Episode 120 Reading the Bible Together

[00:00:00] Dan: Hi everyone and welcome to Training for Life Redeemed. I’m Dan and I’m here with my father David Jackson. We are going through, the theology of the child. We’re kind of now looking more at the, you know, the processes of raising children and giving them, Informed choices, that’s the right phrase, I’m trying to remember what the phrase was, but, and so how do we go about doing that?

[00:00:22] Dan: We talked a bit about that last week, and this week, Dad, we’re going to be diving into How are we going about reading the Bible with our kids? Yeah. Yeah, where do we start? You know, what kind of plan do we have in terms of going forward? What do we want them to achieve? And then, how do we best kind of guide that and nurture that process, I guess?

[00:00:42] Dan: So, let’s… Let’s jump straight back to a little bit from last week. We talked a bit about, using catechisms and we talked about basically making sure our kids read the entirety of the Bible. We talked about that last week. So how, how do we do that? Do I just kind of go, well, you know, I’ve got a Bible reading chart.

[00:01:01] Dan: Let’s mark off the chapters and eventually we’ll get the chapters done. Do I start at the beginning and just read from, Genesis until I get to Revelation, does it make a difference if I do it that way? Should I be doing it chronologically and take, you know, Isaiah and stick it in when I get to him Kings and Jeremiah’s at the end of this and before we get to that?

[00:01:20] Dan: And what, what are we doing when we, as we try and get our kids to know the text.

[00:01:25] David: Well, when we start off with little kids who can’t read, we, you start, if you start off with preschoolers. Where everything has to be simplified down, down, down to a level where their language will cope with it. So we usually start with Bible picture books, with mum and dad talking about the text, or Sunday school teachers, or whoever’s doing this.

[00:01:50] David: We have, from that level we go to Bible story books, where we’re retelling the Bible, and that’s always dangerous. So to retell the Bible. doesn’t mean we, we reinvent it, to get that story right. so, but when you simplify, you lose something. So you must, you must have a plan in your mind as to how you’re going to start with simple things, put a foundation and a structure and then build on that until we fill it in with the whole.  Of what the text says, and by the time you’re an adult, that is a growing understanding. So we’ve, simplifying isn’t wrong, it’s a necessity, but in the process we’ve got to be really, really careful. Because when you put the foundation down and the frame, that determines where everything else is going to go.

[00:02:48] David: so when, here we are, we’ve, we need to be planning. What we call a scope and sequence. Can you explain scope and sequence?

[00:02:57] Dan: You’re just basically laying out what order you’re going to be doing things in. Really, and you do it for a whole year at least for scope and sequence, but like I know I laid out one for our church that was the first seven years of school to go from kindergarten to year six of what we’re going to be teaching and addressing when.

[00:03:17] Dan: and, you know, there’s a thoughtful process that goes into that to make sure that, you know, you’re getting, I don’t know, a mix maybe of, you know, I want to be working my way through the Old Testament and through the New Testament. but if I spend the entire time in the Old Testament, it might take a while before kids get to a New Testament, a long while really, and you do want to be talking about Jesus earlier on.

[00:03:39] Dan: So, you know, that’s why I’ve done a… Mixed approach where they do they’ve done Genesis then they did Mark or they did some bits of Mark. I think we may have actually done Because I was looking at I think we need this more story stuff. So we did Jesus miracles first I think yeah, and then we went back to Old Testament.

[00:03:56] Dan: We came forward and we did Jesus parables, maybe And then back and forth and now you know, this is We’re currently doing Jesus death and resurrection and his appearances to his disciples and the importance of that for the kids. And this is now, like, this is our third year that we’re halfway through where they’re getting to that point.

[00:04:19] Dan: And it’s not that they haven’t heard Jesus death and resurrection yet, because we did it in The Miracles, right? but… We are like they’re getting multiple points on the gospel, but also getting that foundation stuff.

[00:04:32] David: So when you, you’ve got a sequence of what you’re going to do in which order and we put together usually a term or so of Old Testament and then we go to New Testament and then we come back again and we’re doing left foot, right foot.

[00:04:45] David: That’s our sequence. What about our scope?

[00:04:48] Dan: Well, your scope is what you’re actually covering, and so for us, I think to cover the full scope of the, in terms of the Bible, covering all the books. So

[00:05:03] David: for example, you were talking about in Mark’s gospel, you’re going to do narrative, you’re going to do miracles, you’re going to do.

[00:05:12] David: What else?

