Forgiveness is hard to understand and even harder to do. Grownups ask me all the time about what forgiveness is and isn’t, and if it means forgetting and acting like nothing happened or if we can still be careful when someone is dangerous. Learning about the forgiveness from God we have through our King Jesus, and what Jesus told us to do, and how He helps us grow from people who never want to forgive and don’t know how to even begin, to people who are able to forgive, helps us to follow God maybe more than any other thing He asks us to do.

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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.

Forgiveness is a really tough thing to understand. It’s even tougher to do, and especially when we are confused about what forgiveness is and isn’t. What about when we are told we need to forgive someone? What about when we want someone to forgive us? Does forgiveness mean pretending like nothing happened or that everything is okay? Does forgiveness mean that everything goes back to the way things were? These are all questions that grownups really struggle with and I get questions all the time. The answer to all of the questions about is—it depends on what happened and why it happened. Like all difficult things in our lives, we need something called wisdom when it comes to dealing with forgiveness. And when things require wisdom, we know that there are never any easy answers or rules that apply to absolutely every situation in the same way. That doesn’t mean that we don’t need to forgive or that it’s going to be easy. Not at all. Forgiveness is something that has to be learned, and true forgiveness isn’t something we can fake. But it is something we can get better and better at as we learn to walk with God and listen to Him, and we can also get better at deciding what forgiveness looks like in different situations. Not all sins are the same and so not all forgiveness is the same either. I guess we should start with looking at the forgiveness God gives us through Jesus.

The forgiveness we have in Jesus is different than all the other kinds of forgiveness that we have here on earth. In the days of Jesus, the Jews were talking about sins in terms of a debt or a bill that needs to be paid. A debt is money that you owe to someone. Like a house payment or a car loan or maybe you borrowed five dollars from someone and promised to pay them back. That’s a debt and the Bible tells us how important it is to pay our debts—especially when someone has done work for us and we owe them money for it, because they have to eat, right? But the Bible also tells us to be merciful when people owe us money and they just don’t have it. Every seven years, the children of Israel were commanded to forgive the debts of anyone who owed them money. That’s right, they had to just tear up those bills and toss them in the fire. God promised to make things right for the people who were generous and kind to people who just couldn’t pay them back.

And you know what? By the time I finally started listening to Jesus, I had such a huge bill from all the sinful, mean things I had done, and all the lies I had told, and even the mistakes I had made that hurt people—well, there was no way I could ever pay God or the people I had hurt back for all the awful things I had done. And I was doing just fine (well, not really) until the day that God told me how much I was hurting people and hurting Him too. Wow. And it took him two whole months of talking to me all the time, poking and prodding me with thoughts about how much I needed Him and that He wanted me to be an entirely different person. Boy oh boy did I put up a huge fight. But it was that last week that was just the worst because day and night, night and day He wouldn’t leave me alone. He was determined to get through to me that He loved me, even though I wouldn’t understand it for many years. I just thought He wanted to be the boss of me and, in fact, when I finally gave my life to Him that’s exactly what I said, “Okay, I get it, you’re the boss of my life.”

And even though I was wrong about that—well, not totally wrong but I sure didn’t realize that God loved me yet—things began changing in big ways in my life. That was twenty-five years ago and I am still changing a lot. I was really messed up, so He is still working on me. So, anytime you think you are hopeless because your life isn’t changing overnight, just remember that God is still working on Miss Tyler to get her to where He wants her to be. No one can go from being like I was to being like Jesus overnight—it takes a lifetime and even then we aren’t exactly like Him. He’s perfect.

The thing is that God wanted to rip up the bill I owed Him and everyone else so He could throw it in the fire. He knew that I couldn’t ever hope to carry all those terrible sins and make a fresh start. Have you ever heard that expression? To make a fresh start? It’s like those poor people in ancient Israel who owed more money than they could ever pay—maybe because a famine had destroyed their food or their land or enemy soldiers had come in and stolen everything. There are lots of reasons why someone can be too poor to pay their bills. But unless someone tore up those bills, they would be paying them for the rest of their lives and they wouldn’t ever be able to have a chance to be free. We all need to be forgiven sometimes, right? It might not be money—sometimes we need for people to forgive us when we have done something wrong so that we can be friends again or at least not enemies. To forgive someone else is a very great gift. Until we forgive a person, they have to carry their guilt forever and even after they are sorry and have changed.

Have you ever done anything to hurt someone, where you feel really sorry and want to be friends again but they won’t forgive you? That hurts a lot, right? It’s like they are holding you in a prison that you can’t ever get out of until they say so. Maybe they do it because they are hurting and they don’t want to hurt anymore and they are so angry that they want you to hurt as much as they do. They might be angry that they can’t go back and change things to the way they were before they were hurt in the first place. But when we hurt people, or help people, we change their lives. They can’t go back to being the same person that they were before they were hurt or helped—they have that memory in their mind and they were changed whether they wanted to be or not. That’s why, the sooner we give our lives over to God as our King, the better because we can’t ever totally take anything we say or do back. When we agree to let God be our King and believe that Jesus is our King, and let them change us, we will hurt people less and less because we will begin to care more about them and the Holy Spirit helps us to stop being mean, little by little, day after day, year after year. That’s how we learn to love people the way Jesus tells us to.

When we start to understand that Jesus wants us to have a clean slate, meaning a fresh start, by forgiving what we have done in the past, it means that we have the freedom to start living a different way. We aren’t stuck in that ditch of sin forever. God lifts us out of it and we can be different people. Imagine if you owed someone else a bazillion dollars and you had to pay them back a thousand dollars a day. You would know that there was no way you could ever get it done. It would be hopeless. No one has that kind of money. But with God, it is never like that. Sure, we owe Him a bazillion dollars but His favorite thing to do is to tear up bills and throw them in the fire. It’s what He wants most in the world. He isn’t just hoping to be able to punish us—that’s the last thing in the world He wants. He wants us to accept Him as our King so that He can forgive us and show us a new way of living where we can begin to forgive others too, the way we have been forgiven. But we can’t do that unless He forgives us first. That’s one of the ways that we follow Him. But what does forgiveness look like in our lives?

There are different kinds of forgiveness. A lot of people don’t understand that. The first kind of forgiveness is called “turning the other cheek.” In Jesus’s time, reputation was very important and if someone slapped a man, he had to slap them back or he would be shamed and made fun of by the other men. His whole family would get angry at him for making them look like a bunch of wimps. Getting revenge was very important to them so that people would respect them and their family. But Jesus told them to stop doing that—when someone insulted them by smacking them across the face, they had to forgive that insult by refusing to get even. That wasn’t something that anyone wanted to hear. That was the opposite of what they were all doing and had been taught to do. I can hear them grumbling in the crowd, “What? How on earth does He expect us to be respected if we just let people get away with insulting us? Everyone will think we are pathetic weaklings! They will walk all over us and our lives will be ruined!” And maybe they were right, but Jesus was very serious. Not insulting those people back was a way of forgiving them for being mean. Jesus was telling His fellow Jews that it was important to God that they become peacemakers by letting the small stuff go. People insult me on the internet all the time, but if I fight back then I know I will start looking just like them and then people will take sides and it will be a mess. But if I talk to them calmly instead and they keep insulting me, it makes them look bad and people see that they don’t need to take sides at all because I have things under control and I am not hurt at all. When I do that, I am forgiving them and giving them another chance.

But what if someone robs my house or attacks me with a weapon? Do I get them back by robbing their house or going after them with a weapon? Jesus says no. I should call the police to let them know that there is someone dangerous out there who needs to be stopped, but if I go after them then I am just getting revenge and revenge is the opposite of forgiveness. And I won’t be happy no matter how much I hurt the person who has hurt me, scared me, or robbed me. I will just keep hurting them over and over again because my hurt will never go away. As long as we are getting even, we will always be angry and hurting because nothing will ever be enough. We have to know when to say enough is enough and so enough has to be before we get even in the first place. Justice is very important to God and so it should be important to us too. People do need to be caught when they have done bad things, by people who will hold them responsible—the Bible teaches us that. But it’s about impossible for us to do it and still be merciful when what we want isn’t justice but to get even. Getting even with someone else is always about doing something worse to them than they did to us. That’s why we call the police because hopefully they will be fair.

