About a year ago I taught a children's class the story of the Bible using a book called The Lamb.
I found this approach intriguing and excellent for teaching children.
Each chapter had questions at the end, making it easy for review time.
The children loved the story and the pictures and begged to continue when the lesson time was at an end.
I'll give you a brief idea of how the story unfolds: God created the earth and universe, people, animals, and angels, and when He first created it, it was perfect-without any wrong or bad in it.
There was one angel who wanted to take God's place as Ruler over everything, but he couldn't, so he and a bunch of other angels decided to cause problems on God's perfect earth.
This bad angel told Adam and Eve (the first people to live on earth) that God didn't really know what was best for them.
Adam and Eve were God's friends, but they believed this bad angel and did something that God told them specifically not to do.
They disobeyed, causing sin to come into the perfect world.
This sin became part of every person because of the first man and woman's sin.
Because God is perfect and good, He can't be friends with people who have sin, so no one could ever live with Him.
This is called eternal death.
God loved the people He made and didn't want there to be separation between them because of terrible sin, so He promised Adam and Eve that He would one day send Someone who would take away their sins forever in the exact way God said it must be done, and people could then be with God again.
People didn't really see how terrible sin was to God, so He told them to do something that helped them understand.
He told them to take a perfect male lamb (it couldn't have anything wrong with it), put their hands on its head to represent putting their sin on it, and then kill it, shedding its blood.
This was God's way of showing that He could punish sin according to the law without punishing people, and that He would keep His promise to one day send Someone to die for all sin.
The people had to believe that God would keep His promise.
Some people thought that they could try to do things to have their sins taken away without killing an animal, but God said that it couldn't be done.
He gave a list of Ten Commandments to show that not a single person on earth could do anything to be perfect and get to heaven.
Everyone had the sin in them and couldn't keep all ten of the commandments.
Years after God had promised Adam and Eve that He would provide Someone to pay for sin, He sent His perfect Son to the earth.
Jesus was born into the world like a human, with flesh and blood, but He was God's Son so He didn't have the sin that was in all mankind.
This is the only way that sin could permanently be paid for.
As Jesus grew up, he did many things that showed who He really was, and He knew that He would one day die in the place of all people.
When He became a man, many people didn't' like Him, so they took and beat Him, then hung Him on a cross (which was a very cruel way of killing people in His day).
He died there, and God said that everyone's sin was put on Him when He was on that cross, and that's how He paid for sin in the place of mankind.
If this is the first time you've heard this, I'd encourage you to pick up a Bible and read the whole story.