are creatures on the earth with you. But still, it isn’t perfect yet.

²⁶ Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

²⁷ So God created man in his own image,
    in the image of God he created him;
    male and female he created them.

And God created people. It doesn’t say how many—that word man doesn’t mean just one person, it means humans. And it says “them” so it could be just two or it could be thousands. We’ll have to keep reading to find out. Right now it doesn’t matter because people have arrived and they, men and women, are made in the image of God, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago. What do they look like? We have no idea. Were they black or white or something in between? Did they have blonde hair or dark brown hair? Usually people just imagine what they see in picture books but the Bible doesn’t tell us. The people who write the picture books usually make the people look like themselves. And that’s okay, but we really don’t know what the first people look like—and it doesn’t matter because remember, we are made in the image of God, and He is spirit and has no color at all.

²⁸ And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 

And God blessed them. The only things in Creation that God blesses are the flying creatures and the water creatures and human beings. Not bugs or cows or cats or dogs. No one knows for sure why that is. The Bible doesn’t tell us. We’ll talk about what blessings are some other time but for now I will give you a hint. When God gives you a job to do and when He gives you what you need to do what He asks—that’s a blessing. God told the fish and birds and humans to be fruitful and to fill the earth and He made it possible for them to do that and now there are people and fish and birds everywhere! It worked! He told humans to subdue the earth and have dominion over it and we have done that too—because He made us clever and creative enough to live anywhere. But being made in the image of God is much more than that and if you haven’t listened to that teaching, you will have to go back and catch it. You are very important to God’s plans, you know. Back to the story! Now God speaks again, to the people.

²⁹ And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. ³⁰ And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. 

The people must have been hungry, and maybe they were wondering what there was to eat. And they looked around and saw fruit trees and maybe they saw carrots poking up out of the ground. Think of what it was like, for the first time, trying all those different fruits and berries and roots and things. Think about watching lions next to cows, eating grass. Does it look funny? Does it look just perfect? Like a place without fear or violence or danger? A place with plenty to eat and no one doing anything wrong?

³¹ And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

2 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. ² And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. ³ So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

Of course, we have been talking about this so you know that God’s work of creating was done, but His work as King of the Universe was just beginning. That’s what it meant for a god to rest in the ancient world, that’s what it meant to the Israelites in the desert as they thought about what God had told them in the Creation story, that He had made the Universe his realm, and the earth a very special place in it to rule over and bless. Nowadays, we read Genesis one and see it very differently, but God was telling the Israelites amazing things about Himself. That, unlike the false gods of the nations around them and especially Egypt who had made them slaves, He created them to be special, and not to be slaves. He created them to rule over His Creation. He created creation to be exactly what they would need to live because He is a loving creator and not a tyrant. Unlike the false gods, He runs the universe Himself and doesn’t need a god in charge of the sun and another one in charge of the rain to help Him. He filled the earth and made it useful, everything we need, and then He made us to rule over it wisely and kindly—like He rules over us. And although the story seems silly to some people today, the way He told it to the ancient Israelites told the story of who He is and how different He is than the gods they had heard about all their lives. Always remember that God is telling us a story about Himself, and nothing is more important than understanding about God and about the relationship He wants with us and how He has blessed us and His plans to save us through His one unique Son Jesus. Sometimes we forget that and we focus on things that aren’t very helpful but I want you to remember that in the Bible God is always teaching us about who He is and what He has done for us. And when He told the story to Moses, it was written perfectly so that they could understand it. That means that sometimes we have to learn old things when we want to hear it with their ears and see it with their eyes because our context is different than theirs was and they knew things that we don’t know anymore. And it is good when we can do that but sometimes there are things that are always going to confuse us until we see Him face to face and can ask our questions. Although maybe we won’t care anymore.

Remember that the Bible is true even when we don’t understand everything or understand it wrong. It tells us that we can always trust God. It doesn’t tell us that everything will always be easy and that nothing bad will ever happen to us but it does tell us that God won’t betray us and hurt us even when other people do.

In the coming weeks, we will be talking about Adam and Eve and the Garden in Eden. So if you guys want to start reading Genesis 2 and 3, that would be a good idea. If you need to catch up on past episodes, check them out at contextforkids.com or contextforkids.podbean.com or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.

I love you. I’m praying for you. And I hope you have a wonderful week studying the Scriptures with the people who love you.

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Hi, I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to episode #6 of Context for Kids, where I teach you a lot of cool stuff that most adults don’t even know. This week’s episode is called “And God Rested.” But this doesn’t happen in chapter one, even though it is at the end of the Creation story.

2 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. ² And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. ³ So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

Well, what’s up with this being in chapter two instead of being the end of chapter one? Well, I’ll tell you a secret. Okay, so it isn’t a secret. It’s just something that most people don’t know. There were no chapters at all in Genesis until 1227, which is almost eight hundred years ago! That means that when Jesus was reading from the scrolls in the synagogues in Capernaum and Nazareth, there were zero chapters and definitely no verses. There were also no pages! They would unroll a scroll and really had to know their stuff to be able to find things. If you have never seen a Torah scroll from a modern synagogue, you ought to go look one up online. They are very big. Other books had their own scrolls, but first and second Samuel used to be just one big scroll and the same goes for first and second Kings and first and second Chronicles. Ezra and Nehemia were together and I am pretty sure that Jeremiah and Lamentations were also combined. If you had a scroll of the entire Hebrew Scriptures, then no one would be big and strong enough to carry it around. And they were all handwritten too!

But they had no chapters and no verses. As I said before, the chapters are less than eight hundred years old. Jesus lived two thousand years ago, and Moses lived 3500 years ago. Verses in Genesis never happened until Rabbi Nathan invented them in 1448, less than six hundred years ago. And the chapters of the New Testament were divided up into verses in 1551 in a Greek version. That’s still less than five hundred years ago. Although it seems like it was a long time ago, really compared to how old the Bible is, it’s not long at all.

So, all that just means that the Chapters and Verses weren’t original and weren’t created by God. People put them in so that it would be easier to find things. I think it is one of the greatest inventions of all time, actually. I can’t even imagine having to find stuff without them. But, because the chapters were created by people, sometimes it is a puzzle why they begin and end where they do. In fact, there are quite a few places where Christian and Jewish Bibles are different and a verse that is at the end of one chapter in a Christian Bible might be in the next chapter of a Jewish Bible instead. All the verses are still there, but because people made decisions about what should go where, there are some changes in chapter location. But, since the Bible didn’t originally have the chapters and verses, even with the differences it is still very helpful.

But this is one of the puzzling places where verses don’t seem to be in the right chapter. Those three verses, to me, clearly belong in Genesis chapter one because they are the end of that story. But, when the people who made the chapters and verses divided everything up, they didn’t know what I am going to teach you today about what it means for God to work six days and then rest on the seventh. When Moses was telling the ancient Israelites this story in the wilderness, they would have known and now we know too because of archaeology. For them, today’s ancient archaeology was real life! We dig up an ancient coin and put it in a museum but to them, that coin was something to buy food with or a goat. We find an old earring and we are just amazed and people show pictures of it on the news but at one point it was just hanging in the ear of someone long forgotten. And all the stories in the cuneiform tablets that we laugh at and think how silly they were to believe such things—like the sun being a huge glowing boat that Ra sailed across the sky—that was normal to people, even to people who didn’t believe it. So, when we read the Bible, it is important to think of what they knew and what they didn’t know. They didn’t know that the sun was a huge ball of hot plasma almost a million miles away. They thought it was exactly the same size as our moon, which is teeny tiny in comparison. The moon just looks the same size because it is closer but they had no way of knowing that at the time. Normal to them seems silly and backward to us because we don’t have the same context. Remember that context is whatever is normal to you that you figure everyone else knows too. Context is what makes an inside joke funny but what also makes a foreign language confusing. We have to learn someone else’s context to see things the same way they see them and to understand what they are and aren’t saying.

Now, these Israelites 3500 years ago had heard the stories all their lives about gods and their temples. There were a whole lot of gods in Egypt! Something we see in some of those cuneiform tablets I told you about are stories about gods getting their temples all ready. They would build the Temple and put all the furnishings inside it and prepare the priests and the altar and all that, and then they would “rest.” And it would take the gods six days to fix up their Temple the way they wanted it, and on the seventh day they would “rest” in it. So, if you were one of the ancient Israelites listening to Moses tell the creation story, when you heard that God rested on the seventh day you would know something very important—you would know that God set up the world so that He could be King over the universe and over all of us. That’s because that word rest meant for a god to live in his or her Temple with their people all around them. But for you to understand that I will have to explain ancient Temples and how they worked—what exactly they meant to those Israelites in the desert listening to Moses tell them the stories that God shared about Himself.

https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-ziggurat-2353049

https://www.historyonthenet.com/ziggurats-and-temples-in-ancient-mesopotamia

Okay, close your eyes and imagine this. In Mesopotamia, which is to the east of Israel, in the modern-day regions of Iraq and Iran, they had huge buildings called ziggurats which is totally a funny name, I know. They were very tall with outer walls that were sloped, looking sort of like a pyramid with it’s top cut off. Unlike the Pyramids, which were made of huge cut stones, the ziggurats were made with sun baked clay bricks—but don’t think these were small bricks because they weighed 33 lbs each. And there was a huge stairway going right up the side, also built of bricks. Once you reached the top of that level, there was another stairway going up onto a new level, and then a third. Sometimes there were as many as eight levels, and at the very top there was a beautiful square temple, gleaming in the sun. That’s where they thought their god would come down to earth. Not just any god because they worshiped a lot of them, but the patron god who specifically took care of their city. And no one could go up there except for the priests. The priests were like the servants at a palace because that is how they saw their god, as the king who ultimately protected their city. The human king was just his representative on earth. If you remember last week’s teaching about what it means to be made in God’s image, then you will understand when I tell you that only the king or queen was thought to be the image of the pagan gods. No one else was important enough. What a different story than the Bible tells, that all of us were created in God’s image!

