The truth is that we know more about angels on TV and in Christian art than we do about angels in the Bible, and so before we dive into our first real encounter with angels in Genesis 19 we’re going to see what the Bible does and doesn’t say about Angels. And we’ll talk about the three most famous angels of all!

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

Since two angels showed up with God on Abraham’s doorstep (okay, he didn’t have a doorstep), before we get into Genesis 19 we need to talk about angels and messengers and men because sometimes it can be hard to know what we are dealing with in the Bible and the same word is used to describe messengers who are human and messengers who are angels! Hebrew isn’t like English where we have a ton of different words, and a lot of Hebrew and Greek words can’t be translated or understood by just using a dictionary definition. We have to look at the whole verse and sometimes even the whole chapter to know what they mean this time—and the next time we see the word, it might mean something entirely different. If you are confused, then you are not alone because grownups have to figure this stuff out too. And different Bibles use different English words too—which is why some Bibles say angels and others say messengers. It sure isn’t easy translating Bibles—not just anyone can do it. Maybe someday you will be a language expert and you can do it but not me, nope, I couldn’t translate anything if my life depended on it. We all have different parts to play in serving God, and I am so grateful that some people are really good at understanding other languages because otherwise I wouldn’t know what the heck is going on.

The Bible has a lot to say about angels, but it’s very mysterious and confusing. It’s not like there is a chapter totally devoted to angels just talking about them like a high school biology book. We have to filter through the entire Bible for clues—which means that unless someone knows the Bible really well, they probably have a lot of wrong ideas about angels. And to make things even worse, outside of the Bible there are even more beliefs about angels that have nothing at all to do with the Bible. Maybe you’ve heard that people become angels after they die, or that angels all have wings, or that there are angels who look like little babies who fly around in February, shooting people with mini-arrows and making them fall in love. When I was younger, but still a grownup, there were TV series like Touched by an Angel and Highway to Heaven, making it even more confusing. It’s hard to separate what the Bible says from what we see on TV, in movies, from legends, or in books. And that wouldn’t be such a big deal, but it makes what we see in the Bible confusing. And sometimes we picture things in our minds that have nothing to do with what the Bible says. Genesis 19 is the first time we see angels in the Bible actually called angels, and we see them as normal-looking men who have messenger jobs—which means that they are doing jobs for God here on earth, either delivering messages or checking things out. We will see angels doing other things too—like fighting battles and saving people. Really, an angel’s job is whatever God tells them to do. Sometimes angels are in disguise, and sometimes they aren’t—and when they aren’t, they are really scary-looking, and we have to be told not to be afraid. And when we look at some of the things people wrote about angels outside of the Bible, we can see some pretty wacky ideas that came from their time in exile in Babylon!

First of all, I want you to know that we aren’t going to talk about the Angel of the Lord because that’s different from ordinary angels—the Angel of the Lord is God somehow, but I really don’t understand it totally. Regular angels are heavenly beings, meaning they live where God is and they can see God and talk to Him and get orders from Him and all that jazz. We know from the Bible that angels were created to be angels by God. When people die, they don’t become angels. People who are dead are still people and when Jesus comes back and they come alive again, they will still be humans but with perfect bodies that can’t get sick and die anymore. Although Jesus said that we will be like angels when we die, because we won’t be getting married, being like something isn’t the same as being that thing. For example, I am like Taylor Swift because I am a woman, but that’s where it ends. So, we are like but not like angels. In fact, angels are superior to us—they live forever once God creates them unless God ends their lives and so they are smarter and wiser and know a whole lot more than we ever will. The word angel is really just a job description for these heavenly creatures. We get the word angel from the Greek word angelos, and the Hebrew word is malakim, but those words both mean the same thing—messenger. That’s where it can get confusing because angelos and malakim, messengers, can also be human beings, so we have to read what the Bible says to know when we are dealing with an angel from Heaven or a human being carrying a message as a messenger or a priest or a prophet. In the book of Revelation, at the end of the Bible, the writer is sending messages to the “angels” of seven churches in modern-day Turkey. Are those angels humans or from God? It doesn’t say but it could be both, although since they are seven letters, it sounds like they should be humans—not like angels need letters from humans, right? And angels deliver messages from God and not from people.

Depending on where we are in the Bible, there are different names given to God’s angelic messengers. Sometimes they are called ministers, or Daniel calls them watchers, or hosts and mighty ones when they are fighting angels, and mediators. But in the end, no matter what they are called, they all have the same job—which is to do whatever God tells them to do. But angels aren’t robots—they have what we call free will which means that they can decide to say no. And there are stories in the Bible about angels who said no and who even went to war against God and got chucked out of heaven. We’ll talk about that more later. Angels aren’t as much trouble as we are but they can still be rebellious and get themselves into trouble. Not so much like in the movies—those angels can be kinda hopeless and silly like in It’s a Wonderful Life. Angels have very important jobs other than carrying around messages—some are part of God’s heavenly council, and they listen to God make plans and even offer suggestions for what He can do. Sometimes, God even asks for volunteers for jobs—like when He needed someone to trick an evil king by telling his false prophets what the King wanted to hear instead of what His true prophet was saying—because the king wasn’t listening to him! Sometimes, God needs an army to protect His people from invading armies and He sends angels. And because human soldiers can’t kill angels, that’s a super bad deal for the human soldiers. If you ever saw the last movie of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, they had a ghost army in it that no one could fight because they were already dead, but angel soldiers aren’t dead. Which is good because that would be totally gross and scary if that could actually happen—which it can’t. Sometimes, though, we see angel armies fighting against the armies of Satan—mysterious creatures called demons. That makes the fighting very difficult—the angel in charge of God’s armies is named Michael. The angel who seems to be in charge of the super important messages is named Gabriel. And that’s another important thing because not all angels are the same—some seem to be bosses over the others.

Although angels don’t have human bodies, the Bible shows us times when they disguise themselves as human beings—like in Genesis 18 when the two angels were traveling with God, and they were all pretending to be human travelers. Lot’s not even going to notice that they aren’t human until things get really ugly and dangerous. And they are very fast—because the first thing we will notice about the angels in chapter 19 is that they traveled somewhere between eighteen and forty miles from Abraham’s camp in Hebron all the way down to Sodom in just a few hours. That’s super-fast.

