There are a lot of bad dads and moms in the Bible, but if Lot isn’t the worst one, then he is near the top of the list. Being a young girl in the ancient world was a very dangerous thing and sometimes the members of your own family could be your worst enemies. How far will Lot go to obey the hospitality codes of the ancient world? Who is he willing to sacrifice in order to look good? And what can we learn about the men of Sodom from the way they reacted to what Lot tried to do?

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

All you grownups, this is a very harrowing chapter of the Bible so I strongly recommend that you listen to or read my adult teaching on Genesis 19 and all of the context so that if your kids have questions that I can’t answer here, you can be equipped and armed to do it yourself. I am very mindful about the age range of the audience here and so I have provided a supplemental context teaching on all of the difficult and controversial issues concerning Sodom over on Character in Context. I am interpreting the chapter in line with the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, which is more appropriate for kids, and not according to more modern popular preaching.

I am calling this teaching, “Lot—the worst dad ever” but Lot isn’t the only terrible parent in the Bible. King David comes in a close second and as far as moms go, there was a Queen of Judah named Athaliah and she killed the whole royal family so that she could be queen after her son died. Fortunately, one of them escaped as a baby. There are a lot of parents in the Bible who made the mistake of playing favorites with kids and that never went well either, but what Lot did in trying to protect his guests was so shocking that it is really hard to read and sometimes it makes it look like God loves girls less than boys when really it was just Lot being Lot again! Today we’re reading Gen 19:4-9.

Before they (the angels in disguise) went to bed, the men of the city of Sodom, both young and old, every single one, surrounded Lot’s house. They called out to Lot and said, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Send them out to us so we can know them!” Lot went outside to them, just outside the entrance to his house, and shut the door behind him. He said, “Don’t do anything evil to my visitors, my brothers.Look, I’ve got two young daughters. I’ll bring them out to you, and you can do whatever you wantto them. However, don’t do anything to these men, because they are my guests and so I have to protect them.” “Get out of the way!” they said, adding, “This guy comes here as a foreigner, an alien, but now he’s acting like a judge! Now we’re going to hurt you way worse than we were going to hurt them.” They came closer and started to press so hard against Lot that they were going to break down the door.

Well, that couldn’t have possibly gone any worse. Lot evidently thought that these guys, the neighbors he chose, liked him a whole lot more than they actually do or that they at least might respect him, which they obviously don’t. So, we’re going to talk about the dangers of being friends with bad people but we are also going to talk about what a terrible father Lot is, and how badly girls were treated in the ancient world. This is going to be a depressing episode, but I want you to remember something whenever you are reading the Bible. The Bible tells the truth, and so that means it talks about what did happen which is usually not what should have happened. We already know that because Abraham has done some really awful stuff so far and he will again in the very next chapter. Just because Abraham is God’s choice to start a new family on earth doesn’t mean that Abraham is always good, smart, honest, or trusting in God’s promises. Neither is Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, or David. They are all going to do rotten things as well as good things. Only God is perfect and truly good, which is why Jesus is perfect and truly good. God is the only real hero of the Bible. But we’ve already had problems with Lot in the past—Lot isn’t wise or very generous. When he had the choice in Genesis 13 of what land he wanted and what land he was going to leave Abraham with—young Lot chose the land all up and down the Jordan River and left old Abraham with all the hills and rocks to climb. Not cool, Lot. And then, to make matters worse, he set up his tents outside Sodom, a wicked city with a wicked king. When he got kidnapped by the four kings and was rescued by his uncle, he still didn’t leave and now he’s gone and decided to live inside the city. Peter said that Lot was righteous because he was very upset about the behavior of the people of Sodom, but not upset enough to leave! It was good of Lot to take the two strangers/angels in for the night but pretty much everything else he does is one terrible mistake after another. We aren’t supposed to like Lot very much—except compared to the men who lived in Sodom. So, not much. Really, apart from taking these angels in, we haven’t seen one positive thing about him. The one common denominator—meaning the one thing everything involving Lot has in common—is a whole bunch of trouble and usually related to his really bad decisions. And he never seems to learn from his mistakes. He sure makes some doozies.

Like we talked about last time—to invite people into your home and promise them safety—means that you not only have to live in a place, but you also have to be accepted and trusted as someone who has the right to invite in strangers. The men of Sodom don’t seem to feel that way about Lot. Remember that guests couldn’t be asked what they were doing, where they were going, or even who they were! Lot was acting like one of them, but they didn’t see things that way. As far as they were concerned, Lot didn’t have the right to offer anyone protection. So, they don’t think anything about surrounding his house or demanding he send his guests outside to do goodness only knows whatever they want to do. They probably figure that Lot needs to be put in his place and shown that they have the right to do whatever they want to visitors and that there is absolutely nothing he can do to stop them because this is their city and not his. And this is where the story gets the absolute worst. This is one of the most awful things you will ever see someone do in the Bible and there are a lot of terrible things. Lot goes outside to talk with his “neighbors” and tells them that he has invited the strangers in and promised them protection, so he can’t go back on that without looking weak and shamed in front of his guests and his family. No man in the ancient world wanted that to happen. A person’s honor was the only protection they had against their neighbors. If they could take Lot’s guests away, then they could come back and do whatever they wanted to everyone in his family and him too. A smart man would have left this place a long time ago. But what is Lot’s decision? Who will he protect? Who is he willing to throw to these wicked men?

Well, Lot decides to protect himself and his own reputation with the men of the city. He offered to let them hurt his young daughters instead and we know they are young because they aren’t married yet—even though they are betrothed to some men in the city, which means they are engaged to be married to men they might not even know. Men who might actually be outside Lot’s home right now as part of the angry mob. Of course, if these men know that the girls are engaged to men of their city, that would make them furious because even in Sodom, you weren’t allowed to hurt the wife or fiancé of another man. It was one of the worst crimes you could commit. In the eyes of everyone there, those girls already belonged to the two men they were engaged to. If they hurt those girls, they would be sinning against the men they were going to marry and if they did that, no one’s wives, fiancés, or daughters in the city would be safe. They would be starting wars between families and that was serious business in those days. Everyone would have to take sides and things would get really violent and really crazy really quick. Maybe Lot did that on purpose, hoping that maybe someone would grab one of the girls and it would start a huge fight but as a parent, let me tell you that most grownups would rather die than do something like that to put their child in danger! But as far as Lot was concerned, it was less of a sin to hurt his daughters than his guests—as crazy as that seems to us. Lot was concerned about his reputation and so he was following the cultural rules of the ancient Near East (which is all the land from Egypt to Babylon) that told him that strangers were more important than daughters. It was a terrible time for women and girls to be alive, let me tell you. Like I say all the time, this was the world that God wanted to change. This story tells us what happens when a whole city not only doesn’t know our God but also doesn’t seem to care about anything right, good, or decent. How could Lot stand living there?

Well, sometimes we get comfortable being around bad things as long as they aren’t happening to us. Imagine being friends with a bully but the bully is really nice to you, and so it only bothers you a little bit when your friend is being mean to littler kids or the unpopular kids. Plus, you know that having a bully for a friend means that no one wants to mess with you and even more than that, you know your bully friend thinks that being mean is an okay thing and the people they are mean to just deserve it. What will that friend do to you if you tell them they aren’t the great person they think they are? Well, they aren’t going to be your friend anymore. When Lot told the strangers not to sleep out in the city square, he was telling his neighbors that he knew they couldn’t be trusted—and even though they couldn’t be trusted, no one wants to hear that they aren’t just totally awesome people who are just doing what needs to be done. You know, there aren’t many bad people in the world who really think they are wrong. Everyone has a reason for what they are doing, and they think their reasons are good ones even when they aren’t. That’s why we all have to be careful because when we think we are right is when we can be the most wrong.