Jesus told His disciples that they need to be willing to forgive or they wouldn’t be forgiven and that scares a lot of people but I don’t want you to be scared. Jesus knows how hard it is for us to learn to forgive, and that we have to be taught how to do it and how to be gentle and loving. He is very patient to teach us all those things and He understands that it isn’t something we can just decide to do and suddenly be good at it or wise about it. The best place to start forgiving is to be kind to the people who have hurt you and are really very sorry and want another chance. Maybe someone lied, or maybe there was just a misunderstanding and they got mad at you for something you didn’t do, and they said something mean. That happens to all of us, and we all do things that hurt other people. We want people to forgive us and give us a hug when that happens and to understand that it wasn’t because we hated them. That happens in families all the time, right? We get frustrated and cranky and we say something nasty just because we want someone to feel hurt, but then we come to our senses and realize that it just made things worse and we want a clean slate to start over again. So, we say we are sorry and do nice things to try and make up for it. Forgiveness means that the other person decides to be kind and understanding and accept you again. But if they hold a grudge and don’t forgive you for even the small things, that can feel worse than anything you did to them. That’s another way to get revenge—by not forgiving.

That’s a very dangerous kind of unforgiveness because we are all guilty of sinning that way. I have apologized to my kids and my husband for being mean—a lot! I want them to know that I love them and that I am sorry and that I was wrong to be mean. I want them to know that they deserve an apology. I want them to know that they are important to me, and that I owe them an apology. I don’t apologize to get them to forgive me. I can’t make them do that. I apologize because I was wrong and they didn’t deserve what I did to them. I can’t make it so that my sin never happened, but I can let them know that I was wrong. We won’t all steal or hit someone with a stick, but we have all said and done things that are hurtful. If we aren’t willing to forgive others when we do the same things that they do, then how can God forgive us for doing the exact same things? Fortunately, He is very patient as we learn how to forgive. It takes a long, long time. But it also gets easier the more we do it.

It’s funny, in a way, that God tells us that we have to forgive BUT we can’t force anyone to forgive us. All we can do is ask, and whether they forgive or not is up to them. That’s why we need to learn not to sin against other people because we never know what will be the last straw for them—the thing that they decide is too much and they never want to be around us again. We owe it to God to forgive people, but that isn’t the same thing as us being able to force people to forgive us. Honestly, when we do that, we aren’t looking like we are very sorry or understanding about what we did to hurt them. And some people will get angry over a misunderstanding and won’t forgive us even when we didn’t do anything. We can’t do anything about that either except to be kind and leave them alone. That’s really hard, let me tell you. I had a really good friend in the 8^th grade and we were close all through the summer before our first year of high school. One the first day back, she looked at me with hatred and hurt in her eyes but to this day I don’t know why. She would never tell me. I wouldn’t have hurt her on purpose, but I guess she thought I did and never forgave me. I had to be kind because the only other thing I could do was be mean. I wasn’t a Christian then, but I knew that being mean back to her wasn’t going to solve anything. I couldn’t make her tell me what was wrong and I couldn’t force her to forgive me. But I could learn to forgive her. It took a long time.

What do we do when someone hurts us and apologizes and then hurts us again and apologizes again and it just keeps going on forever? Well, there is the kind of forgiveness where we are friends again just like we were before and then there are sad times when we forgive the person who is hurting us but have to keep them away from us. When we can go back to normal with a person, that’s called reconciliation. Reconciliation is like a hug after an argument, okay? Where there is still love there and trust and the relationship you have with a person has been hurt but can get better again and you want to work on it. But what about when someone is dangerous? You can forgive them by not getting back at them and by being kind to them instead when you see them, but that doesn’t mean they should be a part of your life. Someone once told me a story and I wish I knew where it came from because it was a good one. Someone came up to Jesus once and asked him how many times he should forgive his brother for sinning against him—seven times maybe? Jesus said, seventy times seven times! And that doesn’t mean you keep a score sheet for every time you forgive a person—that’s messed up. It means that we keep on forgiving forever. But what does that look like in real life? Here’s where the story comes in–

A friend knocks at your door and you open it and they punch you right in the face and walk away. Then they come back later, knocking on your door and saying they are sorry, so you open the door and after forgiving them and talking a while, they punch you in the face again. And this happens again and again. Opening that door was reconciliation, okay? Trying for things to be good again. But there comes a time when forgiveness is all we can give because the other person doesn’t want the relationship to be good—they just want us to open the door so that they can punch us again. At some point, when you hear the knock at the door and the person says sorry, you leave the door closed and say, “I forgive you but I am not going to open the door again to give you any more chances to punch me.” I really like that story because it shows the difference between forgiving someone and letting them hurt you forever. You don’t have to let anyone hurt you forever. You can leave the door closed when it is dangerous to open it. That doesn’t mean you aren’t being forgiving, it just means that you are done with being punched. And, if anyone is doing something like that, I would suggest calling the police. You don’t deserve to be hurt. Forgiveness means that you don’t hurt the person who hurt you, but it doesn’t mean you have to let them hurt you forever.

Forgiveness is really hard to learn. I don’t want you scared that God is going to like send a lightning bolt at your butt for not being able to forgive perfectly and especially not right away. There are times you will feel like you have forgiven a person totally and then something happens and you feel all the terrible anger and bad feelings for them all over again. That’s normal. It makes me angry when someone hurts me and especially when they don’t even care or never apologize. But when I don’t forgive, my mind starts thinking of all the terrible things I wish would happen to them. I don’t want them to change. I want them to be bad so that they can be punished forever. That’s what happens in my brain when I am unforgiving. But when I am forgiving, I start to understand that I do want them to change. I don’t want them to keep being bad just so that I can have my revenge against them. I want them to change to be good so that they won’t hurt anyone else and so that the world will be a better place. I want the people who have hurt me, to stop hurting others too. If they never change, then how many other people will they hurt? Satan wins when that happens. I want God to win. I want God to take the people who have hurt me the most and to change them into the kinds of people who are sorry for all the bad they have done, and help people instead. When we forgive them, and we don’t get even, we get out of their way and it makes it easier for God to reach them and change them.

There are people who did that for me, even though I didn’t understand it at the time. They didn’t get back at me when I hurt them—if they had, I would have just gotten back at them even worse because sometimes I didn’t think I had done anything wrong in the first place. But they were patient with me because God was patient with them. They showed me a different way and as they were kind even when I was mean, I started to feel bad when I would hurt them. God was using their forgiveness to teach me how to start loving others as they were loving me. I wanted people to forgive me. I needed people to forgive me. Sometimes, I needed people to walk away from me so I could understand that I can go too far. Without forgiveness—the forgiveness of God and other people in my life—I would still be who I was twenty-five years ago and the world would be a worse place than it is now, at least for the people who know me.

People didn’t keep me in a jail by not forgiving me, and when they were wrong they said they were sorry. That showed me a different and better way. I liked how it felt when they said they were sorry when they had hurt me. I wanted other people to feel that way when I hurt them and knew I was wrong. And the more I did that, the more God could trust me and show me the other things I was doing that hurt people. And He showed me how to make things better. I still hurt people sometimes, but I know that making things right again is an easy way to help someone else’s heart heal. And I give people space when they don’t know how to forgive me yet. I can’t force them to forgive me. I also can’t force them to apologize. That’s God’s job. It’s good to learn to say sorry, but no one can make us mean it. God wants us to say it and to mean it. And He wants us to be able to learn how to forgive too.

Next week, we are going to start learning how to be more like Jesus and I am very excited about this. Before we move on to more of the life story of Abraham and Sarah, and then to Isaac and Jacob and his sons, we need to look at Jesus so we can see the difference between being perfect and being really messed up and in need of Jesus!

I love you. I am praying for you. And I know that you can change your life and the world around you by learning to forgive.

We talked about this a bit back in episode 107, but this episode is actually about a lot more than it looks like on the surface. When we know what to look for, this is the most powerful promise yet about the Messiah, Jesus. God made a promise to Eve, and now He makes an even greater promise to Abram! This will be the last lesson in Gen 15.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I now post slightly longer video versions. (Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context without reading an entire chapter every week!)