Not everything we would call an angel is actually the same thing—we are mostly used to angels disguised as people in the Bible and sometimes they are wearing white robes when people see them in visions but there are also other created beings in heaven. Cherubim and Seraphim are created beings that we find around God’s throne and protecting Eden from invaders. And they are scary looking, lemme tell you. The Cherubim aren’t those chubby little baby angels with bows and arrows shooting cartoon characters in the butt to make them fall in love. Nope, you wouldn’t ever want to see one because you’d be scared to death. I mean, they are guarding God’s special places and so you wouldn’t want them to not be scary, right? They have two or four wings with hands under their wings and the sound they make when they are flapping their wings is just deafening and they also have cow hooves for feet. And they have eyeballs all over their bodies and four faces—a human face, an eagle face, a lion face and the face of an ox, which is like a bull (a male cow) but bigger and used for pulling plows and heavy farming stuff. You see one of these guys and you will definitely need to change your underwear. Ain’t nobody trying to get past them and especially when they have swords, okay? But I don’t think they actually need swords if they look like that. If you are brave enough to mess with those guys then a sword isn’t going to scare you either.

We don’t know nearly as much about the Seraphim, except that they have six wings and seem to maybe be on fire—but that’s debatable. They used two wings for flying, two for covering their faces (because God is so holy that they can’t look at Him), and two covering their feet but sometimes in the Bible when it talks about covering or uncovering your feet it means putting on or taking off whatever is covering your private parts. Covering your feet was a funny way of saying you were going to the bathroom! Because, otherwise, I have no idea why they would need to cover their actual feet with their wings unless they had super gnarly, dirty toenails. One thing that angels, cherubim, and seraphim all have in common is that they all praise God, a lot. They sing about how wonderful God is and they don’t seem to ever get tired of it and because their bodies aren’t like ours their throats probably don’t even get sore. Do you like to sing? I love to sing. Singing to God forever sounds like a great job to me. I bet that none of them are tone deaf or sing flat or sharp.

When we get to the Psalms and even in Deuteronomy, we find out that when God made all the different languages at the Tower of Babel to keep the people in Shinar from building that huge thing that was so small that God couldn’t see it without going down to look at it—which is just one of many hilarious jokes hidden all over the Bible—well, Moses and the people who wrote the Psalms said that God gave seventy angels the responsibility to guide and watch all of those new nations. They were supposed to watch over the people because God wanted to save them all but when the people started worshiping those angels as gods, the angels didn’t do anything to stop them. Which is, you know, really bad but that is just one of the ways where angels are like us—we can all decide to do the right thing or the wrong thing. And these guys were just not thinking straight. No way was this going to work out okay! Daniel talked about how the archangel Michael was busy trying to fight one of these angels just to get a message through to Daniel after he prayed! Daniel called that angel the Prince of the Kingdom of Persia. And it took Michael, the head of all God’s armies, three weeks to get through so you know this wasn’t a person who was a prince but a very powerful angel. You know, it’s hard to understand why anyone who was that close to God could do such a thing, right? But it is easy to want to be worshiped.

But as for normal angels, in addition to the jobs we have already talked about, we see that they also patrol the earth like policemen, looking for things to report back to God. And we might ask ourselves, “but doesn’t God know everything?” And although I think He does, He also likes to have others make themselves useful. I mean really, God doesn’t actually need us to do anything because He could just do everything Himself but He doesn’t. And we don’t know why. There isn’t anything that we can do or the angels can do that God can’t do Himself but part of how He likes to work seems to be involving others. God is very social, and He likes to do things as a community. I think that’s really cool that God, who is so powerful, likes for all of us to be useful and to feel needed. That makes us a lot different from the animals because we can do things that really matter, even though we can also choose to do things that are very terrible. God values what we do and that’s why He gives us specific gifts—and the same with angels. And there are probably types of angels that aren’t even mentioned in the Bible because humans don’t come in contact with them. The universe, after all, is a huge place—which brings me to how Jewish beliefs about angels changed over time and especially after the exile.

When we see angels in the Old Testament, they look like men and they work carrying messages, fighting God’s battles, praising Him, and all that. But after the Jewish people came back from their exile in Babylon, some of them began to write fiction—and fiction is stories that aren’t true but are entertaining and tell us what people were thinking at a certain time about different things. Many of these stories are about angels and they are really imaginative. It seems as though they took what the Bible says about angels and mixed it together with the beliefs of the Babylonians and the Persians and the Greeks—just everyone who was boss over their people for five hundred years. You see, whenever you are part of a culture—and that’s our context—ideas rub off on you. If you go into a Christian bookstore in most of America, you will see art and figurines of angels who are mostly white with long blonde hair and blue eyes—which is odd because why would angels have recessive genes? Hey, high schoolers, figure that one out for me please.  And they have huge wings, and they are mostly women. That’s how our culture sees angels here in America and it is very different from what we see in the Bible where they all look like guys without wings, and I am betting they were all brown-skinned with brown hair and brown eyes so that they looked normal to the Bible people. Lemme tell you that blonde, white, blue-eyed angels walking around would have been super freaky. And yes, people were usually scared when angels appeared to them, but no one talks about how they looked so we have to assume that apart from being spectacular as angels, they would have been considered normal.

Ancient Israelites had some kinda wacky beliefs about God before the exile—which is why they worshiped other gods and goddesses too. Even though God told them not to they did it anyway. It seems like they figured God was the boss of all the gods and it was okay with him if they also worshiped the mother goddess Asherah, and Ba’al whom they thought was responsible for giving them rain, and Dagan who they figured gave them lots of wheat and barley to eat. Now, after they came back from Babylon, they never did that again and they knew there was only one God but some of them found another way to believe the almost exact same thing—and they wrote stories about how angels were doing all those jobs instead and because they were angels, they didn’t need to be worshipped and couldn’t be worshiped. And so, in these stories that were written in Greek and Aramaic, they came up with ideas about what they thought Heaven was like and what things looked like wherever God is at with the angels working behind the scenes. So, you have angels who are in charge of these warehouses where they store up the snow, the rain, and the wind. And they gave them fancy names like Uriel, Samlazaz, Araklba, Rameel, Kokablel, Tamlel, Ramlel, Danel, Ezeqeel, Baraqijal, Asael, Armaros, Batarel, Ananel, Zaqiel, Samsapeel, Satarel, Turel, Jomjael, Sariel, and many, many others. Of course, different people wrote the different stories at different times and in different places and so the list of names they gave to the angels never matched up with each other, or their jobs either. But it was okay because people understood they were writing “what if” stories.

