Do Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob show up in archaeological records? Why or why not? Chapters 14 and 15 of Genesis are going to need a lot more archaeology to explain than what has gone before and so I thought it would be a good idea to talk about how we know what we know about the Biblical world, who figured it out, and how and most importantly, where I get my information from so you guys can find it too. There will be a ton of links in the transcript this week for those of you who really want to “dig in” to the world of the Bible.

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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.

Are you ready for some archaeology??? I sure am! We’re about to get into a really strange chapter of the Bible because it is about a war, and we haven’t seen any wars up to this point. We won’t even see Abram mentioned until verse 12, and he isn’t even part of the story until verse 13 when someone comes to tell him that his nephew Lot has been kidnapped along with everyone else in Sodom (remember how I told you that Lot’s choice for where he wanted to live was a really bad one in the last episode? This is just the beginning!). Because we are about to be introduced to a bunch of people and places we’re never heard of before and will never hear about again, this is a good time to discuss a very important topic. Namely, what does archaeology tell us about this war and about the people who fought in it and about Lot and Abram? But before we get to that, we need to have a talk about what archaeology even is because it is a word that means one thing but it also has a lot of related parts.

Archaeology is the study of human history, and so to study human history we need to find things that humans have made and left behind. Not everything that humans have used is helpful for archaeology. For example, we don’t have any idea how Cain killed his brother Abel but if he used a rock to hit him and then threw it down on the ground, there is no way for us to tell that rock from any other rock. But how about when Abel sacrificed one of his new lambs to God? Abel would need a knife, which he would have to make, and it would be made of rock so you would see where he used other rocks to chip away at it to make it sharp and maybe he rubbed the edge against another stone to make it sharper. Maybe he took some animal skin and wrapped it around one end for a handle. Now, if someone found that, then that could be used to study how humans used to do things. And they would look around in the place where that knife was found and maybe they would find a piece of a clay pot, or a stone used for grinding grain into flour, or maybe arrowheads or spear tips that were used to hunt deer or kill dangerous animals. In caves, they sometimes find art drawn on the walls by the people who once lived in there or hid in there. Maybe they might find evidence of ancient buildings—like rocks that were shaped into rectangles or mud baked bricks. If they found something that had to come from a long way away, then they knew that the people who lived there had either come from somewhere else or traded with people from far away. All of these sorts of things are very important for understanding the world of the Bible.

You might be really surprised at some of the things that archaeologists find. Some archaeologists work underwater finding shipwrecks, and others work in places where the lakes have dried up because the rivers have been moved. In fact, that’s how they discovered a fishing boat from the time of Jesus! Some of the things that archaeologists find can be moved and some can’t. For example, if they find a Spanish Galleon at the bottom of the ocean, they can’t take the ship and move it to a museum to study it but they can take the gold doubloons, silver, and precious jewels on board—which is what happened when they found the San Jose just seven years ago, three hundred years after it sank. But they found more than money because it also had sixty-two canons on it, and big pots that were used to carry oil and supplies, and also bottles. The dates on the coins made it a lot easier to figure out what ship it was, as well as the number of canons. Do you think something like that would be fun to do?

Another underwater archeologist named Franck Goddio found the lost city of Thonis-Heracleion deep under the water, four miles from the coast of Egypt near the mouth of the Nile River and not only that but it was covered by over thirty feet of water and buried under three feet of sand! He knew it was there somewhere because the Greek historian Herodotus, who lived long before Jesus, talked about it. They are still digging it up now, but they have found temples and all sorts of wonderful things that teach us more about Egypt!