Do you think that High Priest Caiaphas and his buddies believed they were evil for what they did to Jesus? Not a chance, they even said it was a good thing for Jesus to die because if they didn’t get Him killed, then there would be trouble with the Romans. Do you think that the people who were trying to trick and trap Him with clever arguments or trying to get Him to make powerful people angry enough to kill Him thought that they were the bad guys in the story? No way, they just saw that everyone was starting to follow Jesus instead of listening to them and they wanted to stop Him. They believed that listening to them was the same thing as listening to God! How about the Roman soldiers who beat Him up, whipped Him, made fun of Him, pressed thorns into his head and crucified Him? They were having a great time—they hated being stationed in hot, miserable Judea where the people didn’t act like normal Romans and a lot of those soldiers were Samaritans who hated the Jews for tearing down their Temple on Mt Gerizim a hundred and fifty years earlier. They believed that the strong should hurt the weak to keep them in line and scared and obedient. Romans generally didn’t see non-Romans as even being totally human or deserving of being treated well. So, despite how awful it is to read about what happened to Jesus, the only person involved who ever seems to feel bad about being a part of it was Judas, who sided with the bullies to get Jesus arrested in the first place and he did it for money. He sold Jesus because he thought he had good reasons. But when Judas saw what happened, he felt so bad that he killed himself. Everyone else felt they had done the right thing. But they were all acting like bullies just thinking about themselves and what they thought was best for them. Bullies never go around thinking they are wrong to do what they were doing. And the men of Sodom all believed they were right as well. We can all be very wrong while believing we are very right.

But everyone has at least some standards and when Lot offers the men of Sodom his young daughters who were engaged to two of their own people, they got so furious that they told Lot exactly what they thought about him. I wonder if he was surprised. I wonder if he thought they were his friends just because they had never hurt him and let him live there. I wonder if maybe he thought he was a good example for them and maybe they would see that he wasn’t as horrible as they were and would reconsider their life choices. A lot of people who are friends with really mean people believe that about themselves but it almost never turns out to be true. When a nice person hangs out with a bully, the nice person usually gets meaner, and the bully rarely gets nicer. Why should they be nicer? Since they have a “nice” friend, they probably think that makes them a good person. Especially if that “nice” person just lets them get away with whatever they want to do to whomever they want. Like Lot, “nice” people who are friends with bullies are often really surprised when the bully gets tired of them and treats them just as badly as they treat everyone else. It is very foolish to think that we are too special and wonderful for a bully to do the same things to us that they do to everyone else. Most people have to learn that the hard way. I learned it in church when I was friends with a pastor who was a terrible bully. Well, I guess I was his friend, but he was never mine because as soon as he got angry with me he made me sorry I had ever even met him. Anyone can be a bully—kids, adults, parents, teachers, and even pastors. Bullies can’t be trusted—not by anyone. Lot made a big mistake in thinking they wouldn’t hurt him or anyone in his house. Maybe he was their friend, but they weren’t his friends. They were just buddies—people who are okay with each other until something happens to make one of them angry.

After Lot told them to hurt his young daughters instead, somebody yelled, “Get out of the way!” and then they started talking to each other, probably saying things like, “This guy came here from the outside—he isn’t even one of us and look at him telling us what we can and can’t do! He thinks we don’t have the right to know who these guys are and what they are doing and he says we shouldn’t hurt them. Who does he think he is to tell us what we can and can’t do? What we should and shouldn’t do? What’s right and wrong? He thinks he is our judge, better than our own elders who have lived here all their lives and who made us a rich city! How can he believe he has the right to come in here as a stranger from who the heck knows where and tell us what to do? He has no family here to protect him! Let’s show him exactly who he is—a nobody! We’ll do worse to him and to his whole household and these strangers and then he’ll know who the boss is. We don’t need his permission to take his daughters or his guests.”

Can you even imagine how scary that would have been for Lot and his family? These men were forcing their way to the door with Lot standing in the way, and Lot didn’t have any friends in the crowd who were going to protect him. Lot and his family were doomed! Abraham saved him the last time he was in trouble but this time he was totally on his own. But we know something that Lot doesn’t know—the two men in his house aren’t really men. They are actually angels who were sent to Sodom by God to figure out if all the bad stories He was hearing about the evil and wicked men of Sodom were really true. At this point in the story, it is safe to say that they have seen enough to know that all those people who were crying out were telling the truth. What we don’t know at this point in the story is what the angels are going to do about it. We will get to that next week. It’s a very exciting story but it is also just another chance for Lot to make some really bad decisions and to find out that nobody takes him seriously.

There are a lot of examples in the Bible about people getting messed up with the wrong kinds of friends and ending up in big trouble. King Solomon’s son Rehoboam, after Solomon died and he became king, had a choice between listening to people who were suffering when his dad was king and some wise mentors or to his buddies. He made the wrong choice. Solomon started out as a great king who made good choices but after a while, he wanted to build more and more stuff and palaces and temples for his hundreds of wives, so he took a ton of money from the countries around him and even forced his own people (God’s people!) to work as slaves doing all the building. And he taxed his own people too, so much that when his son Rehoboam became king, they begged him to have mercy on them. They said that if he was kind to them that they would be loyal to him. Rehoboam asked his older advisors what he should do and they told Rehoboam to listen to the people and to cut their taxes and stop using them as slaves so that they would follow him as king. But then Rehoboam listened to some people his own age who told him to be even meaner to the people than his dad was. If Rehoboam had listened to the wiser, older advisors, then he could have been a great king. But he listened to his buddies instead and told the people that he was going to whip them with scorpions and demand even more of them than his father had. Well, that was a big mistake because Israel was made up of twelve territories and ten of them up and abandoned Rehoboam. They made a new kingdom for themselves under a man named Jeroboam and the kingdom was never whole ever again. All because Rehoboam decided to be a bully and he had buddies who were telling him that was the right thing to do.

A lot of people in the Bible had friends who shouldn’t be listened to, but maybe the most surprising was a man named Job, whom God said was the best guy in the world. Job was rich and powerful and loved God and had many friends, but as soon as everything started going wrong for Job—his kids died, all his sheep and goats and cows died, and he lost everything except his wife—well, those friends started giving him some really bad advice and were acting like bullies. Bullies don’t just beat people up. Most bullies use their words more often than they use their fists. Instead of being kind to Job, they started telling him that everything that had happened was entirely his own fault and they started making up nasty stories about evil things Job must have done to deserve it! And they just wouldn’t stop no matter what until God yelled at them. Job kept saying, “Guys, I haven’t done anything wrong! I haven’t done any of these terrible things you are accusing me of!” But every time Job told the truth, his buddies just got meaner and meaner. Not only were they accusing him of hurting people who couldn’t protect themselves, but now they were calling him a liar and prideful and mocking him—which means they were making fun of him. As if Job’s life wasn’t bad enough, with his children all dead and all his stuff gone, and covered from head to toe in painful open sores—now the people he thought were wise and believed were his friends were making fun of him and worse. And they all thought they were the good guys because they believed with all their hearts that Job needed to be told to get right with God or else things would get even worse than they already were. Sometimes, we can be so convinced that we are right that we think everything we do is totally justified and okay. But they were all wrong and God told them so.

You know, we can even look at Jesus’s disciples and his own brothers. Of course, Jesus knew about his disciples and knew they weren’t perfect and he wasn’t ever going to take their advice on anything because they gave super terrible advice. They told him they wanted to call down fire from Heaven on the Samaritans just because they disagreed with Jesus about where the Passover should be celebrated. Peter told Jesus not to go to Jerusalem for Passover if the chief priests, scribes, and elders were going to have Him killed. One of them chopped off the ear of one of the servants of the High Priest and Jesus told him to put away his knife, which was probably the one he carried to slaughter the Passover lamb the day before. The disciples weren’t really known for being the best judges about what was right and what was wrong—they were just normal people like us.

I love you. I am praying for you. I want you to always be very mindful, to think very carefully, about who you think your friends are. Are they really your friends or are they just your buddies until they get mad at you? Are they kind people or would you be scared to talk to them about the things they are doing? How do your friends treat other people? Do they get you into trouble or are they good influences? It can feel good to have bullies on our side but the truth is that bullies aren’t really on anyone’s side except for their own. Lot found that out the hard way.

This week, we will be talking about the mysterious angels in disguise, what Lot did to make his neighbors angry, and what a city gate was.

