Kindness is complicated. It’s a lot different than just being nice because Jesus wasn’t always nice but He was always kind. Being nice is just being pleasant to people, but kindness is treating people better than we think they deserve to be treated. And that isn’t easy when we are angry, sad, in pain, or just plain frustrated. Kindness is going to be really important to understand when we get back to Genesis 18 and 19!

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

Of all the ways to be like Jesus, being kind seems like it would be the easiest when actually it can be the most complicated. I suppose the best way to describe it is how people treat us better than we have treated them, or when one person treats us better than everyone else does. There are a lot of ways to be kind, and some of them are very simple, but the truth is that kindness can be very hard when we are angry or hurting or confused. When we were learning about how Sarah and Abraham treated Hagar, neither of them were kind and they wouldn’t even call her by her name—but God called her by her name and made her promises even when everyone else was being hateful to her. We see that a lot in the Bible, where God is kind when others are cruel. Or when God is patient with someone when others want to just get rid of them.

In fact, when we get to Genesis 19 and talk about Sodom and Gomorrah, we will see a lot of kindness and unkindness. Even starting in chapter 18, when Abraham sees three men traveling and who end up in his camp, he is kind to them and gives them a feast and even takes care of them personally. It is in the middle of the afternoon in ancient Israel with no air conditioning and they have been traveling so they would have to be very thirsty and hot and he made sure that they had shade, and milk, and the best food he can provide. He didn’t know who they were until later, but showed them kindness anyway when he could have treated them like unwelcome strangers. That’s a great example of kindness. In the next chapter, two of the men who are actually angels go to the city of Sodom to find out if all the people who are crying out to God because of the unkindness and cruelty of the men of the city are telling the truth. Abraham’s nephew Lot goes out to them and convinces them to stay with him for the night because he knows how cruel and evil the men are and wants to protect them. That’s another great example of kindness. But when the evil men of Sodom try to beat his door down to get at the strangers, Lot puts his own daughters in danger instead of the strangers or himself. That wasn’t kind at all. He was kind and righteous compared to the people of Sodom, but that wasn’t saying much.

But we will see in both situations that God is kind even when we aren’t. God rewards Abraham with a son through his wife Sarah, who hasn’t ever been able to have babies. And God treats Lot with kindness by saving his life and the lives of his daughters even though he was willing to hurt them terribly in order to look like a good host. Even when God destroyed those cities, it wasn’t to be cruel but to put an end to the evil those cities were doing to everyone else. Sometimes, kindness to one person means that another person needs to have consequences. Many years had gone by since God had helped Abraham save the people of Sodom from the four kings who had taken them all as slaves. We would hope that they would have changed their ways but instead they got worse and were hurting everyone who visited the town.

The people in the Bible are very much like us—sometimes we are kind and sometimes we are cruel but God is always kinder than we deserve. Sometimes—a lot actually—when you read through the Bible you will say, “Oh my gosh, God, don’t be kind to that person!!! What are you even thinking about?? Don’t you see the terrible things they have done???” But He doesn’t listen to us, and He is really kind anyway.

But how are we supposed to know when to be kind and how kind to be? That’s super hard. In fact, that’s why this is part of the fruit of the Spirit—because we don’t know on our own and God has to teach us as we become more and more like Jesus. The way we start out, most of us really don’t want to be very kind when we aren’t happy or even when we just have a headache. It’s hard to be kind when we are only thinking about ourselves but that’s how we all start out—only able to think about ourselves. We think about our pain and our sadness and our anger and our feelings without really understanding that everyone else has all of these feelings inside them too. We forget how nice it is when we are feeling mean and someone is kind to us even though we said something nasty to them. And we realize that what we really needed was for someone to not be mean back to us and what a relief it is when they are nice to us instead. I think that’s why we as kids are so mean to our parents sometimes when we are feeling bad, because we know that our parents aren’t going to punch us out when we are mean to them.