Most archaeologists work on land, of course, trying to find the ancient cities talked about in the Bible as well as in the myths, legends, and history of other cultures. And sometimes, when those places are found we learn that the legends are actually true—like when the ancient city of Troy (warning, a bit of fake battle violence in video) was discovered and we found out that maybe the Trojan War was real after all! There are even special names given to the different areas where archaeologists work. Assyriologists study ancient Mesopotamia, where Abram and Sarai came from and where the Jewish people went into exile over a thousand years later. Egyptologists study the land of Egypt and have not only explored pyramids but have also discovered the kinds of homes that the children of Israel lived in. Classical archaeologists study the ruins of ancient Rome and Greece, uncovering the places where Paul preached the Gospel to the Gentiles. And most important of all to Bible archaeology are the people who work for the Israeli Antiquities Authority, which finds and protects every discovery in the land of Israel and especially the ones that are Bible related. If you ever go to the Temple Mount in Israel, you will see that archaeologists have dug down deep and discovered the buildings that were there when Jesus was preaching in Jerusalem! And Eilat Mazar discovered the palace of King David! A few years ago, a tourist who was visiting the city found something that belonged to King Hezekiah!

There are people who work alongside “digging” archaeologists who are experts at deciphering ancient languages, and others who know all about old coins and how they were made and where and when they are from. People who know all about pottery and the different kinds of clay from all over the world are incredibly helpful. Others know about weapons, jewelry, bottles, idols, statues, columns, writing tablets, tombs, graves, mummies, skeletons, clothing, keys, armor, art, musical instruments, tools, masks, and even toys! All of these teach us about the people who lived in a place at a certain time. I can’t even imagine being an expert about one of those things—those are some really smart people. But, when they are digging, how do they know what the date was on all the things they find? That’s a toughie. If they get lucky, they will find coins with a date on them, or something written that talks about when a certain king was ruling over them. But archaeologists can also tell how old a city is by how it was built, and what they used, and what kinds of metal objects they had in the city at that time. If a tool is made of bronze then it is probably a lot newer than a tool made of iron. A knife made of metal is probably going to be newer than a knife made out of rock. A city that has many items that were made from things that had to come from far away—like seashell jewelry in the middle of the desert—had to come from travel or from trading with people from other places.

Until just recently, most of the things that were discovered were stolen by robbers who would raid tombs and temples, steal the most valuable things and sell them to museums in places like France and England and other European countries. And they didn’t care about being careful or about the amazing wall carvings and paintings that they passed by. They just took what they wanted without permission from the people who lived there! That’s why Israel is so careful about their archaeology! But now, people are very careful and countries are very careful about who they let in and what happens to whatever they find. One of the most important things that was ever discovered was the Rosetta Stone in 1799. This was a really big rock that was carved with the same exact thing written in three different languages. Because one of those languages was ancient Greek, which people understood, they were able to decode two lost languages! One language was ancient Egyptian, written in hieroglyphs (which are pictures instead of letters) and the other was Demotic, the newer Egyptian language that replaced the language written in hieroglyphs. Before then, no one understood anything that was written from those times—not even the Egyptians because the language they speak now is Arabic and before that they spoke Coptic. What’s important about being able to understand ancient languages is that there is more than one type of Rosetta Stone found in that area of the world and because of it, linguists have been able to learn how to read ancient Hebrew, Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Amorite and Aramaic. In fact, I just took a really cool class about that from my friend Dr. Christopher Dodd about the history of the Hebrew Alphabet and he also did an online zoom version for teenagers so if you are interested, let me know and I will see if he will teach it again. Learning all these languages has often been about finding something that has two or more languages on it saying the exact same thing and decoding the unknown languages based on the one you know. Without all of that happening, we wouldn’t have any kind of proof that anyone from the Bible actually existed and we wouldn’t really understand very much about the history that those people were writing about at the same time.

So, whenever someone tells you things about Sargon or Hammurabi or anyone else who lived back then, the only reason we know anything about them is because someone found one of these things and very smart people worked very hard for a long time to figure out how to read a language that no one had understood for thousands of years. So, archaeology is like a treasure hunt, but not like how Indiana Jones does it because that man was a menace. He would destroy an entire Temple just to get something for a museum. When I took archaeology in college, back in the late 80’s, my professor hated Indiana Jones and he made sure that everyone knew that Indy was nothing but a grave robber who should be locked up for life. But the reason I told you all of that is so that you will have a better handle on things when we learn about Genesis 14, not next week but the week after because next week we need to talk about the Passover and the importance of being hopeful!