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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.

All you grownups, this is a very harrowing chapter of the Bible so I strongly recommend that you listen to or read my adult teaching on Genesis 19 and all of the context so that if your kids have questions that I can’t answer here, you can be equipped and armed to do it yourself. I am very mindful about the age range of the audience here and so I have provided a supplemental context teaching on all of the difficult issues concerning Sodom over on Character in Context or on my theancientbridge.com website.

In chapter 18 of Genesis, God told Abraham that He had come to check out the claims of suffering people about the city of Sodom and He told Abraham that He was sharing all this because He knew Abraham. That’s a covenant term, knowing someone, but it can also mean other things. And it’s funny that God told Abraham this because if you remember the ancient rules of hospitality, Abraham could invite the three “men” for dinner but he wasn’t allowed to ask them anything about who they were or what they were doing. Of course, the three men were actually God and two angels in disguise, and so Abraham did know them, kinda, but he just didn’t realize it. God shared all of His plans with Abraham and Abraham begged God to be merciful with any of the people living there who were doing what was right and last time he checked, his nephew Lot and Lot’s wife and two daughters were living nearby. And if there were righteous people there, Abraham begged God to spare everyone. Wow, sounds like Abraham was taking his responsibility to bless all the nations of the earth very seriously! Had Lot been a good enough example that the angels would be able to find even just ten righteous people so that the whole city could be spared? We’re going to find out. Let’s read chapter 19:1-5:

The two angels got to Sodom in the evening as Lot was sitting in Sodom’s gateway. When Lot saw them, he got up to meet them. He bowed with his face to the ground and said, “My lords, please come with me to my house, wash your feet, and spend the night. Then you can get up early tomorrow morning and be on your way again.” “No,” they said. “We would rather spend the night in the city square.” But Lot begged them so much that they followed him and went into his house. He prepared a feast and baked unleavened bread for them, and they ate it. Before they went to bed, the men of the city of Sodom, both young and old, every single one, surrounded Lot’s house. They called out to Lot and said, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Send them out to us so we can know them!”

Uh oh. This sounds anything but good but let’s start at the beginning and talk about what a city gate was. It wasn’t like the gate of a castle that you would see in a movie or on TV. You know, the ones with the bars that can be raised and lowered and there is a moat outside and really just an opening in a big stone wall. When you see the word gate in the Bible, it generally means a building that makes an opening in a wall, really a building with buildings in it. Men would gather there if they were elders of the community or rich enough that they didn’t have to work and if people were fighting, they would take themselves over to the gate so the elders of the city could hear the problem and make decisions about who was right and who was wrong. That’s also where people would make agreements in front of witnesses or would have contracts written out and sealed on clay tablets or, if there wasn’t anyone who could write things down (most people couldn’t), the elders would watch people agree on something so that if something went wrong later, they could all say, “Yep, that’s what they said they would do. We all heard it!” A gate wasn’t just something you walked through—it was where you went to get important things done. So, if you have ever heard the story about how there was a gate into Jerusalem called the “eye of the needle” that was so tiny a camel couldn’t get through it, you will know it isn’t true because (1) we actually know the names of all the gates into Jerusalem and (2) a small gate wouldn’t be practical for doing business and there would just be no point because a small gate is worse than no gate at all. Not only could enemies get inside the city that way, but it would be hard to defend. It would be totally pointless because a gate wasn’t just about getting in and out of a city.

Right away, these travelers aren’t called men anymore like they were when they left Abraham. Now they are called angels, but only to us. Lot doesn’t know this but Moses wants us to know it. And it helps explain how fast they got there. So, Lot was standing there—maybe because he was rich or maybe because he was talking to the other men of Sodom or maybe because he had nothing else to do. He was definitely old enough to be an elder because they’ve been in the land of Canaan for twenty-four years now. But as we are going to see later, no one in the city respects Lot enough to go to him for advice. It must have been late in the day, because he seems to be alone when the angels arrive. And if you didn’t hear last week’s teaching on angels in the Bible, the fact that they are there so quickly is surprising to us. Abraham did a lot of cooking and so they had to have left his camp late in the afternoon but here they are arriving in Sodom the very same evening! Hebron, where Abraham is, was somewhere between eighteen and forty miles from Sodom—depending on where around the Dead Sea it was. We still don’t know for sure. That’s a really fast trip in just a few hours. They were walking and it wasn’t like they had a nice paved road to travel on. If humans were going three miles an hour walking on the dirt and rocks then they were doing really good, so that should have been at least a six-hour trip and probably more like a twelve hour trip. But they got there lickety-split. Of course, Lot didn’t know that—he figured they were just two regular guys. But he also knew what his neighbors were like when people came to the city and so he got up from where he was sitting and went to say hello.

Lot bowed down in front of them, which was strange because usually, strangers would do that when coming into a town and seeing an older man sitting at the gate. I think that Lot knew he needed to make a really good impression because he knew that if he didn’t get the strangers to trust him, they were going to be in terrible danger. Lot made what seemed to be a really nice offer—for them to come to his home inside the city, wash their feet, spend the night, and head out in the morning. What Lot was really saying was, “Please come into my house so that you will be protected and then tomorrow you need to get out of here early.” Do you remember when we talked about hospitality when we learned about Genesis 18? As long as the three visitors were in Abraham’s camp, eating and drinking, they were protected by Abraham and he wouldn’t allow anyone to hurt them. In this world, there are Bible commandments and commandments that we all agree to as a society. There wasn’t a law in the Bible telling anyone to do this—it was something important to just about everyone whether they worshiped our God or the pagan gods. A man who was accepted as a city resident could invite strangers into his home and everyone else had to leave them alone. But we are going to find out that the other men in Sodom don’t think that Lot really qualifies as a city resident. That’s going to cause problems and they are going to tell him that he doesn’t have the right to do what he is doing. He isn’t allowed to invite people into their city and expect them to be protected. Abraham was the head honcho in his camp, the patriarch, and he could do whatever he wanted. Lot wasn’t considered to be an actual citizen by the other men of Sodom, no matter how long he had lived there, and so when he invited the men to spend the night, it got him into big trouble. I don’t know if Lot knew that they felt that way about him or not—probably he did.

Let’s talk about something else here. Lot is now living inside the city of Sodom and we don’t know how that happened. Last time we checked, back in Genesis 14, Lot was living in a tent outside the city of Sodom with his flocks and herds of sheep, goats, and critters. Lot was a wealthy man with critters and slaves. But then the war happened in Genesis 14 and all his stuff got taken and we don’t know if he ever got it back. Maybe Lot isn’t a rich man anymore or maybe he still is. Maybe his animals are being taken care of by other people outside the city but he is living in a house instead of a tent. We don’t know. All we know is that Lot used to live outside of a wicked city and now he lives inside it and that probably isn’t a good thing. So, Lot may be rich or poor and may have lived in the city for twenty years or just one year. No clue. But we do know two things: Lot decided to live inside the city and Lot knows it’s an evil place to live.  

 So, Lot makes this super generous offer to keep the strangers safe and sound in his own home and they do something really strange. They say, “Nah, we’re good. We’ll just take out our sleeping pads and lay down in the square on the cold, hard, stones and sleep there.” Why would they say that? It’s easy to think that they were just insisting on sleeping in the open part of the city because they wanted to see what would happen, and that might have been part of it but they were also playing the kind of honor/shame game that was common in the world of Lot and Abraham. It was an honorable thing to do to offer travelers a place to stay for the night. But it could also make the guest look shameful if they weren’t careful—like they were men who needed someone else’s help. Even if they did need it and there is nothing wrong with needing help. So, they played a sort of game where someone asks, “Come to my home and eat and spend the night,” and the other person says, “No, we’re fine, thanks.” And then the first person offers again, “No, please, please come spend the night.” And then it makes it look like they are both doing one another a favor. The host gets to look generous, and the guest is giving the host the opportunity to be generous without seeming like they are needing help—even if they do need help. Everyone gets to look good. Which is really all they cared about in honor/shame societies. It’s not about being good but looking good. For all you grownups listening, it’s like being in High School, forever.