Today we are finishing up Genesis 15, and you guys have learned so much. But you haven’t learned the most important part yet! God promised Abram the Land, a child, and told him to go fetch a bunch of critters for a special ceremony that we only ever see one more time in the Bible, and, as you remember, that one didn’t go so well for the citizens of Jerusalem! But this is possibly the most important covenant anywhere in the Hebrew Bible because this one is the forever promise that gave us Jesus! When normal people would perform this ceremony, which is called the Covenant of the Pieces, they would cut the animals in half and place the pieces on opposite sides to make a path down the middle. The two people would say, “Whoever breaks this covenant, may what happened to these animals happen to him!” Then they promised by the names of their gods to be faithful, and they believed their gods would take revenge for making them look bad if they didn’t. That’s why Abram has been shooing all those birds away—he has been waiting for God to show up somehow to walk through the animal parts with him. But then Abram was put into a deep vision where everything was scary and dark, and God told Abram what would happen to him and his family in the future. What happened next was completely shocking and unexpected.

When the sun had set, and it was dark, a smoking firepot and a flaming torch appeared and passed between the divided animals. On that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “I give this land to your offspring, from the Brook of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates River: the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaim, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites.” (Gen 15:17-21)

What??? Abram didn’t walk between the pieces? And why on earth did a smoky firepot and a flaming torch float through them instead? This just doesn’t make any sense at all, right? No Abram and no God either. Or was there? What was the smoke and the fire all about anyway? God tells His people all through the Bible that He doesn’t have a body, even though everyone else believed that the gods of the nations had bodies like ours. God isn’t a human. He doesn’t have DNA, so God isn’t really even a man either, or a woman. God is just described in ways that help us to understand that He can be like a father, like a mother, like a mamma bird, like a king, like a husband, and like a whole lot of things. But God isn’t a person in any way that we could possibly understand—even though sometimes He does seem to show up in human form or speaks through the Angel of the Lord. It is just all very confusing because our brains are small, and God is big. I suppose it would be really nice not to have a body sometimes—a lot less complicated, that’s for sure.

So, what’s the deal with the smoke and fire?? One of the ways we see God showing up in the book of Exodus is specifically as a cloud of smoke and a column of fire. The cloud of smoke protected the Israelites from the hot sun during the day, and the fire kept them warm all night—pretty awesome, right? And maybe you remember God speaking to Moses through a burning bush where the fire didn’t hurt that bush at all! And later, God told Moses and Aaron that He would appear above the ark of the covenant in the Tabernacle, with His glory hidden in a cloud. When the Temple was built, and Solomon threw a huge celebration in God’s honor, a cloud came into the Temple that was so big and amazing that the priests had to get out because it was too intense for them to handle! When Elijah was proving to the priests of Baal that their god wasn’t even real, God proved that He was very real by sending fire down from heaven to burn up an animal on an altar that was completely soaked with water and even had a moat around it! Other times in the Bible, God says He is coming on the clouds, and that always means that somebody is in big trouble and someone else might even get rescued. Jesus said in the Gospel stories that He would be coming in the clouds and that it would be bad news for the people who were lying about him, including the high priest, just so that they could get the Romans to kill him. And let me tell you a secret–when Jesus said that, it made those guys just furious because they believed that only God could judge the high priest.

The smoke and the fire were a promise of protection. This promise told Abram that until the end of the world, God would always have His eye on the children of Abram—no matter what. Abram doesn’t know all of this, of course, because none of it had happened yet, but God was giving Abram a clue about how He would appear to the children of Israel in the future. Abram was probably very confused about the smoke and the fire until he heard God’s voice saying that the covenant between them was forever and that his children would inherit everything the Canaanites had all around him. And some of those Canaanites were even called giants! But what did it mean that only God passed through the animal pieces? Certainly, God wasn’t going to break His promise to Abram or do anything wrong. But whoever goes through the animal parts is supposed to die if they break the promise. And, one day, Abram’s descendants would completely break their pledge to serve, obey, love, and worship God. They would fill His land with idols and even His own Temple. They would bow down to the Sun, Moon, and Stars, and when they did that—it meant they were putting their butts in the air toward God’s Holy of Holies. They baked unleavened bread for the Queen of Heaven, who was either Ishtar or Asherah—we aren’t really sure. Women cried and cried at the Temple for the Babylonian shepherd god Tammuz during the summer months when they thought he was trapped in the land of the dead, and there was no rain. They did absolutely everything God told them not to do. And so, one day, the cloud that God’s glory was hiding in just up and left and never came back. Isn’t that sad? God loved them so much that He stayed for hundreds of years while they did those things to Him. And the prophets had all warned the people, but nobody listened.

When God left His Temple, the people weren’t protected anymore, and the Babylonians came and destroyed the city and the Temple and took all the wealthy and powerful people so far away that they would never be able to go home again. But God wasn’t through with His people. He still loved them because He remembered how much He loved Abraham. Abraham’s descendants had broken God’s covenant, but because Abraham hadn’t walked with God through those animals, someone else had to make things right again. God’s people, even when He brought some of them back to the land of Israel, had to serve cruel pagan kings for another five hundred years! And they were always praying for the Messiah to come and rescue them, and to destroy all their enemies. They wanted their own kingdom again, with their own King. They wanted everything to be like the “good old days” but a whole lot better because the “good old days” are never really all that good for most people. They studied the Bible, and they could see that God had promised a new and better king who would come from King David’s family. Sometimes, that King would seem like a mighty warrior, but at other times, it seemed like he was rejected, hated, and very humble. Some even thought that maybe God would send them the King they deserved—one kind if they were worthy and doing what God wanted and another kind if they weren’t doing what God wanted.

What they never suspected was a King who would be both—a King who would be gentle, trustworthy, and loving toward people who were hurting but who would be a mighty warrior against demons, sickness, and everything that was hurting His people. A King who loved them all so much, not just them but all the world, that He would make everything right between them and God again and teach them how to trust God. He showed them exactly what God is like by just being Himself. And that King, of course, is Jesus. Do you remember when we learned about God’s Creative Word all the way back in episode #2? Jesus has always been with God (no one knows Him better!), and Jesus is how God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Everything good that we see around us, including the stars in the sky and all the planets, is God’s love for us poured out through Jesus. God didn’t need a planet, and He sure doesn’t need food or water. He created all of those things because we need them, and He was making a good home for us. But when Adam and Eve sinned, the world got broken. It was still good because God’s creation is good, but things were broken. God told Adam and Eve that there would one day be a child who would come from a woman who would fix everything they had messed up when they tried to be like God.

When the smoke and the fire passed in between the animal parts, God was making a forever promise that the child would somehow come out of Abram’s family—but this isn’t the first time God had hinted at that. Do you remember when God first spoke to Abram at the beginning of chapter twelve? God told Abram that he would be a blessing to all the families of the earth! Did Abram understand what that meant? His family were all idol worshipers from Babylon. Abram was commanded to get away from them! Many generations had passed since Noah and Abram’s ancestor Shem had come off the ark. Did anyone still remember that God had promised to send someone to crush the head of the serpent who had tricked Adam and Eve into rebelling against God? Or had people given up hope so long ago that they had to be reminded again? Whether Abram understands everything or not, we know that God is always busy setting up His plans to rescue us from sin and death. This was a big step. The family was chosen at last, and now that Abram had finally obeyed everything God had commanded him (it took ten years), God is rewarding Abram. It’s like God is saying, “Okay, Abram, you did what I asked, and so now everything comes down to you and me. You are my choice to start a new family, and that family will become a great people, and one day, one of your own children will bless every person who will ever live. And whatever goes wrong between now and then, I will make things right. My plans don’t depend on you and your kids doing everything right. One of your kids will do everything right, and He will change the world forever.”