[00:05:13] Dan: Yeah, so there’s teachings, I’ve broken it up into the, the miracles, I think one of the first things we looked at, and then we went from that into Jesus parables, because there’s lots of, because it’s, most of the parables are narrative based, it’s easier for the kids to learn. Like I’m not, you’re picking the passages that are suitable for the story.

[00:05:37] Dan: children’s age. So I’m not going to do, you know, like we’re doing this stuff I’m currently doing with the kids at my church. We’re looking at, yeah, Jesus enters into the, into Jerusalem and that’s his, yeah, we do the Lord’s supper and we do his arrests and stuff at Gethsemane. I did not do everything that John has that Jesus is teaching at the Last Supper.

[00:05:59] Dan: Okay. So, so we didn’t do the complex nature of. Yeah, the Holy Spirit and what’s happening on multiple levels there. We just did. So we’re looking at,

[00:06:09] David: we’re looking at the sequence of the narrative events, the chronology. Yeah. And one of the things that we would say to parents and to people planning these things, often Bible programs for children have the chronology all over the place.

[00:06:25] David: so when I, when I did my dip ed. I had to do a thing on moral and religious education. I thought, Oh, there’s a window of opportunity. The lady who lectured the course was a Christian. And so I, I did a survey of our Sunday school kids, with the permission of the superintendent. We had about 200 kids in Sunday school.

[00:06:49] David: Back in the day, so I surveyed them to see if they knew the difference between when things happened, which came first, Noah, Moses, David, Jesus, you know, can you put them in order? Not a chance in the world. It was all random. mind you, it was also random. They didn’t know whether, which story was in the Bible and which wasn’t.

[00:07:11] David: So David and Goliath, Jack and the Beanstalk. Here, you look at that and you go, something’s wrong with our scope and sequence, because we don’t know the order of events. We can’t fit them into the sequence of God’s work of salvation. That makes a big difference to comprehending what’s going on. The other thing we did was to note that there’s narrative story.

[00:07:37] David: You’ve got. abstract things that are happening as you described when you get into parables you’re doing a little bit more abstract stuff when you get into John’s stuff John’s gospel it’s getting a lot more abstract.

[00:07:47] Dan: yes yeah and I wouldn’t plan on doing a lot of John’s gospel until year six really yeah but the student that for the kids I’m teaching but having said that the sermon on the mount you can do a lot earlier it’s a lot more Simple.

[00:08:04] David: Simple enough. Yeah, yeah. And you can build on that. So, keeping the chronology in order helps, and then our scope is when we break that down and say, I’m going to do this part of Matthew or this part of Mark, and then when I come back on the next cycle. Which might be in three years or four years time, we’ll do the stuff that we, so we would teach the Exodus narrative, skip over building the tabernacle, skip over Leviticus, skip over in Numbers, pick out the narrative out of Numbers, and then the next cycle we’ll come back and we’ll look at Torah, at the ten commandments, we’’ll look at what the tabernacle was all about, we’ll go and have a look at Deuteronomy,

[00:08:51] David: So you do the, the abstract after you’ve done the narrative. That’s all cool. but for little kids, you’re also scoping that through in terms of, how you represent that to the children. Are you summarizing it? Are you retelling it? Or when you get to grade three, they can read it for themselves. One of the things that I think we need to stress is that when a child can read.

[00:09:18] David: Or even before that, it’s really important that we don’t, that we give up retelling the Bible and we go straight to reading the text. One of the problems I note, listening to so many of these, is that whenever you retell the Bible, you actually damage it because you read into it things that aren’t there.

[00:09:43] David: You take out really significant things that need to go in. We’re, we’re redoing it. And when we redo it, we don’t do it well all the time.

[00:09:53] Dan: I mean, automatically, if you’re not just reading the text, you’re interpreting it. Yes. And that then requires, as you were talking a bit later about, the need for us as parents to actually have a very good understanding ourselves to be able to do any kind of guiDance here with our students.

[00:10:09] David: You need to know the Bible really, really well. because that James three passage, let not many of you become teachers we’ll be judged with greater judgment. when you’re laying a foundation with a child, there should be an element of the fear of God in us. Jesus talks about if you cause one of these fellows to be trapped in some wrong understanding or something, it’d be better to put a rope around your neck and tie it to a millstone.

[00:10:36] David: And I got a bit of a surprise. I always thought it was like a mortar and a pestle. The millstone is a stone big enough that the donkey needs to turn.

