Help Your Kids Learn and Love the Bible by Danika Cooley

Author:Danika Cooley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian Living/Parenting;Bible—Children’s use;Bible—Study and teaching (Elementary);Religious education of children;Children—Religious life;REL012160;REL012120;REL012000
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2021-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

Don’t get weird

I knew a man who based his family’s diet on Genesis 1:12: “The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.” This friend would eat only fruits and vegetables with seeds on the inside. No strawberries allowed. Nor would he eat carrots, spinach, mushrooms, or turnips—they were missing internal seeds.

That’s a weird way to read the Bible. There is no implicit or explicit command in that verse at all. Instead, we learn God made plants that reproduce. We find out plants produce the same kind of plants, often through seed. Most important, we learn God created the heavens and the earth—and it was good. We discover God is a good, loving, and creative God, providing food and habitat for his creatures even before he creates them.

The danger of reading the Bible weirdly—without regard for wise guidelines—is that we may miss the point. We might miss Jesus and the free gift of salvation available through him. Exegesis is the process of carefully studying a section of the Bible to find the author’s original, intended meaning. Hermeneutics is the process of applying the Bible to our lives today. It involves careful interpretation of the text. After we decide what the author originally meant to communicate, we must decide how that impacts us today. We need to remember the Bible is our authority. We are not in authority over the text. We avoid imposing things on Scripture that aren’t there, or removing information that’s clearly stated.

The first principle of reading the Bible is to read clear text clearly. The Bible is clear when it comes to God, our sin, salvation through Jesus, and the way we are to live as believers. We don’t need to take clear instructions and make them weird. We don’t develop doctrine from parts of the Bible that are hard for even the most studied Bible scholars to understand. That’s a recipe for heresy. Instead, we develop doctrine from Scripture that is clear.

Since we’re reading the Bible for its clear meaning, let’s be careful to read each passage for a single meaning. Unless Jesus or a Holy Spirit–inspired writer of Scripture reveals a second meaning to a passage, we shouldn’t add one. We aren’t in the role of the Holy Spirit, finding rare and secret meanings to God’s words. We can trust God’s revealed words to be sufficient, clear, authoritative, and necessary. When we start inventing meanings—or following invented meanings others are teaching—we run the risk of falling into heresy, or even blasphemy.

We read Scripture in the light of other Scripture. God never lies, he doesn’t change, and he always agrees with himself. If there’s an area of the Bible we’re unsure about, we consider what the rest of God’s Word says about the subject. There are some wonderful biblical theology books for children that help with establishing a right doctrine. Catechisms will help in this area as well.

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