Is the Bible Being Presented Inaccurately?
I've been thinking and praying about an issue I feel is going on within Christian families and society today—how the Bible is being presented to different age groups.
Let me explain.
I used to help out at children's ministry. I dealt out snacks, played movies, organized activities, and in general, tried to keep everything in order (note the tried 😂). Doing so gave me a backstage look at what the children were learning in Sunday school ... you know, the traditional Bible stories. Parables. Jesus doing miracles. David slaying Goliath.
As a bit of backstory here: Growing up, me and my younger brother almost always attended regular "grown-up" services with my mom. We almost never attended Sunday school, besides a few VBS camps (we still have fun memories from those. 😉) So I was in fact fairly new to this childrens' ministry thing, having never attended it growing up.
So along with these other children, I watched colorful cartoons along with the weekly lesson, each projecting a different story from the Bible. Jesus healing the paralytic man. David killing Goliath. The garden of Eden. The same morals of the stories I've heard as a child—Jesus can do anything. God can use the weak. We must not disobey God. The lessons I've heard so often before—and I'm sure other children have too.
But then I realized something.
The Bible isn't a storybook ... but it's often presented as such.
I used to have a childrens' Bible. One with colored pictures, large print, and paraphrased sentences. I loved that Bible—it was the source of the most amazing memories with my mom growing up.
But looking back now, while that Bible was directed toward children my age—there were so many things missing. Talk about paraphrasing the Bible. From what I remember, it consisted mainly of stories. It completely missed out on some of the most insightful and applicable books of the Bible—Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Hosea, Malachi, Ephesians ... the list goes on and on—only pulling on the most interesting stories like Daniel and Jonah (though oddly enough, I've found that most childrens' Bibles don't include what happens to Daniel after the lion's den incident. It's only a tip of his story).
But the Bible isn't filled with happily-ever-after tales with a "moral of the story" listed at the end. There are some genuinely gruesome things in God's Word.
This started to make me think—are we portraying the Bible accurately to the younger generation, or is it being dumbed down for the sake of simplicity and familiarity?
There isn't just one moral of the story.
A lot of children's Bibles and those movies have a moral of the story. I'm sure we all know those lessons I've heard all too often.
But here's the thing—the Bible isn't just a series of Aesop's fables. There's a reason people re-read and re-read the Bible, over and over again. To get new information. To gain new knowledge.
When I was nine, I read the Bible and thought well, yay, I can be done with that. In my nine-year-old mind, I thought reading the Bible through once meant I knew it all and I would never have to read it again. Well, thank goodness my mom made me read the Bible again for school. Because the Bible isn't just a novel where you can just run right through it and forget all about it. For one, it's extremely long, and two, it's not just any book—it's God's Word. This means He can work through it to reveal things you've never seen before, even on your hundredth time reading it.
Trust me, I know from experience—though I haven't quite read the Bible a hundred times yet. Each time I've read the Bible, God gives me so many new things I've never seen before, it's like I'm reading it for the first time.
It's the same thing with the stories in the Bible. Bible cartoons and childrens' Bibles proclaim the extremely basic, washed-down moral as though there's only one. Take Adam and Eve's story, for example. The lesson I've always been taught from it is that we must obey God.
But there are a million other things to learn from Adam and Eve too. What about not getting deceived (Genesis 3:1-6)? What about miscommunication (Genesis 2:16-17 & Genesis 3:2-3)? What about the consequences of sin? What about taking responsibility for our actions (Genesis 3:12-13)?
There never is just one thing we can pull from one part of the Bible, which is another problem with how the Bible is presented to young children.
We should watch the way the Bible is presented.
Repetition builds over time, until eventually, it becomes a part of us, in a way. For children, the same popular stories and lessons are being taught, over and over again, by Christians. We give children Bibles that are watered down and portray God's Word as a book of stories ... aka inaccurately. And it becomes so, so familiar that these same stories become boring to us, even as teens and adults.
Same with memory verses. Most of us were probably brought up at such a young age to memorize Bible verses. They're mainly the ones that are popular, like John 3:16 or Jeremiah 29:11. While those are amazing verses, there is a danger to something becoming so familiar. We forget its impact. We forget what it means.
How many times have we heard about Jesus dying on the cross? It's such an impactful occurrence that I really don't have words to describe, but when it's presented by Christians as a mere story in a picture book story Bible, it becomes nothing more than that—a story for children.
We must not let the way the Gospel is presented to any age make Jesus's great sacrifice any less impactful.
We should not be ashamed of God's Word.
The next time you flip through a children's Bible, try thinking about all the things it's missing out on. The book of Psalms has been such a comfort to me in certain times in my life, but most childrens' Bibles I've seen exclude it entirely, along with many others, like Songs of Solomon and a lot of the New Testament. What about what happened to Jezebel? Why is even Jesus's death presented as though it's not a big deal when it changes literally everything about our lives?
At the end of the book of Revelations, God addresses the removal or manipulation of the Bible:
"And if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book."
In other words, removing or manipulating the scripture in the book of Revelations (and presumably the whole of the Bible) is a serious offense to Him.
Passing the Bible for less than it actually is falls into this same category. As Christians, we should not dumb down the Gospel for anyone, child or not—in doing so, we may come across as ashamed of the very things we believe in. The Bible is not a fiction book with dirty content that we should be ashamed of. It's not airbrushed or sugar-coated, and it certainly shouldn't be regardless of age.
We need to be honest about what we believe, the Gospel, and His Word—and how the Bible is not just another book filled with stories that some often portray it as.
It's the living, breathing, Word of God.
Now it's your turn!
What do you think about the way the Gospel is presented to different age groups? How do you think we should change this? Did you grow up reading a children's Bible? Did anyone out there NOT go to Sunday school? (Please don't tell me I'm the only one 😂) Drop a comment below and let me know!!
That's it for today! Thank you SO much for reading, I hope to hear your thoughts!
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