p. 167 | BIBLE MODES OF REVIEW

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · March 11, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 11

BIBLE MODES OF REVIEW.

For almost everything that needs to be done in a Sabbath-school there are patterns given in the Bible. The uniform lesson, singing, blackboard exercises, class teachings, and review methods are all there.

Every plan of progress which a dozen men are claiming to have initiated is found marked out in the Bible. A good illustration of this truth is given by the Rev. W. H. Cobb, of Uxbridge, Massachusetts, in the following sketch of a recent exercise in his Sunday-school concert:—

“‘Moses’ review lesson’ was the topic of our last Sunday-school concert. We are taking up the books of the Bible, one each month, and have reached Deuteronomy. Our plan is to crowd into an hour as full an outline of the book as time permits, illustrating it from all available sources. It occurred to me, while preparing for the last concert, that Moses is a model to all who find difficulty with ‘reviews.’”

“1. He did not try to review too much. He had only three days to go over the work of forty years; but he did it judiciously, selecting the most important points. Some of us seem unable, in a half-hour, to get beyond the second or third of twelve half-hour lessons.

“2. He spent little time on the narrative part. Religious truth was of far more consequence in his eyes than even so wonderful a story as that of Israel in the wilderness. The latter occupies only three chapters of his thirty-three, and seems to be reviewed for the sake of the ‘now therefore’ which begins the fourth chapter.

“3. He had a definite plan of instruction. It is easy to trace it. The spirit of the law (chaps. 4–11); the letter of the law (chaps. 12–26); the sanctions of the law (chaps. 27–33). Thus the bare precepts are flanked on either side by inspiring appeals to the moral consciousness of Israel, and to their instinctive hopes and fears.

“4. He clustered all the lessons about a central thought. It would often be practicable and useful for us to hang our review teachings upon the very same nail that Moses fastened on this occasion; namely, the Creator exalted, and the creature humbled. There is scarcely a chapter of Deuteronomy where this is not brought out with distinctness.

“5. He combined the warmest expressions of God’s love with the strongest threats of his wrath. Such oft-repeated and wonderful words of tenderness, as ‘The Lord loved thee,’ ‘The Lord chose thee,’ ‘The Lord had delight in thy fathers,’ mingle with the terrible curses which culminate in chap. 28. Let us, who have the gospel, pour out freely before our classes its treasures of grace, lest the very lawgiver of Sinai put us to shame; and on the other hand, let us not assume to be weaker than Moses, and withhold the terror of the Lord; for the New Testament echoes that word of Deuteronomy, ‘God is a consuming fire.’”

—S. S. Times.