But these make-believe stories were incredibly popular—like the Left Behind series of books when I was in my twenties, and so they influenced the way people saw things and thought about angels even when those stories didn’t line up with the Bible and usually didn’t. But they weren’t written to go into the Bible. It was a form of story-telling about things that were important to them, and nothing was more important to them than the Bible. All people from all times have come up with imaginative stories—not everything the Jews wrote about ended up in the Bible because they came up with fun stories just like everyone else does. I remember once I was talking to someone who believed these were stories that were inspired by God, and I had to tell them that they were meant to be fiction and that Jews sometimes wrote fiction and the person asked me, “why would they do that” and I answered, “why wouldn’t they write fiction? It’s what all humans enjoy!” The important thing was that they knew the difference between their stories and their Bible and didn’t confuse the two.

If you talked to Americans today about what angels are like, they would probably give answers based on what they see in books, movies, TV, and art. Because that’s our culture. If they are my age, they probably watched the TV shows Highway to Heaven and Touched by an Angel, and hopefully, they would know that there is a difference between the Bible and entertainment. But if they don’t, when they read the Bible, they might be adding things into what they see in their head that just aren’t there in the story. We’ve talked a lot about that sort of thing going on with stories about Nimrod and Melchizedek that have nothing to do with the Bible or with history! And the stories mostly disagree with one another anyway. Angels have always been incredibly popular in stories all over the world because we are all fascinated by the idea that there are invisible helpers all around us and sometimes things happen that we can’t explain without angels. Angels make us feel better, and safer, and especially when Jesus goes around telling the grownups that the angels who watch over little children are always very close to God!

And here’s where we get to something confusing. The Old Testament, the Hebrew part of the Bible, doesn’t talk about demons. But by the time of Jesus, they are getting talked about a lot. What are demons and where do they come from? Are they angels who went bad? And what about Satan? Is he really a fallen angel? There are as many stories out there about Satan and demons as angels—they just aren’t as popular in wall art for nurseries and bedtime stories. Like angels, we don’t have a whole lot of information and so just like everything else in the Bible from Nimrod to Melchizedek, when there isn’t a lot of information, people like to make things up for fun. So, we don’t know for sure if they were actually angels. But there is a very famous angel that we hear a lot about once Jesus starts to preach—and that is Satan. In fact, Jesus says that He was watching when Satan was cast down from heaven and that, as the devil, he is the father of lies because all lies come from him. The word Satan comes from the Hebrew word that means accuser—someone who is always a tattletale, only worse—and devil comes from the Greek word diabolos which means slanderer—someone who is always taking smack about other people and disrespecting them.

And so we have to think that Satan, the devil, was once one of the angels guarding the Garden in Eden and not really a snake at all. Which is why he could talk which makes much more sense. And he was in the Garden and that didn’t worry the man or the woman and so maybe he belonged there. The prophet Ezekiel (Chapter 28) talks about a guardian cherub who was in the Garden who became wicked and even violent so he was tossed out. That sounds like what Jesus was talking about, right? And, of course, He saw it because He has always been with God and part of God and God and all that theological stuff. But that’s good news for us because it means that Satan isn’t like God. Satan was just another created angel and so he can die just like any other angel. And he can also be beaten, which is what Jesus did when He died and went after him.

I love you. I am praying for you. Angels are super interesting but understanding them takes a lot of study and research and a lot of getting rid of the ideas in our heads from tv, movies, books, and the art down at the Christian bookstore!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe during COVID you found out how difficult it can be for a bunch of people to be in a small space for a long time, and that’s what happened with Abram and Lot, who had so much stuff and so many slaves and hired men that there was a lot of arguing over who should be able to feed their animals in what places. What is Abram going to do to solve this terrible problem? And how does it show us how much he trusts God?

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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).

If you remember, before they even went down to Egypt to escape the famine so that they wouldn’t all starve to death, Abram found out that they had made a huge mistake in bringing along their nephew Lot when God surprised Abram by promising him a son. Although Abram was supposed to leave his family back in Haran, Abram did bring someone much younger who could be like a son to them, and inherit all their stuff, and take care of them when they got older. I mean, yeah, they are already pretty old—Abram is around 75 and Sarai is ten years younger, so like 65 years old—but both of them are going to get a lot older than that. Abram will live to be 180 years old and Sarai will live to be 127 years old. They aren’t even halfway through their lives yet! But they have no kids and what’s more, they can’t have any kids because Sarai is barren—which means she can’t have a baby. God told Abram that He would make him into a great nation, but for that you need kids and so Abram probably brought Lot along as an insurance policy, you know, just in case God needed help making Abram into a great nation. We like to try and help God but the way we go about doing that is usually wrong. Instead of just waiting and cooperating and becoming better people, we try to find a shortcut and so this week, we are going to see how that is going to blow up in everyone’s faces—but especially Lot’s.

We are in chapter 13 right now of Genesis, so let’s look at today’s verses: Now Lot, who was traveling with Abram, also had flocks (sheep and goats), herds (cows), and tents (which they all lived in). But the land where they were staying wasn’t enough to support them as long as they stayed together (all those critters needed a lot to eat and the tents would have been pretty crowded together), because they had so much stuff that they couldn’t stay in the same place together, and there were terrible arguments between Abram’s shepherds and Lot’s shepherds. (This was when the Canaanites and the Perizzites were living in the same place.) So, Abram said to Lot, “Please, we shouldn’t be fighting, and our shepherds and herdsmen shouldn’t be fighting either, since we are family. Have you looked at all the land that is around us? We need to split up and go in different directions so we won’t be so crowded: if you go to the left, I will go to the right; if you go to the right, I will go to the left.” (Gen 13:5-9)