Just imagine if Abram had known that it would take almost another two thousand years for the time to be just right for Jesus to be born, the Messiah, Savior, and King of the world! But what does any of that even mean? Why is it important that Jesus is our King? What does that mean to us? Remember how I told you that the descendants of Abram weren’t sure if the Messiah would be humble, gentle, and rejected or a mighty warrior? Well, let me tell you about the mighty warrior King we see in the Gospel of Mark. We see Jesus fighting against demons, even a whole legion of demons at once, and destroying them. Jesus also destroys sickness, disabilities, and every kind of disease and even brings people back from being dead. It’s like Jesus goes into evil places and rescues people. When Jesus is fighting the forces of evil, He isn’t messing around—no mercy and no forgiveness. But when Jesus is dealing with people who are hurting, He is gentle and kind. He treats demons one way and people another. In fact, we rarely see Jesus being unkind, but when He is, it’s because He is talking to the religious leaders who aren’t helping the people and who are even hurting them. Some of the religious leaders followed Jesus, but not very many. Most of them were trying to keep the people from believing that Jesus is God’s Messiah, the King. It was the same thing as telling people that God isn’t God either. Many of them, especially the chief priests and the high priest, were just jealous and were afraid they would lose their power. If they lost their power, they would also lose their money because they were making a lot by using the Temple as a business. They had teamed up with the cruel Romans, who had soldiers everywhere, so everyone had to do what they said. Others were just afraid that if people were listening to Jesus, they wouldn’t listen to them anymore. It can be really hard when you are used to people wanting to hear what you have to say, and then all of a sudden, those people are listening to someone else instead. And especially when that someone else can work miracles! Who can compete with that?

Jesus is a King who shows one side of Himself to demons and another side to those who are hurting. Jesus knows who the real enemy is. Jesus wants everyone to turn away from doing bad things, from making other people’s lives miserable, and to follow Him instead. You see, there are two Kingdoms in the world—the Kingdom of Heaven, where God rules over everything and everyone and things are good, and the Kingdom of the Beast, where rich people hurt poor people, and strong people hurt weaker people; where some people believe that they are better and more deserving of good things than others and people hate each other for totally stupid reasons. When we choose Jesus as our King, when we believe that He crushed the head of the Serpent like God promised Adam and Eve, that Jesus is how God promised to bless the world through Abram’s family, that it was Jesus who went through those animals disguised as smoke and fire and promised to fix the covenant between God and Abram that was broken by his descendants, it means that we are choosing to live by the rules of the Kingdom of God—to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love other people as we want to be loved and we would want people to treat the people we love. Anything that you wouldn’t want someone to do to hurt the person you love most in the whole world, serving Jesus means that you wouldn’t do that to anyone else either.

To have Jesus as King means that He is our example and that He is the only human being that we can really trust totally and obey completely because He will never tell us to do anything that is evil. God wanted us to have an example to follow—but Noah wasn’t perfect, and neither were Abram or Sarah, Moses, Aaron, David, or anyone else. They are going to do really awful things sometimes. We have them in the Bible to teach us that there isn’t a human on earth, no matter how special or chosen by God, who is a perfect example. Goodness sake, God chose me to teach you guys, but it doesn’t mean that I am right about everything I will teach you, and it doesn’t mean that I don’t get pretty salty when I am cranky or feel like I have been backed into a corner or am embarrassed. I am still trying to become more like Jesus. I have a long way to go. And so, if someone was to tell you, “That Miss Tyler can be mean,” you can say, “Yeah, I know, but she’s working on it and feels really bad about it when it happens.” Or if another person says, “Miss Tyler is wrong about such and such,” you can say, “Yeah, sometimes when she is teaching me, she tells me that she found out she was wrong and teaches me something different instead. She says we are all wrong about something. I don’t listen to her because I think that everything she says is right. I listen to her because grown-ups force me to.” Or how about, “Miss Tyler did this really awful thing once,” and you can say, “That’s why Miss Tyler tells us to follow Jesus and not just do whatever she has done. Only Jesus can be totally trusted.”

That’s why God gave us all these stories about how the people He chose did awful things—so that we wouldn’t think that we could follow those people instead of Jesus. Some people do terrible things when they are scared, and others when they want something that doesn’t belong to them. Sometimes people do something they think is right because their culture (which is the world and people around them) tells them it is right because they don’t know God well enough yet to understand that the Kingdom of Heaven isn’t like that. Sometimes, we will see things in the Bible that we wouldn’t ever think were okay today, and we’ll be like, “What the heck were they thinking???” But to them, it was a normal part of life. God isn’t going to fix everything right away; He had to be patient, and He is still being patient. Look how long it took Him to get us to stop making people work as slaves! Jesus told His disciples that some of the commandments that Moses gave the children of Israel in the desert would be because the people’s hearts were hard. So they were still allowed to do some evil things, but Jesus always told people to be perfect, like God is perfect. If you wouldn’t want God to do something to you, like enslave you, then don’t do it to anyone else. Jesus showed us that loving others is about serving them and understanding that we aren’t better than anyone else. He did that by showing us that even the greatest person who ever lived, who could work miracles and raise the dead and who was one with God at Creation, would die just so that He could fight Satan and sin and death and all his demons and win once and for all.

Satan looked at Jesus and probably thought to himself, “I need to stop Him, or everyone in the world will follow Him, and they won’t listen to me and do things my way anymore. If everyone listens to Him, there will be no more murder, stealing, hunger, cruelty, or hatred. There will be no more war or torture. Kids will be able to play anywhere they want with no one watching to make sure they are safe. I won’t have anyone who wants to do things my way once they all start living like He wants. I need to get rid of Him, but I need to do it in a way that is so terrible, embarrassing, and shameful that no one will even want to admit they ever knew Him. People will either be ashamed that they thought He was the Messiah, or will believe that He is a criminal, or will be too scared to even admit they know Him because they won’t want to be killed too.” Satan didn’t know that he was being tricked into having to come face-to-face with Jesus, the all-powerful Son of God. When Jesus died, He went to Satan’s turf (where Satan was strongest and most powerful) and beat the heck out of him, and now (even though he still causes trouble) Satan is dying. He isn’t giving up trying to trick us the way he did with Adam and Eve, trying to tell us not to obey God because we can decide for ourselves what is right and what is wrong. If Jesus followed God, with all the miracles He did and after creating the earth and everything in it, it has to be the only smart choice. Obeying God was why, when Jesus was murdered, Satan couldn’t fight against Him. Jesus didn’t have any reason to be ashamed, and He wasn’t guilty. Satan had never had to deal with anyone truly good and perfect before. But, by the time he figured out his mistake, it was too late.

That’s why we must have Jesus as our very real King and why we need to understand the importance of living in His Kingdom the way He wants us to. The more we do things His way, the bigger and better His Kingdom grows, but when we do things Satan’s way, we are just keeping that dude alive because he gets to hurt people through us. I mean, he isn’t doing it—we are doing it. When we are mean or bullies, if we steal, or spread lies or embarrassing things about other people, if we don’t keep our promises to help people do what is good, and when we don’t treat people like God loves them just as much as He loves us, then we are part of Satan’s Kingdom. That’s how Satan’s Kingdom works, and that kind of terrible behavior is called the Mark of the Beast. The prophet Ezekiel tells us that God has a Mark of His kingdom, and John tells us that Satan has one too. It isn’t anything a person can see, but it is about who we are following, and a person can pretend to be following God but really be doing terrible things when no one is looking. God sees us always and loves us always, so we can trust Him to live like He wants right now.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you will learn how to trust Jesus not just as your Savior but as your King too.  

Parents–Genesis 16 has some very sensitive themes in it so on Friday I will be uploading a special teaching on my grownup channel covering the material if you want to teach the material that I can’t teach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, God tells Noah and his family that they can get out of that stinky ark. I bet they kissed the ground! But what kind of life could they expect compared to what they had and why does this part of scripture sound so much like Genesis 1?

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

(Parents, all Scripture comes from the CSB this week, the Christian Standard Bible, and we will mostly be in Genesis 8)

 Then God spoke to Noah, “Come out of the ark, you, your wife, your sons, and your sons’ wives with you. Bring out all the living creatures that are with you—birds, livestock, those that crawl on the earth—and they will spread over the earth and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.” So Noah, along with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives, came out. All the animals, all the creatures that crawl, and all the flying creatures—everything that moves on the earth—came out of the ark by their families. (Gen 8:15-19)

Well, according to the story, Noah and his family were on that ark for a heckuva long time. In fact, according to the Bible, they were on the ark for 370 days, so just over a year. I don’t know about you, but that is not my idea of a good time. I probably wouldn’t have eaten that entire time just so that I wouldn’t be throwing up because I get super seasick. And, so, yeah, I would have died, come to think of it. When the waters stopped coming down, that would have been a pleasant surprise. When the winds came and the water started to go down, that was definitely a happy occasion. When the bottom of the ark touched down on the mountain—oh boy! And then Noah sent out birds to see if they could land anywhere or eat anything and, finally, God told Noah and his family to come out of the ark.

