The Old Testament for Seventh Graders (in Four Weeks!)

As the senior pastor of a small church I take the time once a month to change from leading my weekly adult Bible study to once a month lead the youth group. I always look forward to this time with the youth of my congregation. Since I get very little specific time with them I decided this year I'd endeavor to take them through the entire Bible in six months (as that covers the months where I actually have one week with them).

What follows in the next several posts are the four handouts I gave to my youth and taught from over the course of four different weeks concerning a summation of the Old Testament written with seventh graders in mind. I chose a title for each paragraph of several simple sentences. Several (hopefully) representative passages and the word in capital letters at the end of each paragraph was a picture that I drew and had them draw if they wanted of something somehow to help connect to that particular part of the Old Testament. I'd be interested to know what others think of this approach and of the specifics of what I did. Each handout was intended to be a half-sheet of paper.

Creation and Fall - Genesis 1-11

Creation – God IS.  Everything exists because He made it.  Everything was made “good” in the beginning.  SEVEN

Man and Woman – Man and woman were created in “God's image” and for all things good and were told to have children and spread out over the earth and take care of it.  TREE

Sin/Curse/Death – Man and Woman disobeyed.  Disobedience concerns everyone throughout all time and is under the curse of God demanding death and actually brings death to everything and everyone.  It also means removal from God's presence and that we can have nothing good apart from God providing this Himself to us.  LAMB

Flood – People got worse and worse over time and disobeyed God more.  God destroyed the earth and saved only Noah and his family and animals for refilling the earth, because Noah loved and obeyed God.  After the flood God promised to never destroy the earth in the same way again. RAINBOW

Babel – Later, the people united against God, but God confused them and spread them out over the earth like they were supposed to have done in the very beginning.  TOWER

10 Reasons I Believe In A Recent Creation

(In no particular order)

1 – God was the only one present “in the beginning” to give a testimony of the “what,” “when,” and “how” (Gen.1:1) and has in fact done so.

2 – Genesis 1 describes one week of seven consecutive days of creation and not great ages or vague periods of time.

3 – Genesis 1 describes creation in reference to “kinds” that recreate after themselves and not evolutionary development, thus no necessary length of time between the various creatures in order to evolve.

4 – Genesis 5 gives a very precise chronological genealogy between Adam and Noah; and Genesis eleven gives another very precise chronological genealogy between Noah and Abraham (Abraham can be dated to some time around 1800-2000 BC). Any suggestion of “gaps” in names does not account for gaps in time since exact times between births and deaths are recorded.

5 – Genesis 6-8 describe a global catastrophe that more adequately accounts for the fossil record in opposition to the evolutionary suggestion of uniformitarianism (everything happened the same over time and there was no particular global catastrophe).

6 – Jesus lineage in Luke 3 traces from Jesus back to Adam treating the genealogies of the Old Testament as authentic historically.

7 – The various dating methods (radio-carbon, light travel, etc.) used by modern science presuppose vast ages and uniform decay and also that creation wasn’t already mature in the beginning. This discounts the obvious “maturity” of everything that was created (i.e., man and woman, animals and plants that are expected to begin reproducing, stars that are already in place and shining at various brightnesses and varying distances).

8 – The order of creation in Genesis one suggests a completely different order for creation than evolutionary theories involving great ages. Light appears before anything. The plants are created before the sun. Birds and fish are created simultaneously and the one does not evolve from the other, but create “after their own kind”.

9 – Death cannot be attributed to sin (as the Bible tells us in Gen.2:17 and Rom.5:12), if there was no recent creation, since death would have been present for many hundreds of millions of years prior to Adam.

10 – A recent creation has been held by the Church until recent history (see Terry Mortenson and Thane H. Ury, eds. Coming to Grips with Genesis: Biblical Authority and the Age of the Earth. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2009. Pgs. 23-78).