Well, whenever someone says goodness is how to be like Jesus, it makes me want to say, “Well, duh…” but what does goodness even mean? It means so many different things in English that it makes your head spin. This week we will talk about what “goodness” means in the Bible and how the Holy Spirit works in us to get us closer and closer to being good.

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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.

Goodness is a confusing word in English—I mean, what exactly does it mean? Is it the opposite of badness? How can we be good when Jesus said that only God is good? And how is it different from the other ways that we are supposed to be like Jesus? Is self-control goodness? How about gentleness and faithfulness and kindness? Goodness seems so vague that we aren’t really sure what to make of it. Adults tell kids to “be good” or “on your best behavior” when relatives come to visit or at the store or school or whatever. But what does all that have to do with Jesus? How was Jesus good as opposed to being somehow bad? What did the word mean when Paul used it and how would the Galatians have understood it? What did it mean to the Jews whom Jesus was preaching to when He said that no one is good except God? What does good mean to us now? Out of all of the fruit of the Spirit, goodness is definitely the most confusing.

Good grades. Good hair. Good dog. Good Morning. Good news. Good enough. Good grief. Good is a word that can mean so many different things in English. But when we are told that the Holy Spirit will teach us and change us to make us “good” it’s sort of like hearing that we’re expecting good weather during a drought. Does that mean sunshine or rain? Which one is good? Does good simply mean nice enough to go out and have a picnic at the park or does good mean that rain will fall and the plants won’t die? And what does it mean if we are being good? Does it mean that we are just behaving ourselves or that we are doing things that are actually good and helping others? Paul was talking to a bunch of grownups when he said this, and so we have to take that into account too. In fact, Paul was talking to a group of people who weren’t being allowed to sit and eat at the same table with other people. There was an in-group and an out-group and these people were on the outside and not allowed to sit with the in-crowd because they weren’t considered to be good enough. Unless they did a certain thing, they weren’t considered to really be fully a part of God’s family. Paul was telling them that the thing they were being asked to do wasn’t really a sign of belonging to God’s family at all. Let me tell you a story of something that happened to me this week that made me very sad.

I know someone whom I like very much. Recently, he changed denominations—which means he is going to a new church now, which is fine. He was asking me some questions and at one point he told me that unless I also go to his church, that I am not fully a member of the family of God with him. I was very surprised. That’s the same exact problem that Paul was dealing with, when one group wouldn’t have anything to do with another group unless they did a certain thing. And it wasn’t like that thing was believing Jesus or worshiping God. But, do we get to decide who belongs in the family of God and who doesn’t just because they aren’t doing a certain thing that is important to us? Paul said no—he said that the Holy Spirit would make the people who belong in the family of God to be more and more like Jesus. That’s how we know. We look at who people were before they believed and we watch God change them for good. If only God is good, like Jesus said, then as we keep following and believing Him, we will never be entirely perfect but we will get closer and closer to being good and further and further away from being bad. And that’s because the word that Paul used that we call good actually meant excellent.

To be excellent is much different than simply being “good” and behaving ourselves. To be excellent means that whatever we are doing, we do the very best we can. That doesn’t mean that everyone is going to get straight A’s in school because sometimes, a person’s best is B’s or C’s. Just like not everyone is going to get an A in Gym class or get chosen for the choir or to have a role in the dance recital. Goodness, or excellence, means that we are determined to be the best we can be in those things that God has given us to do. It means that we aren’t out there setting a bad example by being lazy or treating people badly when we know very well how to treat them well. Imagine if Jesus had only made enough bread and fishes for half the people who were listening to Him preach—that would be so mean! There would have been a riot when the people who didn’t get fed found out about it. Jesus could make enough bread for them all so He did. Imagine if that poor man with all the demons only got half of them chucked out of him! So he still had to live in the graveyard hurting himself and others! What would be the point of getting rid of any of the demons at all? What if Jesus only healed one of the legs of the paralyzed man?

Of course, Jesus could do it all and so He did. Jesus was always excellent. He preached the best sermons anyone had ever heard. He prayed the best prayers. He gave the best answers and asked the best questions. Of course, let’s be honest; He had a huge advantage over us, right? But that doesn’t mean that Jesus couldn’t have decided to just do a little bit for us when He could do a lot. Jesus was often very sad when He saw how much people were suffering, and so He helped the people who were in front of Him when they came to Him. Jesus was very generous with His power to heal and feed and teach. That’s another definition of goodness—to be generous. Being generous means that you share what you have with others and don’t keep it all to yourself. God made me to be really smart with books but a terrible dancer—you just have no idea how bad. He made it so that I love history and the Bible. And then about ten years ago, He gave me the gift to teach people. And then He told me to teach you. But what if I just read my books and enjoyed learning but didn’t share that with anyone? What if I just used what I know to make people feel bad? I’d be showing the opposite of goodness, that’s for sure. All of that is what God gave me and so I give that away to you. It doesn’t mean that I know everything or that I am the best teacher in the world—not by a long shot. But I work hard and study because I want to be excellent in this. I can’t be an excellent dancer and I can’t play musical instruments or read sheet music, and I am so bad at sports that it’s just sad. Even trying would be a waste of my time. But I can become more and more excellent, or good, at what God created me to do. The Holy Spirit helps me with that.

Have you ever wondered how the Holy Spirit works to make us less bad and more good? The Bible says that we are God’s images. All of us. Every human being in the world is created as God’s image. Not animals—just people. All people. In the ancient world of Abraham and even later with Jesus, an image was usually an idol. Someone would make a carving or a mold of something that made them think of their gods and goddesses and then they would perform a ceremony with a knife (I don’t know why they used a knife) and they would touch it to the mouth of the idol and they believed that the spirit of the god would go into the idol—which would turn the idol into a real representative for that god. Because before that, they knew it was just a worthless chunk of clay, rock, wood, or metal. That’s what an image of a fake god or goddess is—something dead that they believed had part of the god or goddess living inside it that they could talk to, worship, feed, take to the bathroom, dress up in fancy clothes, and put to bed at night.