Now, can you just imagine all those tents and all those people and all those critters? Way more than before Abram went down to Egypt (and we don’t know if Lot went or not because the Bible never tells us anything about that) because Abram lied to Pharaoh, the king, about his wife Sarai and Pharaoh gave Abram sheep and goats and donkeys and camels and slaves so that she could be his wife because he thought she was just Abram’s sister. Lot had his animals and slaves and tents too. And because of everything Abram returned from Egypt with, they now have a huge problem. Although they have been able to live together peacefully and happily since they left their home in Haran, now they can’t anymore. Abraham got very rich from lying to Pharaoh when he didn’t trust God, and now the problems are really going to start avalanching all over all of them. Life is sure complicated. Abram was scared of dying and he believed that if he lied that he would stay alive and might get rich too, but now that it happened, he has to say goodbye to his nephew. You will find out in your life that money can cause a lot of fights, and so can the stuff we have. Some people end up with everything they ever wanted but they lose their friends and family. Abram and Lot are going to have to deal with that—because they have been fighting and the people who take care of their animals have been fighting too. That sure isn’t how anyone should want to have to say goodbye to family, right?

There is a really serious word in this week’s lesson. That word is rib (rrreeve) and it kinda shows up twice but in ways that mean different things. The first time we see it is when the shepherds of Abram and Lot are fighting, and this means that they aren’t just squabbling and complaining about not having enough room. Using rib means that maybe Lot’s men were saying things like, “This field is OURS so you can’t be here! We were here first, you need to go somewhere else!” And maybe Abram’s shepherds were saying, “Hey, we work for the head honcho, Abram, and he has way more stuff than your master and that means that we are better than you guys are. Scram!” Rib is the kind of word that the prophets used when God was telling the people of Israel that they were going to be in big trouble if they kept worshiping other gods and if they kept hurting the people who were weak, and poor, and vulnerable. He was warning them that they were breaking the Covenant He made with them at Mt Sinai after He set them free from slavery in Egypt. Rib is what grownups would call a “lawsuit” word, because one person (or group) is making a claim that another person (or group) is guilty of doing something that is wrong and hurtful and they are going to a judge to find out who is right and who is wrong and from the looks of things—they went to Abram and Lot so the two of them could fight it out. After all, Abram was the patriarch of the entire group, which means he was the big man in charge, but Lot was pretty much his second in command. It was actually the job of Abram to come up with a solution.

Before we get to Abram’s really wise and trusting solution, I want you to notice something important that happens in the middle of this story. After talking about how the shepherds were having such terrible fights, Moses tells us that the dreaded Canaanites and the Perizzites were living in the same area too. But wait! I thought they were the bad guys–but they are totally leaving Abram and Lot and all their people and stuff alone! God is showing us something very important—that when things get crowded, we are usually meaner to the people we love and depend on than we are to strangers. Now, if you are old enough to remember being cooped up in the house when all the COVID stuff was going on then maybe you remember being really bored and feeling like you would do anything to have more room or see someone other than your family. And maybe the grownups in your house really needed some kind of break because whenever people are together too much, kids tend to tease and yell and be mean to each other. I was very blessed because my kids were grownups and they worked at the same food plant as my husband so my life didn’t really change at all since I only leave the house when I have to go shopping. I just sat around reading my books and making up new teachings, like I always do, because people just kinda freak me out. But if you felt all cooped up and like you were gonna scream, then maybe you can understand better than I can what was going on with Abram and Lot. Family can be wonderful to have around but when there is nonstop fighting, it can feel even better to be all alone! But none of them could be alone because they were all crowded into the same place. They were getting along fine with all the idol worshipers in the Land of Canaan, but they couldn’t get along with each other.

All sorts of groups of people who should love each other make the mistake of getting pushy and angry instead of learning to be humble and kind. It’s easy to be mean, right? It’s harder to be kind and to be humble. Humble is a word that means a person doesn’t always try to get their own way, or the best of everything, and they don’t brag and boast about themselves. I am sure you have met people who do that—bullies always do that stuff. I used to have a terrible problem with bragging all the time. I wanted people to think I was awesome so that they wouldn’t mess with me. I didn’t really think I was so great but I wanted them to think I was. I wanted them to look up to me and be impressed with me and to respect me. But then God really let me know that it wasn’t okay for me to do that—and if people didn’t feel all those ways about me because of the things they saw me do, then they shouldn’t feel that way just because I was bragging about myself. The truth is that when we talk about ourselves and how great we want people to think we are, what we are really doing is saying that everyone else is a lot less special than we are. I wasn’t thinking about that. I just wanted people to like me, but what I was really doing was making everyone else seem like they weren’t very important at all. Now when I talk about myself, I usually share about the stuff I do wrong because we all do stuff wrong and no one wants to be the worst so we can all laugh at ourselves when we see how alike we all are.

Up to this point, Abram has a hit and miss track record for trusting God. He believed God when he was told to leave his family behind and travel to a strange place. That was a lot of trust. But he didn’t trust God enough to leave his nephew Lot behind. He did turn around and trust God that he would have children and grandchildren when God promised him “offspring” (which is a fancy word for kids and grandkids) before Abram built the altar at Shechem. But then he didn’t trust God to protect him in Egypt, so he told a really dangerous lie that got Sarai, his wife, into deep doo doo. But what Abram does this time is really amazing and shows that when it comes to the Land, Abram totally trusts God. He trusted God enough to go there, and to travel around it making altars, but what he does next would have been really risky if He didn’t believe God’s promise to give the Land to his children. First, Abram shows his wisdom and patience and how humble he can be:

So, Abram said to Lot, “Please, we shouldn’t be fighting, and our shepherds and herdsmen shouldn’t be fighting either, since we are family.”