So just think of all those levels and this huge building rising into the sky with the beautiful temple on top and that’s where they thought their god lived, between heaven and earth. And all the priests scurrying around, doing everything they could to feed the god, to take care of the idol, or statue, of their god. Wanna hear something funny? They actually treated the idol like it was really their god. They would put it to bed at night and get it up in the morning. They would give it a bath and pour perfumed oil on its head and feet. They would dress it up in fancy clothes and they would make really fancy meals for it. Then at night they would put the idol to bed again and start all over again the next day. It was a thankless job—because—the idol can’t talk…nevermind. Although the priests did get to eat whatever the idol left behind. They believed that the spirit of the God would eat the spirit of the food and leave all the yummy physical stuff behind.  (Jeremiah 10:1-9 actually describes these idols and how they were manufactured. So does Isaiah 44:9-20)

And the people of these cities would hear the stories of their gods and how, after the Temple had been built, they would make it livable, into a home, by filling it with furniture and people over a six day period of time and then, when everything was finally all ready, on the seventh day the god would descend from heaven and make that temple up on top of the ziggurat his or her home. The god would rest there, not to sleep but in order to reign as a king. Although their gods did sleep too. And somewhere on the ground was the human king’s dinky little palace that probably looked like an outhouse in comparison. But the people would hear this story and they would feel safe because they believed that their god had made his or her home with them and was watching over the city to protect it from invaders. But that god in that ziggurat temple could only protect just that one city because remember, their gods weren’t all that powerful and they weren’t good at doing too many things at once. I mean, they needed humans to take care of them so they wouldn’t starve!

The ancient Israelites knew all these stories too and possibly believed them after so many years in Egypt. God had to show them how different He was from all these fake gods of Egypt and Babylonia and Canaan so that they would love and trust Him completely. So, God told them His story about creating and filling, not a dinky little temple that was made by people, but the entire heavens and earth. And just like those fake stories about pagan gods who could only manage to furnish and fill a Temple in six days, He created everything we see around us on earth and in the ground and the waters and the sky and in outer space. And those fake gods created people to be slaves and to serve them. God told the Israelites that He created people and served them by providing everything they would need to life a good life full of blessings. And when God told them that He rested on the seventh day it would have blown their ever-loving minds.

You see, this God isn’t just a god of one city or one people or one country or one anything. He doesn’t rule over just one dinky little city and the people in it. He rules over all the heavens and all the earth. The whole earth is His ziggurat and the heavens above are His Temple where he sees not just one city, but everything created.

Of course, once God allowed a permanent Temple to be built for Him, He didn’t have them put it up on a Ziggurat built of bricks by men but up on a mountain that He created, Mt Zion. That’s what ziggurats were supposed to be—mountains. But the real Creator God doesn’t need anyone to build him a mountain! David understood this, and in I Chronicles 28:12 David tells us that the Holy Spirit gave him God’s plans for exactly how to build His Temple on Mt Zion. But David also wrote Psalm 24 because David understood the ancient beliefs about gods living on the top of mountains but David knew there was only one God. And when he talks about God building on the waters, that’s right out of the creation story.

The earth and everything in it belong to the Lord. The world and all its people belong to him. (Here David isn’t giving any credit to any other god for anything, even the people who worship false gods belong to our God) ² He built it on the waters. He set it on the rivers. (That’s right out of Genesis because when God started creating, all that existed were the waters) ³ Who may go up on the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy Temple? (Remember, in the ziggurat, only the priests could go up on top of the manmade mountain of sun-baked bricks) ⁴ Only those with clean hands and pure hearts. They must not have worshiped idols. They must not have made promises in the name of a false god. (wow, this means that anyone, rich or poor, old or young, male or female, slave or free, Israelite or gentile could go up to Mt Zion and worship God as long as they worshipped Him alone) ⁵ It is they who will receive a blessing from the Lord. The God who saves them will declare them right. ⁶ They try to follow God. They look to the God of Jacob for help. Selah ⁷ Open up, you gates. Open wide, you aged doors. Then the glorious king will come in. ⁸ Who is this glorious king? The Lord, strong and mighty. The Lord, the powerful warrior. ⁹ Open up, you gates. Open wide, you aged doors. Then the glorious king will come in. ¹⁰ Who is this glorious king? The Lord of heaven’s armies—he is the glorious king. Selah (ICB)

But both David and this Temple would be far into the future from here. The Israelites were still stuck in the wilderness where they camped for forty years. They had seen some amazing things when God plagued Egypt but now He was telling them that He wasn’t just bigger than Egypt, He was bigger than the whole Universe.

Let’s look at our verses again:

2 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. ² And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. ³ So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

Everything was finished, and God was telling them that, in a way, the whole Universe was His Temple because that’s how big and awesome and powerful He is. And on the seventh day, God made the entire universe His home from where He would watch over His special creation of people because he wanted to be their one and only king. He wanted to be their protector and provider, something all those false gods could never really do but thinking they were there made people feel better. So, God stopped creating—and He began running the universe He had carefully and lovingly created. Because it was good. Everything worked just the way it should. It was perfect for people and animals and it was a peaceful place because no one was killing anyone and no one was even eating meat—not even lions and tigers. And God blessed this seventh day. Blessings are cool. When God blessed the seventh day, He made it holy.  He made it different forever.

The seventh day is important. There is even a commandment about it in Exodus 20: ⁸ “Remember to keep the Sabbath as a holy day. ⁹ You may work and get everything done during six days each week. ¹⁰ But the seventh day is a day of rest to honor the Lord your God. On that day no one may do any work: not you, your son or daughter, or your men or women slaves. Neither your animals nor the foreigners living in your cities may work. ¹¹ The reason is that in six days the Lord made everything. He made the sky, earth, sea and everything in them. And on the seventh day, he rested. So the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

On the Sabbath, we remember that God created everything in the universe. We stop working, stop achieving, stop trying to get ahead and get rich. We stop demanding that other people do things for us. We stop and honor God and trust Him that working six days a week is enough. Even our animals get a rest but I can tell you that that is all my cats ever do. They are like living in a perpetual, unending sabbath, geez. And my dogs aren’t much better!

Jesus had a lot to teach us about the Sabbath too. On the Sabbath, He went to the local synagogue and read from the Bible and worshipped God. If someone had a demon in them, He booted it to the curb. He healed everyone who was sick and He fixed everyone who had disabilities. My son has had three surgeries over the past two months, two on his head and one on his lungs and I would just love to go to a church and see Jesus there to fix everything once and for all! Sometimes, mean leaders would come after him and accuse him of doing something wrong when He healed people but He told them that the Sabbath is a blessed day and people should be blessed on it! After the Exodus, God freed the slaves from their life of working day in and day out, seven days a week, just to make Pharaoh happy. He showed who He is when He did that. He showed that the Sabbath is a wonderful day of freedom celebrating the fact that He alone is king over all the universe.

Jesus said that no one should be enslaved on the Sabbath—not to Pharaoh or to disabilities or sickness or demons. He told the mean leaders that it would be wrong to leave people like that and it wouldn’t be a right action on God’s holy day when He wanted everyone to be able to celebrate with full and happy hearts. Jesus always showed the people who God is in all of His actions. God never created us to be sick or hurting, but our sins over the thousands of years since Creation have piled up and sometimes innocent babies are born with terrible problems. In Jesus’s day, most of the Jews, His own people, were very poor and malnourished. Jesus got angry because most of the rich people weren’t helping them at all. God’s laws in the Torah were meant to protect people who were hurting and who were sick and poor and being trampled by powerful people but the leaders had lost sight of all that. God wanted His people to be saved from all of that. When Jesus went around healing people on the Sabbath, He was showing them how much God loves them and wants good for them—just as much as when He created the Heavens and the Earth and then created us so that He could be with us as our God and King of the Universe.

Jesus showed us what it means to truly rest on the Sabbath day. We meet with others to read the Bible and worship God and learn more about Him but it is all empty if we refuse to do good things for people who need help. I always have a funny story I tell about the Sabbath. It’s a made-up story. So, in this story, who is honoring God’s holy day?

A family’s car is broken down on the side of the road on the Sabbath. It’s morning but it’s in Texas in July so it’s already super-hot and because they can’t start the car there is no air conditioning. The baby is screaming and the kids are whining. Another family drives by and rolls down their window and says, “I’d like to help but it’s the Sabbath so I can’t. I will come by tomorrow and if you are still there I will help you then.” Fortunately, another family comes by and they stop and the man takes off his suit coat and rolls up his sleeves, and starts helping fix the car. The kids come and invite the other set of kids to play in the park by the side of the road and the mom from the second car holds the screaming baby to give the baby’s mom a break. The second family is late for services but they don’t leave until the original family is safely on the road again. So, who kept the Sabbath? The family who avoided work but refused to do a good deed or the second family, who worked hard to do what was right? The second family of course, because they showed mercy and love to the family who was in need.

I love you. I am praying for you. I hope you have a wonderful week studying the Bible with the people who love you.

What does it mean to be made in God’s image? We’re going to talk about archaeology and ancient kings and even about idols. And what about the perfect image of God that we see in 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. This is episode five but if you have missed any of the other episodes, you can find those archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has the old episodes downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.