When Moses taught the children of Israel in the wilderness about how our God is different, he used the same exact words to describe how we are the real images of God. That He made us like Him in how we think and in a lot of what we can do. We aren’t God, but we are living, breathing reminders of God throughout the whole world. That’s why Genesis 2 says that God made man out of clay and breathed into him—because that was something they could all understand. They understood that unlike the gods and goddesses of the other nations who were just rocks and wood and clay and metal who couldn’t think, talk, hear, or walk because there was no life at all in them, that we are different. We are made by God and He did put part of Himself in us. Not so that we can be worshiped but so that we could show the world how wise and wonderful He is. He did it so that we could be excellent and rule over all of the things He has created like He would if He were us. That’s how it should have worked but the whole Bible reminds us that it never did. We are always being bad, and sometimes as bad as possible, instead of allowing God to make us excellent in ways that tell creation the truth about who He is and what He is like.

Now, even better than being created as His images is what happens when we believe that Jesus is Lord and we give ourselves over to Him forever. That’s when we receive a special gift—the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit moves in, bad stuff has to start moving out so that goodness can take over more and more. Of course, the bad stuff doesn’t just leave right away because with some of us there would be nothing left. The Holy Spirit works inside us to teach us and to help us want to get rid of the bad and to become better and better so we can be filled with more and more goodness. Somedays, I feel so surly that I am surprised the Holy Spirit doesn’t just move right out but as God is patient and gentle, so is the Spirit. The Spirit can’t be anything that God isn’t, which means that we don’t have to worry about the Spirit hurting us or changing us in ways that will hurt us. Sometimes the Spirit asks us to give up things that are very difficult to give up—like if we hate someone or don’t want to forgive someone we are really angry at. You know, sometimes hating people can make us feel like we are safe from them hurting us ever again but all it really does is make us miserable. But I can promise you that every change the Holy Spirit wants to make in you is a change that will make your life a whole lot better.

I guess we can say that the Holy Spirit is sort of like a balloon that gets bigger and bigger. Inside the balloon is goodness and as we learn to trust God more and more, the balloon gets bigger. That’s going to leave less and less room for the bad stuff that God wants to get rid of. I probably shouldn’t tell you this but before I knew Jesus, I was swearing and cussing all the time. The really, really bad words, even. Then two weeks after I gave my life to Jesus, someone at work noticed that I had stopped swearing. I hadn’t even noticed! That’s what we call a wonder—proof that God is real and working in our lives even if we can’t see Him. There was no reason why I would have ever stopped swearing because I didn’t think anything was wrong with it. I never even tried—just all of a sudden I stopped because I had a Holy Spirit balloon beginning to grow in me and that’s the first thing God wanted gone, I suppose. But it was only the first. I have been a Christian for twenty-five years now and the Holy Spirit has pushed out so much bad stuff that I can’t even hardly remember what I used to be like. That’s probably a good thing. I wasn’t totally bad or anything, but God wants me to be good and so He keeps working on me to make me better even if I never will be totally perfect.

The idols of all the fake gods couldn’t hear, see, smell, taste, talk, breathe or walk—but we can. Of course, their gods couldn’t hear, see, smell, taste, talk, breathe or walk either so I guess stone and metal and wood and clay did a pretty good job of representing them! But our God is real and created everything—if something is going to represent Him it needs to be able hear Him and talk about Him. Only humans can do that, and it’s why He made us different from the animals. Only humans can teach others about God and show them what He is like. Of course, there is one perfect image of God and that’s Jesus. Not only can Jesus teach about God but He can do it perfectly. Not like me because I get stuff wrong. I haven’t been with God forever. I didn’t create the world with Him. I can’t hear God whenever I want to and I haven’t ever seen Him. But Jesus has. The Bible tells us that Jesus is the one and only perfect image of God, who we can’t see. But Jesus could be seen and when He did things, people were seeing what God would do and what was important to God and how loving, and kind and amazing He is. When He talked, it was God talking. Wouldn’t it be great if we could be like that too and we wouldn’t ever be mean or wrong?

Jesus told a story once about God’s goodness—how generous and kind He is and how angry that can make people:

The way things are in God’s Kingdom is like a landowner who went out very early one morning to hire people to work in his vineyard where his grapes were ready to be harvested. He told the men standing around that he would give them a denarius (which was a fair wage for a day’s work), and he sent them to work picking grapes for the day. He went back three hours later and found some people just standing around with nothing to do and so he told them that he would hire them too and pay them fair wages. He went again at lunchtime and late in the afternoon and gave jobs to everyone he found standing around. When it was almost quitting time, he found even more people and asked them why they weren’t doing anything and they said it was because no one had given them any work to do. So he gave them jobs too.

When the sun was beginning to go down, very late in the day, he told the man who managed his fields to bring to workers to him—starting with the people he hired when it was almost time to go home for the night. Everyone was surprised when the landowner gave them pay for an entire day’s work! The landowner was a very generous man, paying them that much money when they had hardly worked at all. And the people who had been hired very early in the morning, when they heard about it—boy oh boy did they get excited. “If that is what he gave those slackers who hardly did anything, just think of how much money we’re going to get!” they said to one another. But when they came to the landowner, he paid them exactly the same amount as the people who had only worked an hour. And boy were they angry about it and started complaining!

“What the heck is going on here? We worked our butts off all day long in the hot sun and we’re getting the same amount as those guys who only worked an hour? This isn’t fair!” But the landowner was very kind and replied, “My friend, I haven’t hurt you. I paid you exactly the amount I said I would and you agreed it was fair at the time. Take your pay and go home. I really wanted to give these other guys the same amount of money as you got—and the money is mine so shouldn’t I be able to do with it whatever I want to? Are you jealous of them because I was kind and generous to them?”

