Is Jesus the Messiah?: Week One

For the next semester, up until the kids get out of school in June, we're going to be focusing on Jesus as our Messiah. The idea and brainstorming for this section has been going on for almost a year, and it feels right for this point in our kids' walks with Christ and the life of our church. Each week we're going to take a different prophecy for the coming Messiah and put it up against Jesus. The kids are going to see as the entire puzzle plays out, and hopefully will be able to share with the parents what they learned.

First, a little background information. The Bible is split up into two parts--The Old and New Testament. What's the difference? All of the kids got that question right. There was an emphatic chant of JESUS from the crowd. I'm glad we know that much :) What the kids had trouble with was what do we do with the Old Testament? If we're followers of Jesus, why would we read a book that has no Jesus in it? One of the first-graders hit the nail on the head, "because it's how God and us get along. It shows our sins." True. At this point, I asked the kids what the word messiah means. We finally figured out that it basically meant Savior. We talked about how before Jesus, the Jewish children had to wait for the Messiah to come, and they were always on the lookout. But, God didn't leave them with nothing to go on--he put clues in the Old Testament to help describe who Jesus is. We decided to go back in time to when Jesus was born and to look at the clues and try and figure out if this Jesus character really is the Messiah. We also looked at the dates between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Thousands of thousands of years, in some cases!

The first thing the Jewish children would have looked for is a prophecy that happens multiple times in the scriptures. The scriptures say clearly that the Son of God will be a part of David's family. We read three or four verses and talked about what it meant to be a descendent of David and to be a part of his house. We talked about how this ruled out a lot of people when the Jewish children were looking. If they weren't part of David's family, they couldn't be the Messiah. So, now that we knew the Messiah was part of David's family, we had to figure out if Jesus was.

So, we went to the New Testament. We found more than a few confirmations that Jesus was part of David's family. The kids all thought that was really cool. Then I read to them from Matthew 1--we laughed about all of the names and silly phrasings, and we talked about how nobody ever reads the genealogy (woah! big word!), but the Jewish children did because it was so important that the Messiah came from David's line. The kids and I all decided we would continue to check Jesus against the Messiah. He hadn't steered us wrong yet.... Oh yeah, and we talked about how at that time, everything went back to the father. I asked the kids who Jesus' father was--Got a few Joseph's, a few God's. And his mother, Mary. We quickly realized that God was obviously related to David, Joseph was related to David, and so was Mary. So, there was no doubt that Jesus was related to King David. Awesomeness. 1/200.

We then played a little game to reinforce the whole point. We sent one kid out of the room. The rest of us picked a "golden person". When the other kid came back in, we had him try and guess who the "golden person" is. Everybody in the room gave one clue. We talked about how hard it would be to not have any clues whatsoever--the chances of being wrong would be way too big. Then we talked about how we're lucky God gave us clues. And that our clue this week was that the Messiah would come from David's line. And so far, Jesus stacks up.