Is Jesus the Messiah?: Week Five

This week was a really interesting lesson, and I heard a lot of the kids really excited about it! Some even said it was their favorite ever! We looked at the prophecies in Jeremiah 31:15 and Hosea 11:1 as a big group--they say that there will be weeping around the time of Jesus' birth, and that out of Egypt He'll come.

One of my favorite parts of this lesson was when we read, "and out of Egypt I will call my son". About five heads shot up, and I was so proud of them for the way they were critically examining the bible. I asked them what was wrong, and they told me that we already read Jesus came out of Bethlehem! What a conundrum, but we all had faith that God would figure this out for us.

We split the kids up into groups... The first group (3-5) went with me. We talked about how Abraham was the father of nations. Then we went on a little genealogy trip. Abraham to Isaac, Isaac to Jacob. We told the story of Jacob's inheritance (You know, the one where he tricked his blind father into giving him a ton of money by skinning a goat and pretending to be his other brother Esau?) and how he ran away. While he was running, he came across a field and fell madly in love with this girl, Rachel (is this a Disney movie, or what?). He asked her father, Laban to let him marry her, and he said "sure buddy, but you gotta work for 7 years!" So Jacob did but it felt like nothing because he was so enamored with this girl. Then he gets married and he wakes up the next morning and WHOOPS, it's the uglier sister, Leah. Crap. So, he goes back to Laban and asks him what his deal is, and Laban says "okay, work another 7!" and so Jacob does and he finally gets Rachel.

Meanwhile, Leah and Jacob have all these kids... but he can't get any goin' with Rachel, so he's really upset. God's closed Rachel's womb because of favoritism, and Rachel's upset about it. Then miracle baby Joseph comes along (remember, the favorite of the pack? I wonder why that could be...), and Rachel's like "hey! I want another one!" so miracle baby Benjamin comes along, and in the middle of delivery (cue the lights for drama), Rachel starts weeping frantically because she's about to die giving birth to this baby, and she starts weeping for her children. And so the Jews have called her the mother of all Jews (kind of like how some Christians refer to Mary).

So, that's what the first group learned....

Then the second group (K-2) went on a mission. They read Matthew 2:1-12, which basically says that the wise men met with Herod (bad guy!) before coming to see Jesus, and Herod told them to come back and tell him if the baby is really the King of the Jews 'cause he wanted to "worship" him (and by worship, we mean kill). So the wise men went, saw Jesus was awesome. God came down and said, "Listen, buddies, don't go back to Herod, 'cause he's gonna kill the baby", so the wise men were wise and went a different way back to their homelands. Eventually Herod started to realize they weren't coming back, so he headed to Bethlehem to kill all the boys under 2. So, we kids went on a mission with our baby Jesus (our shoes), and we heard God telling us to flee to Egypt, so we did. We ran away from Herod, and WHEW! we were safe.

Everybody came back together and we had the big kids tell the young kids about Rachel, and the young kids told the big kids about Egypt. We looked at the old testament verses again, and we saw that it totally came true! Rachel was weeping for babies being slaughtered, AND Jesus did come out of Egypt because he had to flee there. GO GOD!