That’s a really good story that shows us how good God is. If that had happened in real life, those men wouldn’t have had enough money to feed their families that day if they had only gotten paid for an hours’ worth of work. We don’t know why they hadn’t been hired or what they were doing all day and all the landowner cared about was making sure they got paid what they needed to survive. And that’s what God’s goodness is like. He is just as concerned with the person who became a Christian today as He is with the person who has been a Christian for fifty years. And they will both get the same reward when they die—they will live forever. When Jesus was talking to the thief on the cross beside him, and that thief asked Jesus to remember him when He became King, Jesus told the man—even though he was a criminal—that he would be with him forever in paradise. Some people don’t like that—it’s the bad inside us that wants to be jealous and mean. But goodness wants for everyone to be saved and to be changed to be more like Jesus. Just think of what would happen if everyone in the world who does bad just keeps doing bad and no one ever changes? I suppose the world would be like it was before the flood when everyone was just evil all the time and no one was safe. But that isn’t a good world—that’s a terrible world. We shouldn’t ever want Satan to win, and that’s what happens when people who do terrible things never change. Just think of how angry it makes Satan when one of his favorite bad guys totally changes into a good guy! Yikes! It’s like someone came into his house and robbed him! We can imagine a world where Hitler changed before so many people were killed. Wouldn’t that have been better? Satan really won big time with Hitler. I hope they enjoy each other’s company.

Goodness is always a challenge that never ends—whether it means being generous, or being excellent in what we are doing to serve God, or in being less and less bad all the time. Jesus was once called, “Good teacher,” and He said, “Why are you calling me good? No one is good except for God!” Does that mean that Jesus was disagreeing with the man, that he wasn’t really good? Not at all. Jesus knew that the man was about to ask Him a question that went something like this, “What do I have to do to be good enough to have eternal life?” Jesus knew that “good enough” is not what we should ever be aiming for in our lives because when we reach “good enough” we don’t have to continue to be better anymore. Jesus wasn’t saying that we can never be good enough to make God happy, but that there is no such thing as good enough except for God. If God is changing us, we will always be getting better. Good enough for that thief next to Jesus on the Cross meant seeing that Jesus really was the King of the Jews and God’s unique Messiah. He was dying and so he wasn’t ever going to be any better than he was. If he had lived longer, then he would have become even better than that. He would have developed more goodness as his Holy Spirit balloon got bigger and bigger inside him.

God never stops changing us, not ever. Sometimes, there are a lot of changes. Over the last two months, God has majorly changed me three times. I mean, like, dang. I have more goodness in me and less badness but that badness surprised me when I finally saw it! Yikes! And then sometimes a lot of time goes by and things seem to stay the same but probably God is letting me rest and get used to my new normal before He starts finding new badness to get rid of. And sometimes my badness fights back and doesn’t want to go and I get all stressed out and start playing video games all day. That’s how I always know that God is trying to fix something—I get really irritated and start avoiding Him. Aren’t people just funny like that? It’s like I can tell He wants to fix something but I have no idea what it is and not knowing is the worst thing about it so I just go and hide. Maybe you think that Bible teachers aren’t just like regular people and that we don’t do silly, ridiculous things when God wants to change us but I can tell you for sure that we aren’t any more reasonable than anyone else is. We’re all pretty much the same. So you don’t have to be perfect—you just have to let God make you more good than you are right now.

I love you. I am praying for you. Goodness isn’t something we will ever get right but we can get a whole lot better. Better is what God wants. He wants it for us and He wants it for everyone around us too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just like with Adam and Eve and their kids, the Bible is telling us again that we are one big human family with one big God, but why was that story so important for Moses to tell and why is there no other story like it in ancient history?

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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 9 and 10)

Noah’s sons who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan. These three were Noah’s sons, and from them the whole earth was populated. (Gen 9:18-19) These are the family records of Noah’s sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. They also had sons after the flood. (Gen 10:1) These are the clans of Noah’s sons, according to their family records, in their nations. The nations on earth spread out from these after the flood. (Gen 10:32)

Genesis chapter ten is just plain weird. It is, and so is chapter eleven because chapter eleven probably happens before chapter ten. But that’s not so strange in the Bible. In the ancient world, they weren’t as fussy about talking about everything in order and if you ever read Jeremiah, it’s like the guy is zooming back and forth in a time machine! And when the Gospel writers wrote about Jesus, they put events in different orders based on the story they were each telling. Remember that they came first—not us. And the Bible was written to them and by them in a way that would make the most sense for them. They weren’t wasting their time thinking, “Hmmm…people in thousands of years are going to want this to be more scientific and they are going to want everything in order and they are going to really want us to explain all this stuff that makes perfect sense to us…” If you listened to my very first broadcast, about what context is and why it is important, you understand this already. Knowing context, which is the stuff that is normal to some people but not normal to others, solves a lot of problems when people from different backgrounds are trying to talk to each other and when it is important to be understood!

At the end of chapter nine, we have one family and one God. By the end of chapter eleven, that won’t be even remotely true anymore. And don’t worry, I am not going to read all those long genealogies to you—mostly because I don’t want to have to pronounce some of those names! Genealogies are very important in the Bible—genealogies are the story of a family tree. They tell you who someone’s parents and grandparents and great-grandparents are. If you remember our past lessons then maybe you remember the Hebrew word, toledot (toe-leh-dote) because it gets mentioned a lot in Genesis one through eleven. And what’s really weird is that, for a book that talks so much about the children of Abraham, he doesn’t even show up until the very end of chapter eleven. So far, Moses has been telling the story of all the world being in one place, and about God dealing with the whole world but that is about to change. At the end of chapter eleven, God is going to choose someone to begin His great plan to rescue the world and everyone and everything in it. And it will start in the most unlikely of ways but that’s generally how God likes to do things. When we think He will choose one person, He chooses another. When we think He will do one thing, He does another. When we want Him to do this, He does that. God is good, but He isn’t very predictable! I guess that if we could figure out what He was going to do ahead of time, it would mean He is too small and predictable to be very good. And there are plenty of things I have thought He should do that I am glad now He didn’t do!