This may not seem like a super big deal but it actually is. Abram is older than Lot. Abram has way more stuff than Lot. Abram has more people than Lot does. That means that Abram has the most important thing in the world to the men of the ancient world—Abram has a ton of honor and Lot has a lot less. What is honor? I was just reading a new book yesterday and it gave a much less complicated explanation than the one I usually use. He said that honor is about how much respect people had to give you. And no, they didn’t have a choice. I mean, not unless they were at the same level. And no one had as much honor as Abram. Everyone had to respect him—including Lot but especially all of the slaves working for the both of them. It was just how things were back then. No one would even think of mouthing off to Abram, disrespecting him, insulting him, laughing at him, or any of that. He was the big head honcho over the entire group. No one would say, “Abram, you aren’t the boss of me” because, yeah, actually he was—for a lot of reasons. Abram had the power and the right to just tell Lot to go far away and never come back and Lot would have had to go. Their servants and slaves could argue with each other, but Lot had to respect and obey Abram or no one would respect Lot! It’s actually a lot like High School. Not something I particularly enjoyed because I had like no honor in that place and the popular kids could be mean to me and no one would do anything about it. Because they had a higher status than me. They were popular and I was not, at all.

Right here, Abram is treating Lot like an equal even though Lot knew that no one else in the world would see him as being at the same level as Abram. Instead of saying, “Tell your herdsmen to leave mine alone, right now. Who do they think they are to tell my herdsmen what to do?” But instead, Abram was humble and generous with his nephew. He didn’t brag or make Lot feel small and unimportant. Abram treated Lot with incredible kindness even though no one else back then would think he should. Abram tells Lot that they are family, all of them, and that it was wrong for them to be fighting and causing a fuss. Instead of telling Lot to cut it out and stop, Abram says “please.” People who were big leaders like Abram didn’t have to say “please” very often—only when they were around someone a lot more powerful than they were. So, when he was around Pharaoh? Yeah, he was saying please and thank you and sir and all that. We will talk more about the importance of being polite and Abram’s good example a bit later. Right now, we need to look at Abram’s wise solution because he is really having a good week, right? With being a great example for us? Abram says to Lot:

“Have you looked at all the land that is around us? We need to split up and go in different directions so we won’t be so crowded: if you go to the left, I will go to the right; if you go to the right, I will go to the left.”

Wow, not only isn’t Abram kicking Lot to the curb but he is making sure that Lot knows they are still family and not only that—Abram is letting Lot decide for himself which land he wants! What? But isn’t the land all for Abram’s offspring? Can he give away the land God promised? What if Lot decides to take the entire land of Canaan? It could have happened, right? Abram totally gave Lot the choice. And that might seem like it isn’t very smart, but Abram is showing God that he trusts Him to make sure that Abram’s offspring do get all the Land of Canaan, just like He promised. Abram is like, solid on trusting God about that Land, dang. He can be a bit wonky about other stuff, but this is where Abram’s trust in God absolutely shines and is a great example to all of us! Do you have something like that in your life? Where you have no trouble trusting God for this but when it comes to something else, maybe you don’t trust God at all? I think we all do.

To Lot, this must have seemed like the opportunity of his dreams. His uncle just seriously said, “Whatever land you want, you can have and I will take the leftovers.” When you have a lot of critters to feed, it’s very important to make sure that they will have a place where there is a lot of food and water. Lot knows that choosing wisely can make him a very rich man and choosing poorly could really ruin things for him. What is Lot going to do? Will he give Abram the best of the land, or the worst? What do you think? Will Lot be generous or greedy? We haven’t had anything to do with Lot so far. He hasn’t said anything or done anything. All he has done is follow Abram around and he wasn’t even mentioned when Abram went down to Egypt. Maybe Lot saw the Negev desert with all the rocks and deep canyons and said, “Um, yeah, no. Gonna stay right here where there is food and water. You know where to find me when you come back.” We just don’t know.  And we are going to leave off at this cliffhanger! You will either have to read ahead or wait until our next Genesis lesson to find out.

Although Abram was being very kind and generous with Lot, Lot wasn’t even supposed to be there in the Land of Canaan and so that was a problem. Lot is being offered an amazing choice, but every choice is also something we call a temptation. A temptation is when someone gives you a chance to do something you really, really want to do but probably shouldn’t—or definitely shouldn’t. In our story of Abram, so far, when he was tempted to bring Lot along on their journey, he gave in and did it and was sorry later. When Abram was scared to die, he was tempted to lie and to make his wife lie too, and a whole lot of people were sorry later. But, when he was tempted to just take the best land for himself because he was oldest, most respected, and honored, Abram didn’t give in. When his family in Haran probably tempted him not to leave them, Abram didn’t give in. Just like us, sometimes Abram gives in to temptation and does what he wants to instead of what he should do, and sometimes he does what he should instead. Let me just tell you right now that I haven’t ever been tempted like Abram was. Who even knows what I would have done if I was him! Probably some good and definitely some bad. God must really love us a lot because we are really irritating.

You know, Jesus was tempted with a lot more than just some good land. Jesus was actually tempted a lot, by a lot of people and even His own disciples! And not just small temptations either, like “Do not take a chocolate chip cookie, Humperdinck,” and you can’t stand smelling the smell without biting a bite so you give in and take the cookie. Jesus faced huge temptations. Not about cookies. I don’t think they had cookies back then. Actually, I am pretty sure of it. No, when Jesus was tempted it was over some really serious stuff. After His Baptism in the Jordan River, the Holy Spirit led Jesus out into the wilderness so that he could be tested and prepared for his ministry work. He ate nothing for forty days and forty nights. And at the end of that time, Satan came to Him because Satan knew darned well that there was no way that he could trick Jesus unless He was already very weak and very hungry. The first thing he tried was to get Jesus to prove that He was God’s son by making the rocks around Him into bread. And you have to know that bread sounded like a seven-course meal at the finest restaurant at the world right at that moment. Have you ever smelled a loaf of bread right out of the oven? It’s one of the best smells in the whole world. Now think of how it would smell if you hadn’t eaten anything for over a month! But Jesus said no, and He quoted a verse from Scripture saying that it was more important to have the words of God than food. But Satan wasn’t done. He tried again. He is God’s enemy and he wasn’t going to lose without a fight.