Sometimes, being kind gets confused with being nice. A nice person is a person who is pleasant and agreeable but that isn’t always the right thing to be. If one person is bullying a smaller person and you are nice, you aren’t going to deal with the fact that the bigger person is doing something very wrong. Instead, a nice person will try to make everyone feel better so that they can be friends with everyone. A nice person doesn’t want to make enemies and so they will just try to smooth everything over instead of dealing with what is going on. A mean person might come in and beat the snot out of the bully. But what does a kind person do? A kind person makes sure that the bully stops what they are doing in such a way that the bully knows they are wrong, but the kind person also treats the bully better than they are treating the smaller person.

In the Book of I Samuel, chapter 25, we meet a bully named Nabal, a kind woman named Abigail, and a guy named David who is all over the place on how he treats people—sometimes wisely, sometimes as a selfish bully, and you never quite know what he is going to do. David is a man after God’s own heart, which means he was God’s choice for king of Israel, but that doesn’t mean that David has a heart like God’s. David loves God but that doesn’t mean he is like God—sometimes we forget that. But in this story, David has been on the run for years from King Saul—who wants him dead. David makes his living by killing the enemies of Israel and taking their stuff and wherever he is hiding out, he protects the people who own that land and the shepherds who are staying there with their flocks of sheep and goats. That’s what David and the people with him have been doing for Nabal. But when a festival day comes, David sends people to Nabal to ask for some sheep to roast for a party since they have been protecting his three thousand sheep and a thousand goats. At least, I hope he was asking—he did send ten of his fighting men and sometimes it is hard to know for sure.

But the Bible tells us that Nabal was a harsh and evil man—and that Nabal means fool. By the way, that’s generally a clue in the Bible that we are not dealing with a person’s real name because no one would actually name their kid that. The Bible does that a lot when someone is too shameful to be named—like the five kings in Genesis 14 who had the funny names pretty much calling them all evil. Like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. No one would name their kid Sneezy or Dopey—that’s just rude. Those were nicknames. But Nabal was a rich bully and very foolish and he wasn’t the slightest bit grateful to David and his men or even scared of them. He said some nasty things about David and sent the young men back to him. You see, not only wasn’t Nabal kind but he didn’t even qualify as nice! And neither was David because when he found out he told all of the men with him that they were going to slaughter every man in Nabal’s household by morning and he even swore an oath—which was every bit as foolish as what Nabal was doing. Although David had treated the shepherds well in the past, now he was willing to be even more of a bully than Nabal. Nabal was just insulting David, but David was willing to kill innocent people in revenge. Hey! That sounds just like Lamech in Genesis 4, remember?

But God wanted to teach David a lesson in kindness, so He sent Nabal’s wife Abigail to David with a ton of the best food they had to offer—two hundred loaves of bread, two huge jars of wine, five sheep all ready to be roasted, a hundred clusters of raisins still on the vines, and two hundred sweet pressed fig cakes for dessert. Wow! That was obviously what she had been planning to feed her entire household for the feast day but she gave it to David instead. Nabal, her husband, had been unkind to David and his men and David was about to be even more than unkind back but the Bible tells us that Abigail was intelligent so what she did was kindness to both sides—here is what she did:

When Abigail saw David, she quickly got off the donkey and knelt down with her face to the ground and honored David. She knelt at his feet and said, “I am so sorry, my lord, but please let your servant speak to you directly. Please listen to what I have to say. My lord, you should pay no attention to this worthless fool Nabal, because really he lives up to his name: His name means ‘stupid,’ and stupidity is all he knows how to do.I didn’t see the young men whom you sent. Now my lord, as surely as the Lord lives and as you yourself live—it is the Lord who kept you from murder and taking revenge—may your enemies and anyone who wants to hurt you be like Nabal, who is nothing but a fool. Please let this gift I have brought you be given to the young men who follow you. Please forgive everything we have done to offend you, because the Lord is certain to make a lasting dynasty for you because you fight the Lord’s battles. For as long as you live, do not do what is evil. King Saul is hunting you and wants to kill you. But your life is tucked safely away in the place where the Lord your God protects the living, but he is getting rid of your enemies by flinging away their lives like stones from a sling. When the Lord does for you all the good he promised you and appoints you ruler over Israel, you don’t want to feel guilty for taking revenge against all these men for what Nabal did when you know that God will take care of the problem for you. And when the Lord does good things for you, please remember me and do good things for me.” (I Sam 25:23-31)