Now, this week, we have a question that people have been arguing about for thousands of years. And that question is, “What does it mean to be made in God’s image?” It isn’t an easy question to answer. Throughout the Bible, the Word of God, God gives us ways of thinking about it but never gives any definite answers like, “In the book of II Opinions, it is written, “When humans were made in God’s image, it meant exactly such and such.” And, you know what? Very few things are written about that way in the Bible and maybe nothing is. I can’t think of anything right now. We have all these huge questions like, “Exactly how did God create the universe?” and “Where did God come from, anyway?” How about, “What happens when we die?” And instead of teaching us solid answers to those questions, this book does something entirely different. This book tells us about who God is and who we are to God. This Bible doesn’t seem to care about the kinds of questions we have—maybe because questions about how God created the universe and where He came from and exactly what happens to us after we die (other than the fact that we end up resurrected in the world to come) aren’t very important. All those questions don’t amount to a hill of beans unless we know from God’s Word why we can trust Him. You see, knowledge doesn’t save anyone. There was this group among the Jews and early Christians about 1900 years ago called “Gnostics” and they didn’t talk about things like sin and repentance—like the Bible does. Nope, they thought if they just became enlightened enough, meaning knowing a lot of cool mystical stuff that the Bible doesn’t even mention, that they could be extra special. And, you know what? People still tend to do that today. Grownups call that “majoring on the minors” which is just a funny way of saying that the things they were focusing on weren’t very important. The Bible tells us about who God is and why we can rely on Him. It tells us how different He is than we are and why we can totally trust and depend on Him. The Bible is a book about God’s character—which is love and loyalty. What God was doing before He created the universe just isn’t important. We’re curious and we might want to know, but I figure out brains are just way too small anyway. The Bible tells us what is actually important, which is what I am trying to teach you. The Bible says that we can trust that God will do what He says and that we don’t have to worry about the details.

Jesus said something about that in the Sermon on the Mount, “²⁵ “So I tell you, don’t worry about the food you need to live. And don’t worry about the clothes you need for your body. Life is more important than food. And the body is more important than clothes. ²⁶ Look at the birds in the air. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns. But your heavenly Father feeds the birds. And you know that you are worth much more than the birds. ²⁷ You cannot add any time to your life by worrying about it. ²⁸ “And why do you worry about clothes? Look at the flowers in the field. See how they grow. They don’t work or make clothes for themselves. ²⁹ But I tell you that even Solomon with his riches was not dressed as beautifully as one of these flowers. ³⁰ God clothes the grass in the field like that. The grass is living today, but tomorrow it is thrown into the fire to be burned. So, you can be even more sure that God will clothe you. Don’t have so little faith! ³¹ Don’t worry and say, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ ³² All the people who don’t know God keep trying to get these things. And your Father in heaven knows that you need them. ³³ The thing you should want most is God’s kingdom and doing what God wants. Then all these other things you need will be given to you. ³⁴ So don’t worry about tomorrow.” (Matthew 6:25-34 ICB)

So, if we don’t have to worry about the things we need, we also shouldn’t worry about the mysteries that the Bible doesn’t explain. If we need to know something clearly, He will tell us. One of the confusing things the Bible says is found at the end of Genesis chapter one,

²⁶ Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

²⁷ So God created man in his own image,
    in the image of God he created him;
    male and female he created them.

²⁸ And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

This is one of the sections of Scriptures that really got those Gnostics, who thought that knowing things could save them. Working overtime on their questions. And questions are just fine, as long as we don’t come up with answers that are more important to us than what the Bible clearly reveals about God. We adults are pretty good at getting totally distracted by all the “what ifs” when we aren’t careful. The reason why is because whenever the Bible doesn’t explain something clearly, people can get a bit wacky about needing answers. But this is one of those cases where there was an answer provided, thousands of years later, as to what God’s image is actually all about.

To understand what God is talking about here, there are some things about archaeology that are important to know because when Moses read this to the ancient Israelites wandering in the desert, there were things they knew that we don’t know anymore. One of the cool things they knew was that kings would set up images of themselves all over their kingdoms, in their different cities, to remind people about who was in charge. The images didn’t even really look very much like the king, because that wasn’t the point. The point was to have reminders of the king all over the place. Reminders of who makes the laws and who protects them when there is a war and who feeds them. Those statues were a witness, a reminder, that he was real and sitting on his throne running the kingdom because normal people would probably never see him and would only hear about him. The people could feel safe knowing that there was someone higher up in charge of running their kingdom and in charge of their soldiers.

So, when Moses was reading this story to his people in the wilderness, when they heard the word for image they would say, “Our King made us to be reminders to the rest of Creation of who He is and what He is doing so, He won’t be forgotten, or doubted. We are His witnesses to the world that God the Creator is the one and only true God. That’s our job.”

I imagine that made them feel very special, and we are very special. We are the only creatures on the planet made in God’s image. Other creatures have the breath of life but we are the only ones that were made to be images of God. You can even call us reflections if you want. Do you remember episode 2 where we talked about the one word in Scripture that only God can do? That word in English is create but in Hebrew it is bara. Well, in these verses that describe God making us, God uses bara not once, not twice, but THREE WHOLE TIMES.

²⁷ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

So, when God created mankind (humans), we were created like Him and also unlike Him. Unlike Him, we are males and females—men and women who can have babies—and like Him in that we are His images on earth while He is in the original in the heavens. Let’s talk about images right now in a way that is totally easy for you to understand. The first thing I want you to understand is that when you have an image, it can be a true image or a false image. If I take a picture of one of you and draw a big old moustache on it or black out half your teeth then I have taken a true image of you and have made it into a false image of you. It’s false because it doesn’t look anything like you anymore. Have you ever seen a funhouse mirror? They are so hilarious. The mirror is bendy and so it can make us look shorter and fatter or taller and skinnier. Now, a real mirror will show us mostly what we actually look like and I say mostly because if you have a mole or a freckle on your left side it will look like it is actually on your right side when you look in the mirror. The next time you look in the mirror, I want you to test it. Stand in front of the mirror and take your right index finger, your pointer finger, and touch your nose. What you will discover is that you are looking at yourself taking your left finger and touching your nose—or at least that is what it will look like. It won’t really be true but other than everything looking kinda reversed, the mirror still shows you a true picture of yourself. When you get to be my age you won’t appreciate that very much, let me tell you. But when you compare your reflection with the funhouse mirror where everything is squashed or stretched and you see a huge difference, right?

And throughout the Bible, we see a lot of ways that we can be true images of God. First of all, in the Scripture we read today, we see that we can be correct reflections of God when we rule over the fish and birds and animals the way God wants us to. He created us to have dominion over the earth, but we have to do it the way He does it if we want to call ourselves true images. God doesn’t use creation selfishly, He feeds and cares for it. God also doesn’t rule over people with cruelty, and so people in authority need to behave more like God. God is the ultimate authority in the universe and yet He served people when He created the universe to be exactly everything we could ever need. He could have made it a totally inhospitable place for us, where we couldn’t feed ourselves or live. Heck, He didn’t need to make the air perfect for us to breathe. No, in every way, He created the earth to help us so that we could spend our time caring for the rest of Creation the way He cares for us. God showed us in Genesis 1 that a true king serves and provides for everyone. If we are going to be accurate reflections of what kind of King and God He is then we need to do the same. Unfortunately, human history is full of examples of animals that have gone extinct because people wanted something they didn’t actually need. Because they weren’t thinking as image-bearers but as fashionistas or they thought that a part of an animal could and should be used in a magical ritual. Today, tigers and other animals are critically endangered because people use one part for something that no one really needs in order to survive.

And so, when those Israelites were listening to Moses speak, they also probably thought of an entirely different kind of image—and that’s the idols of the false gods that they left behind in Egypt. Idols were wooden or stone carvings that represented a pagan god. No one thought that the idol was the god, but they thought they could perform a ceremony that would transfer the spirit of the god into that carving. So, not all carvings were idols, only the ones that they believed had the spirit of their god in it. Those images were bad, of course, but the Israelites would have understood that one of the special ways that humans were created in the image of God is that they were able to have His spirit inside them—like Moses did. Animals and birds and fish cannot have the spirit of God inside them. They knew that Moses and the seventy elders of Israel possessed the spirit of God because they could prophesy—speak God’s words to His people.

Num 11: ¹⁶ Then the Lord said to Moses, “Gather for me seventy men of the elders of Israel, whom you know to be the elders of the people and officers over them, and bring them to the tent of meeting, and let them take their stand there with you. ¹⁷ And I will come down and talk with you there. And I will take some of the Spirit that is on you and put it on them, and they shall bear the burden of the people with you, so that you may not bear it yourself alone. 

They knew that the two craftsmen, Bezalel and Oholiab, had the Spirit of God inside them: Ex 35:³⁰ Then Moses said to the people of Israel, “See, the Lord has called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah; ³¹ and he has filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, with intelligence, with knowledge, and with all craftsmanship

And of course, Moses had the Spirit of God. So would King Saul, for a while, and later King David, and the prophets. I believe that when humans were first created, that we all had it too, but when we rebelled against God it was taken away from us and only given to certain people after that according to God’s purposes. But because we were created in God’s image, we were created to have that Spirit inside us so that we could always be close to God. That’s how it is supposed to be. That’s what it means to be fully human. Being fully human means being everything God created us to be on the inside, where it counts the most.

