After listening to the Amazing Facts Sabbath school lesson mentioned below it is refreshing to listen to the first 20 minutes of Kenneth Hart's class as he attempts to ask some of the more difficult questions posed by the Joseph story. It is pretty good at least until he wanders away into the area of "Ifs" proposed by an 19th century SDA pioneer. If only the people being introduced to God only had a full understanding of God, the assumption that knowledge is not progressive but knowledge of God is regressive as we try to learn what patriaches knew even though Biblically we have no reason to assume that they knew too much.
Now join me as we sing "if only" from the book Holes.
Update:
The next Quarter's Lesson Study is on Ecclsiastes. Kenneth Hart's Website is not real friendly to navigate so here is the link to the page that will give access to his lesson study for this quarter.
One can't help but notice just how out of wack our Sabbath School Lesson Study Guides are. We rush through the foundational book of Genesis skipping most of the important areas and focus only on the children story aspects of the book. Our next quarter will spend the same amount of time on a ten page book. Genesis on the other hand was 76 pages. You can send your thanks for this kind of distorted view of importance to Clifford Goldstein, his email: is found at the following link and you can also let some of his cohorts know about your feelings.
This last quarter should have been simply Genesis 1-11. Which is still 18 pages nearly twice the amount of material then this quarter's Ecclsiastes Biblical material. Of course in their defense if one is only going to study the lesson the same way as a 10 year old in primary division one can easily skip all the difficult parts and the parts which make it hard to see the book as totally literal. In the grand scheme of things at the Leadership level it is more important to pretend it is all literal then to actually think about meaning, poetry, and historical context.
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2 comments:
Thanks I have found this very useful
Kenneth Hart's website has the very familiar saying of Paul Heubach: "God is not the kind of person his enemies have made him out to be."
Humility should also say that neither is God the kind of person that his friends have made him out to be. It is arrogant and blasphemous to speak of knowing God. We only have small inklings that mere man has transmitted through their oral and written words. And yet, no man has seen God.
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