Wow! And this is why Abigail is one of the wisest people in the whole Bible. Her parents in choosing Nabal as her husband? Not so much! But when she found out the trouble that Nabal’s unkindness had caused, she fought back with so much kindness that David didn’t even know what had hit him. She gave him more than he had asked for and she even apologized for not being there to greet his men even though it wasn’t her fault. But even though she was kind to David, she still talked sense into him by reminding him that he is God’s choice for king of Israel and so he doesn’t have to fight against people like Saul and Nabal—that God will fight those battles for him. Abigail tells David that murdering Nabal and all the men in her household isn’t right or even reasonable and that he will regret it if he does it. She was very smart with how she said it, and very kind and wise about how she handled the situation. If she had just walked up and yelled at him for being prideful and a murderer, probably he would have been angry enough to kill her too but she was kind and so her words worked their way into his heart and he turned around and even though he had sworn an oath to kill all the men in her household, he didn’t do it. In fact, David even thanked her for stopping him from killing everyone. Kindness is one of God’s secret weapons against evil. What would Abigail have done if she was just nice?

Well, maybe she would have gone to her husband Nabal and said, “Oh honey, do you really think it was a good idea to make those soldiers angry? Couldn’t we give them something to eat? I am not saying you were wrong or anything, just that we have a lot of food to spare and they are probably pretty hungry…” and while she was trying to be nice to her husband, David would have marched up and killed everyone. No, with a man like Nabal, being nice doesn’t solve anything. In the Proverbs, it tells us that we have to know when someone who is foolish should be spoken to and when they should be left alone entirely. In Nabal’s case, Abigail knew that it would be foolish to even talk to him about it and that kindness to her household meant going behind his back and taking care of the problem herself.

What if she had just been nice to David and hadn’t told him that murdering a whole household of men just because he got insulted by one guy is really, really evil? Well, David might not have killed her family but he wouldn’t have learned the lesson that God sent her to teach him and the next time it happened he would have just killed someone else instead. God sent Abigail to David to teach him a lesson about trusting Him and not taking matters into his own hands and especially not when he is feeling too emotional to think straight. This wasn’t a war where David was protecting farmers and ranchers from the Philistines or anything, this was just David being ticked off because he got disrespected. David wouldn’t ever be a good king if he didn’t learn from Abigail how to be kind and merciful to the people who weren’t being kind and merciful to him. And we see later that there were a lot of times when David could have lopped off the head of someone who was being nasty to him but he didn’t because of the lesson God taught him through Abigail—who became his wife when her husband died. She was right about everything—God took care of Nabal just like she said He would. David would have murdered all those people for no reason at all. Abigail turned David to kindness on that day, so that he and his men weren’t guilty of murdering innocent people.

What about Jesus? What did Jesus tell us about being kind and how was He kind? Jesus was always kind, even though He wasn’t always nice. Abigail called her husband names when she was talking to David because she knew it was true but also knew that it would help calm David down, but calling her husband a fool to his face wouldn’t have accomplished anything at all. Sometimes, Jesus was harsh with people who were hurting others because they had the power to do a lot of damage and Jesus wanted them to stop. Jesus is different from us because He knows what is actually in people’s hearts and on their minds but we can only guess and usually we get it wrong and call people names just because we are angry and impatient and offended like David. But Jesus proved His kindness through the things He did to help the people who were hurting and by confronting the people who were hurting them. He healed people without blaming them for being sick or injured. He cast demons out of people without telling them it was their fault. He fed people without blaming them for being poor. Jesus did good things for people without embarrassing them for needing help—and we all need help sometimes. It’s hard to get help when people make us feel bad for needing it or when they only help us so that they can look good for doing it. Jesus helped people because they needed help and because that’s what God’s love looks like. Sometimes, He even told them not to tell anyone!

