GOD’S MIGHTY HAND
Rescuing the Israelites from Egypt
By Samuel Durant
10 Publishing. 63 pages. £5.99
ISBN 978 1 910 587 034
I am convinced that parents and churches need to work harder to deliberately engage children aged 8–10.
For many years Barna Research has shown the significant fall in church attendance amongst young people. Research suggests that children who leave the church by the age of 16 made the decision to do so before the age of 11. This makes engaging them before that age critical. This book has evidently been published with this in mind and the author and illustrator have worked hard to engage their target 6–11 year age range.
The illustrations are fun and thoughtful, doing well to capture abstract concepts. The author has masterfully managed to condense 14 chapters of Exodus into what is essentially a pamphlet, without losing some of the more important detail of the original account. At times the rhyme is forced and it’s certainly not Dr Seuss, but it’s a good effort.
It’s clearly God-centred and evangelistic in its intent. It’s also Trinitarian in theology, explicitly mentioning God (presumably the Father), Jesus and the Holy Spirit. However, the phrase ‘God came as Jesus’ on page 60 perhaps doesn’t go far enough to draw the distinction between the Father and the Son. The phrase might be understood to mean that Jesus is an incarnation of God (Father) rather than God the Son. This might simply be a result of the limitation of rhyme because the symbol to depict God throughout the book is the well-known three interconnected loops of the Triquetra. The book is a helpful summary of a great Old Testament story and clearly points children to Jesus’s death as the way in which God rescues us from slavery to sin. It also deliberately invites children to read the full story themselves.