You see, when we start Genesis 14, we’re going to learn about things that were a mystery even like a hundred and fifty years ago! When we read very old Bible commentaries, they didn’t really understand very much about the world of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and so they made a lot of really bad assumptions about why certain things were happening. But things started changing in a huge way at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. In 1870, an archaeologist found what he described as “Hebrew written in Phoenician letters.” It wasn’t until they found more and more that they realized they were looking at the original Hebrew alphabet! And because the letters were very much the same as could be found in other languages, they were able to translate what they found. And there are almost 2000 examples of this alphabet all over Israel. Of course, it isn’t a different language than Hebrew—it’s actually like a different font. Like Times New Roman on your computer and how it looks different from Calibri or Papyrus. The first alphabets of most languages had letters that looked like familiar things which started with the same sound. So, the aleph, the first letter, looked like the head of an ox and over time, it changed to look like a sideways “A” and then it started to look more like the modern Hebrew letter, which looks like a mangled x. And the letter nun originally looked like a snake, because the word for snake is nachash and so the picture represented that sound. Now it looks like a bracket.

But before this, something very unexpected had been happening in archaeology for about twenty years. When they excavated (a word that means to dig things up) places in Egypt and Iraq and Iran and Israel and Syria and Jordan and Lebanon and Turkey, they found palaces, temples and even libraries hidden under the sand. And in those buildings, protected for up to four thousand years, were thousands upon thousands of baked clay writing tablets! Archaeologists found tablets in Nuzi, at Tell el-Amarna, at Mari, Ninevah, Ugarit, and many other places. In fact, the very first discovery of these tablets was in the city of Ninevah, where the Bible tells us that Jonah preached! They found the Library of Ashurbanipal, a king who is mentioned in the book of Ezra! In that library they found like 30,000 of these tablets but it took them seven years to figure out the alphabet so that they could read them! There might be as many as half a million of these tablets sitting in museums and universities around the world. There are 130,000 of them at the British Museum, and in Iraq they have way more than that. From these tablets, written during the times of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and King David, we have found out about the laws of the world that Abraham lived in, and the answers to so many of the Bible’s puzzles. People who are named in the Bible but nowhere else have turned up in these tablets. These tablets have charts of the sky, maps of the ancient world, shopping receipts, letters from one king to another, epic stories about legendary figures and gods and goddesses like Gilgamesh, Ishtar, Marduk, and Ba’al Hadad, and Temple records that tell us how they worshiped ancient gods and goddesses—like the records we have from the Temple of Ishtar in Asshur. When that was discovered about a hundred years ago, a lot of people who had made up stuff about Ishtar worship started looking pretty bad. People had made up stories about all sorts of things that belong in a horror movie but really, she was not that much different from other gods in the ancient world.

That’s an important thing to understand about archaeology. We didn’t know very much for a very long time but during the last hundred years, we started learning a lot and a lot of books about the Bible had to be rewritten and we know more every single year. It is an exciting time to be alive and learning about the Bible! Everything I am going to teach you about the covenants we find in Genesis 14 and 15 are straight out of these cuneiform tablets! And I am telling you ahead of time so that you know I am not just making stuff up. I wouldn’t try to trick you guys because I want you to go read about this yourselves someday. Maybe some of you will become Bible scholars and theologians and archaeologists and teachers and I will read your books! Most of the stuff I teach you, almost all of it, comes from the people who study these discoveries and who love the Bible and spend their lives trying to make it easier for us to understand the confusing stuff. And if you guys ever have a question about where I got something from, you just ask me and I promise that when I am just guessing or giving you an opinion that I will tell you. I do want you to know that we don’t have the answers to everything yet. Some things are still a puzzle. Maybe the pieces of the puzzle are out there in the dirt or under the water and maybe not but there will always be new things to learn about the Bible even a thousand years from now.