Now, sometimes we are so anxious to do things that we don’t wait for instructions. Have you ever done that? Sometimes we think it is time—but it isn’t time! I love to teach you guys about idioms—and idioms are phrases or sayings that usually don’t mean what they sound like they mean. But some idioms do make sense if you know the history. Let’s talk about a great idiom to describe doing something before you are supposed to—“jumping the gun.” Have you ever watched a race at the Olympics or at school or on television? Have you ever been in a race? People race on foot, with bicycles, in boats, in cars, and in the water as swimmers. Have you ever noticed what happens at the beginning of the race? Someone fires a special type of gun called a starter’s pistol. They aim it up in the air and although a bullet doesn’t come out, it makes a huge sound sort of like a cap gun but you still don’t want to point it at anyone. Well, when the racers are ready to go and all worked up and excited, you can imagine how easy it would be to accidentally start running before you hear the boom. And when a racer starts too soon, it’s called jumping the gun. They aren’t jumping over the gun, of course, but they are “jumping” before the gun tells them it is time. And if you think those racers are excited, just think about those folks in the stinky ark for over a year. They are all ready and waiting to jump the gun. I bet his sons are all going, “Is it time yet?” and Noah is saying, “Oh my gosh no, how many times do I have to tell you that we will get there when we get there!!??”

Our lives are full of times when we can’t hardly stand to wait for something to start. I bet you can think of a lot of times. That’s why learning how to patiently wait for the right moment is a huge part of growing up. And there are a lot of people in the Bible who are going to jump the gun. And they all get into a lot of trouble! If you are excited for recess and bolt out of your desk too early—trouble! If you open the oven door at the wrong time, the cake you are baking might cave in and sink in the middle. If you are going over a puddle and you jump too early or too late, you get wet shoes. Abraham and Sarah, Moses, the children of Israel in the wilderness, King Saul, King David and many others are going to leap before they look and the results will be disastrous not only for themselves but for others. And in your life, you will do it too. The Bible shows us that God won’t abandon us when we do jump the gun even though we might not like the real-life consequences of what we have done.

Of course, in the case of the Ark, God closed the door so maybe Noah couldn’t even open it if he wanted to anyway. How do you even open a door that God closed from the other side? I guess a lot of times, God protects us from ourselves by making certain things impossible. We’re just stubborn enough to try and do something foolish at the worst possible time. I sometimes wonder how many times God has protected me from really messing up so bad that there is no way of getting out of trouble. Fortunately, I have messed up many times and although sometimes things seemed very hopeless and, sometimes, I even thought I wanted to die, in time things got better and now I rarely even remember things that once seemed like the end of the world. Now, let’s look at our Bible verses for this week:

 Then God spoke to Noah, “Come out of the ark, you, your wife, your sons, and your sons’ wives with you. Bring out all the living creatures that are with you—birds, livestock, those that crawl on the earth—and they will spread over the earth and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.” So Noah, along with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives, came out. All the animals, all the creatures that crawl, and all the flying creatures—everything that moves on the earth—came out of the ark by their families.

Something that we see a lot of in the Bible is the theme of new beginnings. Do you remember what a theme is? The theme of a story is the topic, or the main point or you might call it the subject. For example, the theme of a movie like Toy Story is friendship and how dangerous jealousy is. One of my favorite old movies is West Side Story and the themes of that movie are love and the dangers of prejudice and hatred, and it’s based on Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet which is about the same exact things. Well, there is a theme that pops up all through the Bible and that theme is new beginnings. In Genesis 1, God created something new—the heavens and the earth and everything in them. He did that so that the entire world could know what He is like and so emptiness and chaos could be replaced by something beautiful and meaningful. He began with some people and placed them in a good place where they could do the job of making the entire earth a paradise—a perfect place where they could raise children so that the whole earth would be a wonderful and peaceful place with no violence or hatred or cruelty. Just think if they hadn’t been so anxious to become like God! Talk about jumping the gun! They could have become more and more like Him just by doing what He said to do and by becoming more and more like Him. There is no easy way to become like God, and certainly not by just eating a piece of fruit, no matter how tasty or pretty.

But in the beginning, we saw that God created the birds, and the wild animals, and the livestock (farm animals), and all of the tiny critters like bugs and mice and snakes and stuff. And, of course, He also created people. And He told those people and those critters to be fruitful and multiply. That’s why when God speaks to Noah and the animals to come out of the ark, it is just like when He spoke when He created the world. And He wants them to spread out over the earth and to have babies and to do all the things that God created them to do.

But things aren’t entirely the same. Noah and his family aren’t like Adam and Eve. They’ve already lived a long time and they have seen a lot of horrible, evil things. They lived in a world where no one could trust anyone, a world of horrible violence and people doing whatever they wanted to whoever they wanted. It wasn’t a safe world, and everyone was suffering—people and animals and the earth. God loves His creation, and He hates suffering. In the Bible, the prophets talk over and over again about how much God hates it when the strong are mean to the weak, when the rich are mean to the poor, and the powerful take advantage of the powerless. But that is the only kind of world that they have ever been a part of. The time they spent all alone together in the ark would have been their first experience of not having to worry about someone hurting them. Noah and his wife didn’t have to worry about whether Ham, Shem, and Japheth were in danger. And Ham, Shem, and Japheth didn’t have to worry if their mom and wives were safe. Although, that being said, it was probably hard to feel safe in the ark as the months passed and they must have wondered if they would ever get out of there. But when all people have ever seen is craziness, violence, and hatred in the outside world, it is hard to live any other way. When we are around mean people, being mean starts to look normal.

If you have had friends who used to be kind but then started hanging around someone who is mean, then you probably know what I am talking about. Mean people don’t usually get nicer without Jesus’s help—nice people get meaner instead. Not that people can’t change but generally we start to act like the people we are around. It’s just how we are because being mean is easier than being nice and sometimes it feels really good to make someone else feel bad. Sometimes it feels good to hurt people and especially when we are angry or frustrated or not getting our way. When we feel hurt, sometimes we want to hurt someone else. And when we are hanging around people who do that all the time, it gets easier and easier to give in. Hopefully, just being around their parents was a good example for the boys and their wives. We’ll find out later.

But even though it isn’t a clean start, a totally new beginning with brand new perfect people, it is a new beginning. And because Noah was considered to be righteous in his generation, we know that means he was the best of the bunch and so his family was probably a whole lot better than most as well. Whatever horrible things people had done, they were gone now and Noah and his family had the power to choose to live in an entirely new way. They knew what it was like to be in a terrible situation, and now they could choose to make the world a really wonderful, peaceful, and loving place to live. They could have children and grandchildren and could make the decision to teach them what was right. Everyone should have learned their lesson because of how bad their world had been. If only they would refuse to make the same mistakes. If only they would just say no to being unloving to one another.

Did you know that God is going to do this many times in the Bible? Not send a flood, not that, but start over again with a new family so that He can fix what was broken in the Garden? First there was Adam and Eve, and then Noah, and then Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and finally Jesus. Do you remember when we talked about how the story of Adam and Eve tells us that all human beings are one big family with no one any better than anyone else? That God wants us to see ourselves as all coming from the same place so that no one will think that some people are superior, or better than, others? Well, as if it wasn’t enough to do it once, God is doing it again when Moses tells us the story of Noah and his family. Later on, we will hear about how the children of the three sons and their wives went out in all different directions. Some went to Asia, others to Africa, and even to Europe. That’s what God wanted, for people to live all over the world so that we could wisely rule over all of His Creation. This world is full of wonderful places and wonderful people. Because of where we live, we look different and we like different kinds of music and our languages are different and we eat entirely different kinds of foods. And it’s all wonderful. We are different because God is like an artist, so creative. Think of all the different kinds of birds and how beautiful they are and they are different sizes. God doesn’t just like one kind of bird or cat or butterfly or flower or tree. God is not boring. If God was boring we would all look exactly alike and do the same stuff and it would be awful.