[00:10:45] David: He’s really serious about how we lay foundations with children here. So, that, that becomes an issue. Which then brings us to the selection of the materials that we might use to support all of this. Because kids, the younger the child the more visual. we’ve almost lost the art by the way of telling stories that that is a bit of a worry.

[00:11:11] David: one of my loves as a child, one of the things children really do love is to hear stories and to hear them orally and to hear them in person. I used to love going across the fence to my next door neighbor, Robbie. And Robbie was a little, a girl who married an Australian serviceman in World War One.

[00:11:33] David: And she came back to Australia and she had the best stories. about her growing up in England back in the turn of the century. And, and I mean the 19th to 20th century. for a little boy that was just, they were great stories. No pictures, no nothing. Just listen to Robbie telling her yarns. And my Uncle Garner telling his yarns.

[00:11:56] David: Well, there’s a place for that with kids. But once you introduce the visual into that, whether it be picture books, or now we have Animation. We have channels on the internet. Yeah. we’ve got so many resources to do this and some of them replace mum and dad or replace the teacher. And so you’re putting the kid on automatic pilot.

[00:12:23] David: that’s not a good thing to do. It should be a supportive thing, not a replacement. we don’t need the one-eyed Bible teacher, any more than the one eyed babysitter. So that brings us to some of the issues that we’ve got when we visually present the Bible. Which ones come to your mind?

[00:12:48] David: well, which, which picture Bibles would you recommend?

[00:12:50] David: Oh,

[00:12:51] Dan: which ones do I recommend? Well, I recommend them. I don’t normally focus so much on the images to be honest. I’m normally I’m focusing more on… Whether or not the text bits in them line up well with the text itself. so what are you looking for? Having said that, I still don’t like, whenever I’m looking for images and stuff to use with the kids at school, whether it be colouring in or whatever for Sunday school, etc.

[00:13:17] Dan: I do purposely try and make sure I’m not looking for a white Jesus. I’m not looking for a blonde hair, blue eyed person. Like I’m looking for someone that is vaguely. I guess I don’t know if he’d be perfect, I guess we’re not going to get it perfect, but he was an Israelite, so he should look like an Israelite.

[00:13:36] Dan: He’s, you know, and so should all of his followers, and the people who are not Israelite should look like Romans or Greeks or,

[00:13:44] David: you know. One of the things, I did a book review some time ago for an academic who had gone through picture Bibles that evangelicals use with their children. And I was horrified.

[00:13:58] David: I mean, this woman hates the Bible and she hates evangelicals and she was doing a review of what we teach our children. And really, sometimes you’ve got to go to your enemy to see what you’re doing and see how it’s perceived. But she noted things like, in the Bible, all of the, all the good guys look like Europeans and all the bad guys have coloured skin.

[00:14:21] David: Yep. So. When you go and have a look at the Bible, these picture Bibles, you go, this is about as racist as it gets. it’s not historically accurate and it imprints our culture over, it maps our culture over the Bible. for the children. Yeah. And it’s incredibly powerful. there were other things in there that were equally scary.

[00:14:49] David: One of the things that bothered me was. When you look at artwork illustrating the Bible, why is it that Israelites look like Bedouin Arabs? The women are all wearing a hijab. Yeah. And you go, is that historically accurate? And the short answer is probably not. so I go back and we’ve travelled around a little bit and you look at the tomb paintings of Israelites coming into Egypt and what they’re wearing and then you look at how that story at the time of Joseph, how that story is told.

[00:15:30] David: in a Bible storybook over here, you’ve got people that are, there’s Israelites and there’s Egyptians. They dress totally differently over here. They get the Egyptians, right? But the Israelites all look like wandering Arabs. they look like they literally walked in out of Saudi Arabia or something.

[00:15:49] David: It’s culturally inappropriate. We have, one of my favourites is go through children’s Bible stories and look for pictures of Samson. So Samson is an ordinary man whose power comes from the Holy Spirit, but when you draw him in a child’s picture Bible, he looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger, which means that the power is coming from his muscle, not from the Holy Spirit.

[00:16:14] David: We’ve reinterpreted the text and we’ve missed the point of the text in the process and we’ve embedded that image on a child. the other one that amuses me. pictures of Sarah when she’s having a baby. So Sarah is 90 something years old and she’s about to have Isaac. Yeah. And at that time she was so stunningly beautiful, Pharaoh would kill to have her.

[00:16:45] David: And Abraham lived in fear of his life going around with this beautiful woman. So Bible storybooks depict her looking like she’s old and frail, belongs in a nursing home. and you go, he lived to be 175. These people age at half our age, half the rate we do. She should be pictured as a 45 to 50 year old, a woman at menopause age, only she’s a stunning Vogue cover girl model.