And so, they agree. After all, they have their orders to scout out what’s going on in Sodom and also to find out if there are ten people in the city doing what is right and fair. Nothing says they were working on some kind of schedule where they had to get it figured out by morning. Abraham had Sarah in charge of making all that bread and servants taking care of barbequing the fatted calf, but he did take care of the guests himself. Lot actually makes unleavened bread himself—which is what people ate when they weren’t having a regular meal because the bread dough didn’t have enough time to rise and get fluffier. And it says that he made them a feast, which meant food and wine too. Not just food. Lot was being very generous. It seems like maybe Lot doesn’t have any servants anymore. Remember that Lot didn’t even offer them food so they couldn’t ask for it, but he gave it to them anyway. And Lot wasn’t allowed to ask them who they were or what they were doing or where they were going or anything. They could share if they wanted but at this point, they obviously hadn’t told Lot who they really were—angels from God on a mission. If Lot had known, I bet he would have flipped out. I would have freaked out for sure. And again, the angels ate the food so we know that when they are disguised as humans that they can eat.

In fact, let’s look at a Bible verse from the New Testament from Hebrews chapter 13, verse 2. And I can’t tell you who wrote this because it doesn’t say. Some of it seems like what Paul wrote but a lot of it doesn’t sound like him at all. Some people think that Priscilla wrote it, but there is no way to know for sure. All we know is that the person was a Jew, a teacher, and really knew a lot about the Bible and the Temple and the Priesthood of Israel. Anyway, the verse goes like this—“Make sure to show hospitality to strangers, because some people have welcomed angels as guests in their homes without even knowing it.” And they were probably talking about Lot and what happened in this chapter. That being said, make sure you never do this without the permission of the grownups in your life, okay? Showing people hospitality when we don’t have permission can be very dangerous—as Lot is about to find out because as soon as his guests were putting down their bedrolls on the floor and going to sleep, every single man of the city of Sodom shows up outside his house and start yelling for him to send the visitors outside. They are wanting to know these men, and this is where the situations gets ugly and complicated really fast. The word “know” can mean a few different things and none of them are good right now. One of the rules of hospitality is that Lot wasn’t allowed to get any information out of his visitors. He couldn’t ask them any questions. He didn’t know if they were enemy spies or just people traveling from one place to another looking for work. Sodom was a very rich city from the asphalt mining, remember? That’s why the four kings came after them and took every person and everything they had. The people of Sodom and the four other cities close by, they were rich because of their mining and they used to pay taxes to the big king Chedorlaomer but one day they just stopped and the big king got even—and he would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for Abraham and his pesky friends coming to Lot’s rescue and driving the four kings out of the country. The people of Sodom were probably suspicious of outsiders for good reason, as everyone should have been, but that doesn’t give them the right to be evil.

I believe that they wanted to take the visitors, the angels, and hurt them in very shameful and evil ways to get them to admit why they were in Sodom. It will make a lot more sense next week once they yell at Lot for refusing to hand the visitors over and tell him the reason why he had no right to do that. But we will get to that next week. This week, I want to talk about God’s laws protecting foreigners and visitors. The prophet Ezekiel would say, over a thousand years later, that the sin of the people of Sodom is that they were rich but they didn’t use their money to help the poor and they were oppressive—which means they were very cruel to people in terrible ways. We’ve talked about how important it was in the ancient world for people to be able to count on someone being kind to them and generous, and the people of Sodom were the opposite. Not only couldn’t you depend on any of them to be kind and generous, but you could count on them hurting anyone they could get their hands on! It’s like they learned nothing from how they were treated by the four kings.

God cares about everyone but in the Bible, the people we see Him especially concerned about are the people who are easy to hurt—people who are poor, hungry, homeless, don’t have parents, or far from home without anyone to protect them. God tells the people who have what they need, to help these people because when we help those people, Jesus says that we are actually helping Him. And so, God gave His people laws about how they were supposed to treat the people who are easy to hurt. One of the groups that God gives protection to are called foreigners, sojourners, or resident aliens, depending on which Bible you are reading. It can be easy to hurt them because they are alone, and they may not speak the same language, or have a lot of money. Lot’s visitors were outsiders—foreigners—which means they were from somewhere else. The people of Sodom all had each other—they were sticking together as a group or maybe we could call them a gang. They had the power to hurt absolutely anyone they wanted and no one could stop them. If they wanted to hurt the two strangers, they could do it and no one could stop them. Lot sure couldn’t stop them. But those are exactly the kinds of people that God tells us we must treat well and even protect. And He says over and over again that when we treat people badly, who have no one to care for them, that He will hear about it and He will do something about it. And we do not want to be on the wrong side of that.

When the children of Israel were trying to get to the Promised Land, they tried to go through two different nations to get there—Ammon and Moab. They promised not to hurt anyone and to pay for everything they ate or drank—because it wasn’t right to ask for hospitality—and the Ammonites and Moabites said no to them. God was really angry at them because He gave them their lands and told the children of Israel not to hurt them, because they were family. But the kings of Moab and Ammon treated them like dirt and said, “You can’t use our lands as a shortcut!” God was generous with them but they weren’t generous with God’s people. The people of Sodom were rich, but they weren’t generous with anyone and not even with God’s angels. God makes sure that we have what we need so that we can help people who don’t have what they need. And we can’t help absolutely everyone but we can help some people. That’s all that God asks. I wish I had a billion trillion dollars so I could feed everyone, but I don’t—but God does expect me to use what I do have to help people who need it.

Jesus got a lot of hospitality, a lot, and so did His disciples. That’s the only way He could travel around preaching. According to the Bible, it was mostly women who helped Jesus out but there were also others like Lazarus who shared the home he had with his two sisters whenever Jesus needed a place to stay when He was in Jerusalem. Jesus was from the Galilee, and so when He travelled to Judea, He had to get a place to stay. Jesus told His disciples to be good and grateful toward the people who gave them a home and food while they were visiting but if there was a town where no one would take them in, that they would be treated worse than Sodom on the day of judgment. Dang! God really wants us to be kind to people who have nowhere else to go.

What about the prophet Elijah? In his days, there was a terrible famine and no one had any food, but there was a widow who was making up the very last of her flour and oil into small bread cakes. She knew that she and her son would die because there was nothing left after that. But she shared what she had with Elijah and God took care of her for the rest of the famine and her oil and flour never ran out the entire time. When David and his men were hungry and had nothing to eat, Ahimelech the priest took the forbidden bread and gave it to them because it was all he had. God wants us to share what we have with others and He also wants us to be reasonable about it. It was against the commandments for Ahimelech to give David and his men that bread but it was an emergency situation so he went ahead and gave it to them anyway. That’s because our God is very hospitable. God wants to save lives and not destroy them. God wasn’t going to eat any of that special bread—it was given to the priests every Sabbath—but what would it say about God if those men all went hungry while the priests had plenty to eat from offering the sacrifices?! Doing what is good and right sometimes means that we don’t keep one of the commandments, because some commandments are much more important than others.

Jesus talked to the Pharisees about that a few times. They were being super careful to make sure they were keeping some commandments in some really extreme ways. When it came time to give 10% of what they had grown to the priests every year, they were so careful that they even measured out their spices so that everything was just right. But Jesus said that was fine—only there were more important commandments they were ignoring. They weren’t making sure that the people who were hurting and being mistreated were being taken care of. The priests didn’t need mint and cumin, two spices, more than hurting people needed help! God doesn’t care about spices—He cares about people! According to Jesus, the commandments are all important, but not one of them is more important than loving God and each other. Loving our neighbors is exactly what the people of Sodom aren’t going to be doing.

I love you, and I am praying for you. It’s good to talk to the grownups in your life about why some commandments, like saving people’s lives, are more important than others. Understanding that will help you keep God’s commandments in ways that show the world His goodness, mercy, and love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

If you want to view this on YouTube, check this out! If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you ever been scared to pray because you don’t want to say the wrong thing or because you are afraid that you can’t trust God to do what is right or that He will be angry if you are honest? Today, we’re going to talk about why we can always be ourselves when we are talking to God. And not only that, but about how having to be perfect in our prayers comes from pagan religions and not from the Bible.

