Sunday school for adults – Introduction

I was brought up in a strictly religious environment. Every week I had go to Church – about three times, attend Sunday School, 'Kinderkrans' (Children's religious ring), CSV ('Christian Student Association'), Hostel 'stiltetyd' (quiet time) – seven times a week, and many other. So when I left school, I had had enough of religion. But … it prepared me for the day I met God and Jesus Christ some twenty years later.

Today I am astounded to hear that all these things have been banned from the school program or curricula, and I mostly find people who have never been to Church and who do not even have a Bible. I am writing this series for them, to solve their BKDS, which, as everybody knows, is their Bible Knowledge Deficit Syndrome.

Many of us, including me, had to hear these Bible stories from a very adulterated and distorted standpoint, being spiced up or down by Church Dogma and ignorance, and we believed every part until today. So in this series I am going to tell you Bible stories that you have never heard before – on a very serious note.

Annemie has been very successful in bringing the Bible stories with rich flavour to kids, and I thought that I just might be successful to do the same for adults – hence this effort.

We are both doing this from the platform of our internet ministry called What A Friend we have in Jesus.

See : www.whatafriend.co.za

I am quite sure that everybody on this planet is visited once or more in a lifetime by God and Jesus Christ on a personal basis. If we know our Bible and thus the character and nature of God, we will be well prepared to benefit greatly from such a meeting, and we might even advance the time and chances for such a meeting. If we are prepared for such, further meetings will necessarily follow. We err because we do not know the scriptures. If somebody studies a secular subject he reads all the books available on that, but we ignore the most authentic book of our life.

There is a lot of criticism these days about the Bible, and what is wrong with it, mostly by people who do not know what is written in it. Also mostly because thousands of people have made erroneous interpretations of it. That is why I said earlier that I was brought up on an adulterated version of the Bible.

The Bible is not there to be interpreted. It is there to be studied and to be understood. I will bring you a simple and studied version of the Bible stories, without any interpretation, but only an arrangement that suits the spirit of it. There are many discontinuities or discrete jumps in the Bible, because it was written by many people over many centuries. We only need to bring it into a chronological sequence, and then we will understand it more fully. And this I will try to do.

I will be starting our weekly sessions with part 1 with 'In the Beginning'.

See you then.

Introduction – by P.K.Odendaal