It’s really hard to start from scratch. Noah and his family will have to do a lot of work to survive. They will probably use the ark for shelter, for a home, as long as they can but as everyone begins having children and grandchildren, they are going to have to leave where they are and plant crops like wheat and barley, and find good sources of water to drink, and they will certainly have to be somewhere else for the winter because the mountains would be too dangerous. And they have animals that will need to travel around in order to find good grass to graze on. They’ll have to build fences to keep the farm animals from wandering off or being eaten.

Have you ever moved away from your home to somewhere new? Maybe a new town or a new state or even a new country? Do you know what it is like to have to start all over again? You have to get a new home, go to a new school, figure out where to buy groceries, get a new doctor and a new dentist, find a new favorite place to eat pizza, make new friends, find a new church, and sometimes people have a different accent or might even speak a different language. I can tell you some stories about how hard it was for me to move to new places. And I will tell you that when you move to a different country, even if they speak the same language, those words do not always mean the same thing and you can get into big trouble. I found out that the hard way! If you’ve had to do any of that then maybe you can relate to how Noah’s family is feeling as they needed to start over.

Now, you might ask the question, why did Noah get to take his family with him onto the ark? Well, that’s a story that is going to take us right to Jesus! We are going to see in the Bible, and especially in Genesis, how loyal God is to the people He loves. In fact, He is so loyal that sometimes He does really nice things for the families of the people who obey Him and love Him. Because Noah obeyed God, his family was allowed to join him on the ark even though we aren’t sure yet what kind of people they are. Because Abraham obeyed God, God rescued his nephew Lot and Lot’s family when a city was destroyed, and God even blessed Abraham’s son Ishmael even though God chose Isaac for Himself. Because Isaac was obedient to God, God blessed Esau, even though Esau wasn’t really very interested in serving God. In fact, God gave the descendants of Lot, Ishmael, and Esau lands of their very own, and no one was allowed to touch them. And all because God loved Abraham! Because Moses obeyed God, and because God remembered Abraham and how faithful he was, hundreds of years later God looked out for the children of Israel, who all came from Abraham and Sarah, even though they often made God sorry for it. Because Aaron’s son Phineas was obedient and loyal to God, God specially blessed his family. And because David obeyed God, usually, God was loyal to David’s family even when they became increasingly evil and rebellious. What that doesn’t mean is that the people who God was loyal to and generous with were awesome people. God did good things for them not because they were good but because someone else was, or at least they usually were. God loves loyalty. But what is loyalty about?

We say that someone is loyal when they are on your side no matter what. When you can trust them not to play nasty tricks on you or lie to you or about you or switch sides when bullies come after you or tell your secrets to everyone so they can make fun of you. Being loyal to God is a bit different because with God, He is just perfect and He made us, and when He sent Jesus to die for us so we could live with Him forever. Well, we kinda owe it to Him to be totally devoted to Him and only to Him. But the really amazing thing about God is that when we are loyal to Him, He is even more loyal to us! That doesn’t mean that nothing will ever go wrong for us—I wish! But it means that when things do go wrong that God doesn’t abandon us. God won’t switch sides on us, or leave us just because we do something wrong. No matter what we do or how far we might try to run from Him, He’s just waiting for us to turn around and see that He has been right there waiting for us. Now, there are some people who might try to take advantage of that but God will deal with that too.

Why does He do that with us? Why is He so loyal to us? He is loyal to us when we believe and give our loyalty to His beloved Son Jesus. Lot was saved because of Abraham, and so was Ishmael, Esau, and the children of Israel in slavery in Egypt. When they messed up really bad, God remembered His promises to Abraham and saved them from trouble, and more than that, He also blessed them. When the Kings of Judah sinned terribly, God remembered His promises to David and sent prophets to them to turn them around to do what is right, but He didn’t destroy them. Jesus is like that for us, but He is much more than that. In the book of Isaiah, God said that Jesus would be a light to the nations, that He would bring God’s word and salvation to the nations. When we follow Jesus as our Savior and our only King, we are telling God that we believe His promises, that we believe He did everything He said He would do to save the world by sending Jesus for us. Before Jesus, when God looked at His sinful people, He remembered Abraham and His promises and saved them. Now, God looks at us and remembers Jesus and His promises, and saves us. But now things are a lot different because just believing in and trusting Abraham or Moses or David never changed anyone on the inside. They were still the same people. They might keep the commandments on the outside and might even have been very good people, but they didn’t get to be a part of the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus brought to everyone who trusts Him and gives Him their loyalty.

A lot of people think of the Kingdom of Heaven as something up in the sky but Jesus said that the Kingdom of Heaven came with Him and came to stay in everyone who belongs to Him. And anyone can belong to Him if they want to—all they have to do is trust Him enough to believe and to obey Him. So, we read the stories about Him and we can know they are true. We read that He died as a totally innocent person so that Satan would have all of his authority over us taken away. Satan worked through evil men in order to kill someone completely innocent of anything wrong. That never happened before in the history of the world. When Satan did that, he broke his own power. And when we give our love and loyalty and trust to Jesus, the Spirit of God comes to live with us and changes us from the inside out so that not only will we act more loving and good, we will be more loving and good. That’s how powerful God’s salvation is. It doesn’t mean we are perfect, or that we are good right away, but little by little, day after day and year after year, we become more and more like Jesus—and Jesus is exactly like God.

We become His image-bearers just like it talks about in Genesis 1. We get the chance to live in this beautiful Creation wisely and kindly, not doing damage to anyone but treating others like they are created in God’s image too—because they are.

The Bible tells us that before the flood, people weren’t treating one another as though they were also in God’s image but were hurting them, treating them unfairly, were being violent, and just being horrible. Noah and his family grew up in that world but now they would have a chance to start over and do things right. Of course, they wouldn’t have the Holy Spirit to help and change them, so what do we think is going to happen? Can they do it? How long will it take them to start messing up? We’ll see.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray you have a wonderful time this week studying the Bible with the people who love you.

I was a bit late getting this up but we got stranded in Orlando for an extra day and I developed an ear/nose and throat infection after perforating my right eardrum on the flight there. Praise God for modern medicine and although it is making me sleepy, it’s also getting me better in a jiffy.

One of the weirdest things in the flood story is that after telling Noah how to get everything done for so long, once the flood starts, God stops talking and the Bible even says that God had to remember about Noah and the animals. But what does the Hebrew word zakar really mean and how can we know that God never actually forgets about us?

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

(Parents, all Scripture comes from the CSB this week, the Christian Standard Bible and we will be mostly in Genesis 7 and 8)

Hey guys and gals, it is good to be with you again. I had a nice long vacation and we all need time off, right? Just imagine if you had to be in school all year round, every day! You’d get all burned out and you’d start thinking that one plus two is yellow. I just got to the point where I was so tired and worn out from studying and writing and recording and editing on both my shows that I just couldn’t do it anymore. Not and have it be any good anyway and you guys shouldn’t have to sit through that!

Anyway, back in September, we left off with God giving Noah the instructions about taking some animals by two’s and others by sevens. And I explained the difference between clean and unclean animals and how just because an animal is clean for one thing doesn’t mean it is clean for something else! Well, this week we are going to talk about Noah’s actual time in the ark. And it’s kind of a strange story for one confusing reason but we will get to that in a little bit.

For the time being, we are still in chapter seven, which tells us that on the day that it started to rain, Noah and his family went into the ark along with all the animals. Now, how big do you think the door had to be? Really, really big. And how would you even close a door that has no hinges? Well, it doesn’t matter because the Bible says that God shut the door Himself. Just imagine if He hadn’t done it. All the animals are in their stalls—I mean, I assume they weren’t all wandering around aimlessly—the camels would step on the bunnies. And then, it’s raining and Noah and his family are standing at the door/ramp and thinking, “Oh man, this is one huge and heavy door and I am over 600 years old and it isn’t like someone can lift it from the outside. I think I see a flaw in our plan here.” Fortunately, one of the lessons we learn from this story is that when God gives us a job, He already has all the details figured out. And anything more than that, we are just on a need to know basis and I know I speak from experience that sometimes God will tell me to do something and, like, I am wondering about the next step but He doesn’t tell me until the last minute and when we forget that He always does that, we can get really freaked out. Even when we remember, we can wonder, “Oh man, what if this was all just my crazy idea and He doesn’t have the next step for me because this wasn’t His idea in the first place???” But, like I said, we are on a need-to-know basis and He doesn’t tell us stuff until we absolutely need to know it. That’s how God keeps us listening and depending on Him and realizing that we can’t do things by ourselves. We need God. Only God has the entire picture and we are kinda clueless. And that’s a good thing because if He told us everything right away, we would just try and figure out another way or we’d skip the steps we don’t like, right? I am going to tell you that none of us are smart enough to skip steps so He protects us by telling us to do one thing at a time.