Let me tell you what it doesn’t mean to be created in God’s image. It doesn’t mean what we look like on the outside because the Bible tells us that God is unseen, invisible, and without form. That means that, although we call God “Him” He isn’t a him like the hims we see all around us. God is Spirit. He doesn’t need to eat or drink or go to the bathroom or work out. He isn’t a man and He isn’t a woman. He is God. The Bible describes God sometimes in terms of being masculine, like a father and sometimes in terms of being feminine, like a mother. But the Bible makes sure to make it clear that He isn’t like the false gods of the nations where they were male and female and looked like humans—or humans with animal heads. God is complete in Himself and doesn’t need gender and He doesn’t need to have babies even though some religions say that we are His spirit babies.

It also doesn’t mean that we can create a universe. We can’t do whatever we want whenever we want to do it. Even people who can perform miracles can’t always do it. Healers can’t always heal. Moses had his limitations—he had to wait for God to tell him what to do because the power is always God’s and not ours. David had God’s spirit, but he never worked any miracles. Neither did Isaiah or Jeremiah or John the Baptist. We are images, not duplicates. We aren’t exactly the same as Him. We are just created to be like Him in some ways. Remember, we are like those statues of the ancient kings. We are here to remind people about God and who He is and what He has done and will do.

Did you know that the second commandment tells us that we are not allowed to make an image of God? They couldn’t make a carving of anything on earth to worship as though it represented Him. I mean, how can you make a carving of God who is spirit, invisible and who has no form? You can’t. It’s totally  impossible. I’ll tell you what. Go get some clay and make a sculpture of the air. You can’t. We see the proof that air exists because we aren’t suffocating. We know that wind exists because of what it does to trees and leaves. But we can’t see it. We can only see what it does to things. Same with God. We see what He does all around us. Have you ever stopped to think of how crazy it is that we can still grow food after so many thousands of years? When we make things, they wear out. Have you ever seen water wear out and get old? Does it ever stop being wet? What if someone asked you to make a sculpture of who you are. Not what you look like, but who you are on the inside—the part of you that thinks and is aware of what is going on around you. Are you your brain? Nope, there is an invisible part of us that is aware and no one has ever seen before. In a way, that’s like God too.

But the Bible is also a story of how we humans have done a terrible job of being true reflections. So God had to send us His own perfect image. Now, if we were to carve something that God created and say it looks like Him, even if it was possible for Him to be seen, how would it not be an insult? But what about if God created His own perfect image? One that would never say or do the wrong thing or give people the wrong impression of what He is like? Well, God did that when His Creative Word, His powerful logos, became a human being and lived here on earth. His Word already existed, we’ve talked about that, but when God’s Word took on human form, Jesus showed us the absolute perfect reflection of who God is and what He thinks and how He wants us to act. Jesus didn’t look like God, because God is invisible, but as part of God, God’s Creative Word who created the universe, everything He ever did looks just like God’s character and actions. What did Paul tell us about Jesus?

¹⁵ He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. ¹⁶ For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. ¹⁷ And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ¹⁸ And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. ¹⁹ For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, ²⁰ and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” (Col 1:15-20, ESV)

What does this tell us? Jesus is the perfect reflection of God, who would be invisible otherwise. Jesus is how the world finally saw God in the flesh. Jesus was with God in the beginning as His Creative Word, making everything come to be and to happen—even those things that can’t be seen. He existed before every created thing and without Him everything that was created would fall apart. He is the boss of everyone who believes and we shouldn’t put any leaders before him in importance. God allowed all of who He is to live among us through Jesus—everything He thinks and does and how He loves and cares for us. And most important of all, God saved us through Jesus. He delivered all those people by living with us through Jesus. He healed all those people by living with us through Jesus. He taught us through Jesus. He raised Lazarus and Jairus’s daughter and the widow’s son through Jesus. And He saved us when Jesus died on the Cross and was raised up on the third day.

How did God do all that? How does it work? It doesn’t matter. Our brains are too small to entirely understand it but for almost two thousand years, billions of people have experienced that it is absolutely true. Just like you don’t worry about things that your parents take care of everyday, and you trust them because what you need is always there and you don’t have to understand how it works in order to receive from them what you need, so we don’t have to understand everything that is true in order for it to be true.

Next week I think we are going to talk about the Seventh Day, when God rested and what that means. It doesn’t mean that he was sleeping! I love you, and I am praying for you and I hope you have a wonderful week studying the Bible with the people who love you.

People in the ancient world thought that gods and goddesses were responsible for every single part of nature but when God told the story of Creation to Moses, He made sure He did it in a way that people would know the truth. Nature and weather and the sun, moon, and stars are created–just like us!

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Hi, I am Miss Tyler and welcome back to Context for Kids where I teach you stuff that most adults don’t know, which is cool. Parents, if you have littler kids and you want a curriculum for them, my friend Sarah Hawkes Valente has written a really cool book called Lessons in Yeshua’s Torah that has short Bible lessons, coloring pages and fun craft ideas and all the stuff I am not good at doing. You can find that on Amazon.com and no, she didn’t pay me to talk about it. I also have books available for kids starting at age 7 and up on bigger topics than I can talk about in a half hour, also on Amazon, and I do get paid to talk about that but only if you buy one. You can find the links for those on my contextforkids.com website along with transcripts and recordings of all past broadcasts.

Two weeks ago, we talked about God’s creative word and how cool that is. Last week we talked about how God showed how different He is from all false gods by explaining that He created the earth not for Himself but for us. Today’s program is called “Nature is not God!” And we will be reviewing some stuff from last week but that’s how we learn best, by reminding ourselves of what we have already learned until it sticks permanently in our brains. Later on, in the Bible, this stuff will be super important to know. Understanding the world all around the Israelites and why they kept worshipping other gods will help us not to fall into similar kinds of sins and will also make us understand why they thought they way they did even when God told them not to. Otherwise, we will think they are silly or stupid and we won’t have compassion. Compassion is when we try to be understanding when people have done something wrong or when they are suffering because something bad has happened to them. It is very important to try and understand the world that the Bible was written in because when we don’t, we sometimes come to some very wrong conclusions. We need to understand why they thought they were doing right when they were actually doing wrong!

Fortunately, about a hundred and fifty years ago, archaeologists started finding ancient clay tablets in Israel, the land of the Bible, and in the countries all around it. Because it is very dry there and because the documents were baked hard as a rock, they survived for thousands of years. They are called cuneiform tablets (pronounced kyu-nee-eh-form) and I will post some cool videos and pages for you to look at when I put up the transcript for this. I will often do that, so be sure to subscribe to my blog. These tablets tell us all sorts of things about how people in Bible times thought and believed and lived. In fact, there are so many still just sitting around that haven’t been translated yet. Maybe you will learn to do that and make an important discovery! You know, there is still so much to see and learn and do and discover and invent and there are many ways to serve God!

Cuneiform tablets video

Cuneiform tablets page

In the ancient world, they didn’t think about things scientifically. They didn’t understand why seeds grow into new plants. They had never seen one of those videos that shows how a seed grows underground and they didn’t have the science to understand why. They knew about seeds, of course, and knew that if you put one in the ground and if it rained on it, that a plant would grow but here’s where things get different where they thought entirely differently than we do. They didn’t know about the rain cycle that God perfectly designed to water the earth and they didn’t know that He genetically designed seeds with the blueprint for a new plant. In Canaan, the land later called Israel, they believed that Dagan, the grain god, made the seeds grow into plants and that Ba’al, the storm god, made it rain. We know this because of evidence found in cuneiform tablets. We didn’t know what kind of gods Ba’al and Dagan were until very recently. So, when you hear that Ba’al was a sun god and that Dagon was a fish god, those were stories made up hundreds of years later by people who were guessing and didn’t know any better. No one had worshipped these gods for so long that no one was alive who remembered what kinds of gods they were. Rashi and David Kimchi are responsible for people believing that Dagan was a fish god and it even made its way into a very famous epic called Paradise Lost written by John Milton. People just heard it so much that they assumed it was right and you can even find images in museums of mermen who were mislabeled as being Dagan! But now we know better. That’s why archaeology is so important to understanding the Bible and why what we think we know isn’t always right.

The Bible told us that the false gods would be forgotten and would no longer be on anyone’s lips, which means that they wouldn’t be worshipped anymore, and the Bible is right. The Bible is so right that all we knew for a long time were their names and nothing else about them! They were forgotten for so long that now we can learn about them and not be at all tempted to worship them and even think they were silly. I mean, no one thinks that Dagan actually makes the crops grow anymore and no one thinks that Ba’al Hadad makes it rain. We know that God created everything so well that things run very smoothly. But we mustn’t ever make the mistake of thinking that it all runs without Him. Creation still needs God and answers to Him and we still need God and answer to Him. Some people think or maybe just act like He created everything and just went away. The Greek philosophers, some of them believed that. They thought that the gods weren’t interested in humans at all and didn’t care. Well, they were kinda right because when you don’t really exist, you can’t be interested in anyone, right? Without God, nothing that exists would exist anymore and nothing that works would work anymore. How could it? So, we don’t have to worry about Him ever leaving us or forsaking us. As long as we are here, it means that He is here too.

In Genesis, God was very specific about what He had Moses write down. The people of the ancient world, and even a great many people today, thought that everything in nature was run by individual gods. Today in places like remote locations in China, they practice a religion called animism. Now, I know that animism sounds like animal worship, but that isn’t quite right. Animism is when you believe that everything has a spirit inside it. In a way, they see rivers and rocks and mountains as alive and needing to be worshipped. I say “in a way” because what they believe is that there are spirits inside the rocks and rivers that can be happy or get angry and they need to be kept happy or bad things happen.