Jesus told His followers that if they were kind then they would care for the sick, get clothes for the people who need them, visit people who are in prison, and take care of the people who have no one to care for them. He said that being kind to those people was the same thing as being kind to Him and not being kind to those people was the same thing as not being kind to Him. But He went even further than that by telling us to pray for the people who do bad things to us and to be kind to them. He told us to be kind by forgiving people. Kindness is always an action word—kind people do kind things. They don’t just think kind thoughts. Kindness means doing whatever is needed for someone who has a need. In the ancient world, kindness meant hospitality. Like when Abraham and Lot took care of the angelic visitors who came to them even though they just seemed like strangers. They treated them like important people and not just like random strangers. That’s what kindness does—it treats people better than they deserve to be treated just because they are made in the image of God.

That’s what Jesus did when He ate meals with the people whom no one else would eat with, or when He touched the people whom no one else would touch, and spoke to the people whom no one else would talk to. Even when Jesus was angry, He was still kind and wanted to turn people around. When He died, it was for everyone He was ever frustrated with or angry at and everyone who ever insulted Him or hurt Him or even killed Him. Without the kindness of Jesus, absolutely everyone who wasn’t a Jew would still be worshipping idols. Jesus changed everything with His kindness, which is His Father’s kindness toward us. Jesus could have just saved the Jewish people—His family—but that wasn’t enough because He is too kind and loving to stop there. Jesus died so that everyone could be saved, no matter who they are and what they have done. No matter who you are and what you have done too. And not just to save us but to change us and heal us and help us in every way.

Jesus takes gang leaders and drug dealers and makes them into preachers and teachers and missionaries. Jesus takes murderers and makes them into the gentlest of people. Jesus can change anyone into anything because there is nothing that His Holy Spirit can’t do in the heart of someone who is willing to change. And God is really persuasive when He wants to change us into someone entirely different. The Bible is full of people who did great things only because of the kindness of God or who are alive only because of the kindness of God. God has been proving His kindness since the beginning when He didn’t kill the man and the woman in the Garden on the spot but just kept them away from the Tree of Life, and even gave them clothing as a gift. God was kind when He didn’t kill Cain, but protected him instead. God was very kind when He saved the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt along with everyone else who listened to the warnings of Moses and did what he told them to do. Our God is a god of kindness, even when He has to hold us responsible for the bad things we sometimes do—that’s what He told Moses when Moses asked to see Him. Because He is kind, He gives us a lot of chances to get our act together—way more than we wish He would when it is someone else doing the bad stuff. But because we can trust Him to be kind to our enemies, it means that we can also trust Him to be kind to us. If God was as mean as a lot of people make Him out to be then none of us would still be here and the human race would have been gone a long time ago because we are really annoying.

Kindness is one of God’s secret weapons. And a lot of people are scared that if they are kind that people will just walk all over them and hurt them—because we don’t trust that God knows what He is talking about. We have to always treat people better than they deserve to be treated—the way we would want to be treated. Kindness can look like a lot of things. Kindness can mean sending a murderer to jail so that they can’t hurt anyone else but making sure that they are treated fairly while they are there. Kindness can mean forgiving someone who is starving for stealing a loaf of bread and making sure that they get the help they need so that they can stop stealing. Kindness means getting people the help they need when we can. Kindness is standing up to bullies without becoming bullies ourselves. Kindness means winning over people with God’s love instead of getting revenge. Kindness is always about showing people how different God is from everyone else.

There are many people out there who want to get their own way and do whatever they want to do however they want to do it no matter who gets hurt, and sometimes they do that while saying that they are really serving God. But God never acts that way even though He can and there isn’t anything we can do about it. Really knowing and serving God is about becoming kinder and not meaner. Meaner means that we are heading in the wrong direction and we need to turn around. It means that we are following the wrong sort of god because our God fights evil through being kind.