Up to now, since the story of Noah started, no one except God has said a single thing. Noah has been a quiet guy and so we don’t know much of anything about him except for that the Bible says that he was righteous in his generation, which means he was the best of the bunch, and that he did everything God told him to do, so he was obedient. Other than that, the guy is just silent and God is doing 100% of the talking. But something happens once the flood begins. God stops talking too! Boy howdy, that must have been scary. Think about all that was going on and all the animal poop and human poop piling up and God isn’t saying anything. Noah was never told anything about how long this would all take. And just the eight of them together. Bet everyone was getting pretty crabby, right? Not like you could take a walk or anything. Not like they had cans of Febreze or even toilet paper. Or tv. Or books. And it must have seemed as though God had forgotten about them because, by the time we get to chapter eight verse one, they’ve been in there for one hundred and ninety days.

Who can do the math to figure out how long that is? If we say that months are thirty days long, then that is just over six months. Half a year. Just kill me now, right? Seasickness. The smell. The same people every day. Three brothers—and you know that isn’t going to be good. Probably the same things to eat every single day. No meat. Maybe they were able to milk some of the animals. And God is being quiet and seemingly, they have been forgotten in there and they will be there for the rest of their lives. So, let’s look at that verse–

God remembered Noah, as well as all the wildlife and all the livestock that were with him in the ark. God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the water began to subside (go down).

Now, wait a minute—does this mean that God forgot about Noah?! What the heck—was He distracted or busy with something else? That is how it sounds in English but that’s because, like a whole lot of words from other languages, we don’t really have a one word that can replace the Hebrew word zakar. And zakar shows up a lot in the Bible. In fact, it is one of the best words in the whole world. Zakar is a verb and it doesn’t just mean to suddenly think about something or someone again after totally spacing it. I mean, God doesn’t forget things like we do. I am forgetting more and more things every year because I am grandma-aged now. I will decide to put something somewhere where I know I will remember it and then I never find it again until we move and I begin to pack up boxes! Like, oh my gosh, I have these containers that the vegetable barley soup from Costco that I bought came in and I remember putting the lids somewhere. And they have been missing for three months now. But God never forgets where He puts things. He never forgets about where you are and what is happening to you. No, when God remembers you it isn’t because He forgot about you. When God remembers you it is because He has decided to do something in your life.

When God remembered Noah, He made the floodwaters go down. When God remembered Rachel, He gave her a baby. When Pharoah’s cupbearer remembered Joseph, he got him out of prison—but he really did forget because he’s a person and we do that sort of thing. When God remembers His covenant, and we will talk more about that in a few weeks, He does things to save and bless people. God freed the slaves from Egypt when He remembered His promise to Abraham. And we are going to see that over and over again. Humans can zakar because they have actually forgotten, but when God decides to zakar it is because it is time to do something about what is going on. God is always watching and waiting for just the right time to do something—and more than that, sometimes God is waiting for us to pray before He remembers. We’ve talked about praying a few times and so you know how important it is that we talk to God about what is going on in our lives and to ask Him when we or someone else needs help. When we don’t ask God to help us, then we aren’t treating Him like God at all. He is all-powerful and sees us all the time and He wants to be asked to help out.

Ask your parents or grandparents or aunts and uncles or sisters and brothers or friends how they would feel if you had a problem and you didn’t talk to them about it—I know that I want to help out the people I love but I can’t do that if they never tell me about their problems. Well, God is like that too, only He knows what the problem is. And He sees the whole problem and not just tiny bits. He sees the whole puzzle of your life and cares very deeply about you. I want you to imagine something for me. Just think if your friend had a terrible problem and was hurting or they were in just awful trouble. But what if they weren’t willing to talk to anyone about it? What if you were watching the problem get worse and worse and you knew exactly how to help but you couldn’t because they wouldn’t even admit that there was a problem? Would you be worried about them? Maybe even scared? I know that when it happens to me and the people I love won’t let me help, well, I can’t even sleep at night. It’s a horrible feeling in my gut, in the pit of my stomach. It feels that way because I love them and I want them to be okay. The people who care about you feel that way about you too. I know I feel that way about you.

But sometimes, it seems like God isn’t listening at all and nothing is harder than that. Sometimes it seems like God has forgotten about us or is just so angry that He wants us to die. We think that because humans sometimes are mean and spiteful like that and give up on us. Sometimes we say the wrong thing and our best friend all of a sudden hates us. Sometimes we don’t even know what happened. When things like that happen to us, it is easy to think that God is just like people—but He isn’t anything like us. Do you remember how hard God worked to make things right with Cain and even to protect him? Cain ran away from God but God didn’t leave Cain. And goodness sakes, Cain murdered his own brother—killed him over nothing! I know you haven’t done anything that terrible in your life. But sometimes the bad things we do seem so huge and overpowering that we can’t imagine anyone would ever love us again and especially not God. But the Bible is full of stories of people who did the most horrible things you can imagine and when they snapped out of it and were sorry and turned back to God, He forgave them because He loves us and He wants all of us to be right with Him.

Noah and his family must have been wondering what on earth was going on. I mean, God talked to Noah at first and told him how to do everything about building the ark and gathering food. Now, all of a sudden when it is really scary, God doesn’t seem to be saying much of anything and even though He sent the wind to make the level of the waters go down, He won’t say anything to Noah for almost another eight months, when He told them to go back outside. But the important thing is that even though God wasn’t saying anything, He was still taking care of Noah and his family and all of the animals. And God was taking care of the earth too because things were starting to grow again. There will be times in your life where you will feel very close to God and other times when you will feel very abandoned but today I am going to tell you my secret for getting through those times. Yes, of course, it happens to me too—and I pray all the time and study the Bible all the time and I try very hard not to sin against God or others. But I still mess up, of course.

What I have come to learn though, through experience, is that God is faithful even when I am messing up. He doesn’t give up on me. But what He is doing in the quiet times in our lives when He seems to be gone is teaching us to trust Him no matter what we are thinking or feeling or seeing. And that’s a hard thing to do. People like to focus on what they feel and get themselves into all sorts of trouble. But what we think we see isn’t always what is actually happening. What we are feeling can be influenced by a lot of things that might not be entirely right. What we are thinking is always going to be limited by what we know and what we have gone through and not always by what is really happening. Why, just this week, I saw that something had happened and I got super worried that someone in my family was in trouble but then instead of reacting, I waited and looked into it and found out that my first assumption was totally wrong! I had assumed the worst thing possible. Sometimes when we are stressed out and feeling overwhelmed, we start to get a little bit nutty. It happens to everyone.

Now, let’s imagine Noah and his family during those first 190 days. Can you even imagine the thoughts they were thinking and the prayers they were praying to God? It’s like the Psalms. Now the Psalms are songs and poems in the Bible. Some of them are happy and joyful and some of them are sad. Sometimes they are confident about God’s goodness and power and at other times they are doubtful and even accuse God of not caring at all. The Psalms are very important because there is nothing fake about them. The Psalms are honest. Psalms show people thinking wonderful loving thoughts and ugly evil thoughts. Just like us. Because we all think all kinds of wonderful and terrible things. And I am sure that if we could look inside the heads of Noah and his family we would see all sorts of things.