This is called appeasement. Don’t worry if you don’t understand right now. Appeasement is about making someone else happy by doing things for them or giving them what they want. They might sacrifice animals in order to bribe these spirits into protecting them or not cursing them and making them sick. You guys who have little brothers and sisters, you probably totally understand this. Like when you are in the store and a kid is behaving badly and the parents give him a chocolate bar to shut him up, that’s appeasement. And in the ancient world, people would appease their gods in order to keep them from getting angry and having temper tantrums and destroying their lives by making their crops die (which would make them and their animals starve) or not giving them children, or by not giving them any rain for their crops and trees (they didn’t have sprinklers), or not protecting them from their enemies when they get attacked. False gods were very, very mean when they didn’t get what they wanted. Or at least that’s what they thought about them. So, even if they were starving, they would sacrifice an animal to make that god happy because they thought their gods actually ate the meat (really, the priests ate the meat). Appeasement was about bribing the gods so that things would go well. It was a terribly stressful way to live and God was showing His people that He isn’t anything like that. He can’t be bribed because He doesn’t need anything.

And you may be wondering why I am even telling you all this. You see, all the things that they worshipped and appeased as gods in the ancient world? In Genesis one, Moses made sure to tell us that not only weren’t they gods, but they were just other created things and not only that, not only weren’t they gods but they were there to serve and be used by men and women, not to rule over them.

In ancient Egypt, for example, there was the sky goddess Nut and the earth god was Geb and then there was Shu, the air god. But what does God tell us about Himself and about the sky and the land and the air? God says that He created them. He didn’t give birth to them. God didn’t have babies who popped out as the sky and the land and the air. He created them out of nothing. He was telling His people, “You don’t have to serve these things because they are just things and they don’t even have personal names. They are things that I made for you. They will serve you. You don’t have to appease them.” That’s what the first three days told them.

Then, as He told Moses, He created all plant life. He said that He created the seeds so that they would make more of the same kind of plants. He didn’t tell them that to teach them science because they wouldn’t have understood it that way. He told them that so that they would know that gods like Dagan and Ninurta weren’t responsible for the crops. He was saying, “You don’t have to bribe these gods so that your plants will grow. I made them to grow without anyone else’s labor except your own. You will grow them to feed yourself and your animals, not as food for these pretend gods who can’t even manage to feed themselves.

And He created the sun, moon and stars but although I am calling them that—He doesn’t call them anything but greater and lesser lights. Did you ever notice that? Why didn’t He call them shemesh and yareach, their Hebrew names? He didn’t give them names because other nations gave them proper names (instead of descriptive names) and worshipped them as gods. They worshipped them as the sun gods Ra and Shapash and Utu and the moon gods Sin and Yarikh and Ba’al Hammon. “No,” says God, “they are just things—they aren’t alive. There is no living spirit in them as there is in animals and humans. They are things that I made so that you can have days and years and moedim, meeting times to celebrate holy days with me. No matter how beautiful they are, don’t mistake them for gods. I made them for you.” Today, when we say “sun and moon” those are just descriptions. We know that our sun is not the only sun in the universe and that most of the other planets in our solar system have moons. Those are descriptive names, not proper names as though we think they are living beings.

Then He created birds and fish and told them to be fruitful and multiply. It was up to the fish and birds and flying insects to multiply, not up to any gods who lived in the ocean or in the air. God blessed them—remember that was His first blessing He ever spoke—and so they got their ability to have babies from Him. I actually have no idea what gods were involved with fish. I haven’t ever studied that and I am too lazy to look it up but I know about Sobek and Khnum, the gods of the Nile in Egypt—but they weren’t responsible for fish. Oh well, I am sure someone was. They had gods and goddesses for everything and wouldn’t have left out fish. So, what would He say here through Moses? “When you want food, you pray to me. You don’t have to make any other gods happy in order to eat fish. I created them for you, after all, so don’t give anyone else credit for having any control over it.”

Animals were next. He created creeping things like lizards and bugs, and wild animals like horses and pigs and lions and camels (some of which could be tamed and domesticated), and livestock (cows, sheep and goats). Boy howdy were there a lot of gods linked to livestock. Tammuz is probably the most famous. Although people have called him a sun god, when they found all of those cuneiform tablets we found out that he was actually a shepherd god and an agricultural god. I did a ton of research on him about five years ago. Oh, also, another famous god supposedly responsible for livestock was Mithra—he was the protector of cattle in ancient Persia. But God also made the livestock to be fruitful and to multiply. So, again, God is saying, “Pray to me for your cows and sheep and goats to have lots of babies because I created them. Tammuz cannot help you. He’s not even real.”

And then God created people. And He created people to rule over and have the use of everything He had created. Oh, except for one thing. He never gave people any command or blessing to rule over other people. I hope I mentioned that last week.

So, that’s so important. In pagan religions, nature has to be served by people because nature is over and above people and is controlled by a kabillion different gods and spirits. In God’s Creation, man rules over nature wisely. If man rules over nature unwisely, then nature dies and we die too. Remember when Noah brought all those animals on the ark and he brought two of each kind except for the clean livestock animals? He brought seven of each of those. Imagine what would have happened if he had eaten one of the unclean animals when there were only two of each. Oops. So much for that species, it’s gonna be extinct pretty darned fast as soon as the other one dies. No, Noah had to be wise. God gave Noah animals for eating and animals that were supposed to go out and populate the earth again. But even with fourteen each of sheep, goats, and cows, and other clean animals like camels (which are too useful to eat) and giraffes they still couldn’t eat a lot of meat or else they wouldn’t have many of those left either. They had to be wise in how they ruled over God’s creation. The horses probably ran away because we don’t see them being ridden by anyone in the Bible until we run into the Egyptians. So, the horses ran down to Egypt and the donkeys stayed close by. Of course, the Bible doesn’t say any of this and I am making this part up. I am just playing what if. I mean, the part about the seven pairs of clean animals and the one pair of the unclean is in the Bible. The rest is just me thinking thoughts and we can do that and it is okay but we have to make sure that we don’t mistake that for being in the Bible. Sometimes people say some crazy things and we hear them often enough that we do think they are in the Bible when they aren’t. When we talk about the Tower of Babel we will hear about a lot of things that people think the Bible says, but the Bible doesn’t say it. I always think that’s a lot of fun.

So, we are very special. God tells us in Genesis that He made us to be more special than nature. That means that we are more special than the rarest flower on earth. We are more special than the strongest lion or the fastest horse or the smartest dog or the cutest cat. God was telling us that nature was created for us, by Him, because He wants us to be taken care of. We weren’t created to take care of God. We were created to worship God, obey His commandments, and have a relationship with Him as His people. Some people today think that nature is more special than human beings but they are very wrong. Nature is precious and must be protected, but that’s an entirely different thing. As part of ruling over nature, we must be responsible about how we treat it. We shouldn’t just kill things for no reason. Some animals have gone extinct or almost went extinct just because people wanted a certain kind of feather in their hat or a certain type of fur hat or coat. But that’s not responsible and it isn’t respecting God’s creativity and His work. Imagine if you created something and your younger brother or sister broke it. Maybe you don’t have to imagine. I can tell you a story about what my baby brother Adam did to my Rubik’s Cube but I won’t. Maybe you have made models or lego towers or something and then someone came along and destroyed it. Maybe you worked really hard and were very creative about how you did it. When someone destroys our good work, we feel sad and unloved, right? So we must be very sure not to destroy God’s good work either. We can use it but we must not destroy it. So, we can eat cows and sheep and goats and chickens but if we eat them all then we have not been very good stewards of what He has provided. Stewards are people that are put in charge of other people’s things. Like, if I had a collection of antique cars, and I hired a steward to take care of them, he would have to make sure they didn’t get all dirty and dented and he would have to make sure that they don’t break down. After all, if I come down to the garage and all my cars were messed up, he would be in big trouble, right? Well, one day Jesus, God’s powerful and creative Word, is coming back. We ought to show our respect and thankfulness for all His creation by making sure it is still good like He left it to us. Next week we will be talking more about our job as God’s image-bearers and our responsibilities.

But God doesn’t just show us in Genesis that nature is only a created thing. He shows us all through the Bible. In the mythologies of other nations, like we talked about last week, the gods were usually fighting with each other and they often had to fight with nature. Like Tiamat, the huge sea creature or Apophis the huge serpent in the underworld that tried to eat the sun god Ra every single stinkin’ night. It’s like, “Dude, give it up, you never win. Don’t you get tired of having your butt kicked every night? Have some dignity, man. Go to the gym, work out for a few months, drink some protein shakes and then come back and maybe you can win.”

In Exodus, we will see God showing the Egyptians that all Creation is just waiting to obey His commands and only His commands. That will be exciting to read. But what about Jesus? Did Jesus command nature the way God does in the Bible? He absolutely did! In the Gospel of Mark, when there was a storm on the Sea of Galilee and His disciples were afraid they would drown, He woke up from where He had been sleeping in their boat and told the sea to be muzzled and everything was calm. Another time, He walked on the water. One time, He wanted some figs and He went to a fig tree and didn’t find any, He cursed the tree so that no one would ever eat from it again. When He and His disciples came back later, the tree had withered and died. And I am not even mentioning all the people He healed and all the demons He kicked to the curb. Everything in the world is created by God and therefore everything has to obey Him—except us because He made us special, with the free will to decide to disobey Him. That’s sad when we do that but He wants people to choose Him. Animals can’t choose Him, they have to obey. But we are different and we will talk about just how different next time.

Parents, if you want to get a head start on next week’s lesson, check out my book Context for Kids: Image-bearing, Idolatry, and the New Creation available at Amazon.com. I won’t be covering the entire book, obviously, just a few parts. If you have missed previous episodes, check out contextforkids.podbean.com to download the program, or contextforkids.com to read the transcripts and see what cool links I have come up with for you to learn from.