It’s easy to be kind to people who are kind to us, right? But what about people who are just plain nasty? Jesus said that anyone can be kind to the people who are kind to them—even the worst of sinners can manage that. And so we can’t go patting ourselves on the back when we are kind to the people who aren’t giving us any reason not to be. It’s easy to pray for the people we love, and hard to pray for people we hate. And not those nasty prayers we want to pray, “Oh Lord, make that dude suffer, please.” That isn’t praying for someone—it’s praying against them. It’s perfectly alright to pray that they stop hurting people—in fact, that’s a great prayer because God doesn’t want them hurting people any more than you do. But an even better prayer is that our enemies come to know and love Jesus so that He can change them from people who do things that are terrible into people who do things that are wonderful. That’s what Jesus was talking about when He told us to bless our enemies and not curse them—to make sure they are always in our prayers and so if we ever get a chance to hurt them, we won’t do it. And when they need help, we will be willing to do that instead. Just like Jesus does for us.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to know that being kind isn’t easy, but God will always teach kindness to the people who want to learn it.

What faithfulness means to us today and what the Greek word pistis meant to Paul are sort of the same but also very different. Fortunately, what Paul meant will teach us how much we can trust Jesus and how we want to become people who can be trusted by Jesus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eve, and then Adam, made a terrible mistake and trusted the wrong guy. Will they fess up or will they make their sin even worse?

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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.

So, last week we saw that Eve, and then Adam, made a terrible mistake in Genesis 3 and trusted the wrong guy. Will they fess up or will they make their sin even worse? You probably already know the answer but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot to learn from their terrible mistake. But before we get to this week’s verses, I want you guys to notice something. Did you notice how peaceful everything is in Genesis one and two? God creates the universe through His powerful and creative word, Jesus, and there is no violence in the world—except against plants. In Genesis two, it is still absolutely peaceful. The man is created and brought into the Garden and given a job to do and then Eve is brought in as well. Everyone knows who they are and what they are supposed to do. It really is paradise. But all it ever takes for paradise to be destroyed—and you will find this in your own lives as you get older as well—are accusations and suspicion. The Serpent, through what he said and how he said it, planted the idea in their heads that God is ungenerous, a liar, and not looking out for their best interests. As we will see later, the Serpent wasn’t technically lying but how he told the truth poisoned Adam and Eve’s minds against the trust they originally had for God based upon His actions toward them. That’s why gossip and jumping to conclusions about other people is such a terrible sin. And this is a good lesson in how someone can lie even while they are telling the truth.

When Adam and Eve listened and ate, that moment was the very beginning of an important theme in the Bible. What’s a theme? A theme is an idea that occurs over and over again in a book. A very common theme in books all over the world and throughout history is the battle of good versus evil. And nowhere do we see that battle more than we do in the Bible. And here is where it first began—the cosmic battle between God and the forces of evil for humanity’s loyalty—for our hearts. And each person makes the decision about who is going to win their hearts—will it be God or will it be Satan? Last week we watched as Jesus chose God and God’s plans over and over again when He was tempted. Jesus is sometimes called the “Second Adam” because He got right everything that Adam got wrong. Adam and Eve made the wrong choices when tempted but will they do the right thing now or keep doing more wrong?

8 And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” 10 And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” 11 He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” 12 The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” 13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

Last week, I talked about one-way decisions that we can never un-make. Once we’ve done certain things, we can never undo them. Adam and Eve found this out when they noticed that they were naked and, for the first time, it really bothered them. It bothered them so much that they made itchy clothes for themselves and hid from God when they heard Him coming. Now, you might think that they were scared because they believed that God was going to hurt them but that’s not what the Bible says. The Bible says that they were afraid because they were naked—which is kinda funny because they were always naked but for some reason, now they didn’t want God to see them naked. Reality hadn’t changed at all, the world was still the same, but now they saw it differently. They didn’t like themselves or the world as much as they once did before they ate that fruit. They were even afraid of something that they didn’t need to be afraid of when they were in God’s presence. You see, once they ate the fruit of that tree, it gave them the ability to see things in a different way and they responded by deciding what was good and what was bad for themselves. They had learned to make judgments that only God made before that. They didn’t have the wisdom or the experience to really know if being naked was good or bad but once they saw it, they made the decision that it was bad—even though it didn’t seem to bother God at all!