By the end of Chapter 11, we see that people have scattered all over the world, but in chapter ten, Moses gives lists of what nations came from which son of Noah—seventy of them. Some of these nations we know because we have the ancient names from other writings besides the Bible, and some we know because of the Bible—like the ancient name of Egypt is Mitzraim (Mitts-rah-yeem) but we’ll talk about the others as we come to them.

First, we have a list of Japheth’s sons—or at least the nations that descended from him, or maybe a mixture. They haven’t always done family trees that way we do now. They would skip over people (like in the Gospel of Matthew) and names might be different because they want to have a certain number of generations because the numbers told them stories in ways that we don’t understand anymore. Did you know they believed that Adam had everyone who would ever be born in his body??? And so, they could say that Adam was the father of Jesus if they wanted and it would be perfectly true. In Jesus’s day, the Jewish people called Abraham their father even though he lived thousands of years before. It’s just a way of looking at things, even though we don’t say that now. People in ancient times were actually much more concerned about the past than about the future—well, except for survival issues. They were concerned about the rains falling at the right time and having a good harvest, but they were what is called a “backward-facing” people in that they believed that it was better to look to the past and to see what was done by their ancestors than it was to be focused on the future. In America, the future is about all we care about so that is very strange to us and we aren’t afraid to live very differently than our ancestors did.

So, it was very important for Moses’s audience to hear that, at one point, they were all one family and that God was the god of everyone and Noah’s covenant wasn’t just for them and that they weren’t a different kind of human from everyone else in the world. Moses is going to show them that people were chosen by God—first Shem and then one of his sons and on down the line until they got to Abraham and God chose Him so that the Messiah, Jesus would be born. It never says that Shem was better than Japheth—and it never says anything good or bad about any of his descendants, no reason why they were chosen. We don’t know if they were the oldest or youngest. And God is like that—sometimes He will even take the worst sort of person and turn them around! All we do know is that by the time God calls Abraham, Abraham’s family are idol worshipers. So probably Abraham was as well. God loves a challenge. And I know there are a lot of legends and stuff about Abraham alone being faithful to God before God spoke to him, but they are just stories, the Bible says nothing of the sort.

But, as I was saying before I got distracted, Moses claimed that Japheth’s sons mostly went north into modern day Europe, Turkey, and northern Asia and I think all us folks whose ancestors came from there ended up white because it is so stinking cold and rainy and we didn’t get nearly enough sunshine and we bleached out and we burn in the sun and especially people like me because I am like 40% Irish and we don’t get along well with mister sun. And here’s the deal about the sons of Japheth—they aren’t all that important to the Bible story. They really aren’t. Oh sure, the Greeks and the Romans appear all over the New Testament history because they had conquered Judea and Galilee and the surrounding areas, and they had to be converted after Jesus rose from the dead—but even that didn’t happen until at least ten years later. His descendants were all pagans but sometimes you will hear about a city or a nation named after one of Japheth’s descendants, like Tarshish, where Jonah tried to sail away to and is probably in Spain. Or Kittim, which is the Island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean sea. Madai became the Medes, who we see in the book of Daniel. Javan became the Greeks. Ashkenaz became the Armenians we know today. As for the rest, we can only guess because those were names that were familiar to Moses over three thousand years ago!

And you might ask, before we go any farther, how did Moses know all the names of these nations? As we will find out later, Moses was raised in the palace of the Pharaoh of Egypt (their king) and from the time he was very young, he would have seen people bringing tribute (gifts) to Pharaoh from all over the known world. As he grew up and was educated, he would learn all about these nations who had to give these yearly gifts to Pharoah, or else. He probably had objects in his home from all over—until he had to leave. Moses was a very educated man. He might have been one of the only Hebrews who could read because the rest of his people were being forced to work as slaves. And it is very important that Moses put this together because it is the only genealogy in the history of the world like it—but I will explain that more later.

Next, Moses tells us about where the sons of Ham ended up—now, these nations we know much better because so many of them show up in the Bible! Cush was what they called northeast Africa—the area that is now Ethiopia and the countries surrounding it. Have you heard of the Queen of Sheba who came to test Solomon’s wisdom and brought gifts from her magnificent kingdom? Sheba was in that area too. Havilah, where Genesis tells us the gold is very good, and Arabia, where Mt Sinai is! And then he mentions Mitzraim—the ancient name for Egypt. Everyone knows about Egypt because it was the world’s first superpower, the world’s first real empire, they built the pyramids, they had amazing medical knowledge (they could even do eye surgery!), they had clocks and calendars and a written language and paper and ink and so many other things. Put became the Libyans, to the west of Egypt. And of course, the Canaanites–who settled in the Promised Land which was called Canaan until it was renamed after Jacob, who was also called Israel. Egypt is like one of the power players in the Bible—we are going to see them over and over again. That’s where people will go when there is a famine (meaning no food), or when they are in danger (like Jesus and Jeroboam, who was running from King Solomon), or when they want help fighting their enemies. In fact, besides Jesus’s family, and Jacob’s family, who were actually told to go there—everyone else went in order to get help that they believed God wasn’t going to give them. And it got them into a lot of trouble because God wanted them to depend on Him. Like the places where Japheth’s descendants ended up, Africa was also full of idols because that was what all the world was going after in those days.

