A Biblical History Timeline Presents A Graphical Representation To Help Teach Biblical Events And Characters And Principles
In our Bible class years ago, somebody, who had been a Christian and been involved in the local Church for over 15 years, said,"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 really notice the error in this claim. Moses lived about five hundred years after Abraham and so it is an impossibility. I have since then compiled a Biblical timeline banner and shown visually the dating of people and occasions.
Unfortunately, a many Pastors and Bible teachers in our churches continue to preach superficial, light weight, flimsy, shallow sermons and their members scarcely grow in biblical knowledge. Preachers love to give us'moral essays' and'warming affirmations' because supposedly, if we love our people this is what we will do. Regrettable 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 our world, the less relevant we are to our world.
Years ago, I was preaching on the burial, death, resurrection and life of Jesus, and a retired minister and strong preacher of Scripture, who had been a pastor for forty years, marched up and reproved me vigorously 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 humbly asked him if I was teaching 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 was not referring to exploring Scripture but to the false teaching and school of thought of Gnosticism, but he would not accept it. So, how can a forty year minister & laborer in the Gospel, not understand and know about a thing that probably half the books of the New Testament refer to?
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 understand these things and be able to interpret their Bible well, if they are not told?
Why is it that we get stuck in a rut of our favorite topics and sugar coated sermons?
We teach on a verse from Zechariah and a passage about Ezra and a topic from the book of 1 Samuel and then the example of Matthew or the perseverance of Noah - bits from here and everyplace, but we do not put it all at once in a visible 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 few of them dangerously leaning toward Liberal doctrine, when if we could be instructed the basic principles of Church history, we then would not be so doomed to do the same again.
Let's us as instructors and preachers stitch together the fragments of the Bible and God's plan into a logical whole that our people are able to draw on for the rest of life, helping them to understand God, His Eternal Plan, the role of the Church and ways to better interpret the Bible to model our lives by.
It is not hard to do, and it's not boring if we are ready to put in a bit of effort prayer and fervor, and just maybe you can use a Bible Timeline too.
For added information about a Bible TimeLine go over to our Bible TimeLine Chart web site and see the Bible study tool.
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