A Bible History Timeline Gives A Creative Way To Help Teach Bible Characters And Events And Facts
In our Sunday Bible group some years ago, one person who had been a Christian and worked in the local Church for years, asserted that,"Yes, but Abraham had the Law and so he understood about......" (they weren't talking about the pre-mosaic law) I wonder how many Christians will actually pick up the inaccuracy in this assertion. Moses came about some 500 years after Abraham and so it is impossible. I have since then compiled a Bible history timeline and shown visually the chronology of people and occasions.
Alas, a many Pastors and teachers in our churches continue to preach light weight, flimsy, superficial, shallow messages and their members barely grow in Bible knowledge. Preachers love to give us'moral essays' and'warming affirmations' because supposedly, if we love people this is what we will do. Unfortunate it seems, if God's men and women are falling through the cracks'for a lack of knowledge' as long as we are positive and loving to all. In reality, the more relevant we become to this world, the less relevant we are to this world.
Years ago, I was preaching on the resurrection, death, life and burial of Jesus Christ, and a retired minister and powerful preacher of the Gospel, who had been a pastor for forty years, came to me and reproved me smartly over some interesting points I made and he remarked 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 humbly asked him if I was preaching anything of a heretical nature at all, to which he answered"No". I continued on to describe that in the case of that particular verse, it was not speaking to exploring Scripture but to the false teachings and philosophy of the Gnostics, but he wouldn't accept it. Let me ask, how can a forty year preacher & laborer in the Gospel, not know and understand about a thing that possibly 1/2 the books of the New Testament relate to?
How could he understand and preach the Bible fully without being aware of a thing that was so influential in the New Testament church? And then how can the congregation hope to comprehend these things and be able to understand their Bible effectively, if they're not informed?
Why do we get stuck in a rut of our pet subjects and feel good discourses?
We teach on a text from 2 Kings and a story about Abraham and a topical from the book of 2 Chronicles and then the obedience of Jamws or the 'water into wine' - pieces from here and everyplace, but we do not put it all at once in a visible understandable, simple to remember, perspective with a good Bible TimeLine with Church History as well. Constantly we are bombarded with new books, modernist ideas, a number of them dangerously leaning toward Liberal doctrine, but if we could be instructed the fundamental principles of Church history, we then wouldn't be so bound to do the same again.
Let's us as tutors and preachers sew together the fragments of the Bible and His plan into a logical whole that our people can draw on for the rest of life, helping them to comprehend God, His Eternal Plan, the role of the Church and ways to better translate the Bible to order our lives by.
It's not difficult to do, and it is not boring if we are ready to put in a bit of study with prayer and fervor, and just possibly you can use a Bible Timeline as well.
For added info about a Bible TimeLine check out our Bible TimeLine Chart site and read up on the scriptural study resource.
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