[00:17:17] David: our storybooks. are making a bit of a mess of what the text is actually telling us. And we need to get that right to present it, the architecture. I’ve got some pictures here. I was in Cambridge, I picked up some pages from an old 18th, 17th century, Bible storybook. And they’re engravings and all of the scenes of the Old Testament and so on look like they came out of Renaissance Italy.

[00:17:51] David: You know, we, we mapped the Bible, we domesticated it and our children need to know its history and it, it’s different and it actually happened. There are other issues in there too.

[00:18:07] Dan: All right. So which resources do you recommend then, Dad? Ah,

[00:18:10] David: well, we had the Bible. The first thing to look at, as you say, is the text of these Bible storybooks.

[00:18:17] David: Do they tell the story as a Christian narrative that leads us to Christ and the gospel? Or are they, my categories are mother goose, cute bedtime story, Aesop’s fables, you know, good boys go to heaven, bad girls go to Amsterdam. Is it about your morality or is it about Jesus? So, there are some, the Jesus Storybook Bible, for example, the Big Picture, what’s it called?

[00:18:47] David: The Big Picture Story Bible. The Big Picture Story Bible, those sorts of things. Look for the theology of the book before you look at anything else. is it, is the Old Testament pointing us to Christ, or is it just a story?

[00:19:01] Dan: Yeah. And the… The thing I like most about the Jesus Storybook Bible is that every single story, it has a little section at the end about how this story then points to Jesus.

[00:19:11] Dan: so, you know, it can be as simple as the promises to David, and then it goes, you know, and eventually there’s going to be a great, better King that comes, and that’s going to be, like, they don’t explicitly say it’s Jesus the whole way through until you get to Jesus, and then they’re like, He’s the one that fulfills all the promises.

[00:19:27] Dan: Yeah, but so

[00:19:28] David: when you’re putting the pieces of the jigsaw down, you’re forming a picture that’s coherent and it’s the gospel. It’s not random pieces of mythology, almost. So that’s important. The other thing that came up today, while I was looking at all of this, is your mother was playing some Colin Buchanan.

[00:19:50] David: And I’ll hold that up. Colin Buchanan, what’s it called? Remember the Lord. And my ears pricked up. Because some of the songs on that CD are taken from our catechism, Q’s&A’s4kids. And some of the songs were songs written by a lady in our church when you were a little fella. Julie Thompson, and they, they’re beautiful songs, but they’re Bible verses in set to music, and it’s about memorizing the text.

[00:20:25] David: and that made me think back. I went to a nursing home, the Baptist nursing home down near Macquarie Uni to visit an old godly lady. She was 94. She had Alzheimer’s, and a friend of mine, we went to visit her and I was waiting. You go in one, only one person could go in. she was well advanced in Alzheimer’s and this male nurse was standing there and he was saying, what do you reckon these old dears, what’s, what’s the last thing they remember?

[00:20:59] David: when they’ve forgotten your name and their name and who their kids are, what’s the last thing they remember? And we were sort of looking at him a bit puzzled and he said, the songs they learned in Sunday school, if you go into the nursing homes and they, The mind is confused in all of these other things.

[00:21:19] David: You sing the first line of those Sunday school choruses and they’ll all join in. He says it’s staggering to see. So there’s great power in what we teach. The little ones will stay with them the longest. And the music, that they sing. So you were showing me some,

[00:21:38] Dan: Yeah, some videos from the Seeds Family Worship and, really any music that’s the scripture.

[00:21:46] Dan: to music. Seeds Family Worship just add hand motions, which also helps with memorization. The actions. The actions. and then, yeah, and then like, we’re using that at the moment at our church. The Seeds, some of the Seeds Family Worship songs, and I pick them out as the memory verses that we’re doing that match up with, you know, the topics that we’re looking at.

[00:22:06] Dan: Yeah. And I then just have the kids doing it, you know, every week. And this week. you know, we’ve got a couple of weeks left of this term. alright guys, there’s no music. Tell me what the memory verse is. And even the boys who are at our church, who hate the song, who don’t stand there doing any of the actions.

[00:22:27] Dan: Boys don’t do the actions. I just tell them, I tell them, I don’t care if you do the actions or not, but you have to be paying attention to it. They still, both boys, Can, could recite the whole thing. They didn’t do actions, they didn’t sing it, but they recited the verse. And that’s without them even doing any of the extra bits, you know, and it works.