The next time, Satan took Jesus to the great city of Jerusalem and placed Jesus up on the highest place in the Temple, which is about 150 feet tall. I am super afraid of heights, gotta tell you, and I would be crying and whimpering and wanting to die. And then Satan dared Jesus again. “If you a reeeaaally the Son of God then jump down because the Bible says that the angels will lift you up so you can’t fall.” But Jesus said, “No, I am not going to tempt God just because you want me to prove something.” Now that’s twice that Satan tried to tempt Jesus and both times he failed miserably. Both times, Jesus was being tempted into being prideful and pride is a very dangerous thing. Pride is the reason that we need to know who we are so that we don’t have to prove anything to anyone. And many times, in your life, people will say, “Oh yeah? Well, if you are such a big deal then show me!” or “I dare you to do this or that.” That usually only happens when people are making big claims about being able to do stuff, but not always. This is a good reason to just be honest about ourselves. Jesus is the Son of God. He didn’t have to prove it to Satan and why on earth would He even want to? Total waste of time.

The third temptation was more difficult because of what was going to happen to Jesus. Satan told Jesus that if He would just worship him instead of God, that he would make Jesus the King of the world. Jesus knew that if He did what He had come to do, to save us from our sins by dying for us, that it would be a horrible experience and here Satan was offering Him a shortcut. But there were two things wrong with it. Jesus would have to turn His back on God and worship Satan, which was not even remotely a tempting tradeoff, plus, we wouldn’t be saved from sin and death. That was enough for Jesus and He told Satan to get lost.

But Jesus was also tempted by the Pharisees and the scribes who came from Jerusalem. I mean like, right after He fed the four thousand people from just a few loaves of bread and some small fishes. They told Him that they wanted to see a sign to prove that they should believe Him. And Jesus said no. If all the miracles He had been doing, right in front of them, weren’t enough for them then a sign in the skies from Heaven wouldn’t be enough either. And then Peter, what he did was probably the worst because after Jesus told them for the first time that He was going to die—Peter took Jesus aside and rebuked Him. That means that Peter didn’t want it to happen and was trying to talk Him out of it. But Jesus knew how important it was, even if He really didn’t want to go through with that. Still, to have His friend try to stop Him must have been hard to deal with.

Next week, we’re going to see how Lot responds to his own temptation. I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to think about how Lot will handle his big choice. And about the big choices you have to make in your own life.

The most important thing that ever happened in the history of the world was when Jesus rose from the grave–but why? How is resurrection different from raising the dead? What is vindication? What will our lives be like when we are resurrected? We’re going to talk about Passover and about Yom HaBikkurim–the day of First Fruits–because they are 100% about 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 CSB, the Christian Standard Bible.

Hey kids, this week we are going to explore the most important thing that ever happened in the whole history of the world and why it changed everything! And it might surprise you when I tell you that it wasn’t when baby Jesus was born and placed in the manger and the angels sang and the shepherds visited! It wasn’t the Last Supper, when He broke the Passover matzah bread and poured the wine and gave them to His disciples to eat and drink, telling them that it was His body and blood. It wasn’t when He fed the five thousand or walked on water or healed the man who was paralyzed. It wasn’t even the day He died on the Cross. Nope—the most important day ever was when Jesus rose from the dead and today we will talk about why, and what resurrection is and isn’t, and why it’s different from what happened to Lazarus, the widow’s only son, the twelve-year-old daughter of the synagogue official, or the boys that Elijah and Elisha raised from the dead. All those were really awesome, of course, but resurrection has only ever happened to one person in the whole history of the world and that person was Jesus!

Why are we talking about this? Because this weekend we celebrate both the Passover and Resurrection Sunday, which is called something like Pascha all over the world except in German and English where it was named Oster or Easter after the month it usually happened in. What I call it is First Fruits because on the day that Jesus was resurrected, the priests were in the Temple presenting the first sheaf of the barley harvest to God. But we will talk about that later too! In Hebrew, the day of First Fruits is called Yom HaBikkurim. Not bickering, no one likes bickering–Bikkurim (Bih-koo-reem).

When Jesus died on the Cross, He was really dead. And that is a big deal. Throughout history, there have been rumors that He was just faking it, or He had just passed out, or that he wasn’t really human and so He didn’t really die, or that He was dead but his disciples sneaked past dangerous, sleeping guards who were armed with weapons and rolled the big heavy stone away without being heard, even breaking the seal on the tomb to do it, and stole the body. Well, all that is pretty hard to believe. How to do you stay perfectly still when someone sticks a spear in your side to see if you are really dead? And how would you not bleed to death after that anyway? And how would no one ever notice that He wasn’t really human? His mom would have figured it out for sure. And the reason people came up with these kinds of claims is for a couple of reasons (1) the highest Jewish authorities didn’t want the people to know that Jesus had risen from the dead and they probably didn’t believe it themselves. If all the people whom He had preached to and healed and fed knew that God had raised Him from the dead, they would all be following Him and believing in Him and it would be all over for the authorities who had Him killed. I mean, only God can resurrect someone—which is different than raising someone from the dead. Way different. And the only reason God would resurrect someone would be to prove that they were innocent and right about every claim they made about themselves and the Kingdom of Heaven. I am going to teach you guys an important vocabulary word—vindication. I know, it’s a long word but it has a very important meaning. When you are vindicated, it means that you are proven to be in the right. When someone has been in jail for a crime they didn’t really commit, and that happens quite a bit, and people find out who really did it or find evidence that they are innocent, the judge will find them innocent and vindicate them. Being vindicated tells the world that the court system was wrong and the person who went to jail was right.

And that’s what would have happened if the chief priests ever admitted that Jesus was alive again. They would have to admit that Jesus was right about everything He had said and done, and that they had gotten Pilate (who was a really evil person) to kill an innocent man in the most terrible way possible. They would have to admit that they condemned (which means that they said he was guilty) someone who had said that He would be coming to judge them, someone who had done wonderful things for people, and who fed the poor and healed the people who couldn’t walk or see or hear or speak. You have to admit that anyone who said that someone like that was guilty, would be in huge trouble with the people if they had that person killed by the Romans.

But there were others later, among the Gentiles—and Gentiles are people who aren’t Jewish by birth—who said things that were just as wrong. You see, someone who was crucified in those days was an embarrassment! People were humiliated if someone they knew was crucified. They said it was a slave’s death, a death for the lowest of the low, a traitor to the Roman Empire. It was so bad that if you were a Roman citizen, no matter what you did and no matter how horrible it was, you couldn’t be crucified. The Romans believed that their citizens were too special to be crucified–and you were either born a citizen, or got your citizenship after serving in the army for twenty-five years (and survived it), or got it because you were a slave in a citizen’s house who got freed after you were 30 years old, or you could buy your citizenship—although no one seems to have any idea how much it cost but we know it was a lot! I guess if you have to ask, you can’t afford it!