Until next week, just remember that I love you, I am praying for you, and I hope you have a great week studying the Bible with the people who love you.

This week we are going to talk about what the phrase “it was good” means because God says it not once, but six times in Genesis 1 and He even says “it was very good” once. Again, because the Bible is a book about God, we’re going to take a look at what “it was good” says about how different He is than all the other false gods being worshipped by the nations surrounding Israel. 

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Hi, this is Miss Tyler and welcome back to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you a bunch of cool stuff that most adults don’t know. Today’s Episode is called “It was good! Making the Universe Just Perfect for Us” because, in the beginning, that’s exactly what God did, He made the perfect world for humans to live in—with everything we could ever possibly need. And to talk about that, we also need to talk about why this was written and what God was telling us about Himself because the Bible is God’s story—the story of God showing us who He is and how He is different from all the false gods who people worshipped because they didn’t know any better. The Bible also shows us how different God is from us and how trustworthy and wonderful He is beyond anything we can imagine.

Before we start today, I want to explain something very important. Did you know that people who are smart, and who are believers and love God, can disagree about things? That’s right! You and your parents can hear me teach something and disagree with me but we can still love one another. I want you to grow up to be the kinds of believers who are loving and gracious and humble. It’s important that when you disagree with someone that you don’t assume they are stupid or know less than you do. I read a lot of books about the Bible written by some wonderful people, and when they are also believers I call them my brothers and sisters. I don’t always agree with what they think but I love them and I respect them and I am happy that they love God enough to write books about Him to try and teach others. Nobody has ever been entirely right about their thoughts and opinions about God except for the One who was with Him at the beginning, and that is Jesus. Not even Moses or Abraham or any of the Prophets. They are all just humans. But Jesus, God’s powerful Word made into a human, knows everything about God. So, everyone else is going to be at least a little bit wrong about things. That’s okay. Even when someone is wrong (and on a lot of things we won’t know for sure until we see God face to face after we die), they are still loved by God and so we love them too, just like we want to be loved when we are wrong and we are all wrong about a lot of things! So, if you or your parents disagree with me, just think about that. You can still love me and still listen to me because even if I am wrong about something, I won’t be wrong about everything. And we can all learn together.

So, in Genesis chapter one, there is this phrase that gets repeated over and over and over again. “And God saw it was good.” And it even says, “It was very good!” once. On the first day, after He made light appear on the earth, and made the very first day, God said it was good. On the second day, He didn’t say that anything was good. On the third day, He made up for it by saying that it was good twice, when He made the land appear and when He made the plants sprout up. On the fourth day when He made the sun, moon and stars, He said it was good. Then on the fifth day, He created sea creatures and birds and said it was good. On the sixth day, He made all the land animals and said it was good and then He made people and said that it was very good. But what does it mean, that it was good? That’s what we are going to talk about today! Hold on to your hats, or your socks, or whatever you are wearing that’s handy.

When Moses wrote the Torah, which is the first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—very few people were worshipping our God. In fact, sometime between the death of Noah and when God called Abraham, knowledge of God had been all but lost. Abraham’s father Terah was an idol worshipper. We know this because it tells us this in Joshua 24:2. Possibly Abraham was an idol worshipper too but we don’t know because the Bible doesn’t tell us. There are some legends out there that claim one thing or another but the Bible doesn’t tell us for sure. What we do know is that when Abraham is called by God to leave His people and follow God, He didn’t show up there and find a synagogue or a church waiting for him when he got there! Everyone around him was worshipping false gods instead—the Canaanites, the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Sumerians and the Babylonians, etc. But where did these false gods come from when only one God created the whole entire universe? Why did people believe in all these gods? Why didn’t they believe in our God anymore? Well, we don’t know the answer to the last question for sure because the Bible doesn’t say. We have theories but we don’t know for sure. Some people say it was because of Nimrod, but the Bible doesn’t say that. And we don’t know anything about Nimrod from history either. All we have are legends written over two thousand years later, and most of them were only written within the past two hundred years. You see, when the Bible doesn’t say much about someone, people like to make up stories to fill in the blanks. That’s okay as long as we remember what is actually written in the Bible and only accept that as the truth. So, we don’t actually know why people forgot about God. It’s sad though.

In the ancient world, people were curious just the same as we are. In fact, I want you to close your eyes and imagine something for me. I want you to think about the sun and the rain. Imagine the sun going across the sky over the course of the day. I want you to think about rain falling and landing on you and the ground. Imagine that you don’t know that the sun is a star 93 million miles away. Imagine that you don’t know about the water cycle, how water evaporates from the lakes and oceans and ends up in the atmosphere, gathering in clouds and then raining down on us. You and I only know those things because someone else figured it out. If you didn’t know those things, what might you think? How does the sun get from the east and cross over the sky, and then dip below the horizon to the west? And how does it happen every single day? Where does the rainwater come from and why isn’t it falling all the time? In the ancient world, they had an explanation for that. They had gods who did all those things. The Egyptians had Ra (or Re), the Canaanites had Shapash, the Assyrians had Utu and the Babylonians worshiped Shamash. The Egyptians, for example, thought that Ra was rowing his sun-boat across the sky every day. At night, he would have to row through the underworld, fighting the giant serpent Apophis. If he didn’t win the fight, the sun wouldn’t come up the next morning—which had to be really stressful for the Egyptians to think about. And you thought school was stressful! Each culture had different stories about the gods and they believed that their gods were different from the other gods. The Babylonians, for example, did think that Ra and Shamash were the same god. They believed that Ra only moved the sun for the Egyptians and that Shamash was responsible for the sun over Babylon. We’ll talk a lot more about regional gods in the future—and that’s just what we call gods who only have authority over a small area. Like, Ba’al could only make it rain in Canaan. Dagon only made the crops grow in his own region. Some other god was responsible for doing this for the Egyptians. Don’t ask me which one, I actually haven’t studied that. There are just too many gods responsible for too many things in too many cultures. It was madness!!!!

And they couldn’t create anything. In fact, they were created. The gods of the nations weren’t like our God, who created everything and wasn’t created by anyone. Those gods often had parents, just like us. They had mommies and daddies and they also had children of their own. You see, the gods of all the nations (who aren’t real, obviously) were a lot like us. They couldn’t create anything and they could only do their one job. They were really rather incompetent as far as gods goes. We would expect them to be a lot more powerful than people thought they were but they were just like us, only more powerful. They weren’t even immortal (living forever) because they could be killed. Sometimes they did get killed. Imagine if one day our God just up and died. The Universe would probably just disappear. Fortunately, that can’t happen because He isn’t like us. Thank goodness, right?

I am going to give you an example of one of their mythologies. Mythology is an important word that doesn’t mean what a lot of people think it means. A mythology is a story that describes how things came to be the way they are when there is no historical evidence of what really happened. Mythology was the ancient way of explaining the reason why things are the way they are. The sun god rowing his boat across the sky to explain why the sun moves is a mythology. Oh, cool fact about that. Have you ever seen an obelisk? From archaeology, we know that the Egyptians built those as “sun needles” where Ra could rest at noontime. That’s what it looked like from the ground, like the boat was parked there taking a breather. When I post the transcript, I will include a link. Actually, when the Greeks first saw the sun needles they thought they looked like meat skewers and named the sun needles obeliskoi, because that is what they called their meat skewers. So, maybe Ra was up there enjoying a shish kebab for his lunchtime break!

But in the Creation mythologies (and that means the ancient stories about how the world came to be in different cultures) their gods didn’t create the earth like our God did. In fact, in the Mesopotamian mythology Enuma Elish, which archaeologists found less than two hundred years ago—and this is super gross. Gross is cool because you will never forget this. Anyway, there was a war between the gods, Marduk and Tiamat, a giant sea monster/goddess. When Tiamat died, Marduk split her body into two pieces and half became the earth and the other half was suspended over it. The rain was the water leaking through her dead skin. EWWWWWW. I mean, I don’t think they gave much thought to this. Could you imagine the stinkiness factor? Would you want to drink the water that came through her dead body? Super gross but super cool. Oh, and I have to tell you how they said people came to be created. Marduk punished all the junior gods who sided against him in the battle by making them do work and grow food for the gods to eat. They got tired of working and so Marduk took the blood of another god named Kingu and made people out of that. They were created to be slaves and their only purpose in life was to make sure these gods were taken care of. And this is very important because when Moses wrote Genesis 1, he knew all this. He grew up in Egypt so he knew all of their gods, and he was educated in the palace of Pharaoh so I bet he knew all about the gods of other countries as well and their creation mythologies. When God inspired Moses to write the story of the making of the universe, Moses would have known how different God was saying He was, from all the other made up gods on earth. And when Moses read the account to the Israelites who had grown up in Egypt as slaves, and all of the mixed multitude of former pagans who also came with them, they would have been amazed.

Genesis 1 tells us amazing things that weren’t true about any other gods. First, it said that no one created God. He didn’t have parents. He didn’t create the earth by killing anyone else and, in fact, we don’t see anything about any war at all! God made light appear—why? So He could see? Nope. He created light for someone else, so that they could have days and nights and so that time could begin. God made a place for weather to happen between heaven and earth. Why? Who needs rain? Not Him. God made the dry land appear and then made plants grow. Why? So He could eat a salad? Nope. God made the sun, moon and stars. Did he need them? What on earth would He need them for—was He cold? Then God made the birds and the fish. Is He hungry? Not hardly. On the sixth day, He made animals of all sorts. Did He need a pet or did he need to travel a long distance on a camel or a horse? I don’t think so. So why did God create all these things and call them good? He doesn’t need any of those things. The Bible says that God is Spirit, without form:

John 4:24 “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

Well, somebody without form doesn’t need things like light and food and land to stand on or transportation. So, who do you think God created all those things for? Was it because He wanted the world’s largest and most beautiful zoo to look at? Certainly, where He lives with the angels must be very beautiful. I bet it is more amazing than we can even imagine. So why does He need the earth and air and fish and birds and plants and light and darkness and animals? He doesn’t. He didn’t create them for Himself. He created them because we need them. In fact, He created them before He ever even created humans.

