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1. Teach everything (Pentateuch)
One of the most persistent paradoxes of the youth-work world is that you often need to travel, but on a youth worker’s salary you tend to rattle around in dodgy, undependable cars.
Driving is essential to my job, but I have an absolutely atrocious history of keeping cars alive . . . much like bonsai trees. I’ve owned eight vehicles in the past five years, most of which met very sticky ends. I rolled my trusty Seat Ibiza down a hill right into an angry farmer’s field. I paid less than £200 for a Ford Escort, which after just one week released an atmosphere-shattering whine before its engine blew up. My favourite, however, was the British racing green Nissan Primera with the white leather seats and a wooden steering wheel that quite literally broke in half. Oddly, these events always seem to transpire when travelling to or from a youth-work conference.
It was, ironically, at the end of a particularly fruitful conference about ‘getting up and going’ that one of my ill-fated cars decided to pack up and die. My team had loaded their suitcases, jumped in and buckled up. I sat in the driver’s seat and turned the key – to nothing. After an embarrassing pause and some macho reassurance, the girls headed back inside the hotel for a drink, while my friend Dewi and I attempted to fix it.
‘Fixing it’ meant opening up the bonnet and pointing at various parts we knew and naming them: ‘radiator’, ‘dipstick’. We poked at the engine with all our masculine might for what felt like an hour, while periodically grunting. Not to be beaten, we tried pushing the car (before getting stuck at the bottom of a hill), jumpstarting it (depleting the Youth for Christ national chairperson’s battery pack), and even laying hands on and praying over it. Nothing. Eventually, our ‘expertise’ comprehensively depleted, we gave in and called a mechanic.
The mechanic was a non-shaving, scrawny twig of a lad who looked about fourteen years old. He got out of his van, glanced at my lifeless car for a second, jiggled something near the engine and yelled, ‘Try it now.’ Very sceptical, I got back in the driver’s seat and turned the key. Shockingly, this produced the juddering yet unmistakable sound of a twenty-year-old diesel engine coming back to life. Dewi and I looked at each other, visibly crestfallen, each secretly wondering how many man-points we’d just lost. The entire repair took fewer than thirty seconds, from the mechanic getting out of his vehicle to effortlessly starting my own.
Sometimes passion, enthusiasm and chutzpah just aren’t enough! A little foundational knowledge, carefully cultivated, nurtured and passed down, makes all the difference.
This cultivation and protection of foundational knowledge is a central principle for youth work found throughout the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch). Rather than leaving their kids stranded by the side of the road inside dodgy theology, Old Testament parents and teachers did everything in their power to make sure their young people knew God.
Because of this, you find here a really clear mandate to establish the foundational basis of who God is and how to relate to him personally. You also find lots of instructions for, and examples of, passing on this carefully cultivated knowledge to the next generation.
The metanarrative of the Pentateuch
Every big story has a purpose, and the purpose behind the big story of the Pentateuch is to introduce who God is and how to know him. After the fall of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, everything went a bit topsy-turvy, and humankind’s understanding of who God was and how to know him got pretty confused and messed up. Good theology got dropped into a blender, and what we were left with was fall-soup. God – the ultimate Masterchef – had to work it through his divine centrifuge and reconstruct it back into a roast dinner.
I don’t remember much from my high school English literature course, but I do recall spending what felt like months unpacking William Shakespeare’s prologue in Romeo and Juliet. A prologue introduces all the main characters, themes and movements of a story. It is basically spoiler central. You knew the whole tragic story of Romeo and Juliet after reading the 108-word prologue, making the twenty-four scenes that followed feel like unnecessary filler. It’s similar to watching a movie trailer that shows all the best scenes and then gives away the ending for good measure.
The prologue of the Pentateuch story is in Genesis 1 – 3. When you get past the many distracting debates about how many days was it actually, and could a platypus seriously have come about through natural selection, you find a very clear introduction to the main themes and characters of the Bible – and the order in which they should come.