“Has God forgotten all about us? Will we run out of food and starve to death?” “I really wish we had just died like everyone else, at least it would have been over quickly and we wouldn’t be stuck in here.” “This is not what I signed up for—I thought I would be in here for a week, tops, but now I am thinking that maybe God drowned in the flood too and we are on our own.” “I wonder if we made God angry and now He has abandoned us forever.” “Great! This is the thanks I get for being obedient and building this thing!” And we might think that Noah was too perfect to think things like this but the truth is that being there would have been just as much of a test as being told to believe God and build the ark in the first place. Throughout your life, you will find that it is a lot easier to do the right thing on the outside than to think the right thing on the inside. Our thoughts tend to have a mind of their own, right? We all think about things we would never really want to do. But when we get scared, angry, or excited then our thoughts sort of run wild and we start thinking of what are called “worst-case scenarios” and we come up with things that would almost never happen in real life. Like what I was assuming about someone I love being in trouble the other day. The truth wasn’t nearly as bad as what I had imagined! Do you do that? Moms and dads do that all the time when we can’t get ahold of our kids and don’t know where they are or who they are with. My kids are both adults now but I worry if they disappear on me. So, if you think those kinds of things, you aren’t alone!

And we haven’t been stuck in an ark for over six months without a change. For Noah and his family, being there without God talking to them, well they had decisions to make. Maybe his sons were saying, “Are you sure we were supposed to do this? Did you forget something? Are we missing something? God has obviously abandoned us, or he is dead—one way or another, something went really wrong. Can’t you do something???”

And maybe Noah wondered too. And so as they talked, they had to make the biggest decision any of us will ever have to make. They had to choose whether or not to trust God. They had to decide whether or not to be faithful and to keep waiting or to give up. And in your lives, that will happen to you too. Because all of us have felt sometimes that God has forgotten us, or has abandoned us, or is punishing us because He is angry. But in the Bible, when He is angry—like with Cain—He says something, right? He finds a way to let us know. Now, sometimes we have sinned and have done something terrible, but we know from the Bible that God forgives us when we are truly sorry and determined to get things right and do better. And we can ask friends to help us. But, God wants more than anything else for us to be on good terms with Him. God doesn’t enjoy having enemies or being angry.

One of Jesus’s own disciples said this, “The Lord does not delay his promise, as some understand delay, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9) But what does that mean? This means that God isn’t going to fly off the handle and nuke you if you mess up. He really, really wants to save people. I mean, just look at how annoying and hopeless we all are and how badly we mess stuff up on a daily basis? If God was anything like me, we’d all be dead already. So, in your prayers, thank God that He isn’t like Miss Tyler!

I want to tell you a story about the time that Jesus even had thoughts that God had abandoned Him. Of course, no such thing had happened because that isn’t how God works. But, you know, Jesus experienced all the things we experience. People He loved, they got sick and died. People He loved, they rejected Him and made fun of him. They even told people that he was crazy! And His own disciples, when things got scary, they ran away and one even denied ever knowing Him. And one betrayed Him. Jesus knew what it was like to hurt and to feel abandoned—because He was abandoned! And on the Cross, it got so horrible that He quoted from one of those honest Psalms I was telling you about. He said, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? (Psalm 22:1).”

Had God really abandoned Jesus? Well, everyone listening wouldn’t know for sure until three days later. You see, if God abandoned Jesus, then He would have stayed dead. Jesus kept telling His disciples that He would be raised from the dead, and that is something that only God can do, right? They were really confused. They all believed that everyone who was obedient to God would be raised from the dead but they thought it would happen all at the same time on what the Bible calls “the last day.” So, why would Jesus even tell them something they already knew? Well, Jesus was saying that it would happen to Him pretty much right away—without a prophet even laying his hands on Jesus’s body the way that Jesus prayed for others and they came alive, and both Elijah and Elisha did as well. But no one did that when Jesus died. They wrapped him in spices and put Him in a garden tomb and rolled a rock in front and sealed it so that no one could break-in. There were even guards outside. Nobody was getting in there so if He was going to be raised from the dead, there was only one who could do it and that was God Himself. But that’s exactly what happened. And then He appeared to a whole lot of people!

But for those three days, things seemed pretty hopeless. The disciples must have felt like God really had abandoned Jesus, and if that was true then He would have abandoned them too. I mean, if Jesus got abandoned then no one is safe. Because, I mean, there are good reasons for God to get rid of us—but He doesn’t because He is patient and loving. If He puts up with us then Jesus is totally safe. But Jesus cried out on the Cross because it felt like He was alone, probably for the first time in His whole life. He had always known God. Now, the people standing around the Cross, they knew Jesus was quoting from Psalm 22 so I want to read some of that:

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why are you so far from my deliverance and from my words of groaning? My God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, by night, yet I have no rest. But you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel. Our ancestors trusted in you; they trusted, and you rescued them. They cried to you and were set free; they trusted in you and were not disgraced. But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by mankind and despised by people. Everyone who sees me mocks me; they sneer and shake their heads: “He relies on the Lord; let him save him; let the Lord rescue him, since he takes pleasure in him.” It was you who brought me out of the womb, making me secure at my mother’s breast. I was given over to you at birth; you have been my God from my mother’s womb. Don’t be far from me, because distress is near and there’s no one to help. Many bulls surround me; strong ones of Bashan encircle me. They open their mouths against me—lions, mauling and roaring. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are disjointed; my heart is like wax, melting within me. My strength is dried up like baked clay; my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. You put me into the dust of death. For dogs have surrounded me; a gang of evildoers has closed in on me; they pierced my hands and my feet. I can count all my bones; people look and stare at me. They divided my garments among themselves, and they cast lots for my clothing. But you, Lord, don’t be far away. My strength, come quickly to help me.

Jesus was describing what had been done to Him. He was also showing that what happened to Him had been written about a thousand years before. And He was telling people that God could be trusted because everyone in the past had been able to trust Him too. The Psalm is a lot longer than that and you can read it all as a family.

Anyway, I love you. I am praying for you and I hope you have a wonderful time learning about God with the people who love you.

A lot of scholars and even believers out there are quick to undermine the ministry and even the existence of Yeshua/Jesus Christ. However, the entire world serves as a witness that something amazing happened when He rose from the dead – the world changed drastically and has never been the same. Not only can we prove that He was a real person, but we can also prove that He destroyed the sting of death by looking at the world before and after His death, burial, and resurrection.

Modern books and ancient books are incredibly different – for example, a book about a modern person would tell you what day a person was born and might skip any other details about that day, but in Yeshua’s (Jesus’s) day, people would generally say nothing about the day of the year at all but would focus on what made that person’s birth important and impressive. As a result, we know very few ancient birthdays before the time of Messiah – especially among the Jews, who focused on a person’s life, and not their birth! Around 200 CE, people got super concerned with when Yeshua was born, but before that, they really didn’t seem to care much. This week we are going to talk about the stuff that the two Biblical authors, Matthew and Luke, did want to talk about, and why it was important. We will also discuss the very interesting reasons why people at the end of the second century came up with the date of December 25th, and how it relates to Rabbi Eliezer and Jewish beliefs about the redemption of the world.

This is a really interesting article if you are interested in studying the December 25th date in more detail

And my friend Sarah has another great book out for families that is also a lot of fun for kids – teaching them about having great character and developing the fruit of the Spirit.

Well, here we are with our last PG-13 teaching for a long time, thank goodness. I much prefer teaching for a general audience but it’s in the Bible so it would also be irresponsible to just pretend like this doesn’t exist. Bathsheba has an undeserved bad reputation, alongside Jezebel and Delilah as temptresses – but in Bathsheba’s case, that reputation is undeserved and I will prove it entirely from the original Hebrew and archaeology.

So this week we will be talking about one of the most admirable women in Scripture – a pagan-born Moabitess named Ruth. But we have a problem because of the Scriptural prohibition against Moabites and their descendants being allowed to join the congregation of Israel! How does Ruth break that curse against her and become the great-great grandmother of King David?

This teaching will be PG-13 for obvious reasons! How many of us would brag about one of our great great great…. grandmas being a pagan prostitute? Probably not many and even fewer people would want it on their genetic resume broadcast to the world but that’s exactly what we see in the Matthew 1 genealogy of Yeshua (Jesus)! In ancient times, a man’s genealogy was a sign of his honor and status – and so you would think that the Bible writers would never have told us about King David’s questionable lineage, but then they boldly proclaim it in Matthew too!

What are we missing? Well, maybe what we see as scandalous was looked at in an entirely different way by the Jews. So this week I will share why Rahab, like Tamar before her, was honorable and not shameful. This week we are going to explore the power of repentance and the absolute forgiveness of God – and what that means for us when we come into the Covenant through the blood of Yeshua.