Getting to Know Your Bible (Family Worship Aid: Week 01)

Hey guys it's Keith Foskey. Recently a friend asked me if I would be willing to do a series of videos that would aid in family worship.

This isn't about the philosophy or the reason behind it, this is more about what you do in family worship.

And not everyone does it the same way and that's okay. These videos are going to be published once a week as an aid to family worship.

They're going to be made in such a way that you can actually show them to your family if you prefer, or you can use them to help you prepare to lead your family in family worship.

It's going to be up to you how you use them, but I do hope that they become a resource for you. I am committed to helping fathers particularly learn how to teach the

Bible to their children, so I hope these videos are helpful in that regard. So let's get ready to go to our first subject in video number one.

Today we're going to talk about getting to know your Bible. So I have a list of things that we're going to go through today here on my computer.

We're going to talk about understanding what the Bible is, we're going to talk about understanding the major divisions of the

Bible, and we're going to talk about how to search for specific locations in the

Bible. Now all of this is very rudimentary stuff, but again I'm thinking about you and how you might be relaying this information to your children.

So this is about family worship, and my family has a lot of children ranging from age 1 all the way up to age 25, my oldest child.

So when I deal with my family, I know I have to deal with a range of ages and range of understanding. So we're going to start with the very basics, and we're going to begin with the subject of what is the

Bible. When we talk about the Bible, what are we talking about? Well, the Bible is God's Word.

It says that all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and that word inspiration comes from a word which means

God -breathed. It means it comes from God, and so when we read the

Bible, we're reading what God has given to us. Now there's a lot that we could learn more about that, and in some later videos we may dive deeper into what it means, but for now when we talk about the

Bible, we're talking about God's Word to us. So that allows us to understand the importance of what it is we're talking about.

Now when you open your Bible, there are going to be two major divisions. The two major divisions are the

Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament is the bigger part, and the

New Testament is going to be the smaller part, and the reason for that is because the Old Testament was written over about a thousand -year period of time, and the

New Testament was written within about a 50 -year period of time. So the difference of the time period, as well as the amount of authors, is much larger in the

Old Testament than it is in the New Testament. The easiest way to think about the Testaments is to think about the

Old Testament as everything that happened before Jesus, and the New Testament is everything that happened in the life of Jesus and what came after.

The Bible is divided when Jesus comes onto the scene, and so everything in the

Old Testament is before Jesus, everything in the New Testament comes after Jesus.

Now once we understand the big divisions of the Bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament, then we can begin to break the

Bible down into smaller sections. So we begin to break the Bible down by categories.

The Old Testament is made up of several categories, beginning with what we call the books of Moses or the

Law. That's the first five books of the Bible. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy make up what's known as the

Law or the Torah or the books of Moses. And then after that, we have the book of Joshua, which takes us all the way through the history books of the

Old Testament, ending with the book of Esther. After the book of Esther, we go into a different type of book, and that is the books of wisdom or poetry, which include the book of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the

Song of Solomon. After those wisdom or poetry books, we go into the books of prophecy.

Now there are five major prophets and twelve minor prophets.

So all together we have the prophets, but then we break that down into the major prophets and the minor prophets.

The major prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, and Daniel.

And then after that, we have twelve minor prophets. And one of the things I would definitely encourage you to do is to learn the books of the

Bible in order, and then be able to take those books that are in order and put them into their categories.

Where do they go into those categories? Are they the books of Moses? Are they the books of history?

Are they the books of poetry and wisdom? Are they the major prophets or the minor prophets? And that's the

Old Testament. Now when we get to the New Testament, we have the books that are called the Gospels.

That's Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and they tell the story of the life of Jesus. After that, we have the book of Acts.

The book of Acts is known as the Acts of the Apostles because it takes us from the point where Jesus ascends into heaven, and it takes us through the ministry of the

Apostles in the first couple of decades of the church. After the book of Acts, we have all of the writings of the

Apostle Paul, beginning with the book of Romans and taking us all the way through to the book of Philemon.

Now, some people count Hebrews as being written by the Apostle Paul, and I don't want to debate that subject on this video, but that is something that is debated.

So for this video, we'll simply say the writings of Paul extend from Romans to Philemon, then we pick up with what are known as the general epistles.

The word epistle simply means a letter, and so the general epistles include the book of Hebrews, James, 1st and 2nd

Peter, 1st, 2nd, 3rd John, and the book of Jude. And the last book of the

Bible is another prophetic book, like the Old Testament had its books of prophecies, the

New Testament has a book of prophecy as well, and that is known as the book of Revelation.

And that finishes out all of the books of the Bible. And so the

Old Testament and the New Testament can be broken down into categories. The New Testament categories are the

Gospels, the book of history, which is the book of Acts, the writings of the Apostle Paul, the general epistles, so we would say the

Pauline epistles and the general epistles, and finally the book of Revelation. A really good exercise for family worship would be to take your children through all 66 books of the

Bible and help them to learn all 66 books of the Bible in order, and help them put the books into these categories so that they know where the books are and they're able to get to them quickly.

And then after that, you can begin doing Bible drills. Bible drills is where you have them, where you name a

Bible verse and have them look that verse up. And that's something else you need to know. If you're new to the

Bible, when you open up your Bible, you're going to see each book is separated into chapters and verses.

The chapters are the big numbers and the verses are the small numbers. So if I said for you to go to John chapter 3 verse 16, you would go to the

Gospel of John, you would go to the third chapter, the big number 3, and then you would follow down until you came to the small number 16, and that would be

John 3 16. So one additional thing I like to recommend is, if you're doing family worship or Bible study with your family, make sure that you're all using the same translation.

It's really difficult, especially when you have smaller children, if you're reading a translation and they're reading a different translation.

That can be very complicated. Now you may be a person who loves the King James. Make sure your children have a

King James. If you're like me and I use the English Standard Version, I make sure my children have an English Standard Version.

In fact, I go one step further. I bought us all the same Bible. That way, not only are we looking at the same translation, we're looking at the same page number.

We're looking at the same portion of the page when we're looking at a particular passage.

That way, it's easier when I'm leading my smaller children in Bible reading, they're able to follow along at that particular point in the

Bible. Now here's something

I want to have fun with. I want to connect these videos together, and I want to have some interaction, especially if you're watching these videos with your family.

I want to include the kids in this, so here's something I'm going to do. At the end of the video, I'm going to give you some information that I'm going to offer as a question in the next video.

So the next video is going to begin with a question from this video, and here is the information I'm going to give you.

The Bible is made up of 66 books, 39 in the Old Testament, 27 in the

New Testament. 39 and 27 make 66. Also something interesting, if you take 3 times 9, that equals 27.

So 3 times 9, 39 equals 27, which is the amount of New Testament books.

So the amount of Old Testament books, if you take the two numbers and you times them together, you get the amount of the

New Testament book. So in my next video, I'm going to ask you how many books of the Bible are there? How many are in the

Old Testament? How many in the New Testament? And if you're watching this as a family, I want the little ones to shout out the answers.

So I want to thank you for watching this video. I hope that you found it helpful, especially if you're taking your family into family worship, and this is something new for you, and you wanted some help, and hopefully this will be a help to you.

Now a quick thing I want to say, if you do like this video, please go into the comments and let me know.

Let me know if it's useful. Let me know if this is something you want me to continue doing. I only want to make videos that are useful and helpful for people, because this does take time, but it's time that I think is worthwhile, if it's helpful.

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