I’ve taken a big step back to the beginning of my start as a teacher. In our church, we have children’s church for 3 to 6-year olds during the preaching service on Sunday morning. It’s been a VERY long time since I worked with kids that young. But there was a need, just once a month, and I felt the Holy Spirit prompting me to step up.
Today we’ll be talking about the Tower of Babel. The trick with kids this age is to make a complicated story simple. Actually, I think that’s a good idea for any age group 🙂
So one of the things I’ll be doing is to use a few sentences from. Spanish, German, and French to illustrate to the kids how God confounded the language of the people so they couldn’t understand each other.
He had told them to spread out and populate the earth. But they had a better idea! They would all stay together and build a tower to heaven, and be as great as God!
Silly people! No one will ever be greater than God. And to show them how silly they were, they all started speaking in languages that very few others understood. As a result, they began to gather in groups that DID understand each other, and they wandered away from the Plain of Shinar where they had started to build their tower. In fact, they did what God had wanted them to do. They went all over the known world, and populated it, just like He said.
This is going to be a fun story to teach, I think. There are blocks we can use to build a tower, and these kids are full of energy. It should be an interesting half hour 🙂
Teaching these little ones is going to stretch me. I was just a kid myself when I first taught two-year-olds. I was 12 when my dad volunteered me to teach that Sunday school class. Over 60 years ago.
My word.
Linda's Bible Study 
Interestingly, even though they were forced to obey God’s order because they couldn’t understand each other, they took the spirit of rebellion with them. All over the globe, we find pyramids…towers like the Tower of Babel.
It wasn’t that they didn’t know the truth. Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth lived several hundred years after the Flood. I ran a calculation that showed Shem lived until after Abraham’s birth. Surely the people, who generally venerated their elders, knew the story of Noah! In fact, according to the Book of Jasher, which is mentioned several times in the Bible, Noah, Shem, and Abraham were all alive at the same time, and actually lived together in the same city for 39 years. As members of the upper crust of their society, they SURELY must have known each other.
Yet, even after their dispersion from Babel, the people continued to built towers like the Ziggurat of Ur, which was part of the rebellion that got them dispersed in the first place — building with the intent of having a place to go if there were another Flood (refusing to accept God’s promise).
Conclusion: we don’t do bad things because of our bad environment, or because we don’t know what is right, or because we misunderstand. We do bad things because we are bad; because we rebel against what we know is right. We all choose to wrong even though we know it is wrong, and even though we know we deserve punishment for doing it. Even small children know this. They are probably the most HONEST about it, too. Not one of us has the ability to do good. That is why God provided the Messiah to take our punishment and provide a way to escape the punishment that we deserve.
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Yes, and of course I taught all that to my 3-6 year-olds 🙂
What we did, actually, was to take your dad’s old Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys and let them build their own towers. And I spoke a short sentence to them in three different languages, by way of illustration. We had fun, and the main thing was to learn that man will never, ever be greater than God.
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Sounds delightful.
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It is! I don’t think I could do it every Sunday, but once every few weeks is just fine.
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I hope you are fortunate enough to have a “student” who can start where you stop off. I would consider it a high honor if I could have had a student aide in Christian education as I had in public school.
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Teens from our youth group actually do help out, and are learning by watching and helping. Same way I did 🙂
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