A Biblical History Timeline Presents A Graphic Mode To Aid And Help Biblical Events And Principles
In our Bible group some years ago, somebody, who had been a Christian and laboured in the local Church for years, made this statement,"Yes, but Abraham had the Law and so he understood about......" (they were not referring to the pre-mosaic law) I wonder how many Christians will actually notice the error in this statement. Moses lived about five hundred years after Abraham and so it is impossible. I have since then compiled a Bible chronology chart and shown more visually the time period of people and occasions.
Regrettably, a large number of Pastors and Bible teachers in our churches continue to preach flimsy, light weight, shallow, superficial messages and their Church members scarcely grow in biblical knowledge. Preachers love to give us'moral essays' and'warming affirmations' because supposedly, if we truly love our people this is what we will do. Regrettable it seems, if God's men and women are falling through the cracks'for a lack of knowledge' so long as we're nice and loving to all. In reality, the more relevant we become to this world, the less relevant we're to this world.
Some years ago, I was speaking on the death, burial, life and resurrection of Christ Jesus, and a retired minister and powerful preacher of the Bible, who had been a pastor for forty years, marched up and reproved me smartly over some interesting points I made and he noted 1Ti 1:4'Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do.' I quietly asked him if I had been saying anything of a heretical nature at all, to which he answered"No". I continued on to describe that in the case of that particular Scripture, it wasn't referring to examining Scripture but to the false teaching and philosophy of Gnosticism, but he wouldn't have it. Let me ask, how can a forty year preacher & worker in the Gospel, not know and understand about a thing that probably 1/2 the books of the New Testament relate to?
How can he study and teach the Bible in fullness without being aware of a thing that was so influential in the New Testament church? And then how can the congregation hope to figure out these things and be in a position to understand their Bible well, if they are not told?
Why do we get stuck in a rut of our favorite subjects and feel good messages?
We instruct on a verse from Judges and a narrative about Noah and a topical from the book of Phillipians and then the example of Noah or the humility of Moses - pieces from here and everywhere, but we do not put it all at once in a plain understandable, easy to remember, perspective with a decent Bible TimeLine including Church History as well. Constantly we're bombarded with new books, modernist ideas, some of them perilously edging toward Liberal theology, when if we could be instructed the basics of Church history, we then wouldn't be so bound to repeat it.
Let's us as tutors and preachers sew together the fragments of the Bible and God's plan into a complete picture that our people can draw on for the rest of their lives, helping them to figure out God, His Eternal Plan, the role of the Church and how to better interpret the Bible to live by.
It's not hard to do, and it is not boring if we're ready to put in a bit of study and prayer and fervor, and just maybe you can utilize a Bible Timeline too.
For more information about a Bible TimeLine go over to our Bible TimeLine Chart site and check out the Bible study resource.
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