There is one more descendant of Ham that we will be discussing, but we will do it next week because he is special. That man is Nimrod and he is so cool to study because what the Bible actually says about him only makes sense because of the archaeology over the last two centuries. Before that. All people could do was guess and write legends about him. We don’t know exactly who he was, but the way he is described is very important! But one of the odd things about him is that he left his family and went to Asia instead of Africa, Israel, or Arabia. We will try to figure out why that was.

Last of all, Moses mentions the children of Shem and where they ended up and these guys show up all over the Bible too. He doesn’t mention Israel or Abraham—he will do that in Chapter 11 instead. But he talks about a lot of other people who are going to be big trouble in the future. First, he mentions Eber and all of the children of Israel in Moses’s audience knew who Eber was—he was their ancestor! So, as they were listening, they would have said, “Shhh…this is the good part!” Ancient people loved to hear their genealogy, their toledot, because they believed it told them more about who they were than anything else could. They thought that being related to someone amazing and famous made them amazing and famous, that’s how honor/shame cultures worked. People judged you by your family’s reputation and not so much by whether you were a great person or a skunk—even though whatever your great grandfather did has nothing to do with what kind of person you are! And have you ever noticed that when people do their family trees, they only want to talk about the really cool people they are related to and not the people who have done horrible, embarrassing things? I am just saying, that if you go around bragging about the good ones you need to admit the bad ones too, right? Okay!

The sons of Shem, like the sons of Ham, also end up being enemies to the children of Israel! In fact, Shem’s descendants all end up being idol worshippers too! It’s from Shem’s kids that we get the Babylonians, and the Assyrians because they went east into Asia. Although the children of Israel were saved from the Egyptians during the Exodus, the Assyrians destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel about seven hundred years before Jesus was born and the Babylonians destroyed the Southern Kingdom almost six hundred years before Jesus. And the Assyrians were conquered by the Babylonians. And the Babylonians were conquered by the Medes (who came from Japheth) and the Persians (who came from Shem). And then they were conquered by the Greeks (who also came from Japheth) and then the Greeks were conquered by the Romans (again, from Japheth). And that was all before Jesus was born, all of that nonsense—of course, Moses didn’t know all that, all he knew was about the Exodus out of Egypt at this point.

So, like, there are no good guys here. Remember that the Bible is the story of God’s rescue mission to bring us all to Himself again like in the Garden. The Bible is not a book about good people who do everything right. It’s a book about people who do some totally whacked things to one another and God trying to get it dealt with so that everyone can be free from all this sin and all this death. But it doesn’t mean that the people in the Bible were grateful or appreciated it. They weren’t generally on their best behavior. When Moses wrote this, he was writing the only document in the history of the world that said that everyone living on the face of the earth came from the same eight people—Noah, Shem, Ham, Japheth, and their wives. And that in the beginning, they had one God, one patch of land, one clan, one nation and one language. So, they weren’t a different species than all the people who came out of Egypt with them (the Bible calls them the “mixed multitude”)—they were not only all human but all family. I guess we could say they all got their water out of the same faucet—and so, they were all created in God’s image. God wanted them to know that we were all meant to be together, even though we can’t all live in the exact same place. God was telling them a secret in the desert, that He was everyone’s only God once and one day He would fix things so that all the world would know Him again like they did when the eight of them stepped out of the ark.

When other nations told their stories, they didn’t talk about how everyone was related—they only talked about how their own gods created them. You know, we’ve talked about this—making them out of the blood of their enemies, or hatching them from eggs, or any number of ways they could think of. Chinese mythology has some especially creative origin stories. But the point of their stories was to make sure that their own people knew how unique and special they were compared to everyone else and in the ancient world, people didn’t see themselves as all created equally in God’s image. They thought that the strong countries were superior to weak countries, that slaves were not as good as their masters, and that women and children were not as good as men to men. That’s just how they were. They were interested in who was the most powerful and who could take what they wanted and kill whoever they wanted to get it. So, when David fought Goliath, everyone thought David was inferior because Goliath was so big and powerful. But God didn’t see it that way and neither did David. I am so glad we don’t live like that anymore. Yuck. I am teeny tiny. I’d be in huge trouble.

You see, God’s rescue plan wasn’t just for the children of Israel. I mean, if He had been forgotten by almost the entire world then it means that danged Serpent would win. In Isaiah 49:6, God talks about what Jesus would do—and He wasn’t just going to save the children of Israel, or the Jews, from their sins and from death—all the things that happened in the Garden when Adam and Eve disobeyed and everything got messed up. Nope, God has always had a plan to rescue everyone who is willing to believe Him. Look at what He says to Jesus, “It is not enough for you to be my servant raising up the tribes of Jacob and restoring the protected ones of Israel. I will also make you a light for the nations, to be my salvation to the ends of the earth.” Wow! God isn’t interested in leaving everyone in the ditch just because of which son of Noah they came from or where they ended up living or what they look like or what language they speak. When God goes on a rescue mission—He really means it and that is why, right before Jesus went back to be with God, He said, ““All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matt 28:18-20)

Why to the ends of the earth? Because we are all God’s people, created in the image of God and so God sent Jesus to do what no one else could ever do—live a perfect life and suck all the power out of sin and death when they tried to take Him down. And that’s a story everyone needs to hear—so God sent out first a small group and then more and more and more and now there are people just about everywhere who are teaching what Jesus did and how He defeated that serpent so that all of those curses in the Garden are done and dead. We see some of it now, but less and less as God’s truth spreads out to all of our cousins all over the world. That’s why Jesus called us all brothers and sisters because He wants us to know that we are all related with no one better than anyone else. Sure, some people can run faster or think more quickly or sing better or make beautiful art or whatever—but that just means they are better at doing something, not that they are better. Totally different! One of the things that Peter had to learn in Acts 10 is that God doesn’t play favorites—and no matter who you are or where you came from or what you have done, you can put your trust in God because you are just as precious and valuable to Him as anyone else. God doesn’t care about your DNA or your family tree, He cares about you.

