Covenant Theology…for Kids!!!! (continued)

This is the third in my series of Covenant Theology for Kids posts. (I’ve added a label to all my Covenant Theology…for Kids!!! posts so that they’re easier to find for reference…I hoped this might be helpful or useful to those of you as you plan for the upcoming year. This has been such a fantastic way for my children to have a hands-on opportunity to express this period of salvation history through God’s Covenants.) And…I need to apologize for the lighting in these pictures…it’s positively drab! That’s because it was positively drab outside on the day we did this – stormy and rainy – so there was absolutely no natural light for these pictures. Anyhoo…on with the post for God’s Covenant with Moses.

All of the Old Testament points to and prefigures the New Testament…but perhaps none do so more clearly (to us) than the story of Moses. From the beginning of Moses’ story to the end, God reveals more and more of Himself to His people, and sets the stage for His Son to enter in the fullness of time…

**Moses being saved from the massacre of young boys decreed by the Pharaoh –> the Infant Jesus saved from the massacre of the Holy Innocents decreed by Herod
**The blood of the lamb on the wood of the doorpost used during the Passover meal to signify protection from the angel of death and God’s judgment, and the further consuming of that lamb as food for the journey about to be undertaken…the blood of Our Lord, the lamb of God, on the wood of the Cross. The lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world and the further consuming of the lamb of God in the Holy Eucharist as spiritual food for our journey Home.
**God’s chosen people set free from the bondage of slavery at the hands of Moses (once a shepherd, still carrying his shepherd’s staff) –> all of God’s people set free from the bondage of sin at the hand’s of Our Lord (the Good Shepherd who calls us by name).
**God’s chosen people exit bondage of slavery in Egypt through the waters of the Red Sea –> we exit the bondage of sin through the waters of Baptism.
**God feeds His people with manna from heaven to sustain them on their journey to the Promised Land –> we are fed the Bread of Life which sustains us on our journey to the Promised Land – Heaven!
**Again and again, God’s chosen people grumble, complain and turn away from Him, and again and again, God offers His mercy and compassion to them on their journey – never once does He leave them –> again and again we grumble, complain and turn away from Him, and again and again, God offers His mercy and compasssion to us through the Sacrament of Confession – never once does He leave us!

The story of Moses is colorful and lengthy and beautifully illustrative of God’s mercy and faithfulness to His people. So, I took a great deal of time explaining, reading about and soaking in this story with the children. It was time well spent. The story itself is beautiful, but when viewed through the lens of our rich, Catholic faith, we were able to see the signs of the Sacraments within. God was laying the foundation for the seven Sacraments through Moses and the Israelites as they journeyed to the Promised Land. It is a story of great Mercy – and that is a story most needed right now, I think!

Here are some great resources for this study:

For me–
**The First-Born Son of God – from the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology (great overview of this covenant found here)
**Sacraments in Scripture – Tim Gray
**Any of the offerings from the St. Paul bookstore on the Old Testament are wonderful and highly suggested! These would be a wonderful supplement for a teen or high schooler completing a study of Covenant Theology! and especially…
**Salvation History – Scott Hahn

For the children–
**Exodus – Brian Wildsmith
**The Moses Basket – Jenny Koralek
**Bible History: A Textbook of the Old and New Testament for Catholic Schools – (this is used by my 7th grader)
**The Children’s Illustrated Bible – DK, Selina Hastings (note…this is NOT a Catholic Children’s Bible, but I find the illustrations by Selina Hastings and the historical information in Dorling Kindersley (DK) publications to be so rich that I use these in my home making corrections where needed for inaccuracy or omissions – I have 2 different versions of this illustrated Bible and I love them both.)
**Bible Atlas – Brian Delf
**Blackline Maps of World History – Terri Johnson
**Then and Now Bible Maps
**The Story of the World Audio CD read by Jim Weiss – text by Susan Wise Bauer

Video resource which I wholeheartedly recommend for this study!!!
**Moses: Signs, Sacraments, Salvation – Footprints of God series, Steve Ray. This is an absolutely marvelous series and we loved this one especially. The children love Steve Ray’s explanations…and so does my husband!

(Note…we borrow so many things like this from Netflix…if you have a great library system, you may not need this, but we don’t, and Netflix offers us the Footprints of God series, all of the beautiful saints DVD’s in the Ignatius catalog, history, nature documentaries…anyway…just plugging for Netflix in the homeschool 😉 )

Now, what you’ve been waiting for…the culmination of our study in this covenant with Moses…our crafting with the covenants! This is an important part of our study because it is all hands-on and it cements what we’ve read about! It’s so fun to brainstorm this part…if we had endless time and resources we would have done the rock Moses struck for water and a large model of the wilderness the children of Israel wandered around in circle after circle for 40 years. There are so many rich moments from Moses’s story, but we chose to focus on Moses leading the people of Israel out of bondage.

We used a combination of wool felt, felted wool, beeswax, and those great clothespin dolls! (See the older posts in this category for links to my favorite suppliers.)

We created the Red Sea out of blue felt (on purpose…read why here!), and we thought the felted fish a nice touch. 🙂

back to a description of our offerings…I’ll move the picture back down here so you can see it without going up and down, back and forth…here ’tis…

(isn’t the lighting just awful?)

No, that’s not a carrot stick Moses is holding. 🙂 It’s his staff. Poor Sparkly. It was slightly more staff-like before Peanut found it lying on the table, taunting him to fracture it in exactly 6 pieces. The re-assembly represents a wooden staff from a slightly more knotty tree I’m told. The staff is made from brown beeswax. (When sculpting, we prefer beeswax to sculpey clay because sculpey clay sags and droops over time unless you bake it, whereas beeswax will hold its shape until it is warmed thoroughly in your hands.)

Moses is holding the broken chain of bondage, and next to him you see a tiny basket of manna and the 10 Commandments. We didn’t have the hand of God to etch them for us, so we used beeswax, a slightly more malleable substance than stone. The chosen people are just a wooden form found here (scroll all the way to the very bottom of the page – the ones we used are the wood angel/fairy folk form which is 3.5 inches high).

Hope you enjoyed this post in our series of God’s covenants with man through Salvation History! Be watching as we move forward in our study to David!