Now, I don’t want you guys thinking that you should go outside naked. We don’t do that! We’d get arrested! Plus, our human bodies really aren’t designed for nakedness outside of the Garden—with all the thorns and thistles and sharp rocks and the cold and the rain. We aren’t animals. We aren’t living in the perfect environment where nakedness just doesn’t matter. Modesty, or protecting your body from other people’s eyes, is a good thing because now there is evil in the world and you need to be safe. Covering up is one of the ways that we show we are different from the world, by respecting ourselves. The world is a different place now and even when we are in New Jerusalem with King Jesus, we will be wearing clothing.

So, we see that God calls to the man and says, “Where are you?” And that’s kind of strange because certainly, God knows where everyone is all the time. Jesus said He knows every hair on our heads and so He has to know where our feet have taken us. I think that when God used to visit the Garden, Adam and Eve would hurry over to Him. I sure would and I bet you would too! If people hear there is a movie star or a sports star nearby, they go running and so I imagine that if we knew that God was close by, we’d run even faster! After all, we might like a famous person but we love God! But they were nowhere to be seen this time, and they didn’t come to Him so He asked, “Where are you?” What He was probably really asking was, “Why aren’t you here with me?” Again, He has to know the answer, but He gives us the chance to be honest and say we’re sorry.

Adam tells God that he is afraid because he is naked, and so he is hiding—what Adam doesn’t say is that they decided to trust the Serpent and disobey Him and that this is the consequence. Perhaps Adam is hoping that God isn’t that smart. But God is smart and so now He has to confront Adam about his sin. “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” I guess there were only two ways that Adam was going to know He is naked—the first option involved someone telling him. But how would that even work? Say the Serpent tells Adam and Eve, “Dudes, you guys are like bare-buck naked!!” And what were they supposed to say, like, “What’s naked mean?” If there are no clothes, then the word naked doesn’t mean anything. Like, if I came up to you and pointed and said, “You are ferfluffilized.” You would say, “Excuse me? What? That’s a totally made-up word! That doesn’t mean anything!” Well, naked doesn’t mean anything in a world without clothes. So it wasn’t enough for someone to tell them they are naked, they have to understand what naked means. So, that means they told themselves that they were naked—but how did they even notice it? There was only one answer to that—they must have eaten the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The one thing God told them not to do.

Let me tell you really quick about rules. Rules never exist until someone does something that makes the rules necessary. Like, if you buy a chainsaw, the safety instructions say, “Do not stop chainsaw blade with hand.” Ya think? Good grief, something that can cut wood is going to go right through a hand but I guess someone did it so they had to make a rule. And if you buy a Superman costume, the warning will tell you that the cape won’t make anyone fly. I guess someone tried it and maybe they died, or hopefully didn’t do anything worse than break something. A bottle of dog medicine says this, “May cause drowsiness. Use care when operating a car,” but who lets their dog drive—that’s scary. Do not, ever, let your dog drive the car even if he isn’t taking meds. How about the warning telling people to take off the shirt before ironing it?? When I post the transcript for this, I will post some funny websites with a bunch of these (they are linked at the end).  I think, in the history of the world, this is probably the very first time there was a rule before someone did something terrible. We humans learn by not dying when we do foolish things.

Rules are what we call a “double-edged sword’ And that is an awesome idiom for us—a double-edged sword can be good or bad. Imagine a knife—a knife with one edge will cut your sandwich and you can press down on top of it to make the blade cut all the way through, right? But if it is sharp on both sides, it will cut you and the sandwich if you do that—which is good because it cuts your sandwich and bad because it cuts you. Rules are like that and wise parents are careful about their rules. Because sometimes rules give people ideas about doing things that would never occur to them otherwise. Like, if I made a rule not to jump off the roof when my kids were little, they might say, “Wow, I never thought about jumping off the roof before, that might be cool.” And so my son Andrew, one day I am in the kitchen and I hear the immortal words, “Bandit, I do it all for you!” And I hear this great big thud as his body hits the back lawn. There was a covering over the back porch that could be accessed by the windows from their bedroom. It was a miracle he didn’t break something. He never did it again and after seeing how long it took him to breathe again, his twin brother never tried it either. Oh, and Bandit is our dog. I have no idea why he said that. It’s funny now but he could have landed on his head or broken his back or a hundred other things. After that, I made a rule—no jumping off the roof. Except no one wanted to do it ever again. Almost all rules are like that—but not God’s rule about the fruit because once they did that, there was no going back. But back to the story—what did Adam say to God?

