Context for Kids

Abram has a lot of ups and downs in his walk with God and this week we will be talking about one of the downs. Famine strikes the land of Canaan and Abram takes Sarai and their household down to Egypt where there is plenty of food. There’s a big problem though—Sarai is a very beautiful woman and Abram asks her to promise him something that puts her in a lot of danger.

Everyone is talking about Baby Jesus now, all over the world, but what you may not know is that God just loves to do things through “impossible” babies who couldn’t have even been born without God working incredible miracles. So, this week we are going to look at Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Samson, Samuel, and John the Baptist to see how God makes impossible things possible and especially through the greatest miracle baby of all—Jesus!

What if the Maccabees never stood up to Antiochus Epiphanes? What if they had lost the war? What if Mary and Joseph had never been born or they had been raised as pagans? Thousands of things could have gone wrong, but fortunately, Hannukah is the story of how things happened in such a way as to make sure that Jesus, our Savior, was born!

We are taking a break for the next two weeks to talk about the celebration that made the birth of Jesus possible! That’s right—the Feast of Dedication aka Hannukah. This week we’ll talk about the importance of being loyal to God no matter what! Next week, I will explain why there is no Jesus without Hannukah!

Abram, Sarai and Lot all arrive in the Promised Land and God actually appears to Abram for the first time and makes him two more promises that help to explain his very first promise to Abram! But uh oh, what problem will this cause with Lot? We’ll talk about sacred groves, regional gods, altar building and what it meant for Abram to “call on the Name of the Lord” outside a Canaanite city.

Wow! Abram listened to God, believed His promises to bless him—almost—and left his home for the land of the dreaded Canaanites. But why did he disobey and bring his nephew Lot? And how does all this relate to the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness?

This week we will tackle one of the most important things in the Bible—God’s very first promise to Abraham! Up to now, the world has mostly been a mess but God is about to take matters into His own hands to create for himself a nation unlike any other on earth. We’ll be talking about the words bless and blessing and what they mean when they are referring to people. As a bonus, we’ll see exactly why no one in the Bible is perfect except for Jesus and why that’s okay.

Today we are going to introduce the family of Terah and discuss why the Bible is about to change so drastically! The life of Abraham literally changes the world forever, and as we would expect, the story of the Bible is going to change as well. Up until now, we have only been in the introduction—God has been introduced as the Creator, as the Savior, and as the one who has never stopped wanting to fix our drama—and now we get to see Him finally putting His rescue plan into action. This is the last teaching of Torah portion Noach so next week, we will be in Lech Lecha!

The Bible really changes when we get to Genesis 12 and so I wanted to take a week to talk to the kids about what the Bible is and isn’t and why there are so many different kinds of writings by so many different people in it, and why we can trust it.

Transcript: https://contextforkids.com/2022/11/02/episode-80-what-is-the-bible/

Before we start talking about Abraham next week, it’s really important to talk about “the prayer before the Lord’s prayer” which we find in Deuteronomy and begins with the Hebrew word shema, which isn’t an easy word to translate into English but it is a very important word that we need to understand. If that wasn’t confusing enough for us, we also have to figure out what the heck it means that God is “one” because people have been asking questions about that for a very long time.