So Jacob talked to his family, and to all the other people that were in his camp. He said, “We are going to leave this place and go to the place called Bethel. I’m going to make a special table there, so that I can burn animals to show respect to God. You know, God is the one that helped me every time I got trouble, and he stayed with me wherever I went.” Jacob kept on talking to his mob. He said, “Some of you mob have little statues with you, that came from other countries. Some people think that those statues are gods that have power. You mob have to get rid of those statues. Then you all have to wash your bodies and put on clean clothes, because we are going to a special place to show respect to God.”
John 11:55Plain English VersionIt was nearly the time for the Jewish people to have their ceremony called Passover, to remember that a long time ago God got their grand-fathers out of Egypt. A lot of Jewish people from everywhere went to Jerusalem to get ready for that ceremony, and they washed themselves in a special way. See the chapter |
30 Cross References
Every year Jewish people went to Jerusalem for a special ceremony where they ate flat damper for a week. On the first day of that ceremony, they always ate a special dinner called Passover. It was 2 days before that ceremony was going to start, and the bosses of the Jewish ceremonies and the law teachers met together to work out a way to grab Jesus and kill him. But they wanted to grab him when nobody was looking. So those leaders said to each other, “Everybody likes Jesus, so we have to wait a bit. We can’t grab him while there are lots of people here for the ceremony. They will get angry with us, and we will have a very big fight.”
It was just before the Jewish Passover ceremony, and Jesus and his followers sat down to eat together. Jesus knew that it was nearly time for him to leave this world and go back to his father. While he was in the world, he always showed his followers that he loved them. And he kept on loving them right to the end of his time on earth. Before this time, the devil, the boss over the bad spirits, gave one of Jesus’s followers the idea of turning against Jesus. That follower’s name was Judas. He was the son of a man called Simon Iscariot. Jesus and his followers were sitting at the table,
It was early in the morning, and they took Jesus from Cayafas’s house to the house of the government boss in Jerusalem. His name was Pilate. It was the time of the Passover ceremony, so the Jewish leaders wouldn’t go into that house. You see, in their Jewish culture, if they went into a house that belonged to somebody that wasn’t Jewish, it was like they became dirty, and then they couldn’t eat the Passover food.
So you join those men, and go with them to God’s ceremony house, and do that ceremony with them, and pay for the things they buy. Then they can shave their heads. That’s our culture, to show that they have done everything they promised to do. And the people will see you do all that with those men at God’s ceremony house, and they will know that the things people told them about you are not true, and they will know that you do everything in our Jewish law and culture.
Paul listened to everything they said, and he agreed to do that ceremony with those 4 men. The next day, he got them together, and they started to do the ceremony to make themselves clean. After that, Paul went to God’s ceremony house, and he told the leader of the Jewish ceremonies the date they will finish that ceremony and give animals to God for each of them, the way they do in Jewish culture.
But when you trust God, you go close to him, and when you do that, he will come close to you, and he will help you. So you have to stop doing bad things. Don’t even think about doing bad things. Don’t think that maybe you will go the right way, or maybe the wrong way. No, forget the wrong way, and just go the right way.
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