by Ryan McAdams

Having spent the better part of the last three years in lessons upon the Old Testament, our curriculum will bring us to the incarnation of Jesus Christ at the start of April. Some may wonder why we spent so long outside of the New Testament, and I will certainly grant that our journey took a bit longer than we expected. But even so, it felt like we had to rush through certain books and skipped most of the prophets. In spite of all of that, I hope that our children have gained at least a small understanding of God’s hand throughout the entirety of history.

For myself, I grew up in the church and heard all about Moses, David, Daniel, etc. – the main Bible characters. I prided myself on my Bible page-turning speed and mastery of Biblical trivia (I didn’t learn the definition of trivia until later). But, I missed the forest for the trees, and had no sense of the unifying story of God’s redemption of man underlying all of the stories I knew. Now, not everything we do in our children’s ministry stems from experiences from my childhood, but these experiences do provide concrete examples of dangers to avoid.

In our not-so-brief jaunt, we started with God’s creation and how He saw that it was very good. And that since the day that Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, humankind has spiraled further and further away from God and God’s perfect creation has suffered, and yet God promised a victor over the serpent. We came to Abraham and saw God’s promise to bless all nations through him and how God counts faith as righteousness, and through the son that God promised, God raised the nation of Israel. We read God’s covenant with the people of Israel, and that He would treasure them above all other nations if they obeyed His covenant. And we spent time reading through that covenant, seeing how God has chosen to set apart His people to himself, but then seeing that after the initial conquest of the Promised Land, the people quickly turned from the Law to their own ways, and the resultant suffering and oppression. We learned how after His people rejected Him as their king, God selected David as His king and promised to establish David’s kingdom forever, but that immediately the kings following David turned away from God to other gods and to their own might, resulting in a kingdom split and eventual destruction and exile from the Promised Land. Even still, God promised and executed a return for the exiles and never revoked the covenants He made. In fact, God continued to offer hope to the remnant of His people.

Taking the brief overview, most of us can observe the cycles of sin and corruption along with God’s grace and orchestration of the events of history. But lesson by lesson, we had to try to both learn from the lesson itself and also tie it back to this larger picture. If the children were tracking with the lessons and had engaged themselves in the story, they would have experienced brief moments of hope followed by crushing disappointment. And, if we ended our lessons with the end of the Old Testament, the children would find themselves in the same state of despair as the first-century BC Jews.

But, we have the New Testament, and we know what God did. God sent Jesus, His son, to take the sins of the world, to bless all nations, to sit on David’s throne forever, and to crush sin and death once and for all!

The Old Testament gives us greater depth and appreciation for all that Jesus Christ accomplished with His death and life. If we want to teach the kids the Gospel well, the Old Testament introduces and prepares us for the good news that comes as a result of the true main character of the Bible, the redeemer, the King, the God-man, Christ Jesus, the Lord.

So, we’re looking forward to our curriculum’s foray into the New Testament and hope that the lessons and unifying themes from the Old Testament can help our children to understand God’s redemptive plan and Jesus’s mission on Earth in a fuller way.