One other thing that Genesis 10 tells us is that people were gathered all over the world according to their “lands, clans, nations, and languages.” It says it three times—after talking about the sons of Japheth and again after the sons of Ham and with Shem too. That’s another important way for God to tell us that those are the only differences—and they aren’t really even very important. The land—that’s where you are born and there is nothing you can do to change it, your clan (that’s your family group), your nation (or country), and your language. No one has any control over any of those things. They don’t make you better or worse than anyone else. People are divided by distance and by language because it is hard to communicate, but nothing is there about being divided by color. Because that’s something new and evil we invented. That wasn’t from God. In fact, Paul said, ^“There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; since you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal 3:28, et al)

That means that if you trust Jesus, nothing else is important. Nothing can hold you back from whatever He tells you to do. No one can say they are superior to you because we are one. We are one big family again. Just like in the beginning.

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

Adam and Eve have another baby, whom they name Seth, and during his life, people begin to “call on the Name of the Lord.” What does that mean and why is that important throughout the rest of the Bible?

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

(Parents, all scripture is from the CSB, slightly modified, unless I say otherwise)

²⁵ Adam was intimate with (knew) his wife again, and she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, for she said, “God has given me another offspring(child) in place of Abel, since Cain killed him.” ²⁶ A son was born to Seth also, and he named him Enosh. At that time people began to call on the name of the Lord.

Hey! Adam and Eve are back in the story! The last time we saw them was when Cain and Abel were born, remember? Remember how Eve said that she had gotten Cain with God’s help? And how, although we are given names for both boys, there isn’t anything about who named them? These new verses start out very differently from the verses about Cain and Abel. Now Eve’s tune has really changed. Now, she sees that God has given her another child. Eve has changed a lot—she doesn’t see her new child as something she has “gotten” but something she has been given. Eve is now giving full credit to God when she has this new baby. And, unlike Cain and Abel, Eve actually names Seth. In the same way, Seth will also name his own son Enosh.

Remember last week? We talked about Cain’s descendants and all the important things they invented and did. One was a bad dude, Lamech, but the others seemed to be really creative guys. It sure looks as though Cain’s curse was only on Cain and not on the people who came after him. Well, from now on we’re never going to hear about Cain’s family ever again. Starting now, the story will be about Adam’s descendants through his third son Seth. From Seth and his wife will come some important people—some good and some bad. Until we get to the time of Noah, we won’t really know very much about the very long list of names we will read in Genesis 5. Only two men, Enoch and Noah, will be called out for being good guys. The rest of them, all we will know is how long they lived before having certain kids and how old they were when they died. Otherwise, zip, zilch, nada.

Does the Bible tell us anything else about Seth? Yes, in chapter five it tells us something very important—that Seth wasn’t created in God’s image but in Adam’s image. Does that mean that Seth looks like his dad? Kinda, but we aren’t talking about his physical appearance here, his eye and hair color. Humans were originally created in God’s image, but that doesn’t mean we look like God. It means that we were created to rule over Creation the way that He rules, showing His character to the whole world and caring for it like He does. It meant that we were supposed to show we were in His image by doing things His way but then something terrible happened—people stopped doing things God’s way and began doing things their own way instead. So, Seth was the image of Adam and not the image of God. We are all created with the capacity, the ability and potential, of doing things God’s way but we most often do things the way that the humans around us do things and so we generally end up behaving very badly indeed. When the Bible says that Seth was in Adam’s image, it means that Seth would follow the example set by his father and would not follow God perfectly in how he lives. Would anyone ever be born in God’s image again?

Yes! As the Apostle Paul tells us in Colossians 1:15, Jesus was created in the image of God—and actually, Jesus is the image of God. I say created instead of born because Jesus isn’t like us. We all had fathers and we are a combination of our moms and dads but Jesus didn’t come from Joseph, only from Mary. His Father was God because his mother Mary became pregnant by the Holy Spirit of God. Do we know exactly how that works? Nope. The Bible doesn’t say. Guess it isn’t really all that important for us to understand and we probably aren’t smart enough to understand. Let’s look at that verse and a couple of others.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For everything was created by him, in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through him and for him.He is before all things, and by him all things hold together.He is also the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him,and through him to reconcile everything to himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. (Col 1:15-20)

So, does that mean that no one can ever be made in God’s image ever again, like Adam and Eve originally were? Well, we aren’t born that way anymore but we can be remade that way, through Jesus.

You are being renewed in knowledge according to the image of your Creator. ¹¹ In Christ there is not Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all. (Col 3:10b-11)

It’s very important for us to all understand that God didn’t make us to be hopeless! He has a plan so that we can be more and  more like Him and do things His way, just as it was in the beginning before that crafty Serpent convinced Adam and Eve that God didn’t want what was best for them and was holding out on the good stuff. That’s nonsense, of course, but they were tricked into being suspicious enough of God that they decided to make a very bad one-way decision that led them into nothing but trouble.

Now, our second lesson in this week’s scripture is the beginning of two of the most important things in the entire Bible—prayer and worship. That’s what “Calling on the Name of the Lord” means. For some reason, in the second generation after Adam, the people decided to make a good decision for a change. I mean, that’s really what Genesis three and four have been about, people having choices to do great things or terrible things and choosing to do terrible things instead. Until now. Suddenly, in the days of Adam’s grandson Enosh, people begin to call on the Name of the Lord. This is probably long before Lamech is born. But what does that mean—calling on the Name of the Lord? Does it mean that they suddenly learned God’s Name and began to say it out loud? That’s what it sounds like when you translate it from Hebrew into English and so, a lot of people think that’s all it means but that is not what this phrase means when it shows up in the Bible—and it shows up a lot. Sometimes, we make the mistake of looking at the translation of a Bible idiom and take it literally. Like, if I stick my head out the back door and call my kids’ names, it probably means it is dinner time. But would I call “on” the names of my kids? Nope. That would be weird. If I call my kids names, I will use their names. If I am mad, they might hear their middle names too.