You see, when God made light appear and separated the light from the darkness and said it was good, what He was really saying was, “Job well done, this works exactly the way it needs to. It’s perfect to do exactly what I designed it for—for nights and for days. Because someone is going to be created who needs the light to see during the days and to sleep at night. I am going to create something that can’t exist unless there is time for them to live and grow in.”

When God made the dry land appear, He said it was good because someone was going to need a place to stand, unless they planned to tread water for a very long time. Now there’s something to consider. How long can you tread water? And when God made plants grow, and fruit trees spring up, He also said it was good. Someone was going to need lettuce, and carrots, and bananas, and apples. It was good because He looked at it and saw that it was absolutely ready for someone special. He’d done a very good job, a complete job of providing food—but for who?

Then God made the sun, moon, and stars. Did He need the warmth of the sun to be comfortable? Did He need the moon so that He wouldn’t be stumbling around at night? No way! Someone else needed those things. The Bible said that they were needed for days and for years and for seasons. The Hebrew word for seasons is moedim, a word that means “meeting.” Well, that’s strange. There isn’t anyone to meet with anyone else, only God and His Word, which we talked about last week, and His angels, right? As Alice in Wonderland would say, “Curioser and curioser.” And once more, He said it was good. Another step in the Creation process was just right.

Next, God created fish, flying insects, and birds. He even pronounced the first blessing in Scripture on them. So, the birds, and fish, and insects are blessed by being able to have babies and fill the air and skies. But what could God possibly need those for? And again, He called it good. Good for what? Is He planning on going fishing or birdwatching?

Now, on the sixth day, God created all sorts of animals. He created livestock (cows, sheep, and goats), and wild animals (like cats and dogs and pigs and camels), and creeping things (lizards and land insects). And He said that it was good. Everything was exactly how it should be. In fact, everything was perfect and ready for God’s final creation. And this was a creation that God would call very good. After this next creation, God would stop creating and rest and take His place as the King over all creation.

God created people. He created them in some ways totally unlike Himself. God is spirit and we call God Him but God isn’t a “Him” like the pagan gods were all a bunch of hims and hers. Calling God “it” would be rude and impossible in Hebrew anyway. God created people like He created the animals, with males and females so there could be babies and they could fill the whole earth with more people. But the Bible doesn’t say that God blessed the animals like He blessed the birds and the fish (I have no idea why). God blessed us instead. He blessed us to be able to have babies and not only that. He blessed us to fill the earth and to gain control over it. He blessed us to rule over the animals and birds and fish and everything that lives on earth.

28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.”

To people who lived in a world where they believed that everything was run by gods and goddesses, and who believed that they were totally at the mercy of wild animals, and that they couldn’t control anything or do anything to change their lives, this was amazing news. Not only weren’t they menial slaves, expected to grow food for the gods, but they had a loving God who made food for them instead. They didn’t have gods who cruelly and selfishly ruled over them with an iron fist. They were created to be rulers over the earth, to change it according to their needs (instead of their gods’ needs) and to use the animals as they needed to. Instead of being created just to be lowly slaves, they were created with dignity. They could be proud to be humans because they were made in God’s image, both of them, male and female (we’ll talk more about being made in God’s image some other week). They were both blessed and both given the job of filling the earth and using it for whatever they needed and ruling over the animals. The only thing that God didn’t tell people was to rule over one another—that’s God’s job. And God said that Creation was now very good. Everything was perfect and just the way it needed to be. God was done creating.

And that is an amazing story about an amazing God who wasn’t like any of the gods whom people had made up. That’s why you can trust God because He didn’t make us to be menial slaves laboring away just to feed Him. The Psalms say that we are fearfully and wonderfully made and not only us, but the world is also wonderfully made—just for us. It is perfect for us, in fact. It is good.

But God created something else in secret. Something that He will hint about in Genesis 3:15 and in a great many places in the Bible. Especially in the books of the Prophets. We talked last week about the Word of God, and how that Word became Jesus. John told us that Jesus was with God, as His powerful Word, in the beginning, and when God spoke and everything came into being, that powerful Word was Jesus. When we look at the Creation story and see that everything was created for us, we need to remember that the Word was also created for us. Most people call Him Jesus here in the United States but all over the world people have different names for Him depending on the sounds they have in their languages. In my house, we call Him Yeshua, which is Hebrew, but maybe you call Him Jesus (Spanish), or Yesu or Isa. That Jesus was with God in the beginning as His Word means that God knew that we would get into trouble and need to be saved someday. So not only did He give us air to breathe and earth to stand on and plants and animals but He also made a way for us to be with Him forever. He loves us so much that He made sure to supply for all of our needs before we even needed them. So guess what? That means that you can trust Him to help you with your problems, no matter what they are, and to not hurt you. He loves you. That’s why He made the earth just perfect for you.

I love you too. And I am praying for you. And I hope you have a wonderful time this week studying Scripture with the people who love you.

If you can’t see the player, just go to the blog and play it from there or check it out my podbean channel where all past broadcasts are archived. Transcript below for my kids who prefer reading.

Hi! This is Miss Tyler and welcome back to Context for Kids. This week we are going to talk about something very exciting—the authority and power of God. And there’s no better place to start talking about that then Genesis chapter one when He like, literally makes everything!

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. ² The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

³ And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. ⁴ And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. ⁵ God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

People in the ancient world thought about things very differently than we do today, Today, if we can’t see something then we have trouble believing it even exists. Kinda. We have trouble because we separate everything into different categories. Over here we have science and over here we have politics and over here we have religion, and we don’t like for them to mix. Have you ever seen someone who didn’t like anything on their plate to touch? Where they don’t want a pea in their applesauce, or meat? Honestly, meat in applesauce is awesome so I don’t know why anyone would hate that but some people do. When they are eating chicken they want it to taste like chicken, I suppose. But people nowadays like to have these big important issues all separated out from each other—sometimes. When the Bible was written, that wasn’t true at all. Religion was a part of everything because God was seen as behind and a part of absolutely everything on earth that happened. They didn’t think anything happened without Him. They didn’t think the sun rose without Him or that the moon would come out at night without Him. Every time someone had a baby, whether people or animals, they felt it was because of Him. And when crops grew and when the rain fell. Everything was about God. And if the rain didn’t fall and the crops didn’t grow and if someone didn’t have a baby, they saw God in that too. God in the ancient world was seen as what we grownups call a “micromanager.” And so when they saw everything that was going on in the world, that was proof to them that God exists. They didn’t need to see over the top miracles to believe there was a God because just the fact that everything in the world was running smoothly was proof enough. I mean, how did all of this stuff happen without God personally doing it all for them?

Of course, you and I were brought up in an entirely different kind of world. God is still exactly the same but we have changed since the Bible was written. So, things that made perfect sense to them don’t always mean the same thing to us. Sometimes we need to interpret what things meant to them before we can apply it to our own lives. We can add to it and take away from it without even meaning to. They would have thought that a world where politics and medicine and culture can exist without religion would have been silly. How can a person do anything without God or without Him knowing about it or being a part of it? But that’s what our culture does today when it separates God from everyday life, and it has been that way all my life. But when we believe in God, we have to become more like Bible people. That doesn’t mean we have to all go move to Israel and live in tents and herd sheep and goats or anything, that would just be silly and plus, there isn’t enough room there for all of us. And we sure shouldn’t go back to owning slaves or having human kings or doing everything like they did. We still live in our modern world and some of the ways we are different from them are very good. We do a lot of things differently now because Jesus taught us not to hate our enemies and to serve others instead of demanding to be served. I don’t need a slave because I can get off my own lazy butt and do things myself.

But one of the sad things that happened is when science replaced God in a some people’s minds. I am a scientist. I went to college and I studied math, physics and a whole lot of chemistry and got a degree as a chemist and worked in Research and Development when I was much younger. So, I just love science. Science rocks. Science is very cool. But all science does is figure out more and more about the excellent universe that God designed to work very, very well. Scientists—we can’t create anything like God does. We have to work with what He has given us. He gave us minds, and imagination, and intelligence, and curiosity. We can observe how things work. And have even proven through science that just because we can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Think about germs and viruses. Until about four hundred years ago, no one could see germs because it takes a microscope to see them. Until the 1930’s, when the electron microscope was invented, no one could see viruses either. But you know what? People knew they existed because of the effect that they have on people. Germs and bacteria and viruses cause food to become contaminated and people to get sick. Even though they aren’t big enough to see with our eyes, everyone could see what they did. And this world is like that, we see all around us what God has done and what He continues to do. We don’t have to see Him in order to see what He does.

We can invent things too, but invention is different from creation. Only God can create something from nothing and give it meaning. We can also make things. Do you like to cook? I love to cook. Last night I made beef with broccoli, which is a Chinese dish. I took some beef, and some broccoli, brown sugar, soy sauce, garlic, sesame oil, corn starch, and a few other things and I made a yummy dinner. But I had to go to the supermarket to buy all of those things. And the supermarket had to get those things from ranchers and farmers and manufacturing companies. None of us created those things. We all worked with things that God created out of nowhere. And after He made them, He gave them to us for food. Not all those things right away, as we will see as we study the Bible. Beef wasn’t originally on the menu at all!

