A Biblical Timeline Offers A Graphical Mode To Help Teach Biblical Characters And Events And Facts
In our Bible study years ago, somebody, who had been a Christian and laboured in the local Church for over 15 years, said,"Yes, but Abraham had the Law and so he understood about......" (they were not referring to the pre-Moses law) I wonder how many Christians would actually notice the inaccuracy in this statement. Moses lived about five hundred years after Abraham and so it is not possible. I have since compiled a Bible timeline banner and shown visually the chronology of people and occasions.
Alas, a numerous Pastors and teachers in our churches continue to preach light weight, shallow, superficial, flimsy messages and their congregation hardly grow in biblical knowledge. Preachers love to give us'moral essays' and'warming affirmations' because supposedly, if we really love our people this is what we will do. Too bad it seems, if God's men and women are falling through the cracks'for an absence of knowledge' as long as we are nice and loving to all. Truly, the more like this world, the less relevant we are to this world.
Some time ago, I was teaching on the life, burial, death and resurrection of Christ Jesus, and a retired pastor and powerful preacher of Scripture, who had been in the ministry for forty years, came to me and reproved me smartly over some interesting points I made and he stated 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 was preaching anything of a heretical nature at all, to which he said"No". I continued on to explain that in the case of that particular verse, it was not referring to examining the Bible but to the false teachings and philosophy of Gnosticism, but he wouldn't accept it. Let me ask, how can a forty year minister & worker in the Gospel, not know and understand about a thing that probably half the books of the New Testament discuss?
How can he understand and preach 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 effectively, if they are not told?
Why is it that we get stuck in a rut of our favorite subjects and sugar coated discourses?
We preach on a verse from Ecclesiastes and a narrative about Joseph and Mary and a topic from the book of Jeremiah and then the obedience of Abraham or the healings through Peter - bits from here and all over, but we do not put it all at once in a plain understandable, simple to remember, perspective with a capable Bible TimeLine and Church History as well. Constantly we are bombarded with new books, modernist ideas, some of them perilously edging toward Progressive doctrine, but if we could be taught the fundamental principles of Church history, we then wouldn't be so bound to repeat it.
Let's us as tutors and preachers stitch together the aspects of God's Word and His plan into a logical whole that our people are able to draw on for the rest of their lives, helping them to figure out God, His Eternal Plan, the role of the Church and ways to better translate the Bible to live by.
It is not hard to do, and it's not boring if we are ready to put in a bit of study and prayer and fervor, and just possibly you can use a Bible Timeline as well.
For more information concerning a Bible TimeLine go to our Bible TimeLine Chart website and check out the biblical study tool.
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