People will tell you that there is nothing about Abraham, or Isaac or Jacob that has been found by archaeology and they are telling the truth. But it shouldn’t surprise us. After all, Abraham is one of the four most famous men who ever lived—behind Jesus and Moses and Jacob—but when he was alive, he wasn’t a very important man in the ways that get you mentioned in history books. Abraham wasn’t a king. Abraham wasn’t a great warrior taking over the world. Abraham was never the ruler over even a small town. Abraham and his kids and grandkids were pretty much just normal people in the eyes of the world. They kept their sheep and sometimes traveled around to new grazing spots, so they lived in tents and not in cities. No one had any reason to write about Abraham at all except for his descendants and mostly they didn’t talk about him at all outside of the book of Genesis. What was important about Abraham wasn’t that he was famous or powerful, because he wasn’t either of those things when he was alive. The Bible tells us that what was important about Abraham is that he trusted all the crazy, impossible promises that God made to him. That isn’t the kind of stuff that gets your name written down on cuneiform tablets.

Also, it is very likely that Abraham couldn’t read or write—because he didn’t need to. Only a very few people in those days could read or write because they lived in a world where it was totally unimportant. People talked and remembered. They believed that talking was more accurate and writing things down was only important for professionals like scribes and priests who got paid to copy things down for important people, like contracts and treaties and agreements. When normal people made agreements, they did other things like cut animals in half, or eat a meal together, or marry their kids to each other, or plant a tree or put up monument stones. They didn’t write it down because they depended on their gods to make sure that everyone kept up their end of the agreement and no one wanted to make their gods angry. Most likely, besides Pharaoh and his scribes and Melchizedek, Abraham might have never met a single person in his life who could read and write. And it seems so strange to us because we write down everything—even a lot of stuff that we definitely shouldn’t write down! And we have books and books and books about books of history. We even have histories of silly things. What they had was stories, like these stories that Moses told the children of Israel about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And they knew them by heart because they had heard them all their lives. It wouldn’t have been until many, many hundreds of years later that they needed to get them written down and even then they would have to wait until they had a place to store them—like David’s palace in Jerusalem or in the Temple.

They would have thought to themselves, “Why do we need to write about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob when even the smallest children know all the stories about them?” Just think of all the stories you would know if you didn’t have TV, books, movies, or the radio, right? They lived in a very different kind of world that is impossible for us to fully understand because it doesn’t exist anymore. And so, it shouldn’t surprise us that we don’t see these names outside of the Bible. In fact, the earliest name we see in archaeology is King David’s, written in stone nine hundred years before Jesus was born. There are also a lot of discoveries proving that there were Hebrews in Egypt working as slaves. But it would be wrong to think of archaeology or science or anything else as a way to prove that the Bible is true. After all, no one ever needed that before modern times. We know the Bible is true because once we come to know God, we begin to understand the things that were written about Him in the Bible by all the different writers and prophets and poets and apostles. The Bible is very important but it will never be more important than God or Jesus and knowing them. A lot of people in this world know a lot about the Bible and they think of it as a great book but they don’t know or believe in God. And there are many people who trust the Bible more than they trust God and they do some really bad and even mean things trying to prove that it is true.

But we don’t need to do that. God has never told us to prove that the Bible is true. God tells us to live as his very own image-bearers, showing the world what God is like by acting like Him. And that’s a hard thing to do, way harder than trying to prove that every single little thing in the Bible is accurate. I think that a lot of people who are trying to prove the Bible is true aren’t acting like it is true and I don’t want you guys to be that way. God tells us in His word to be loving and not hateful, humble and not prideful, peacemakers and not picking fights, merciful and not mean, gentle and not rough, kind and not cruel, trustworthy and not liars, generous and not greedy, patient and not demanding, able to control ourselves and not lashing out at people in angry ways. That’s what proves that the Bible is true—when people like you and me become more and more like God in the way we behave and especially in the ways that we treat others. And one of the best ways of doing that is by not trying to prove that we are always right about everything.

So we can’t prove that Abraham was a real person from archaeology—who cares? But when we serve the God of Abraham and become more and more like Him, just like Abraham did, people will believe the story just because they can see it is true in our lives.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to think about the ways that you can prove God is real just by showing people His love.

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

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel. Parents, most scripture this week will be from the Miss Tyler Version (the MTV) which is the Christian Standard Bible reworded a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the meaning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the great unanswered questions of the Bible is “what if Adam and Eve had just admitted what they did and said they were sorry?” Of course, we will never know for sure but the Bible tells us exactly what to do when we sin. We have to get right with God by going to Him and admitting it.