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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 Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to be more understandable to kids.

Did you know that a lot of grownups are too scared to pray? Sometimes, people get the idea that God is so untrustworthy and mean that He is listening to every single word and every single thought just so He can have an excuse to do something awful to us or other people—like somehow He is waiting for permission from us to do something just terrible. Where did that kind of thinking come from and does it make any sense? Sometimes we get way too many ideas about God from how other people worshiped their gods and still do. So, we are going to talk about prayer in other ancient religions and how people have confused what those gods were like and what our God is really like. We can’t trust our God if we are thinking about Him like the people who worship a lot of gods do. Their gods were always just like people—only like people with superpowers who could be way more dangerous and mean than any human ever could!

Do you know any bullies? Bullies are kids and adults who are just mean and nasty and they are looking for an excuse to do something rotten to anyone they don’t like. What about people who are nitpickers and critical? Nitpicker is a name we call people who have to just mess with us on every little thing they think we are doing wrong no matter how unimportant it is. People who are critical are always just making us feel bad for whatever they don’t like. People like this are no fun to be around and most families have at least one person who is like this. Hopefully, we aren’t that person! I used to be very nitpicky and critical, just getting on people for whatever it was that they weren’t doing perfectly or whatever irritated me or whatever I thought they were wrong about. I thought I was helping—maybe not helping them but helping myself to make everything more like the way I wanted it to be. Being around me was not pleasant at all when I was being like that. I made people feel like I didn’t love them at all and like I didn’t see anything good about them. I am really sad about that now.

And when I became a Christian and was still doing that (and sometimes I still do it), it made God look like He must be that way too—just waiting for you to make a mistake so that He can pounce on you and make you feel bad about yourself. And I personally know that’s the opposite of what He is like. But the gods of all the nations around the children of Israel actually were like that. You never for sure knew exactly what would make them angry or even if you could do anything that was good enough to make them happy. There is a prayer that archaeologists discovered. It was written by a man going through a bunch of terrible things and he went from temple to temple, making sacrifices and trying to make all the gods happy because he didn’t know which one was angry or why they were angry and punishing him:

I wish I knew that what I am doing actually makes the gods happy! What seems like to me just makes the gods angry; The things I think are horrible are somehow okay with my gods. Who knows what the gods in heaven even want? Who understands the plans of the underworld gods? Where is anyone who has learned the ways of the gods? (rephrase mine from Walton’s Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament pg 145)

Isn’t that just awful?—Knowing that your god approves of really horrible things and doesn’t care enough to let you know what it is that they want? And because there are so many gods and goddesses, not even knowing which one is angry at you? And because there are so many gods and because they all have different personalities and likes and dislikes, what makes one of them happy might make another one angry. If two gods are fighting, and you worship one, will the other take their anger out on you? And to believe that when you die, you don’t just stop existing but you end up in the underworld and who the heck even knows what those gods will do to you—or your dead loved ones if you make them angry. It was a total nightmare. But that’s what life was like in polytheistic nations—which is a fancy way of saying “groups of people who believe in a whole lot of different gods”. We’ve talked about this many times, how really pathetic these gods were. They had to be fed every single day by priests, or they would get weak and they wouldn’t be able to do their jobs. The sun wouldn’t come up or the rains wouldn’t fall or too much rain would come down and there would be a flood, or all the animals and people would stop having babies, or whatever. Keeping the gods happy meant that they did their jobs and ignored the people. No one wanted the attention of the gods because that just got you in trouble one way or another. Bored gods were nothing but trouble. They wanted them well-fed, happy, and too busy to mess with humans! But they were also a mystery, which is what makes them a lot different from our God—who is really the only God there actually is.

God explained, through Moses and the Prophets and then perfectly in Jesus, exactly what He wants. No one had to guess. In fact, all of those laws (and some of them only made sense to the people they were originally given to because we don’t even know what they mean anymore and even the great Jewish scholars of the past couldn’t figure it out for sure)—anyway, all of those laws told the Israelites one thing. They said, “You have to be better than the world all around you. You have to love no other god except Me, and you have to love your neighbors.” And that’s hard. It’s still hard and especially since Jesus told us that our neighbors are actually everyone and not just the guy next door or the people who look like us or have the same religion or whatever. God used the commandments to tell us in every single generation forever that, “however good and kind and generous the world around you is, you have to do better to show them what I am like.” And so, we learn, little by little, to not be like the example set by the gods of the other nations who were hateful, cruel, and selfish. They loved stirring up trouble, hurting the weak, and starting wars. But if Jesus is right (and we know He is), then we have to be different than that. We can’t be thinking of ourselves and what would be good for us if it hurts someone else. Jesus never did that. In fact, He was willing to be hurt for the good of absolutely anyone who would ever believe Him. And what turns out to be good for us should be good for everyone we come in contact with.

And if God expects that from us, then we can expect even more from Him. If He wants us to be better than everyone around us, that means He is better than absolutely everyone—in fact, He is perfect. He gave us the Bible so that we could read the whole thing from front to back to learn who He is and how much He is willing to sacrifice so that we can be His people. In fact, when Moses wanted to see God, God told Moses His name, Yahweh, and said this—“Yahweh–Yahweh is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to get angry and full of faithful love and truth, always faithful and loving for a thousand generations (like 40,000 years—forever), forgiving people who decide to do wrong things, who do wrong things because they don’t care what is right, and people who just make mistakes. But that doesn’t mean there will be no consequences, because the wrong that people do can make things bad for a very long time for their own family.” (Ex 34:6-7)

God wants us to succeed, not to fail. There are plenty of humans beings who just want the worst for you and will trick you and take advantage of every mistake you make, but that isn’t what God is like at all. That’s why He is so forgiving, because He wants every single one of us to be more like Jesus and that can’t happen if He is just waiting around the corner for us to mess up so He can kill us or torture us. Believe me, if that was true, I wouldn’t have survived my twenties! Or even my forties! God knows how ridiculous we are and He also knows that, without Him, we are stuck in sin—not even knowing what is right or wrong. God wants His Kingdom on earth, the whole earth, to be a place where we all love Him and one another—that is His goal. That’s been His goal ever since the beginning. That’s why He created the Garden and put Adam and Eve in it, so that they would love Him and each other without any of the nonsense awful things we do to mess stuff up. Next week we will talk about what love means so I am gonna stop right there. I almost got off track. Again. It’s like I am a dog who sees a squirrel and forgets what they were doing!

God is going to treat you and everyone else however it takes to make His goals happen. That’s why He told Moses how patient and loving and trustworthy He is. It’s why He is so careful not to just kill us all when what we need is to be taught and loved and healed. He didn’t create us perfect. He created us with the ability to make good and bad choices and because we are His children, He cuts us a lot of slack and just rolls His eyes when we make mistakes. And when we are doing bad things, He works to change us so that we can do better. He isn’t a nitpicker, and He isn’t just critical and upset with us no matter how hard we are trying. In the Bible, there are a bunch of instructions, but you know what? They were nudges for them (and us) to learn to be better than the world around us and to save our communities when things are desperate. But behind them is always His goal to get us to love one another excellently. Unfortunately, until Jesus, people found ways to use those instructions to do what they wanted.

What does all this have to do with prayer? Everything! We have to know what God is like and what His goals are before we can settle down and be honest with Him, and before we can be honest with Him, we have to be able to trust that He is nothing like the false gods of the rest of the world—just waiting for an excuse to hurt us and the people we love. How can we be honest when we are afraid of every word we say? I know there are people like that but if God was like that then Jesus wouldn’t have died to save us—because God wouldn’t have wanted to save us.