So, because they couldn’t deal with the embarrassment of following and believing in someone who was executed as a criminal and tortured and hung out naked for everyone to see, they came up with some other theories. No, the Romans didn’t really kill Him—they were stupid and He tricked them. Yeah, it looked like He was dead but that’s because he wasn’t actually a human but he really had a pretend body and he was just a spirit in disguise. They said these things because, in their way of thinking, it was too strange to think that someone is Divine, who is in some way God even though we don’t totally understand that because our brains are too small and if He explained it we would probably explode—well, they couldn’t see how someone like that could also be so human that He could die a real death. Nobody really understands even though people try to come up with little sayings and mind pictures to explain it. Sometimes we just have to say, “I have no idea how this works but I know it does!” A god who could die? That made no sense whatsoever to a Gentile who had been brought up to think that was nonsense. And we know that people made fun of the early Christians for it! There is even graffiti making fun of a man named Alexamenos for worshiping a god who could be nailed to a cross and killed by mere mortals! As for the ones who thought Jesus had a pretend body, they were called Gnostics (Nawh-sticks) and they thought that the physical world was so evil and yucky that there was no way that a divine being would ever have a real body with real skin and a body that had to eat and poop and pee and all that. Because they thought to the goal of life was to escape their bodies and be spirits, they figured that God hated real bodies too.

I know, grownups come up with some strange stuff to make them feel better about believing in Jesus, right? And you don’t have to remember any of that because it is nutty and confusing and that’s not what the Bible tells us so why even go there? What the Bible tells us is that, before His death, Jesus said over and over again that on the third day, He would rise from the dead. It was so confusing that even His own disciples didn’t understand. They didn’t like to hear it. Peter even told Him that it shouldn’t happen! Peter didn’t understand that Jesus didn’t come to lead an army to kill all of Israel’s enemies but to make them into the kinds of people who were no longer violent and who loved their neighbors as themselves. And when we are angry with people—like Peter and the rest of the Jews were angry at the invading army that took over their country and cruelly taxed them and abused them and enslaved them and starved them by taking their food and using it themselves. Who can blame them, right? They thought that the Messiah, the anointed Savior from God, would destroy all of Israel’s enemies and begin a wonderful new Kingdom where Israel would rule the world and no one would mess with them again and they could worship God at His Temple in peace. And that sounds pretty awesome when you are suffering—but it wasn’t God’s plan. Instead of sending a Savior who would kill, He sent a Savior who would die.

If you have ever read CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, you know how he explained what Jesus did by having Aslan do something similar for Edward to save him from the consequences of his sins and to defeat the witch. The witch punished the wrong one, someone who was totally innocent, she killed him in a terrible way. When she did that, Aslan came back to life and destroyed her kingdom. That’s an allegory, a story that explains one thing by telling a story about something else, written to be entertaining. But what Jesus did was far more amazing—what Jesus did was real. You see, none of us are innocent—so when we die, it really doesn’t do much of anything to Satan. We’re supposed to die—all humans die at some point, right? But Jesus was perfect and never sinned, so He didn’t deserve to die. The curse on Adam and Eve didn’t apply to Him because where they disobeyed, Jesus obeyed. Where Adam and Eve lied, Jesus never did. When Adam and Eve tried to make themselves to be more like God, Jesus was humble and served everyone even though He could work miracles. Jesus broke the curses of the Garden. They didn’t apply to Him and so Satan didn’t have any power over Him. And Satan sure tried to tempt Him, but it didn’t work! And people tried to tempt Him, but that didn’t work either. And He didn’t want to die, He asked God to make another way. But even though He didn’t want to do it (and not wanting to be crucified isn’t a sin! It’s just honest!), well He did it because He was perfectly obedient. That means that the power of death, which we can’t do anything about, couldn’t keep Jesus dead. And in trying to keep Jesus dead, Satan and death lost the battle and are now weak and dying. They still work on us, even when we believe Jesus, but not like they worked before we believed. And that’s why it is so important to talk about Resurrection, which is like the greatest thing about our future!

When Elijah, Elisha, and Jesus raised people from the dead, it was very different from what happened to Jesus. The boys raised by Elijah and Elisha, the daughter of Jairus, the widow’s son, and Lazarus were raised from the dead. That means that they were dead, but became alive again, but had the same exact bodies. Like in a video game—not one where you start over from the beginning but where you pick up exactly where you left off. If you were raised from the dead, nothing about you or your body changed except that you are alive and healthy again. And don’t get me wrong, that’s awesome! It’s amazing! It’s a miracle! But it isn’t the same as what happened to Jesus and what will happen to us someday, because all those people who were raised from the dead died again just like normal people.

When Jesus died, and this is hard to hear, His body was really torn up badly. Isaiah 53 says that he didn’t even look like a human being anymore because they tortured him so badly. In paintings, you only see the nails in His hands and feet and the blood from His forehead where they put the crown of thorns on Him. But we know from the Bible that they beat His face and pulled out His beard, and the Romans scourged Him with metal-tipped whips on his front and on His back. When He was put on the Cross, He didn’t even look like Himself anymore. Without the sign above His head, no one would know it was Him. But three days later, when the women went back to the tomb to wrap Him in spices, they saw a man who looked like a gardener and they asked him if he knew where they had taken Jesus. They were so upset. Now, if Jesus looked the way He looked before He died, they would have recognized Him right away. But Jesus looked different—Jesus was perfect. Jesus had a resurrected body—and someday we will too. With His resurrected body, he could appear suddenly in a room. He could walk along with people who knew Him personally and they didn’t know it was Him. He still had the nail holes and the spear wound in His side so that they would believe it was Him but other than that, Jesus was not the same. Jesus had a body that wouldn’t grow any older, that couldn’t get sick—but he still ate! And that’s definitely something to look forward to. The people who said that Jesus never had a real body thought that having a body was the worst thing in the world, they wanted to be set free from their bodies so that they could be spirit beings. But the Bible tells us that resurrection is about having a real body after we die—a perfect body that can still enjoy eating and singing praises to God and hugging and all sorts of things. That means my son won’t have medical problems anymore. It means that the problems that my strokes caused won’t be a problem anymore. Many years ago, I had a dream of what it would be like. I saw a woman walking toward me, she was famous but she had died about twenty years earlier. And she wasn’t pretty when she was alive. But in my dream, she walked up to me and whispered in my ear the most wonderful things about God (which I can’t remember! Darnit!) and she looked the way she always did but instead of not being pretty, she was the most beautiful person I have ever seen in my life. When I woke up, I was crying because not being able to look at her anymore was horrible. I would have done anything to see her face again. And so I know that no matter what we look like now, we will look the same when we resurrect only we will all be incredibly beautiful—and you know what? That means we are already beautiful, but we can’t see it here because of sin. You’re beautiful, and if we weren’t all messed up because of sin, everyone would know it. But you can know it. I already do know it.