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

Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.

One of the great unanswered questions of the Bible is “what if Adam and Eve had just taken the blame,  admitted what they did and said they were sorry?” Of course, we will never know for sure, but the Bible tells us exactly what to do when we sin. We have to get right with God by going to Him and admitting it. And so, this is the most important thing I have taught you up to this point. Taking responsibility for what we do, being honest when we are wrong, saying we’re sorry, doing whatever it takes not to make that same mistake again—that isn’t only important in our relationship with God, but with our parents, our brothers and sisters, our friends, the people we work and go to school with—and one day when and if you get married. People who can’t admit they are wrong are going to be failures at everything that matters most. People won’t trust them or respect them and they will end up with no friends and divorced and fired from jobs. Nobody wants that, but that’s the price of not repenting, which we will talk about later. I don’t want the person I just described to be you and so today we are going to talk about the easiest person to admit we are wrong to—and that’s Jesus, our Savior.

Why is Jesus the easiest person to admit that to? Well, because He loves us perfectly and He already knows everything we have done wrong. In fact, He knows the stuff we have done wrong that we don’t even know is wrong yet! What? Am I saying that you are doing stuff wrong in your life right now that you don’t even know about? Absolutely! We all do until we learn and then we understand and have to do better—but that is something that happens naturally as you grow up, become more mature, and read your Bibles. As for right now, only Jesus knows everything about us. So, we can’t fool him.

Over the last three weeks, we’ve talked a lot about what Adam and Eve did, and what they didn’t do. They sinned a really huge sin. Most of our sins are not nearly as big. Most of us will never talk face to face with God and then disobey a direct order. That’s fairly unique. Adam did it, and so did Moses. And the consequences were severe—Adam was kicked out of the Garden and Moses was told that he could never enter into the promised Land. What did Adam do? He disobeyed a direct order from God not to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In a way, he decided that God was lying about the consequences and he decided to trust the serpent instead. Adam made the serpent his god when he did that—I actually talk about that a lot more in my curriculum book, Context for Kids Volume 4: Image-bearing, Idolatry and the New Creation so I am not going to talk about that a lot here—too complicated for a half hour radio show. Moses was told to speak to a rock in order to bring water out of it but Moses was so angry at his people that he smacked the rock twice with his staff. That brought shame to God.

So, that’s what Adam and Eve did, but what didn’t they do? They never admitted that they were 150% dead wrong, with hot wrong sauce on top. They couldn’t have been more wrong if they had made plans on how to be as wrong as possible. No, they didn’t kill anyone but they were only given one commandment. Not ten commandments, not six hundred and thirteen commandments—just one. And it wasn’t a hard commandment. It was the easiest commandment that anyone had ever been given in the history of the world. No work involved. Just say no. But that’s how temptation is, right? When we think that something we can’t do is something that we should be able to do, we just go nuts if we don’t have something called self-control and trust. What is trust? Trust is when we believe that what someone is telling us is true and good. We believe that they know better than we do and that what they are telling us will be good for us in the long run. I know that the people who love you will tell you to be very careful about whom you decide to trust. As we saw with the snake in the Garden, just because someone sounds convincing, or like they know what they are talking about, or want what is best for us, doesn’t mean that they aren’t really wanting to make trouble for us. Reading our Bibles and talking to God about everything will help us become wiser about whom we listen to and whom we avoid. What about self-control? Self-control is learning to say no to ourselves. I am still working on that one! When we want to do something we know is wrong, we have to learn to say no. When we are about to make a one-way decision that can’t be undone, we have to learn to say no until we understand the consequences. When we really want something but aren’t sure if it is good or not, we wait until we do know for sure. When we want to eat a whole pie with ice-cream for breakfast—that’s always just a mistake and if we do it then we deserve the belly ache!