The truth is that we can tell God anything because there is nothing we can say to Him that He doesn’t already know. But that doesn’t mean that He doesn’t want us to talk to Him about it. You can say all the wrong words about all the wrong things and all the wrong people while feeling terrible feelings and it is absolutely okay. He isn’t going to go off and do something messed up just because you are angry with someone. He will help you with your emotions because He gave you those emotions to tell you about what’s going on inside you and outside you. Emotions are our friends and also our enemies sometimes if we do the wrong things with them, but emotions aren’t ever wrong. Emotions just are whatever they are. God knows how wild and uncontrollable they can be. And sometimes, we need to be really mad when bad things are happening. And we need to cry when sad things happen. We also need to laugh during good times. So, we can come to God with all our emotions and He knows what to do with them and help us with them, so that we can control them better in the future or maybe even feel them more because He feels that way too. Do you believe that God is happy when there are wars and little children are killed because of terrible grownup decisions? No, He gets angry and He doesn’t care who those children are. So, we can tell Him in our prayers that we are angry or scared or tell Him about our good news too. It is all important to God.

Now, I didn’t used to know all this, and I would be so careful while praying. You see, I knew God was real and it was very important to me to please Him but I also didn’t trust Him at all. Someone did something terrible to me when I was about 34 years old—twenty years ago. And then he got other people against me too and it hurt worse than anything because it was in my church. My heart was broken and so I would talk to God about it and I kept asking God to fix it, but then I would get all freaked out and say, “But please don’t hurt his family God, please protect them. I don’t want them to suffer for what he is doing.” Isn’t that sad? I actually thought that God would hurt innocent people if I didn’t ask Him not to. I was a pretty new believer then and I still didn’t understand Him. It wouldn’t be until I was thirty-seven that I realized I could say absolutely anything I was thinking and feeling—even if I was angry at Him. And I have been very angry at Him many times. But prayer isn’t just magic, like they believed in the ancient world—our prayer is a talk with someone who loves us very deeply and forever. God is committed to you, forever, and He will always want you to be able to be honest with Him and trust Him because once you do, He can really start making you more like Jesus.

And I guess this is a good time to talk about the prayers of people to their false gods. I told you that it worked like a magic spell, right? First of all, they had to bring some kind of gift to that god—to bribe him or her. Their gods weren’t interested in them at all unless they brought some sort of expensive present. And then they had to say the god’s name exactly right because if they didn’t then that god wasn’t smart enough to hear them but if they did say their real name exactly right then the god had to do whatever they asked. Those gods could be bribed and controlled, and they weren’t all that smart. That’s why all the nations around Israel and also the children of Israel themselves had a hard time understanding God because He was just nothing like any of the other gods. He confused them. How could one and only one God create everything and do everything and know everything? It seemed crazy. They had to learn and it took a long time. That’s why they didn’t understand how prayer worked and why they kept worshiping God while also praying to other gods for help at the same time. They didn’t trust God to handle all their needs. They believed He was just like all the other gods who weren’t even really gods at all.

And we can still do that even when we know there is only one God. There are people who will tell you that God won’t hear you if you don’t use the right names or say the exact right things or that if you don’t understand the commandments perfectly that He won’t listen to you. And it is sad they believe that about God because with a god like that, no one can ever be good enough no matter how hard they try. That’s a god leaving you to feel hopeless and angry and that’s the sort of god that people give up on because what’s the use of believing in someone who can’t ever be pleased? Have you ever known someone like that? Someone who doesn’t like you no matter how good you behave or how much you do or anything? I do, and it is an awful way to live. What if you get straight A’s in school except for a C in PE and all they care about is that C in PE? Not everyone is good at sports—I wasn’t no matter how hard I tried. And what if you get all good grades except in math no matter how hard you try because your brain just has a tough time with numbers and equations? That’s so hard. It’s God who gives us the abilities to do certain things and not others. I have a beautiful singing voice but cannot read sheet music or play an instrument. I would get bad grades in those things. But when people blame that on you, they are really blaming God and the way He made your brain to work really well in some ways and to struggle in others. Not everyone is good at everything. Unlike people, God knows what you can and can’t accomplish. Your best really is good enough even if that best is only a C grade!

And you know what? Understanding God and our Bibles is even more complicated than anything you take in school. He isn’t nearly as hard to understand as we make Him out to be just because all these people have all of these ideas about Him being all sorts of ways because that’s how they were taught. If they had parents or a Pastor who was always yelling at them about how mean God is and how angry He is at them, that’s the god they are going to teach people about. I suppose that’s one main reason why God sent Jesus, so that we would see and hear and experience what God is and does in real life. The disciples are kind of hilarious in how much stuff they got wrong about God and how Jesus has to keep setting them straight. When two of them wanted to call down fire and brimstone on a city of Samaritans, Jesus said, “Dudes, no, that is not okay. Dang.” They kept wanting Him to be violent and He kept saying no. They wanted Him to take revenge on people who were mean to Him or wouldn’t listen to Him and He kept saying no. They wanted Him to send all the children away, and He really said no. In fact, He told His disciples that anyone messing with children was messing with Him and it would be better for them if they had a stone tied around their neck and get thrown into the sea. And then He told His disciples that not only did the angels who cared for children see God’s face up close and personal every single day, but that we should all be more like those children coming to see Him.

Jesus cared about the poor, and people in prison, and those who were hungry and thirsty and who didn’t have any warm clothes to wear, and who were sick and disabled. He cared for the people whom everyone else thought were suffering because they deserved it and didn’t deserve any special attention. He cared for all the people who were messed up in some way or another and let me tell you, the religious experts were really angry about it. And the religious experts today can be just the same. Jesus said that the most important commandments weren’t about giving enough money to God or keeping the Sabbath or any of that but were about doing what is right for other people. Giving money to God is good, but when we make things better for people who are hurting, it shows the world what God wants and how He wants to world to be a more peaceful and loving place where people don’t have to be scared anymore. They didn’t like that because some of them were rich from taking advantage of poor people. They didn’t want to hear that just keeping the commandments as written and ignoring the importance of love wasn’t good enough. There are always people who think they can please God by just doing the easy stuff, but loving people has to be learned and it is much harder. Some commandments are way more important than others and loving others and God are the two most important. If keeping one of the other commandments makes us do something to hurt someone else who is already hurting, then we aren’t making God happy at all.

That’s the God we are praying to. And so, we can say all the wrong things when we pray and it’s okay. We can be angry at Him or other people and it’s okay to trust Him with that. In fact, there is this prayer in the Bible that is really disturbing. A guy who has been through terrible things is so angry at his enemies that he wants their babies dead. What??? Who wants babies dead? Well, sometimes when we are really angry, we just forget what is right and good and we say whatever it is that comes to our mind. Because the babies of his own people were killed, he wanted his enemies to know what that feels like. He probably didn’t really want those innocent babies to die, he just wanted revenge. He wanted his enemies to feel how he was feeling. I think we can all look back to times when we felt the same way. And it is absolutely alright to be honest with God about that sort of thing. Believe me, He isn’t going to do it, but He can and will help you with how you are feeling. Not by smacking you down and saying, “Dude, that is so messed up,” but by comforting you and crying with you and not abandoning you even if it feels like everyone else has.

So, we can trust God with our messy emotions, and the messed-up things we are thinking, and our confusion, and frustration, and just everything. He isn’t looking for an excuse to smack us down for being honest, but when we are talking with Him, sometimes He talks to us about it. He doesn’t expect us to know things we don’t know or to be more mature and loving than we are right now. He’s here to help us become more like Jesus. God isn’t ever unfair even though people are. God isn’t waiting for us to mess up so that He can make fun of us like some people do. God doesn’t want to destroy us—He wants to give us life and wants to be with us forever when Jesus comes back as King of the world here on earth. The Bible says that He will wipe away all of our tears and people won’t be dying or getting sick or in wheelchairs or anything like that. My son’s body will work perfectly—that makes me happier than anything else! And no one will ever hurt you again.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you will take a chance on God today and talk with Him about anything and everything and be honest about how you feel. I promise you that He isn’t going to be mean or tricky or unfair to you. God is better than the best person you will ever know in real life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special episode: Many kids feel (or are made to feel) that they are mistakes for this or that reason. It’s an issue near and dear to my heart so we are going to tackle it.

Oh no! God has made it clear that it was always His plan to give a miracle baby through Sarah and now Abraham realizes that his beloved thirteen-year-old son Ishmael won’t be his heir. From now on, what was once just a mess is now heartbreaking and it will only get worse.

