Permit me to ride a hobby horse of mine for a few minutes! I want to issue a plea for an exegetically informed gifted illustrator to produce illustrations for a really excellent children’s Bible story book. I wonder how many children grow up with completely wrong ideas about Scripture simply because of a misleading picture in a story book. I’m not questioning the motives of the illustrators—no doubt they want to produce pictures that are simple and appealing; but how often do they end up distorting what the text actually says?
Noah’s ark is the classic example of this. How many children grow up thinking that the ark was some ludicrously unseaworthy tub that looks like it would capsize on a small pond if a breath of wind happened to touch it, never mind survive a cataclysmic worldwide flood?! Portholes (where are they mentioned in Genesis?!) with a fully grown giraffe’s neck sticking out. Is it any wonder that children grow up thinking the idea of an ark is ridiculous? The Answers in Genesis organisation has done a phenomenal job of showing generations of children (and adults) what the ark would really have looked like, even recreating a full-size replica of it in Louisville, KY.
My mother had a Bible that included a picture of the manna in the wilderness raining down from the sky on a little girl who stood holding her arms open to catch it. It was a very memorable picture which stuck in my memory for decades, but it contradicts how the text of Scripture actually describes the arduous and back-breaking work of gathering the manna off the ground six mornings a week!
I was thinking of this issue again last week when I preached on Moses striking the rock at Horeb to provide water for the thirsty and complaining Israelites. Each week I provide a sheet for the children in the congregation to accompany the sermon, so they can fill in blanks as they follow the message. For the younger children I look for a picture that relates to the sermon for them to colour in.
Trying to find an appropriate picture of the water from the rock was extremely frustrating! Almost every picture I came across on the internet showed Moses tapping a rock and something like the stream of water from an airport drinking fountain springing forth! It’s such a missed opportunity to educate our children about the reality of this Bible history!
These are incredibly dramatic stories that deserve the best illustrations we can provide—excellently produced in terms of art and colour and vividness, but as faithful to the text as we can make them. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all—especially to children—so we should labour hard to make sure the pictures are as accurate as possible.
Instead of the pictures that show several dozen Israelites in the desert with a couple of cows gathered round this little trickle of water, why not show the two million or so people and herds and flocks of animals and the rock exploding as a vast underground reservoir erupts like a geyser and creates a river of freshwater in the desert that follows the Israelites through the wilderness? (1Cor 10.4).
How do later biblical writers describe this water? Ps 78.15-16, 20: He split rocks in the wilderness and gave them drink abundantly as from the deep. He made streams come out of the rock and caused waters to flow down like rivers… He struck the rock so that water gushed out and streams overflowed.
Then the idea of two million people and their animals being supplied with water for forty years in the desert won’t seem to laughable. And more importantly, when Paul explains in 1 Corinthians 10.4 that the rock is a picture of Christ being struck by the rod of God’s judgment so that the spiritual water of life bursts forth from his shattered body to supply countless millions with eternal life, we have an accurate lens through which to view the illustration—the mighty thundering waters of Niagara Falls rather than a feeble little jet from a drinking fountain!
No doubt a hundred comments will soon tell me of any number of excellent resources that do exactly what I’ve been pleading for here! I hope so! And if not, biblically informed illustrators please take note!!
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