The Bible's Four Layers of Wrappings

The first graders received their own bibles today.  It will follow them through the grades. When they reach high school, they will receive another one.  To make this moment memorable, considerable care was taken to  prepare the  gift. 

The bible was wrapped  four times, each wrapping  denoting a special significance.  With children seated in a circle, each one was handed a brown-wrapped present.  Through interactive dialog, the children understood the significance of the brown paper wrapping.  Brown stands for being old or ancient.  The bible is very old.  The words in it have guided mankind for a very long time so that it is often called the ancient wisdom. The group was then instructed to unwrap the first layer, the brown wrapping to reveal a golden wrapping.

Children were asked what things are made of gold?  Jewelry was the first guess.  Gold stands for something valuable.  We value our very own bible.  The words in the bible are valuable like gold.  We treasure our bible for a lifetime.  The class then unwrapped the gold wrapping to reveal the next layer, the comic page from the newspaper.

The comic page entertains us with its stories.  The bible has a lot of stories.  There are stories about the beginning of the earth, how ordinary people lived, suffered and met their challenges.  They were led out of slavery in Egypt to the promised land with the parting of the Red Sea. This and other stories can be found in the bible. There are stories about kings and prophets and brave men and women who listened to God’s voice speaking to them to do the right thing.  The comic page wrapping was unwrapped to reveal the white tissue wrapping.

White stands for God or Light or Purity.  The bible wrapped in white  means that the bible is a gift from God.  Reading the bible is our way of finding out what God has in store for people.  From time to time messengers from God come to be born among us to remind us of God’s laws on how we should conduct our lives.  We get to know more about what the bible says as we study the special lesson for the week and work with the materials prepared for the lesson.

The bible is really made up of several books, sixty six books organized into the Old Testament and the New Testament.  We can look at the chart of the books of the bible.  We can match each model of each book to the chart every time we read from that particular book.  We can also look at the timeline that shows pictures of important events of the bible along with the names of the books.

We have had lessons with the very first book,  Genesis.

A child wanted to know what is the last book.  The teacher allowed the child to pick the last book from the scaled model of books and asked him to read its name.  With the help of classmates, he came up with the Book of Revolution.  Correction here, it is the Book of Revelation.  What does revelation mean?  When you reveal something, what have you done?  A child offered “discover.”

With the four layers of wrapping unwrapped, we reveal the heart, the substance of what was wrapped, the bible.  We also will learn that the same stories and scriptural readings will reveal more and more meaning to us as we revisit them every year. 

Take care of your very own bible and treasure it like gold, enjoy the stories and learn the word of God to guide you for the bible is God’s gift to you.