[00:22:46] Dan: It does work very well.

[00:22:47] David: It’s like an earworm. One of the things that, I mean, it, it annoys me, but I’m respectful of the power of it is that this generation of people growing up sing with an American accent. All the music they listen to has this American accent. So they love and gard and all this sort of stuff.

[00:23:09] David: My age, I find that annoying. But it speaks loudly to the power of the music to get the concepts into, to get the words and the power and the whole feeling of the thing into the memory and then to make it part of the culture. we need to be doing that. and choosing wisely what we, what we pair with our Bible reading.

[00:23:35] Dan: Now, as we keep going, Dad, with the age of our kids, by the time they’re near three, you want them to be reading. What? Year three. Year three. Yep. Not by the time they’re three. Year three. Year three. So that’s around nine. Yep. you say that they should start to read their Bible themselves. Yes. Which Bibles would you reckon, because it’s, you know, I don’t want to give them a King James necessarily.

[00:23:57] Dan: They’re going to struggle with that. It’s not even, particularly if it’s the old thys and these. most of the year 12 students still can’t handle that. But when I was, when I do it, the little kids, when they read it, when

[00:24:09] David: I was in grade three, my mother bought me a King James Bible and I, I read that thing, and I, I struggled with it, but I read it, cause it was interesting.

[00:24:23] David: It was exotic. There’s all sorts of stuff in there, including rude words. Yeah. So we got into all of that. And then. I found a Bible that had a summary of each chapter, the old King James, some of the editions had a little summary of what was in the chapter. And so I went through and I read the summaries and I thought, Oh, now I get the flow of the story and then I could go back and read.

[00:24:48] David: Then later they came out with the RSV and I thought. I got one, mum gave me one of those and I looked at it and I thought, wow, this is great. This flows much more easily. And then the English version started to come out in a big way. Yes. And now

[00:25:02] Dan: when I get my little Bible app out, I have a choice of about 200 different versions of the Bible for me to read.

[00:25:09] Dan: Which one do I pick? Which one do you pick? Give me, give me at least two.

[00:25:12] David: All right, so, if you’re, if you’re doing kids, children’s ministry. I would, there’s only two versions I would use. One is the International Children’s Bible. The other is the New International Readers Version. Now, if you’re into NIV, the New International Readers Version is a grade 3 readability version of the NIV.

[00:25:38] David: I think the ICB is a better option. I think on, on balance, it gets it right more often than the… When there’s a question, the ICB also has some brilliant illustrations that I think are a lot more, a lot more helpful. But as we, the ICB, we used to use when you were little, because we had so many kids in the service, we couldn’t run a Sunday school during church.

[00:26:08] David: we used the International Children’s Bible as the pulpit version. So when we did our Bible reading, we would read from the children’s version. I would preach from the children’s version. And we would do whatever else we did, the songs, everything else around that. and that, that worked really well, I thought, the feedback I got.

[00:26:30] David: So, at our church, MBM at Rooty Hill, they’re using the ICB, for their children’s ministry. The next step after that, I… For a year sevens, we did a major search of English versions. We came back with the Christian Study Bible, which is put out by the Southern Baptists in the States. that’s a readable and accurate, make some wise choices about how they represent things in the text.

[00:27:02] David: but I would hope that a kid in year 10, 11, 12 is moving into something that is more precise. and we’d be looking at something like, either the New American Standard, there’s a, the ESV is pretty precise, or now there’s a thing called the Legacy Standard Bible, which is the New American Standard Bible updated by John MacArthur’s mob.

[00:27:32] David: And that seems to be a pretty good… version, but we’ve got so many good choices. Yeah. it’s worth going out and having a look and a play. And if you don’t read Greek and Hebrew, which you probably don’t go and take it to your minister and say, would you check these out for me? you can find reviews online that will help you do that, but there’s a thing called a readability test, and that readability test will tell you whether a kid at this grade can read that comfortably for themselves.

[00:28:06] David: And if you want to play around on Microsoft Word. When you do your grammar check, you can find a readability test. You’ve just got to put in about three or five hundred words of the text. Yep. To find out.

[00:28:20] Dan: To find out. Well now that brings us to the end of this episode. I hope you’ve enjoyed what we’ve been chatting about today.

[00:28:26] Dan: If you would like to grab, or not grab, but if you want to come and ask a question, you can head over to trainingforliferedeemed.com/120. We hope you hit the subscribe button, come back and join us again next week. And, yeah, not long now it’ll be school holidays where we are. So, yep, looking forward to those.