12 The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” 13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

We got a whole lot of blaming going on and no one taking any responsibilities for their decisions! No one made Eve eat that fruit. No one made Adam eat that fruit! Adam knew exactly what God told him. Eve knew exactly what Adam told her. When the Serpent told Eve that she wouldn’t die, I don’t know if she distrusted Adam or God more. But she sure decided that one or both of them wasn’t wothy of being believed. And she took a bite and, lo and behold, she seemed just okey dokey. At that point, Adam decided not to trust God either. I do find it interesting that he didn’t stop her from eating—like maybe he was using her as a test subject to see if she would die before he tried it. So not cool. But there was just a whole lot of bad decisions going on here. And you would think that we would hear the words, “I really blew it.” Coming out of at least someone’s mouth. But nope. Nope. Now we are playing the blame game and that’s the worst choice we can ever make with God because we all make our own decisions.

Adam said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” Oh, but that’s not the whole story, is it! She didn’t just randomly give him fruit while he was minding his own business. Like, “oh hey, Adam, here’s some fruit for your lunch since I can’t make you a turkey sandwich yet. I found this in a new tree, but it totally isn’t from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Nope.” Have you ever noticed that blamers like to make everyone else guilty and they never take responsibility for their own actions? Nothing is their fault! And even worse than that, he blames God too! “This is the fault of the woman YOU gave to be with me. If you had just left me here alone then everything would be fine!” That was really not very smart. Our sins are never God’s fault. We might as well say that we wouldn’t have hit our baby brother if God hadn’t given us a baby brother! That just doesn’t fly—we all make our own choices.

How about Eve? “Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”” This isn’t that much better. At least she doesn’t blame God but she isn’t taking responsibility either. This would be more honest, “So, there was this talking serpent and he was telling us that you were holding us back from having what we deserve and I just went ahead and trusted him and all the stuff he was saying about You even though You have always been so perfectly good to us. But the fruit looked really good and I totally wanted to be able to make my own decisions about what is good and bad so I said, “what the heck, this random animal wouldn’t lie to me,” and I ate the fruit. Now that I actually hear it coming out of my own mouth I totally see how stupid that decision was.”

And the serpent was the smartest one of all because he just doesn’t say ANYTHING. In fact, Adam and Eve would have been better off not saying anything at all than to say what they said. Blaming God, blaming the next guy down the pike. There was a lot of blame to go around but no one was accepting it. As far as we can see from the story of Adam and Eve—no one ever accepts the blame. No one apologizes to God. No one repents. Do you know what repentance means? In a few weeks, we are going to talk about repentance prayers and how we can always go to God no matter how badly we have sinned and be honest with Him and tell Him all about it and ask Him to change our hearts. Repentance means that we admit we have done wrong, and that we make a decision to do better, and to make things right if we can. Adam and Eve could have repented. They could have admitted that they did a terrible thing in breaking God’s only rule—a rule that they immediately regretted breaking once Adam ate and they were embarrassed about seeing that they were naked and deciding for themselves that it was a bad thing. They could have told God that they misjudged Him—that they were wrong about Him and that they finally saw that He was right. They could have bowed down and begged him for another chance now that they saw how important it was to do things His way. But they didn’t and so we will never know what might have happened if they decided not to play the blame game.

But because of this, everything changed. We don’t know what the world might have been like if Adam and Eve had tossed that snake into the lake. If they had trusted God and treated Him like their superior. They thought they deserved more than jobs in paradise. Next week we will see their consequences. But all around us we see the consequences in our own lives. Think of a river that we all need to drink from, and then imagine Adam and Eve dumping toxic waste into that river. There is nothing else to drink and so we all get sick. Well, sin is like toxic waste and we have all had to deal with it.

