Sunday School Lesson:In the Begining (Part 1)
In the beginning God created a beautiful garden. This garden was in a strange, hot country, where you sometimes find miles and miles of wind-tossed sand, and sometimes high, rocky mountains and sometimes wide rivers that flowed between banks of tall reeds. Part of this land was called “The Land of Wandering”. In this country there were big cities, once fine and strong but long since fallen into ruins, with kings’ palaces built inside their towered walls.
People who could make beautiful things in silver and gold and brass, who could carve in ivory and shape delicate vases upon potters’ wheels lived there. They hunted lions and other wild animals in the deserts, and then came back to banquets where music was played to them as they ate and drank. And at the kings’ courts were men who called themselves magicians, and thought that they could read the future in the water, or sand or sometimes the stars.
Away from the great cities, where the kings and princes were often very wicked, lived the people of the Tents. They had sheep and cattle for property, and they moved through the Land of Wandering from place to place. Some of them were very rich and owned beautiful things made of silver and gold, though they did not build temples or houses. The greatest treasure they had, greater than any jewel that ever shone, was their belief in God.
They told of God in all their stories and sang His praise in all their songs. The little dark-haired, dark-eyed boys and girls who played about the tent doors or sat near their mothers at sunset, never tired of hearing the beautiful tales. Some of their grown-up brothers had harps and cymbals, and were taught music and to dance, not merely for pleasure, but for worship of the great God to whose people they belonged. Other nations around them prayed to the sun, or the moon or even to big stone pillars set up in the temples of the hills. But the children of the Tent people prayed to God alone.