Our Catechism / Q2 / Kids

CONVERSATION STARTERS

Psalm 19:1-14 summarizes what we learned in Part One, that God’s fingerprints are all over His Creation. How then should we respond to this?

• Investigate, Explore, Discover. The Scientific impulse is at its heart the intuitive drive of human beings because we were created to know. Curiosity is a part of how we were designed.

According to Psalm 119:1-176, God has tried to tell us how to know and love Him, and how to live healthy and whole, since the beginning. What does this tell us about God and the Bible?

• God isn’t playing a game with us. He wants us to have the answers to the most important questions in life.

John 1:1-34 tells us that God the Father sent God the Son to help us understand how to relate to Him. This passage also tells us that when John the Baptist baptized Jesus, the Holy Spirit (God the Spirit) identified Jesus as God the Son for John. But we learned in Lesson One that the is only One true God, so if God is One, how can He also be Three?

• The teaching that God is Three in One, or One God in the Persons, is called the teaching of the Trinity. This teaching is very hard to understand, and while there are many ways that people have tried to make sense of it, all of them fall a little short. The key is that God wanted us to understand Him and the way He choose to do that was by revealing Himself to us through the familiar ancient near-eastern relationships of Father, Eldest Brother, and Youngest Brother. The Father of the household would lead his home by making plans and then place the authority to accomplish those plans into the hands of his Eldest Son. Then, the Father and the Eldest Son would ensure that everything needed to accomplish those plans was in place by sending the Youngest Son as a kind of messenger to coordinate between those members of the household who were responsible for accomplishing the will of the Father and the Eldest Son (see John 14:1-31).

According to John 1:1-34, no one fully understands who God is, so the Father sent the Son to show us in the clearest way possible. What does this tell us about Jesus?

• John 1:1-34 clearly asserts that it is only through Jesus that the fullness of God’s will and ways can be known or understood. In Jesus, we see every aspect of God’s character as He interacts with His Creation (see Colossians 1:15-20). As such Jesus is the ultimate expression of Special Revelation because He is God in flesh – what is historically referred to as the Incarnation of God (see Philippians 2:5-8).

ACCESS POINTS

Sing-Along: Sing & Discuss the Song “Jesus Loves Me”.

The Story of the Blind Men and the Elephant: Discuss how each man feels a different part of the elephant and therefore describes the object differently. Based on their knowledge, each is describing reality truthfully, but because of their limitation, they are incorrect in their assertions. Similarly, Humans cannot understand Supernatural phenomena or even Natural phenomena which are outside of their personal experience. Instead, they must rely on the experiences of others whom they trust. This is what the bible is, the Divine-Human record of God’s story of life. A primary source of knowledge guided in its composition by the Holy Spirit.

Play an Escape Room: Complete the challenge & then discuss the processes of Investigation that you had to go through to “Escape”.

Role Play: Pretend you are a Hebrew Scribe. Copy passages out of the Bible exactly as they appear in your Bible - this is how it was done in ancient times. If you mess up at all, throw out your work and start over. How hard is it? How much effort does it take to do this precisely?

Watch these Videos: View this series of videos from the Bible Project on how to understand the God of the Bible https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/god-video/

Role Play: Trust Falls. What would happen if someone dropped you?

Art Project: Take a picture, describe it to the kids, and see if they can draw/color what you described. Show them the picture and see how close they got to your description. Was this hard? Why?

Watch these Videos: View this series of videos from the Bible Project on how to read the Bible. https://bibleproject.com/explore/how-to-read-the-bible/

GO DEEPER

As Christians, we believe that it is in Jesus — and only in Jesus — that the fullness of God’s will and ways can be experienced, known, and understood. In Jesus we see every aspect of God’s character as He interacts with His Creation because in Jesus, the God who is outside of Time, came into Time, so He could live among us. If you would like to explore in more depth, why we believe this, you should check out Lesson Two of the Students’ Catechism.

Q2 / STUDENTS

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Why did God create everything?

Q3 / KIDS