But I am going to tell you right now that everyone you have ever known has made this mistake of doing the wrong thing. And we all have to learn to handle it the right way. You are going to do some awful things in your life but I am a whole lot more concerned about how you handle yourself after you do those things than about what those things are. There isn’t just about anything that God won’t forgive you for. In the Bible, we see Him forgiving the worst kinds of sins you can think of as long as the people come to Him and take responsibility and repent. So then, what is repentance? Repentance is more than just regretting what we have done because we don’t like the consequences—like, Adam and Eve hated being kicked out of the Garden. Repentance means that we see what we did wrong, we know that it is wrong, and we start making changes so that we will stop doing it. God knows that we all start out being slaves to the sinful natures of Adam and Eve. Remember how I told you that their sin was like if someone dumped toxic waste into the water we all have to drink from and it poisoned us? Well, we can’t help being poisoned but God expects us to come to Him because He has the cure—and the cure is Jesus. We will talk more about that next week.

This week, I want to talk about how we come to God with our sins and mistakes. And this is the same no matter what the sin is. This is the same for gang members and drug dealers and murderers and thieves and people who look at terrible things on the internet and bullies and people who disobey their parents and who lie or who cheat on tests—everyone and every sin! Everyone can come to God and be forgiven and changed. But how?

I want to tell you the story of King David, the man God chose to be King of Israel. The Bible calls him a man after God’s own heart. Now, what does that mean? Does it mean that his heart was always right and he was perfect and never did anything rotten? Not at all. As a matter of fact, there came a time when David grew very powerful and wanted something that wasn’t his. He hurt someone to get it, and then when he was in danger of getting caught, he murdered someone. That’s right, the man who wrote all those wonderful songs of praise to God—for a while he lived a very wicked life. In a very real way, he walked away from God and focused on being very selfish. He forgot who he was and who God is. He was only thinking of himself and the things he thought would make him happy. Remember how I told you that you don’t always know when you are doing wrong? Well, the story of David tells us that even God’s choice for King, the man who was usually so faithful to God, could sink into horrible sins and do evil things to other people. A lot of times, we want something so bad that we start convincing ourselves that it’s really okay, that we deserve it, and that God won’t mind. I am betting the grown-ups in your life can all tell you about times when they did that. I sure can. But David was so sure of himself that he acted like he even forgot what he had done—even though everyone around him knew. But he was the king and now they knew that he would murder and worse to get whatever it was he wanted. How can you trust someone like that? You can’t! God had to do something to change all that. And we might ask—how on earth did David, who said he loved God so much, get that far out of control? Glad you asked.

You see, when we sin and try to hide it from God or pretend that what we did isn’t so bad, it puts a wedge between ourselves and God. Usually, when we do wrong or want to do wrong, we know that it is bad right away but we like to push those thoughts aside and pretend like we didn’t really hear them. And everyone has done this before—well, everyone except for Jesus. Pretending like we didn’t hear those thoughts is the first step toward grieving the Holy Spirit—or pushing the Spirit of God so far out of our lives that we refuse to listen and the Spirit stops talking to us until we are willing to listen. Once we aren’t listening anymore, and the Spirit stops talking to us, all of a sudden, things that used to seem wrong to us seem less and less wrong. And we do something a little worse, and a little worse, and all of a sudden we are doing terrible things that seem okay to us now. David never fully recovered from the bad that he did because although he admitted that he had done terrible things to God, once the prophet Nathan tricked him into seeing his sins, he still didn’t take full responsibility for them. You see, we can’t just stop at admitting we were wrong to God. That’s just the first step in repentance. We also need to admit to the people we hurt that we were wrong and we have to do whatever we can to make things right again. Because David didn’t do that, later when bad things happened with his children, he didn’t do anything to stop it. Well, that’s not entirely true, but what he did do was all wrong. And it all started with refusing to listen to God’s Spirit and then refusing to really repent of what he did to all the people he had hurt. That’s why we need to listen to God, and to repent as soon as possible when we don’t, and to go all the way to get it right—no matter how embarrassed we are. Getting repentance wrong leads to disaster!