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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. (Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked a bit to make it easier for kids to understand the content and the context without having to read an entire chapter every week!)

This week, we have to talk about something very important. Sarah and Abraham have now been promised a baby boy, but Abraham already has a thirteen-year-old son named Ishmael, whose mother is Sarah’s slave Hagar, whom she gave to Abraham as another wife so that they could have the son they needed to inherit everything and take care of them in their old age. God had promised Abraham a son but never said anything about how it would happen. After ten years of waiting, Sarah had decided to make it happen her own way. She did what anyone would do in those days, and we know this from reading cuneiform tablets from around the time when she was alive. She made another woman have a baby for her, and that baby was supposed to be Sarah’s son, but God had other ideas. He told Hagar that the child would be hers and not Sarah’s. It was only fair because Hagar was a slave, and she was forced to become Abraham’s wife—and she still had to work as a slave even though her son was a very important person in the household of Abraham!

Now that God is promising that eighty-nine year old Sarah will have a son, Abraham has to be both happy and sad at the same time. Let’s look at this week’s verses, Gen 17:17-22–

Abraham fell down with his face on the ground. Then he laughed and said to himself, “Can a child be born to a hundred-year-old man? Can Sarah, a ninety-year-old woman, actually have a baby?” So, Abraham said to God, “I wish that Ishmael could be your choice!” But God said, “No. Your wife Sarah will have a baby boy, and you will name him Isaac. My covenant will be with Isaac as a permanent covenant for his future descendants. As for Ishmael, I do hear what you are saying. I will certainly bless him; I will make him fruitful and will multiply him greatly. He will be the father of twelve tribal leaders, and I will make him into a great nation. But my covenant with you is going to continue on with Isaac. Sarah will give birth to him around this time next year.” When he finished talking with him, God went away from Abraham.

Let’s talk about Ishmael. Was he a mistake? Well, Abraham and Sarah sure made a mistake in not being patient and Ishmael wasn’t God’s choice. God wanted a child who would be a 100% miracle—a child that showed the world that he was a God who could make impossible things happen. The other nations of people worshiped fertility gods and goddesses. They believed that goddesses like Atargatis and gods like Ba’al Hammon and Tammuz were responsible for making sure they had plenty of babies, lots of food, and many critters. But Atargatis couldn’t make a ninety-year-old woman have a baby. None of the gods of the nations around them could do that—all they could do was take credit for what our God was actually doing. Throughout the Bible, a big theme (and a theme is a main point that we see all the way through) is God showing His people that they don’t need anyone else because He is the God of everything and not just one or two things like the pathetic gods of the nations around them. We’ve talked about that a lot. Our God doesn’t need helpers! And He likes to prove it! God wants to start out His special people with a bang! Abraham and Sarah wanted to start it all out with something ordinary—with a young woman having a baby. And there isn’t anything strange about that! That’s normal.

But just because Abraham and Sarah did what was wrong, it doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with Ishmael. He’s an ordinary thirteen-year-old boy. What Abraham and Sarah did was a mistake but Ishmael wasn’t a mistake. People aren’t mistakes. Choices are mistakes. I hope that you can understand that. Sarah doesn’t love Ishmael, but that’s her problem. We don’t see it now but in a few more chapters, we will. That’s her mistake. Ishmael hasn’t done anything wrong but he is alive because Sarah did what was wrong, and then everything got messed up. Sometimes we hate people who remind us of our mistakes but that is a terrible thing to do to someone else. Ishmael, like every human being, is fearfully and wonderfully made. Sometimes, people get told that they are a mistake, but that is a lie. No person is a mistake. Every person is created to be the image of God—every single one. The only mistakes are when we don’t live like God wants us to live. But that’s about choices, and not about who we are. People who don’t live the way God wants today might start living in ways that please Him tomorrow. We humans are amazing creatures, the most amazing creatures in the world. You are amazing too. You weren’t a mistake, no matter what. In fact, if anyone tells you that you are a mistake, then they are making a huge mistake!

For a long time, I really believed that I was a mistake and that everyone would be better off without me. I sometimes wish that I could go back and give me a big hug and tell my younger self that the things I feel about myself aren’t always true. My feelings are real, when I am feeling sad or angry or happy, but what I believe about myself isn’t always the truth. They just feel like the truth! Sometimes those lies feel like the truth because that’s what people are telling us. It’s what they want us to believe. And how they say it and how they treat us makes us believe that they must be right. And sometimes the people telling us those lies have a group around them telling them how awesome they are even when they are being just awful. That’s a good time to learn how to be critical thinkers. Is a mean person actually as good as everyone tells them they are? Does that make sense? Or is the world upside down? I can tell you that the world is definitely upside down and what is wrong seems right and what is right can seem wrong. And we will see that all through the Bible, all the way to the end! I wish that I had understood that when I was a kid.

So, now that I have that out of the way, so that we know Ishmael isn’t a mistake as a person even though Sarah and Abraham did what was wrong to get him, let’s look at what happens in this week’s verses: Abraham fell down with his face on the ground. Then he laughed and said to himself, “Can a child be born to a hundred-year-old man? Can Sarah, a ninety-year-old woman, actually have a baby?” Next chapter, we will see Sarah do the exact same thing—only her face won’t be in the dirt. And like Abraham, she will only be saying it in her own mind. Not out loud because what God was telling him wasn’t something he had ever even dreamed would happen. When they were young, yes, they always hoped but when Sarah stopped being able to have babies, that was that. Women can’t always have babies. When we are teenagers, we become able to have babies but when we are older, our body parts just up and say, “Nope, we’re done.” And it’s very obvious when those things happen. I am at the age where my body said, “Nope!” a few years ago. Sarah was probably about my age when that happened too, because when we meet her she is sixty-five and it’s already too late for her to have babies. But when Sarah finally did have a baby, she wasn’t just grandma-aged but great grandma-aged!

I mean, God just told Abraham something crazier than in Genesis 12 when He said, “Follow me and I will lead you to a different place, but you will have no idea where you are going.” I mean, that’s just weird, but this is even weirder. They knew when a woman could and couldn’t have a baby in those days even if they didn’t understand the science behind it—remember that they believed in baby seeds that were just planted in the mom like a wheat seed in a field—they knew when it was and was not possible for a woman to have a baby and it hadn’t been possible with Sarah for at least thirty years. Of all the ways that Abraham thought he might have a son since he came to the Land of Canaan, this was actually the one that probably had never occurred to him. And Abraham didn’t know God well enough yet to understand that He can do absolutely anything. Abraham is just like we are—God proves Himself to us because He wants us to learn that we can trust Him. But Abraham laughed probably before he even asked himself if it was a good idea. Have you ever done that? Have you ever been in a quiet situation and all of a sudden something occurred to you and you busted out laughing?

Oh my gosh, when I was a teenager, my mom and I went to a Christmas concert down at the Murphys Diggins. And they wanted everyone to have a solemn and respectful moment where we would all hum Silent Night. But my lips started buzzing and I looked at my mom and my mom looked at me and all of a sudden we couldn’t stop laughing and I was trying so hard not to that I thought I might pee my pants right then and there. To this day, I can’t hum without thinking about it. So, I have a lot of compassion for Abraham here and Sarah in the next chapter. Sometimes, laughing is the furthest thing from our minds and it just comes right out anyway. Abraham was shocked. And he laughed. This is definitely one of those, “Let the one who has not sinned throw the first stone” moments for sure. Oops.

And so, after Abraham laughed, he thought about Ishmael, who he loves. The news was amazing—an answer to so many prayers for so long but those prayers had been forgotten because there was just no need to pray about it anymore. But what about their plans over the last fourteen years? Ishmael had been told that he would inherit everything. Abraham was teaching him everything he needed to know to carry on in his father’s footsteps as the patriarch of the family. Ishmael was a very important person in everyone’s eyes but now Abraham realizes that he and his wife have made a terrible mistake. He is going to have to break his promises to Ishmael. Ishmael will have to be second to his much younger brother. Abraham cried out to God and asked, “but what about Ishmael, can’t you accept him as my firstborn?” Have you ever made a promise that you had to break? It’s a hard thing to do. I have never had to break a promise this big and especially not to my kids. I hurt inside just thinking about how sad this would have made Abraham. I bet he was sick to his stomach.

