Complicated people in the Bible

In our everyday lives we meet complicated people. People we hear about but find it hard to know intimately or people who are very different from us. In the bible, there are people whom we don’t know much about but are game changes for circumstances in our story. HCF will look at four complicated biblical characters: Judas (the person who lets us down), Queen Esther (the beautiful famous person), King Nebuchadnezzar (the power figure) and Jonathan (the good friend whose father hates you). Join us as we read the bible together and “gossip” about these people.

Basic principles of how to study people in the bible

1)      Collect all the verses found about the person.

2)      Because all the people we are studying are minor characters in the story, make sure you know what the main point of the story that they are part of (Jesus, Saving Jews, Daniel and David). Look at the type of literature/ genre of the text, the author.

3)      Look up background of the character and narrow down the focus of the study. This takes a fair amount of preparation and I have done this for you. You may find this useful if you would like to do this yourself. Please note that I do not agree with every article on this website. https://bible.org/article/how-study-bible-character

4)      Sometimes the bible refers to the person as being the betrayer, the faithful (Abraham) or wise (Solomon).

Dangers of character studies.

1)      Using biblical characters as models of virtue and forgetting their flaws.

2)      Not acknowledging that what we know about the person is limited information.

3)      Using character studies in Sunday School may make kids feel that to be a good Christian they have to try to behave like these characters, instead of asking God for direction every day.

 

Ideas taken from http://www.christianity.com/bible/bible-study/the-danger-of-character-studies.html

Skill to learn from leading Bible Study this term

How to focus, adapt material so that it is applicable to other students. The focus and application questions in the studies have been written by students from HCF, 2013.