Getting repentance right is hardest at first, but as we allow God to work on our hearts, it gets easier. It never gets easy, because we naturally hate admitting when we are wrong and hate admitting to people that we aren’t perfect—but it does get easier. And the best thing is that as we get better at repenting, a lot of times we won’t want to sin in the first place because we know how much it can hurt our pride to admit that we sinned. Sometimes, I want to be mean and I think, “Oh man, if I do this God will make me fess up and apologize. I really don’t want to have to apologize to this person so I will just mind my manners.” I will never forget the time I was really out of line and snarky with someone I hated, and God made me apologize to them. UGH. That was the worst. So now I am more careful. Not perfect but more careful. If I am in a bad mood or scared or confused or sick or in pain, sometimes I will still step way over the line. And I will have to admit that I was wrong, and out of line (even if they were poking at me, I was still wrong to react badly) and ask them to forgive me. Sometimes they weren’t poking me, and I tell them why I responded that way, so that they know that they aren’t the problem—I was the problem. If your dog has ever been hurting really bad and nipped you when you tried to pet it, then you know that sometimes we just react without thinking. But, if that happens, you know that your dog usually comes to you later with their tail between their legs, very ashamed of themselves and wanting forgiveness. We need to be more like dogs, and we need to be as understanding with people who lash out when they are having a bad day the same way we forgive our pets. Just FYI, cats will never apologize or feel guilty, not ever. Get used to it.

And repenting to God, saying sorry and asking for help so that we don’t do it again, is just like any other conversation we have with Him. Conversations with God always need to be honest. We don’t gain anything by lying to Him because we cannot fool Him. He knows us better than we know ourselves—and He loves us anyway. Go figure!

Just this week (I wrote this all the way back at the end of January), I was having a lot of stress and I really messed up with two people who have always been good to me. I treated them like they were my enemies! At first, I felt like they were in the wrong and I was totally justified—and this is why it is important to always be talking to God about everything. I laid in bed that night and, after I had calmed down, I asked what I should have asked before I ever treated them like that. I said, “God, am I wrong? Was I overreacting? I am so upset right now that I can’t even think straight. I don’t think I was wrong but I am worried because right now I am angry and I can feel that I don’t want to be wrong. If I am right then why am I trying so hard to convince myself that I was justified?—that I had a good reason?” Then I thought to myself, “I’ve been really sick and I have felt bad all day. I know sometimes when I am sick I don’t think as clearly as I need to before talking to people. Maybe I am not thinking clearly enough to really be so sure that I am right.” So, went back to praying, “Lord, I think there’s a really good possibility that I treated these people like enemies because I wasn’t understanding things correctly. I think maybe I sinned against them—really badly—but I still feel too confused to know for sure. I want to be right but I am willing for You to tell me that I am wrong and if I am wrong, I want to tell them that I was wrong. I don’t want them thinking that they were the problem if it was all me. And Father, even if I was right about what was going on, I am pretty sure that the way I handled it was wrong. I wasn’t kind and gentle and loving even though I told myself I was at the time. I was very impatient and pretty sure I was jumping to conclusions. I don’t know if my conclusions were right or wrong but I think I was wrong in how I responded. I need you to teach me and show me the truth.”

Well, by morning, I knew that in one case, I was dead on 100% wrong. I had overreacted. In the other case, I am not sure I was wrong about what I thought was happening but I am 100% sure that how I handled it was totally out of line. So, I went to the people and I took all the responsibility and told them I was wrong. I told them I was out of sorts and I shouldn’t have been talking to anyone because I know how I get sometimes. I asked them to forgive me and I didn’t blame them at all. I didn’t say, “Well, if you hadn’t been such a big jerk…” or anything like that to make myself look less wrong. Repentance for my sins and mistakes means that I only talk about what I did wrong. It doesn’t matter if they were wrong too. That’s for God to tell them one way or the other.

Do you remember what Adam and Eve did wrong? When they were asked about their sins, they didn’t admit what they had done until after they blamed someone else—until they made their own sin look smaller. We can’t ever do that. It’s a terrible temptation, to try and make someone else’s sin look bigger but God can’t help us when all we want to do is play the blame game. God can help us when we take full responsibility for our own actions and don’t make any excuses and don’t blame anyone else. In my case, God helped me see what I was too angry to see at first. God helped me go to those people and admit that I was totally wrong. God helped me to humble myself before them and to not blame them. I had no reason to blame them because I am 100% responsible for me and only for me. I can’t control anyone else and no one else can control me. I make my own bad decisions, thank you very much.

