In Part I of our mini Easter video series, we asked What’s in the Bible creator Phil Vischer why he spent so much time in his new DVD talking about what happened between the Old Testament and the New Testament. The latest installment “Buck Denver Asks … What’s in the Bible? Volume 10: Jesus is the Good News! [Matthew, Mark, Luke & John]” was released on February 26, 2013. Watch his answer in the video.
“Some people might be surprised by how much time we take to talk about what happened between the Old Testament and the New Testament,” Vischer said about his new DVD about the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. After 9 previous volumes in the What’s in the Bible? series – all covering the Old Testament – Vischer started his 10th with a review of what happened in Genesis-Malachi.
“It is really important to connect the Testaments,” he said. You can’t fully understand the beauty of the Gospel story – of Christ’s death on the cross in the place of his people – without understanding the history of those people. Stretching all the way back to Genesis, Vischer shows children the path that humanity chose – a path of brokenness and sin – and how God had faithfully worked through the whole Old Testament to restore His perfect kingdom.
God promised a messiah to the people very early on in the Bible; and yet, even after the last writings of the Old Testament, the Israelites had to wait 400 years for Jesus to be born.
In the DVD, Vischer explains the “fullness of time” when one of the characters, Ian, expresses dismay that the Israelites waited 400 years. The fullness of time means that God waited until all the pieces had fallen into place for his story to work out perfectly. Only he knows why he acts when he acts, but there were a number of things that worked out in the years before Jesus’ birth that made the timing perfect. Alexander the Great had united the Roman world and it was in a time of peace (Pax Romana). There was a common language – Greek. And the Romans loved to build roads, so both the necessary common language and infrastructure for travel were in place for a message of God’s good news to spread quickly!
“It’s important how much the world changed between the end of the writing of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament,” Vischer said.
And as Vischer starts to tell the story of Jesus in Volume 10, a perfect stage has been set.
Pick up What’s in the Bible? Volume 10 today to learn more about God’s perfect timing and his great rescue plan.
Read the second post in this Easter Video series: Part 2: Easter Video Series: How do you teach the Bible story of Jesus to kids?