But God said, “No. Your wife Sarah will have a baby boy, and you will name him Isaac. My covenant will be with Isaac as a permanent covenant for his future descendants.”

God was telling Abraham that Isaac was always God’s plan and that hadn’t changed. Even the people who are chosen by God don’t just get to change God’s plans by doing things their own way or by taking shortcuts when they are not patient and trusting. Everything that God had promised Abraham—a great name and a great nation and kings and more descendants than anyone could ever hope to count and the Land of Canaan for their home—would happen through Isaac and his children and not through Ishmael and his descendants. It was what Abraham had wanted for Ishmael, and since God had been quiet for thirteen years, Abraham probably believed that they had made the right decision. God doesn’t send a lightning bolt to zap our butts when we do wrong. Usually, He doesn’t say anything and He lets us face the consequences. Just because God is quiet doesn’t mean that He approves of everything we’ve been up to. But I know a lot of people who really believe that God will always stop us from doing messed up things. That’s not God’s job. He lets us choose. It doesn’t change His plans but it does change our lives.

So, what about Ishmael? God knew that even though Abraham and Sarah had done something terribly wrong, it wasn’t Ishmael’s fault. So, God told Abraham that He had big plans to bless Ishmael: “As for Ishmael, I do hear what you are saying. I will certainly bless him; I will make him fruitful and will multiply him greatly. He will be the father of twelve tribal leaders, and I will make him into a great nation. But my covenant with you is going to continue on with Isaac.” Wow! God is promising even more to Ishmael than He did back when He was telling Hagar about what a great man her son would be. Not only would Ishmael be a mighty man but his kids would be too. God is promising to bless Ishmael, which means that He will continue to look out for him and won’t forget him. God will also do that for Lot’s sons and for Isaac’s son Esau later on in Genesis. He gave them land that the children of Israel weren’t allowed to take away from them. God is very trustworthy and generous. And he is going to give Ishmael just as many tribes as He will give to Abraham’s grandson Jacob. The covenant promises may belong to Isaac’s descendants but Ishmael’s future isn’t anything to sneeze at! Why? Because Ishmael isn’t to blame for Abraham’s and Sarah’s mistake. God proves that by blessing him. We can make mistakes and we will make mistakes, but we can’t be mistakes.

But God wasn’t finished, “…my covenant with you is going to continue on with Isaac. Sarah will give birth to him around this time next year.” When He finished talking with him, God went away from Abraham. Wow! After all this time—only another year to wait. That means that Sarah will be pregnant in just about three months and that’s not long at all. But what should Abraham do? Should he tell Sarah or would she think he was crazy or would it be cruel to get her hopes up after all this time? Before he had a chance to ask any more questions, God took off. God had said all He needed to say and He had said a lot! God will do that to Abraham in the next chapter as well. I suppose it is amazing that God talks to people at all and we should be grateful when He does but we can’t expect Him to stick around forever answering all our questions. I would probably never shut up if I had the chance. Just ask anyone who knows me in real life and they will tell you! I would never run out of questions.

In the Bible, all the way through, God reacts differently to the questions of different people. With prophets and normal people like me, He talks though dreams and visions and gives us riddles. But with Abraham and Moses, He would just flat out have a conversation with them without all the puzzles. Abraham and Moses both had the special job of starting a family and beginning a new kind of nation in the world. They weren’t just getting answers for themselves but for everyone. Especially Moses. But it is when Jesus gets asked questions that we learn the most about what it is like to have a conversation with God.  A lot of people talked to Jesus about a lot of things but they all had different reasons for doing it. Some wanted answers—and some of the people asking their questions were honest and others were sneaky and trying to trick Him and trap Him into giving an answer that would get Him into trouble. Sometimes people asked Him what they thought the right question was but instead of answering that question, He answered the question they really should have asked instead. The Bible said that He knew what was in their hearts when they asked and that means He knew what they were really thinking and He also knew the real reason they were asking. I wish I could do that!

Have you ever been asked a question that wasn’t really a question? I have, and my problem is that I take almost all questions seriously and so I give honest answers when people don’t actually want them. I mean, when someone asks me if their hat looks dumb and I know they like their hat, I tell them what they want to hear because I know there is a difference between my opinion and what is actually true. If they feel good about their hat, why should I make them feel bad just because I don’t like it? But sometimes, on social media especially, someone will ask what looks like a real question and I will think they are looking for a real answer. But they don’t want a real answer because what they are looking for is a chance to give everyone their answer and to disagree with everyone who says something they don’t like. I hate it when people do that. It’s hard to trust people when they aren’t really asking a question but are setting up a trap that they want a person to fall into.

And I totally fall for it because I only ask those kinds of questions when I actually want answers. If I ask you something about the Bible, it is because I don’t know the answer to the question and not because I want to show off what I know and make people feel like they aren’t smart. If I want opinions, I will say, “what do you think about such and such.” I usually ask questions like that when we can’t actually know what is true.

But when Jesus asked questions, you had better know the answer when you said something. Jesus was wanting to teach you something—Jesus didn’t have to ask questions to find things out the way we do. Sometimes Jesus asked questions to see if people would tell Him the truth—like He did with the Samaritan woman. Other times, He asked questions when people were trying to trap Him so that they would trap themselves instead. But Jesus was never showing off, like the people who were trying to trick Him. Jesus wanted people to see who He was so that when He rose from the dead, that they would remember and follow Him. Sometimes that meant He had to make the people who were trying to trick Him look bad so that no one would want to believe what they had to say about Him. But what Jesus really wanted was for people to see the truth. That’s why, if they asked the wrong question, He answered the question they really should have asked. He knew He wasn’t wasting His time by talking to people who wanted to know about Him. But like God with Abraham, He had other places to go and other people to talk to.

He didn’t stay in one town talking to the same people forever—He went to all the different towns in Galilee, where He healed people and tossed demons out of them and fed them and taught them what God wanted them to hear. Jesus once said that He only ever did what He saw God doing. Jesus is the only one who ever knew or saw God and so Jesus always knew exactly what God would do, no matter what, and He did it. And so, we can trust Jesus like we trust God and we can trust God like we trust Jesus. Jesus wouldn’t ever lie about God and God would never lie about Jesus. Jesus went around teaching everyone not because He wanted everyone to see how smart He is but because God wanted everyone to know how wonderful He is and how different He is from the gods of the Romans who had invaded them and took over their country. When Jesus was done, He left and went somewhere else. That doesn’t mean that people didn’t want to ask Him any more questions or talk to Him longer, but that they had what they needed and Jesus could leave for another place. But, of course, sometimes the huge crowds kept following Him wherever He went!

God was like that with Abraham too. I am sure Abraham would have kept talking with God forever but God had said what He had come to say and it was time for their talk to end. God probably didn’t want Abraham to keep asking questions about things that were already decided. Like, “When exactly is Sarah going to have the baby?” Or, “Can’t Ishmael and Isaac both work together to run the family?” Maybe, “How on earth is Sarah going to have a baby? That’s just crazy talk!” We always want all the details, right? I am sure Abraham has had a lot of questions since that first day when God told Him to leave Haran and leave his entire family behind. And sometimes He prayed and asked and sometimes he just went and made decisions for himself about what God meant and what God wanted to happened and when He wanted it to happen. We usually think that sooner is better than later but God seems to prefer to wait until we can handle His promises or when it is obvious that it was a miracle—like baby Isaac!

So, if you have questions and God isn’t answering them, that’s okay. He doesn’t hate you. Sometimes, getting answers just makes everything worse and when we really need those answers, we will get them. The timing will be perfect.

I love you. I am praying for you. You know, I don’t care what anyone ever tells you when they are being angry or spiteful. You aren’t a mistake. God knows your name. You will make mistakes just like everyone else, but you are not a mistake.