But calling on someone means that we are asking for help. Specifically, we call on God because He is the only one who can help us when we need certain things. In the Bible, we see people calling on the Name of the Lord whenever they need for Him to remember His promises because God’s promises are what we call covenants. And covenants are more than just promises or plans or contracts that can be broken if things don’t work out. When God makes a covenant, it is forever. When God said, in Genesis 3:15, that one of Eve’s descendants would crush the serpent’s head—He meant it.  I personally think that Eve thought that would be Cain, but the Bible doesn’t say that for a fact. I think that as time went by, generation after generation, that the people knew of God’s promise and wondered more and more when it would finally happen and they could go back to the Garden—or at least get revenge on that Serpent. After a while, I believe that people stopped waiting for this deliverer to be born and started praying about it. They were tired of the curse on the Land. They were tired of the growing consequences of sin and death. They were tired of people getting older and sicker. They were tired of working very hard and just having enough to survive. And so, they began to call on the Name of the Lord to save them and to deliver them from all the consequences of what Adam and Eve had done.

Remember, these people didn’t have Bibles. They didn’t have a book full of the promises of God so they could look and remember how faithful He is, like we can. So, they would call on Him and say, “Remember us! Save us!” And whenever we call upon the Name of the Lord, that’s what we are asking, we are asking for Him to save us in some way—whether it meant to send the Messiah to crush the head of the Serpent, or to save the Israelites from slavery, or from enemy armies, or from famine or sickness. We call on the Lord because we know that only He can absolutely save us.

But you might ask, and a lot of people do ask—do we need to know how to pronounce God’s actual name if we want Him to hear us? And that’s a very good question. Now, in the Bible, whenever you see the word Lord in small caps, that means that that word is covering up the four-letter name of God. And that happens almost seven thousand times in the Hebrew Bible. It never happens in the Greek Gospels and other writings about Jesus. By the time Jesus was born, people hadn’t been saying God’s Name out loud for a long time and we actually never see Jesus doing it either. When they were no longer their own Kingdom, and when pagan nations (nations that worshipped false gods) were ruling over them, they seem to have decided that they needed to protect God’s holy name from being used in bad ways by people who didn’t worship Him. And it even became a crime to say it out loud. So, people stopped pronouncing those four letters, yod-hey-vav-hey and if it wasn’t for some old Greek documents from the time of the life of Jesus, we wouldn’t know that they pronounced it Yahweh, and I will link to a very long Jewish Encyclopedia article that talks about the Greek-era Jewish amulets that have the Greek letters on them that tell us how they pronounced it in the first century. Unlike Hebrew, Greek has vowels and so when Jews who spoke Greek as their language wrote down God’s Name, it had consonants and vowels, and not just consonants. I want you to think about that. What would your first name be with no vowels? Or consonants that make vowel sounds? My name would be spelled TLR. And if you didn’t know me personally, you wouldn’t know if I was a Tyler or a Taylor or a Tuler or a Telar or whatever. In modern times, Hebrew has what are called vowel points, and they are added above, below, or beside the consonants so that people who are not native Hebrew speakers can tell how to pronounce words. But in their street signs and newspapers, you have to understand the context to know what the words are and how they are pronounced. There are only a few words that I can read without all the vowel points. It’s just too hard for me. Maybe after the lesson today, you can write out your names with no vowels and think of all the ways it could be pronounced by putting in different vowels. It’s pretty funny. But, because of the two-thousand-year-old Greek amulets, we know that the Greek speaking Jews pronounced God’s Name Yahweh.

But, if your family calls Him Lord, or Elohim, or El Shaddai, or Adonai or Kyrios or God or whatever, that’s fine too. And I call Him God or Lord here on the radio. Now, in pagan religions, they believed that how you pronounced the name of theirs god was very, very important. They didn’t believe their gods were very smart and we have talked about that before. They thought that gods had different names—on one hand, there were titles of respect (just like the Bible uses, things like El and Elohim and Adon and Adonai), and on the other hand they had the regular name for that god (like Apollos, Diana, Zeus, Jupiter, Ares, etc) and on their third hand or maybe a foot, because we ran out of hands, there was their super-secret name that only they knew. And if you could find out the super-secret name, then you could use it to control them like a remote-control car. And we see this in ancient pagan myths like the story of Isis and Ra. Isis and Ra were Egyptian gods, and one day Isis, the Egyptian goddess of healing and magic, tricked Ra, the sun god, into telling her his super-secret name (which isn’t Ra) and once she learned it, she could make him do whatever the heck she wanted him to do. That’s called naming-magic and it is a very popular pagan belief. Of course, the Bible never says that we have to know how to pronounce God’s Name in order for Him to hear us. He is our only God, the creator of the heavens and the earth and all of us. When I say, “God” He knows I can’t possibly be talking about anyone else. I call Him by all sorts of titles and sometimes by the Name Yahweh, and I get my prayers answered—just not always with a yes! I mean, He is still God and He is not a vending machine where I press the buttons for a certain order and then get what I want. But the whole idea that we have to know exactly how to pronounce God’s name is something that came from other religions. It’s about the belief in magic, that how you pronounce something works like a spell. If you say things the right way then God hears you but if you don’t then He won’t. I tell you, the ancient pagans didn’t think their gods were particularly smart or powerful. I am glad they aren’t real.