And I’ve talked a lot about taking the blame for the stuff we do but what does it really mean? Well, we take the blame when we take responsibility for something—whether we did it or not. Like, if you break someone’s window then your parents have to take responsibility to pay to fix it. And you need to take responsibility by admitting what you did and doing extra chores to help your parents with the bill. You don’t blame the kid down the street. But that doesn’t always happen and throughout the Bible there was a special class of people who told God’s people, the Israelites, to take responsibility for the things they did wrong, and to stop doing wrong, and to make things right. Those people were called prophets. You probably know some of their names—Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Elijah and Elisha, and John the Baptist and many more. But I want to talk about one of the prophets in particular—the prophet Isaiah. God spoke to Isaiah during a time of terrible sin. God’s people refused to repent and do good and God knew that they would never decide to do what was right unless He did something drastic to change their hearts on the inside. But He also needed to do something about the sins they had already committed. They had done too much that was just wicked and God couldn’t just allow that sin to go unpunished. There had to be justice, They had to see the terrible price of their sins on the innocent. If they could see that, and if they could admit that they were guilty, then God could finally change their hearts and their lives and take them back from all the evil that Satan had planned for them. Remember when I told you about the cosmic battle between God and Satan? Where Satan tempted people to be disloyal to God and betray Him? Well, that kept happening and it is still happening today but the difference between then and now is Jesus. Jesus said no to temptation. Jesus didn’t ever disobey God. Jesus never sinned. But He is so good and loving that He took the blame for our sins. Humans rebelled against God and chose the wrong side in the war and so the Word became a human and was loyal to death. Jesus made us and so only Jesus could fix us. He showed us the way. Through loyalty to Jesus and God’s ways, we become part of God’s plans again for the whole world to worship Him again someday. Let me read to you about what God told the prophet Isaiah about Jesus and what He would do for us and why He had to do it. People all over the world were suffering because of the pain of sin and God couldn’t allow that to go on forever.

But he took our suffering on him and felt our pain for us. We saw his suffering. We thought God was punishing him. But he was wounded for the wrong things we did. He was crushed for the evil things we did. The punishment, which made us well, was given to him. And we are healed because of his wounds.
We all have wandered away like sheep. Each of us has gone his own way. But the Lord has put on him the punishment for all the evil we have done. He was beaten down and punished. But he didn’t say a word. He was like a lamb being led to be killed. He was quiet, as a sheep is quiet while its wool is being cut. He never opened his mouth. Men took him away roughly and unfairly. He died without children to continue his family. He was put to death. He was punished for the sins of my people. He was buried with wicked men. He died with the rich. He had done nothing wrong. He had never lied. (Is 53:4-9, ICB)

Compare that to Adam and Eve. Compare that to us. He did nothing wrong but when they accused him, He was quiet. Adam and Eve did wrong and when God confronted them, they made excuses. And we do that too. We don’t like to take the blame for the bad things we do even though Jesus took the blame for all the bad things people have ever done. When we get accused for the bad things we do, it’s fair. When He got accused, it was unfair. If Jesus can be so humble and quiet when He is being blamed for things He didn’t do, we can be more like Him and admit the things we have done. We have all done wrong things but He never did anything wrong. God told Isaiah that Jesus would step in and take all of the hatred that Satan had for people onto Himself, all of the consequences for all the times that we did terrible things to one another because we were following Satan instead of God. Satan doesn’t tempt us and lie to us because he likes us and wants to be friends. He does these things because he hates God and he hates us. When we listen to Satan or when we just do things Satan’s way, when we are hateful and prideful and unforgiving and mean and when we lie and steal and gossip and all that, we’re being more loyal to Satan than we are being to God. And that messes the world up really badly.

The good news is that, in the end, God wins the war. But we have to decide what side we want to be on. It’s easy to say that we want to be on God’s side but it’s a lot easier to end up acting like Adam and Eve instead of acting like Jesus. Next week we will see what God ends up having to do in order to start fixing the mess than Adam and Eve made.

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

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/tips/a25713/weird-warning-labels/

https://www.forbes.com/2011/02/23/dumbest-warning-labels-entrepreneurs-sales-marketing-warning-labels_slide.html?sh=437dca8054fc