God, the Creator and superstar of the Genesis 1 – 3 narrative, is at the top, making humans special and unique – in his own image – placing them as stewards over creation, and (as we learn later) throwing Satan down at his feet. That’s the correct order, right? God, as Lord, in obedient and loving relationship with people, who then look after God’s world, while Satan stays at the bottom.
Of course, this is the perfect order, and this is how it should be. However, in Genesis 3 the story of the fall explains how Satan, using creation (the serpent), tempts humans into disobeying God.
This was a disastrous turn of events, and it set in motion the fierce struggle between humans, creation, Satan and God for the rest of the whole Bible – and, as we know, the rest of history too. This triple whammy of rebellion was an act of cosmic treason, which – in the minds of humans at least – reversed the order of creation that God had put in place.
Now we know, of course, that God isn’t really at the bottom, but Adam and Eve treated him this way, and this is how we’ve been relating to him ever since – as if we were more important than him. Sin entered the world, and a ridiculous chasm was opened between God and us. We have since found ourselves cut off from the source of life, totally blind to his awesome goodness. The conflict was initiated, and the drama begun.
The story of the Bible is a love story to be sure, a merciful journey back into the restoration of a perfect relationship with our eternal Dad. Eventually, Jesus completely fulfils and restores the initial creation order though his life, death and resurrection. God is no slouch, however, and he has no ‘cooling-off’ period. He puts into immediate effect this ultimate rescue plan and begins to rebuild the right creation values from the ground up.
This restoration plan begins right away, in these first few books of the Bible. God starts laying the new foundations, gently reintroducing himself to people, constructing base codes of morality and spiritual understanding. He begins to rebuild the natural, organic, instinctual things that were heartbreakingly lost with the fall, piece by painstaking piece.
Genesis starts off this restoration plan using stories and key individuals to introduce anew the basic nature of God’s character. Exodus brings larger people groups into the story and starts to show us how to communicate with God through new ideas, such as tabernacle worship and the requirements for reaching the Promised Land. Leviticus expands on both God’s character and how to know him through developing the intimate details of the Law, leaving us in no doubt about just how holy and unapproachable God is without help. Numbers revisits and summarizes the story so far (mostly from Exodus), emphasizing a few bits we might have missed earlier – namely how to obey and follow a loving, yet very holy God. Finally, Deuteronomy revisits the importance of following the Law (mostly from Leviticus), with a much warmer and more personal focus on Israel being God’s own people. It’s a really cool story!
The stories, characters, people groups and laws given in the Pentateuch reveal the incredible benefits of knowing exactly who God is and how someone can know him. His people learn quickly that it’s better to be with God than without – or against – him. For this understanding to grow in the right direction, it needs to be guarded jealously, cultivated carefully, and then passed on and passed down through the generations. Without it, the next generation would find themselves stranded with half a sandwich and a broken-down car.
Consider, before we look at some key passages, just how much of the basic knowledge of God was vacuumed up in the fall. Key values and traits of God’s character, along with the proper way to understand and know him, were almost lost altogether, and needed assiduous reassembling piece by piece. People needed an access course to get their bearings right. This was the beginning of the journey, but one that is still utterly essential today. Young people still need to be saturated in the essential and very basic truths of God, and then allowed to have a go connecting to him personally. And there’s the message of the Pentateuch – know who God is, and pass it on through knowledge and experience.
Children and young people needed to grow up learning about who God was, and consistently receiving clear invitations in order to have their relationship with him restored, both corporately and personally. This was done in Israel in two ways: through knowledge and experience or – put a better way – through saturation and sanctification.
Saturation and sanctification
The basic foundational truths of God and relationship with him were passed down throughout the generations in Israel using these two basic processes. Saturation and sanctification are like the wide- and narrow-angle lens, bringing both a broad and a deep perspective to bear on the truths of God. If saturation is getting caught in the rain without an umbrella, sanctification is being shot in the gut with a pressure washer. Both are going to get you wet, but I bet they feel different!
Saturation is the wide angle, making sure that everywhere young people look, all the propositional truths of God are clearly seen and heard, through music, repetitive ritual acts, storytelling, writing, pictures and symbols. The camp of God’s people was literally saturated with the history and instructions of God.
Sanctification, on the other h...