And I do know that sometimes people poke at us and sometimes they are mean. But you know what? That’s never going to change. What has to change is us and how we handle things. Are we going to become the kinds of people who fess up to our sins and admit we aren’t perfect and help the people we have hurt? Or are we going to keep going on pretending like everyone else is the real problem and push God’s love and forgiveness and mercy farther and farther away. That’s the choice we make every single day. A big part of living as Christians is learning to make the right choice more and more and, when we don’t, learning to ask God for help in changing us.

I want to tell you another story before we end this week’s lesson. It’s a story of someone who did something terrible and then completely repented. Perhaps you know the main character in my story—his name is Peter. Actually, his real name was Simon and he became one of Jesus’s top three disciples. Jesus gave him the name Peter later. Now, Peter was very excited about everything. A lot of times, Peter didn’t think before he said things or did things. Peter bragged a lot and Peter was very ambitious, meaning he wanted to be very important in the Kingdom of God but never quite understood how different God’s Kingdom is from the Roman Empire. He didn’t understand that, in God’s Kingdom, you don’t chop people’s ears off with a sword. He didn’t understand that he wouldn’t be a very rich and powerful person in the world. He thought that Jesus needed to be the kind of King who became a king by defeating His enemies on the battlefield. He had no idea that Jesus would become King by dying for our sins—but we’ll talk about that next week. But most of all, Peter was sure that no matter what, he would never turn his back on Jesus no matter how bad things got—even if all the other disciples turned tail and ran for the hills. He said he never would.

Of course, whenever we are bragging that we won’t do this or that—it usually means that we haven’t had the chance to do it and because we really don’t know how bad it’s going to get! Bragging about challenges we have never faced is like telling people what it feels like to walk on the moon when we have never done it. It’s just a terrible idea.

But Peter was so sure of himself and when the time came for him to admit to being one of Jesus’s disciples, the night Jesus was arrested and beaten, Peter said three times that not only wasn’t he a disciple, but he didn’t even know Jesus and then he called down curses on himself in order to prove it. And Jesus had warned him that he would do it before the first shout of the Temple Crier in the morning but Peter didn’t believe Him. But as soon as Peter started calling down curses on himself, he heard the shout and realized that he had sinned terribly against Jesus. All his bragging was a lie—and bragging usually is a lie, just FYI. We don’t generally brag about stuff that people can see is true. Well, Peter went away knowing what he had done and he was broken-hearted. He didn’t make any excuses. He knew he was 1000% wrong. He was scared and so he lied and did what he said he would never do. He denied Jesus in every way. But what could he do? Jesus had been arrested and it wasn’t like Peter could rescue him. Peter couldn’t say sorry right then. I think that Peter did a lot of praying that day and especially as Jesus was taken away to be crucified. I imagine that few people in this world have ever felt more guilty or like more of a failure than Peter did.

But that’s also why, when Peter heard that the tomb was empty, he ran so fast that he was the first one there—even though no one else believed what the women were saying. Peter was so sorry but once he knew that Jesus was alive, he was a completely changed person. Peter never ran away again. Peter went on to serve God in the most amazing ways because Jesus showed Peter that our sins aren’t the end of the story—sometimes they are the beginning of a bigger and better story if we allow them to change us for the better. And it all starts with talking to God about everything and anything and being willing to listen to whatever He has to say, no matter what.

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

This week I did a short video about something very frustrating that the first century Pharisees were doing. You see, they had some special rules for oaths and vows (types of promises) that allowed them to get away with not doing what they promised to do if they changed their mind later. Yeshua/Jesus was so angry about it that He told them they were dishonoring God and shouldn’t swear oaths at all–because God told them to swear all their oaths in His Name and they weren’t doing it. We’re going to talk about what this means for us as believers, because this is still a problem with people in general today.

The extended version of this teaching is available for download as a podcast here:

https://characterincontext.podbean.com/e/episode-15-woes-part-4-blind-guides-and-fools-the-maze-of-oath-rules-in-first-century-phariseeism/

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