The Good Book.

We’ve got quite a few different children’s Bibles at home and at church. One of them is illustrated using Lego, and Lego is very popular in this household. It was this ‘Brick Bible’ that Barnaby was reading in church a couple of weeks ago, when he announced: “I’m not going to read this Bible anymore.”

“Why’s that?”

“It makes Jesus say bad things, and it’s not the Jesus I believe in.”

I stopped what I was doing, and asked Barnaby to show me the offending pages. He laid the book on my desk, with an emphatic, “Look!”

And I read, ‘Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father…’

I talked to him a little bit about hyperbole – about using wild exaggeration to underline a point; indeed, that the very wildness of the exaggeration was intended to emphasise that the words weren’t to be taken literally.

I don’t know what he made of my answer, but I was very pleased with his questioning.

 

For some time now, James has enjoyed doing a kind of calligraphy. One of his specialities involves carefully labelling intricate pirate maps of his own invention. Recently, he chose to copy out a passage from one of his Bibles. When he had finished, he came to show me what he had written.

It’s not always easy to know what children are making of the locked-down landscape of our daily lives, which made it so moving to read the verses he had chosen from Lamentations:

‘And now the streets of Jerusalem lie empty,

Bitterly our city weeps tonight –

Comfort is far from her,

Destruction has come from Babylon,

Enemies have taken her treasures,

For the Lord has rejected her, but remember,

 

God’s great love will not let us be burned up forever,

His love will never fail because

It is new every morning, great is God’s faithfulness.

 

Jerusalem, daughter of Zion, you will return.

Keep your heart strong and your eyes focused on the Lord.

Lord, you throne will last forever.

May you restore us and bring us back to you.’