No wheelchairs, no leg braces, no fake knees or shunts or crutches. No brain damage, nothing that we experience in this world. God is going to free us from all the bad things that have ever happened to us, isn’t that wonderful? People who are hurting on the outside won’t hurt anymore, and people who hurt on the inside won’t hurt either. All the bad things that have happened and make you sad, they won’t bother you ever again. If you were raised from the dead, like Lazarus, it would be totally different. He still had the exact same body and memories. Not us. And people will finally get real justice for the things that have hurt them. Justice is when bad things were done to us and someone makes those things right again. Of course, we still have the memories and the hurts from bad things so no one can really make things right again here—they can just hopefully make things better. But when we are resurrected, here on earth like it talks about at the end of the book of Revelation, we will not be hurt by those things anymore. They won’t matter to us anymore. We will all live together with everyone else who loves God and Jesus will be King over all the earth and we won’t hurt the way we do now. Just like Jesus’s body doesn’t hurt anymore. He was on the Cross and it was horrible but He isn’t there now. He is sitting beside His Father, talking to Him about us, and surrounded by angels.

And with our new bodies, because we are resurrected and not raised, we will be able to do amazing things that we can’t imagine now. Without sin in our lives and without people hurting us, just imagine the amazing things we can do with our lives! Just think of the things we will understand! The people who wanted Jesus to have a fake body didn’t understand that bodies are important to God, even though He doesn’t have one. Which is funny because we call God “he” right? Ancient Hebrew had no word for “it” and besides, it would be rude to call God an “it”!!! Jesus is a He, of course, but throughout the Bible, God is described as both father and mother because the only way we can describe God is through metaphors, by talking about what He is like. Although He is like a father, and like a mother, and like a husband, and like a king, He is beyond all of those things. Those labels just help us to understand better. But even though He has no body, we do have bodies and our bodies are very important to Him. That’s why Jesus healed bodies and spoke to ears and listened to mouths and fed tummies and touched people who weren’t supposed to be touched and fixed them so they could go home again. Our bodies are important to God—He designed them to be good, so we could be His hands and feet and to do what He can do without needing a body at all! He doesn’t have a body—He doesn’t need one. He can do more without a body than all of us can do together with our bodies. So, He isn’t a man or a woman or a human at all. He’s God, and He’s amazing. If God was a human, we’d all be in big trouble because we know what humans are like!

Jesus showed us a future where there wouldn’t be any sickness or suffering or hunger or thirst or teasing or bullying or people who are in the in-crowd and people who aren’t. The future, the world to come here on earth when Jesus is King, is a world with real, perfect bodies and where we will see everyone as beautiful because they already are beautiful. God sees us the way I saw that woman in my dream. He doesn’t look at our faces and see us as the world sees us, He sees us as His beautiful creations. People don’t understand what it is to be beautiful. I am glad God made me understand it.

Now, back to Jesus not being recognized in the Garden after He was resurrected. In John 21, starting in verse 14, we see Jesus appearing first to Mary Magdalene: “Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know it was Jesus. “Woman,” Jesus said to her, “why are you crying? Who is it that you’re seeking?” Supposing he was the gardener, she replied, “Sir, if you’ve carried him away, tell me where you’ve put him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” Turning around, she said to him in Aramaic, “Rabboni!”—which means “Teacher.” “Don’t cling to me,” Jesus told her, “since I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them that I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them what he had said to her.”

When Mary heard His voice, she knew it was Jesus and I imagine she was about to fall to His feet and grab them because she was so relieved to see Him alive—after all, it was Mary and the other women who stayed with Him at the Cross and saw everything while the disciples were gone—although one man was there, either John or maybe Lazarus. She knew He was dead! It wasn’t a rumor to her, there was no mistake! But Jesus told her not to touch Him because He hadn’t gone to see God yet. And I imagine He went because Mary ran off to tell the disciples and I can’t imagine she would leave while He was still there—I sure wouldn’t and I bet you wouldn’t either. As long as Jesus is there, I am there too. But why did Jesus go? Why didn’t He go with Mary to see the disciples? Why didn’t He parade around town or go to the Temple and work miracles? Well, like we talked about last year for Passover, Jesus was the Lamb of God and so He was just like that lamb the Israelites ate in Egypt, only a lamb in Egypt was only good for one family and only for that night—but what Jesus did on the Cross as the ultimate Lamb of God destroyed sin and destroyed death for everyone who believes forever. But something else always happened the week of Passover. On the Sunday during the Passover week, the priests would take a very special offering of the new barley crop to the Temple. They would cut a sheaf, which is the stems plus the barley heads (which is what you can eat)—if you have seen a cartoon or a picture of Joseph’s dream of all the sheafs bowing down before him, you know what I mean. The priests would take the sheaf and do a special kind of offering. They would hold the sheaf up and wave it before the Lord so that He would bless the harvest and then everyone could eat the barley, but they couldn’t eat it until God got some first. That was called Bikkurim, or First Fruits. And that was the very same day that Jesus was resurrected. Satan tried to keep Him dead and poured all his power into doing it but Jesus lives again forever. That’s why Paul said, ^“But as it is, Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead also comes through a man.” All those sheaves of barley for more than a thousand years, every year, were all pointing the way to Jesus being resurrected from the dead.

I love you. Happy Passover. Happy Firstfruits. Happy Resurrection Sunday.