But anyway, during the time of Seth and his son Enosh, people started calling on God to ask Him for help, to keep His promises, and to worship Him. Because, when we go to God for help instead of someone else, or when we go to God and tell Him and believe that only He can help us, that’s an act of worship. I bet you thought that worship is all about music! But nope, worship is about a whole life lived for God—listening to Him, obeying him, depending on Him, giving Him credit for this wonderful creation by thanking Him, and praising Him. What does it mean to praise Him? Well, praise can be musical or just words or in writing or in our hearts. When we sing songs about God, that’s praise. When something wonderful happens and we shout about how wonderful God is, that’s praise. When our prayers are answered and we tell everyone about it, that’s praise. Sometimes, my “loudest” praise of all if when I am lying in bed at night and my heart is so full of love for God that I just feel like it will burst.

I want to talk about calling on the Name of Jesus and why that is important. Of course, Jesus is God’s chosen Messiah who died to save us from sin and death. And calling on Him means that we are saying that we believe that God sent Him and that everything He did shows us who God is, and that we believe God raised Him from the dead. When we call upon the Name of the Lord Jesus, or you might call Him Yeshua or Jesus (Spanish) or Yesu or Isa depending on where you live, we are calling on Him to include us in God’s Kingdom because that is the only way we can be saved from the death and sin that the Serpent brought into this world when he tricked and tempted Adam and Eve into disobeying God and not trusting Him. In the book of Acts, written about the things some of Jesus’s disciples did after Jesus returned to God the Father, we meet a young man named Saul. Now, Saul loved God very much and God’s laws were very important to Saul. He believed with his whole heart that the disciples were wrong and that Jesus had led people astray from worshiping God. Well, one day, Saul was on his way to a city named Damascus, which still exists to this very day, and he was going to arrest all of the Jewish people who believed that Jesus is the Messiah. But Jesus spoke to him while he was on the way and blinded him. And for three whole days, Saul was so upset that he couldn’t eat or drink anything. The voice of Jesus—it told him that he was wrong, and that Saul was not on God’s side even though he was trying very hard to do the right thing. Jesus told Saul that He had work for him to do and that He would tell him all about it later. Let’s look at Acts chapter 9 to see the rest of the story:

¹⁰ There was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias, and the Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias.” “Here I am, Lord,” he replied. ¹¹ “Get up and go to the street called Straight,” the Lord said to him, “to the house of Judas, and ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul, since he is praying there. ¹² In a vision he has seen a man named Ananias coming in and placing his hands on him so that he may regain his sight.” ¹³ “Lord,” Ananias answered, “I have heard from many people about this man, how much harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem. ¹⁴ And he has authority here from the chief priests to arrest all who call on your name.” ¹⁵ But the Lord said to him, “Go, for this man is my chosen instrument to take my name to Gentiles, kings, and Israelites. ¹⁶ I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.” ¹⁷ Ananias went and entered the house. He placed his hands on him and said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road you were traveling, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” ¹⁸ At once something like scales fell from his eyes, and he regained his sight. Then he got up and was baptized. ¹⁹ And after taking some food, he regained his strength.

So, throughout the Bible, people have called on the Name of the Lord when they needed saving. And we see throughout the Hebrew parts of the Bible, what some people call the Old Testament, that God responded by saving the children of Israel in a lot of ways, some very big and some very small. But, it was never big enough that everyone could be saved but John 3:16 tells us that God loves the whole world, not just the children of Israel. He saved the children of Israel over and over again because, through them, God would save the entire world—everyone who wants to call on the Name of the Lord. He chose one family, Abraham’s family, and then He chose Abraham’s son Isaac instead of Ishmael, and then Jacob instead of Esau, and then Judah instead of his brothers, and then David and on and on and on until there came to be born Mary, and from her, Jesus was born. But each time, that was God’s choice, and He never started all over again with different people because God had made promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God doesn’t ever break His promises. And so, Jesus was born in response to the prayers of all the children of Israel and all of the people going all the way back to Seth and Enosh who called on the Name of the Lord to save them from sin and death and all the curses that the Serpent’s tricks had brought into their lives. And we will talk about who or what the Serpent might have been in a few weeks before we talk about Noah and the flood.

All those people called on the Name of the Lord to be saved from all those consequences and God’s answer was Jesus. He lived a perfect life. He did things that the Bible says only God can do. Things like forgiving sin, healing lepers, curing the blind, walking on water, and even commanding the wind and the waves to stop. He could also do the mighty works of the ordinary prophets who came before Him, like Elijah and Moses. And God gave Him to us to save us—that was the way God decided to handle the problem of sin and death and all the consequences of what went wrong in the Garden. The prophet Joel said that, “everyone who calls on the Name of the Lord will be saved.” And God’s choice to answer that prayer was His Son Jesus, His personal representative, created in His image and as His perfect image but who lived perfectly when Adam couldn’t. So when we call on the Name of Jesus, we are telling God that we accept His choice for saving us, that we believe that this is how God answered the prayers of all His people for so long. Just think if Jesus hadn’t come—we’d still be waiting and things would be horrible.

Saul thought he was serving God when he arrested everyone who believed that Jesus was God’s way of answering all those prayers for help and salvation, but Jesus came to him in a vision and set him straight. Jesus made him blind so that he wouldn’t be able to go forward with his plans and it sure gave him some serious time to think about everything he was doing and everything that had happened. And then, when he had thought for long enough, Jesus sent another Jewish man named Ananias to make Saul see again. And Saul became one of the greatest Bible teachers who every lived and he went out telling everyone in all the cities of modern-day Turkey and even in Rome all about Jesus and he made many disciples among the people he found, both Jews and Gentiles. God isn’t cruel or spiteful. Even when we do terrible things to hurt people, He can turn us around so that we can follow and serve Him. Ananias was worried about Saul, but later, under the name of Paul, he wrote many letters that made their way into the Bible.

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