So, we understand that God created everything but how does He do it? The Bible says that He just speaks and whatever He wants just happens. I bet your parents wish that they could do that and you would just do whatever they ask whenever they speak. I bet they wish that they could speak and BOOM dinner was on the table and BOOM the dishes are done afterward and BOOM the laundry is all washed and neatly folded in the drawers whenever they said the word. But when we make something, we have to work. When we want something done, it takes the use of our own hands and feet and whatever other part of our body is required. God is so far above us that He spoke and the entire universe came to be. We can’t even tie our own shoes without bending over to do it ourselves, plus, we had to learn how to do it and that wasn’t easy either.

All around us are amazing inventions but they aren’t creations. There is this Hebrew word in Genesis, because the entire front of the Bible was written in Hebrew and Aramaic so that was a silly thing to say—so one of the Hebrew words in what we read today is bara and it is one of the most special words in the entire Bible. It is a word that is only ever used to describe what God is doing. No one else bara’s—not Adam or Noah or Abraham or Isaac or Jacob and not even King David. No one can bara except for God and in the very first sentence in the Bible is says that God did this thing, bara. Let’s read it:

In the beginning, God created (bara) the heavens and the earth. 

You know what the crazy thing is? It doesn’t say how it happened. It doesn’t say what He used to make the heavens and the earth. It doesn’t talk about anything science-y, no matter how hard we look at it and try. Believe me, I am a scientist and I have looked really hard. I can make a lot of assumptions and assume that something is there but if I do it’s just because I want it to be there. The people who originally heard this and read this didn’t care about how it happened. All they cared about was that God created a place for them to live and grow and eat and have their children and survive and be happy. But there was something very weird about this verse. God didn’t have any helpers! Well, that’s just bizarre! Everyone in the ancient world just knew that there were a kabillion different gods and goddesses and that not one of them was powerful enough to create the entire heavens and earth. Who is this one God who claims to do everything all by Himself? This book is already very controversial to ancient people, and by controversial, I mean something that people would have argued about and would have made them very angry.

All the other religions had gods for this and gods for that and gods for everything and none of the gods could do anyone else’s jobs for them because they only knew how to do their own job. In fact, they were so lazy that many of their mythologies said that they created humans because they got tired of growing and preparing their own food. They created plants and animals for food and they created humans to take care of their food for them. They were just powerful enough to do one job but not powerful enough to rustle up their own grub. They were really quite pathetic. Not like the God described in Genesis 1:1. “In the beginning, God created (bara) the heavens and the earth.” BOOM, no big group of helper gods required. And we might think this sounds normal today because just over half of the world is monotheistic now. That means that we believe in only one God who created everything. But when the Bible was first written, almost everyone believed that there were a great many gods. But we’ll talk about that more in other weeks. Right now, I want to show you how cool God is.

I want you to choose one thing to do. You can blink your eyes or point your finger or wiggle your toes. Okay, go ahead and do it. Was it difficult? Did you have to give yourself directions? Like. “Okay eyelids, I want you to start moving down lower on the count of three. One, two, three…go! Okay, lower, lower, you got this, you can do it…yes! Fully closed! You are so awesome but we’re only halfway there. Okay, again, on the count of three, start raising them up again. I know they are heavy but you can do this! One, two, three…HEAVE…keep lifting. I know it’s difficult…Yes, we did it. Good job everyone.

No, of course you didn’t have to do any of that and the truth is that you blink and point and wiggle your toes all day every day without even thinking about how to do it. It was absolutely effortless and took no effort at all. Now think about making lasagna, or a model car, or a painting. Those are things you have to put a lot of effort into.

When God created (bara) the heavens and the earth, all He did was speak. That means that He put in no more effort to create everything than it took you and I to blink, point and wiggle. The Bible doesn’t do a thing to tell us what it was all made of or exactly how it came together or anything because it isn’t important. The Bible wasn’t written to teach us about science. The Bible was written to teach us about God and about God’s relationship with us, His people. We may want it to be a science book but I don’t know why on earth God would waste space talking about that when the really important things in life are about God and His salvation and how He wants us to live. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in wanting to prove the Bible is right that we don’t remember that the Bible was written for people who are already believers. We already know it is right. If someone isn’t a believer, they aren’t going to think the Bible is right anyway. So, when we read it, we should always say, “What is this teaching me about God and about what God wants for me and what God wants from me?” Genesis 1 teaches us so much about the kind of God He is, totally different than all the fake gods worshipped all over the world. But it also tells us about how God feels about us, how amazing and trustworthy and powerful He is and how much we can trust Him with everything in our lives.

Whenever we want the perfect picture of what God looks like, we need to look to our example in Jesus. Can you tell me the only miracle that is recorded in all four Gospels? It’s the feeding of the five thousand! Jesus took five small loaves of barley bread and two tiny fish and fed five thousand men and who even knows how many women and kids. He took the bread and fish that His disciple Andrew had gotten from a child and he spoke a blessing over the bread and then the bread just began multiplying until everyone who had come to hear him teach got to eat enough to fill their bellies plus there were twelve baskets of leftovers later! That’s amazing! How did He do it? The Bible doesn’t say how He did it. All we know is that he prayed as He broke the bread, and probably His prayer was, “Blessed are you Oh Lord our God who brings forth bread from the earth,” because we know that prayer from other Jewish writings. And Jesus was Jewish, of course, so that’s the prayer that His mom and dad would have taught Him to honor God whenever they broke bread in their home when He was growing up.  Maybe He didn’t have to do anything at all except break the bread in order to hand it to His disciples to give to the crowd. But why on earth would that work? I can’t do that. Can you do that? If you were to go get a piece of bread later and say that prayer and break the bread and I am willing to bet that you will just have a piece of bread that is torn in half. Why can’t we do that?

The Gospel of John, in the very first chapter, gives us the amazing answer to that.

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.

Wow, it starts off saying, “in the beginning” just like the first chapter of Genesis and our lesson today. So John is pointing us back to the very beginning of the Bible when God created the heavens and the earth and when He spoke the words to make the light appear. John tells us that God was not alone, that His Word was with Him and was part of Him. That’s an amazingly powerful Word, that it gets spoken about like it is more than just words. My words are not like that at all and I bet yours aren’t either. My words don’t have any power at all to do things like make light and animals and the sun, moon and stars. Best my words can do is order an extra-cheesy stuffed crust pizza. And it shows up. And it is good. But someone else has to take my order and another person has to make it. And then a third person delivers it to my house. What I would really like is if I could pray over the pizza and break it and have pizza forever. But my word, what comes out of my mouth, is totally different from God’s Word. God’s Word is so powerful and alive and life-giving and good that it has a life of its own and that life came to earth to live as Jesus. God’s words aren’t just words, like yours and mine, they are the Word. After all, how can His words be anything like our words? Right? That’s why, whatever Jesus wanted to do, He was able to do. Whatever He said would happen, happened. Whatever He asked for, He got. When He blessed someone, they were blessed and when He cursed that fig tree, it died. He made new eyes for the blind man and cured the leper. He made dead people come to life quite a few times. Even one who had been dead for four days! Because His words weren’t just His words–they were God’s own Word because that’s who He is. So, He could just speak a blessing, and when he spoke a blessing, all of God’s power just poured out into that bread and it multiplied because those five barley loaves and those two fish were two small to hold the power of His blessing! The bread and fish probably would have exploded into a million pieces if they had been forced to hold all that blessing inside.

God’s Word is very powerful. God gave us His words to us in our Bibles, but people were still sinning and doing terrible things and were worshiping false gods even. Many people were faithful to what the Bible was telling them but many were not. And even more people didn’t know about the Bible at all because they were from nations who did not know God and had no idea how different He was from the false, cruel, demanding gods that they worshiped. The prophet Isaiah said that one day a Servant would come who would help God’s people again, the Jews, but that that wasn’t nearly enough, that He would help all the pagan nations too. All the people who didn’t know God and didn’t know His commandments and were doing terrible things that God hates because they hurt people. Their false gods did all sorts of terrible things and so the people on earth, all the people on earth, needed an example of what God looks like up close. And so God sent His powerful Word, and the wonderful things He said and did are written in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and as we go through Genesis, we will also be talking about what the love of God looks like in the flesh so we can all know God better through the Word, through His Son Jesus.

I can’t imagine why I skipped this Torah Portion last year as it is actually one of my favorites and involves one of my favorite topics – the difference between “graven images” and things that just happen to be fashioned in the likeness of something. This is a subject that can be much abused when misunderstood, so I will be using a lot more Bible than archaeology on this one – proving that there is a big difference between idols and, for example, dolls and action figures – and the bobbleheads I enjoy putting in front of my powerpoint monitor.

I am also going to attach a blog I wrote on the subject – one that has received quite a few comments that never got published… and with good reason!

Confronting a Devastating Doctrine: Are Children’s Toys Graven Images? Of Course Not.

Warning, this is a PG-13 teaching and parental guidance is strongly advised.

Well, I noticed that I skipped this Torah Portion last year and so while going through it on Monday, I realized that this would be the perfect chance to teach about the Sotah test in Numbers 5 – the ritual God gave to women in order to prove that they were not guilty of adultery if their husbands got jealous.

This was taught to me by my Temple teacher Joseph Good and you can find his much larger teaching “The Heavens Rejoiced: A Sukkot Story” available to be watched on www.jerusalemtemplestudy.com for subscribers or for sale at Hatikva.org. It is the amazing teaching of the birth of Messiah from his conception during the Feast of Hannukah to his birth on Sukkot – proven not only Biblically but also through extra-biblical Jewish writings.