A Biblical History Timeline Gives A Graphical Way To Aid And Help Biblical Events And Characters And Realities
In our Sunday Bible group some 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-mosaic law) I wonder how many Christians would actually pick up the inaccuracy in this statement. Moses lived some 500 years after Abraham and so it is impossible. I have since then put together a Biblical chronology chart and shown more visually the time period of people and occasions.
Alas, a large number of Pastors and Bible teachers in our churches go on and preach flimsy, shallow, light weight, superficial messages and their members hardly grow in biblical knowledge and understanding. Preachers love to preach'moral essays' and'warming affirmations' because supposedly, if we truly love our people this is what we will do. Too bad it seems, if God's people are falling through the cracks'for an absence of knowledge' as long as we are nice and loving to all. In truth, the more relevant we become to this world, the less relevant we are to this world.
Some years ago, I was speaking on the death, burial, life and resurrection of Jesus, and a retired pastor and powerful preacher of the Bible, who had been in the ministry for forty years, came up and reproved me smartly over some interesting points I made and he said 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 had been saying anything of a heretical nature in any way, to which he answered"No". I continued on to spell out that in the case of that particular Scripture, it wasn't speaking to examining the Bible 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 & worker in the Gospel, not know and understand about something that probably 1/2 the books of the New Testament refer to?
How could he study and preach the Bible fully without being familiar with something that was so influential in the New Testament church? And then how can the congregation hope to understand these things and be in a position to understand their Bible properly, if they're not told?
Why is it that we get stuck in a rut of our favorite themes and feel good discourses?
We teach on a text from 2 Kings and a story about Solomon and a topic from the book of Ecclesiastes and then the faith of Paul or the 'water into wine' - parts from here and everywhere, but we do not put it all together in an obvious understandable, easy to remember, perspective with a decent Bible TimeLine with Church History as well. Constantly we are bombarded with new books, modernist ideas, a number of them dangerously edging toward Progressive doctrine, when if we could be taught the basic principles of Church history, we then wouldn't be so bound to repeat it.
Let's us as instructors and preachers sew together the aspects of the Bible and His plan into a complete picture that our people can draw on for the rest of their lives, to help them to understand God, His Eternal Plan, the role of the Church and how to better interpret the Bible to live by.
It is not hard to do, and it's not boring if we are prepared to put in a bit of study and prayer and fervor, and just possibly you can make use of a Bible Timeline too.
For added information about a Bible TimeLine go over to our Bible TimeLine Chart web site and check out the scriptural study resource.
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