Engage

Before sharing the Bible Storyline worksheet, briefly discuss the following as a family.

Both movies and tv shows have “theme songs”. Sometimes, characters have theme songs, too. What is your favorite theme song? When you hear this theme song, how does it make you feel?

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Practice

• Jesus lived out the Bible’s story. One way we practice the way of Jesus is by learning to find ourselves in the Bible’s story as Jesus did.
• This week’s worksheet is a storyboard of the Story of God, Humanity, and Creation. This storyboard doesn’t include everything in the creation story, but it includes parts of the story that frequently appear in other stories. Guide your family in illustrating each box (see notes below).
• A list of important words appears on the right-hand side of the page. These words are important because they appear in many other Bible stories. Think of them as words to theme songs.
• If you are compiling a Bible Binder, this page goes in the Torah section.

• The story starts with chaos. In Genesis 1, we read that “the land was wild and waste and darkness was over the face of the watery deep”. Some translations use words like “formless”, “void”, and “empty”.
• In Jewish thought, if you had a lump of clay, you had “nothing” because it didn’t serve any purpose. However, once you turned a lump of clay into a bowl, then you had “something.”
• In the verses after this one, we hear God saying “Let there be light” and “Let there be a dome” to separate the waters…but we never hear God say “Let there be water” or “Let there be land.” The water and the land are included in the unordered state of chaos because they don’t have a job yet.
• You might draw a picture of land covered by dark water.

• This story was originally written in Hebrew, and the Hebrew word for God is Elohim. After Elohim creates light and separates light from darkness, He separates the waters. Then, He separates the waters from the land.
• In the top half of this box, students might draw an island with water around it.
• Elohim is God’s title, but God’s name is Yahweh. In the next box, we read how “Yahweh Elohim formed a human out of the dust of the ground” and breathed His life into the human. In the bottom half of the box, draw something that reminds you of this.
• Notice that the human came from the land, and the land came from under the watery chaos. Reading future Bible stories will help us recognize how this story sets the stage for God bringing humanity out of chaos.

• When God creates humanity, he blesses them with the ability to continue filling earth with life. In this blessing, He tells them to grow their family and fill the land.
• In this box, students might draw a picture of a really large family.

• God gave humanity the job of ruling over all the land and all of the creatures in it.
• In a later part of the Bible, a prophet named Hosea recognizes that Yahweh was in a covenant partnership with humanity. Note that the word for humanity is adam. This becomes the male human’s name after the failure in the Garden. After the Garden, the female human’s name becomes Chavah (which means Life in Hebrew), but she is better known as Eve (which means Life in Greek). So another way of looking at the Bible is the story of God and Human Life.
• In this box, students might draw a picture of the humans ruling over the land and animals.

• Humanity had a job to do in the garden, but God intended them to work from a place of rest. As they filled the earth, they’d fill the earth with the life of the garden, and all the land would become a place of rest. There was a special tree in the middle of the Garden called the Tree of Life. This tree represents God’s wisdom. Eating from God’s wisdom would allow them to live forever.

• Humanity could work from a place of rest because God provided them with trees to eat from. However, He asked them not to eat from one tree: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad.
• The choice is followed by a temptation. A snake enters the story to trick the woman into eating the fruit from this tree.

• In the last scene, God gives humanity a choice. This scene reveals their choice to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad. Instead of letting God define what was good, they decided what was good without partnering with God. It was like they were telling God they wanted to rule the land and the animals without him. They wanted to do things their own way. When we meditate enough on this scene, we’ll see it repeat more than any other scene in the Bible. We’ll also see it in our own lives.

• Even though the humans fail, God doesn’t abandon His plan to partner with humanity to rule and bless the land. Instead, we see Him telling the snake that a woman’s “seed” will crush him. Think about how plants have seeds and turn into more plants. “Seed” is another way of talking about children.
  

• Eating from the Tree of Life would have allowed Adam and Eve to live forever. However, because they wanted to do things their own way, God knew this would be terrible. So he banished them from the Garden for their own protection. Note that the Garden was an area inside of Eden. Adam and Eve still lived in Eden, but not in the Garden.
• Their first son repeats their story. Instead of ruling over his desires, he kills his brother. He is banished from Eden and wanders off to the east.