It's relatively easy to use a Bible storybook. Stories have been selected for us from the Bible, and we can simply read these stories to or with our kids. (Even if you're using a Bible storybook with your kids, the rest of this chapter can still be very helpful.) But when our kids are old enough to get a "regular" Bible (a bible that has the whole text in it, from Genesis through Revelation) what are they supposed to do with it?
It would seem logical to simply start reading the Bible at the beginning and keep on reading until the end. But if you've ever tried to do that, you know what happens. The first book, Genesis, is incredibly engaging and full of wonderful stories about creation, Noah's ark, Abraham, and so on. The next book, Exodus, beginswith the great story of Moses and the pharoah, but then come sections where we get bogged down in laws and detailed descriptions of the tabernacle. And when we discover that Leviticus is all laws, we quit and go back to reading just bits and pieces in the Bible, the stories we understand and are familiar with.
The problem is not that the stuff we get bogged down in doesn't make sense; rather; it's that without a larger context we don't know how to read it or what to do with it. It's like planning a trip by car from Panama City to San Diego with only a stack of city maps. You don't have a clue which towns you'll be traveling through until you look at a map of North America as a whole to give you the big picture. THen the maps of smaller areas start to make sense, because you understand them in a larger context.
In teaching any subject, it usually works best to start with an overview and gradually work our way down to the details. Then the details can be understood in terms of their wider context. Exactly the same thing is true of the Bible. The various stories of the Bible, as well as all the other pieces, such as laws and psalms, all fit into a Big Story, a single, coherent, wide-angle picture that serves as our roadmap through the Bible.
Most kids have heard Bible stories, but without the Big picture, the Bible Story of the Bible, they don't have a clue how the various stories are related to each other or in what order they did happen. Did Abraham come before or after Noah? Who came first, King David or Sampson?
Knowing the stories is better than not knowing them, of course, even if the kids don't know how they fit together. But if we really want our kids to understand the BIble, we must help tem understand these two relatively simple things
1. The Big Story (Or main storyline). Once children grasp the outline of the Bible, the Big Story that weaves itself through both the Old and New Testaments, telling of God's plan for humanity and of how God has been working out that plan, they can fit the pieces into a larger context.
2. The structure of the Bible: Children need to learn how the various books of the Bible fit into the Big Story so that they can find their way around the Bible.
We'll discuss more in later blogs.
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