How Bible Prophecy Can Help Your Child Answer the Big Questions About God

Posted on Apr 07, 2022 Topic : Men's Christian Living, Prophecy, Women's Christian Living
Posted by : Todd Hampson

Have you ever seen a movie you loved so much you couldn’t wait to see it again? Maybe you told your best friend about it so you could watch it together. Even though you knew ahead of time what was going to happen, you loved watching the movie with your friend. If this has happened to you, I bet it was really tough to resist telling them what was about to happen in each scene. When you’re excited about what’s to come, it’s hard to keep it to yourself!

God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and eternal. Since he is all-knowing, God has foreknowledge of what is to come in the future. Also, we live moment-to-moment in what we refer to as time. God, on the other hand, is eternal. He is not limited by time or space. Think of it like this: We live life as if we were seeing a movie for the first time, but God sees all of history in advance—like a favorite movie he’s already seen. Bible prophecy is really just history told in advance. You and I might read history books to learn what happened in the past. God sees the future as if it has already happened—as if it were already recorded in a history book! We can’t fully understand how this works, but that’s okay because we are not God. In fact, that’s one of the reasons we worship God—He has qualities that are far beyond anything you and I can fully understand.

Here's another question for you: When you were a child do you remember some of the big questions you had or some of the deep thoughts that ran through your young mind? Children think on a deeper level than most people realize, even though they were once children. Part of that is our attempt to protect children and preserve childhood—which is commendable. But when it comes to the big questions about God and theology we often tend to teach content on too basic of a level.

One of Pixar's early commitments that set them apart from most of the other animated content at the time was that they would not dumb down the content. The original brain trust at Pixar were determined to make films that appealed to everyone on a deep level. The early string of hits that Pixar produced all featured characters and storylines that children and adults could relate to for different reasons. They also never shied away from the big questions of life including meaning, purpose, relationships, origins, and destiny.

While this isn't a primer on Toy Story, A Bug's Life, or Monsters Inc., I use that as an example to point to the fact that we can go deeper with young readers when it comes to theology. They can handle it. They want to handle it. I'm not saying we give 8 year olds thick scholarly textbooks on systematic theology and eschatology. But we can teach them the all-important basic truths of our faith on their level and in a way that builds a foundation for lifelong trust in God's Word and a thirst to learn more.

I write books primarily on Bible prophecy and eschatology. While I wouldn't recommend taking young readers on a deep dive into the antichrist, the mark of the beast, or the hordes of demonic locusts that will all emerge in the future tribulation period—I do recommend providing young readers with a firm grasp of the basics of Bible prophecy and eschatology.

Bible prophecy is like the central nervous system of the Bible. It connects to every key figure, historical story, line of theology, and covenant between God and mankind. Young readers can (and should) learn the apologetic nature of fulfilled prophecy and how it serves as a built in proof of accuracy for the Bible. They can learn about how God has used prophecy for every key move forward in His grand narrative from the first prophecy of Jesus in Genesis 3:15 to the prophecies about our beautiful and amazing future in the closing chapters of Revelation. They can learn who the Old Testament prophets were and how their prophecies related to their immediate context and future events that impact us.

Young or old, people have an innate desire to understand two basic things—our origins and our destiny. Where did we come from? Where are we going? Bible prophecy answers those questions. What better time to lay a solid foundation for understanding the big questions of life than during childhood? I hope to inspire and equip a few people to help the next generation form a solid foundation of confidence in God's Word and an understanding of how God has worked in the past, and where we are going in the future.