The Christadelphian Instructor/Questions for Children Under 8

1. Who made all things?

Answer: God

2. Where is God?

Answer: In heaven

3. Is He anywhere else?

Answer: Yes: He is everywhere.

4. How can God be everywhere if He is in heaven?

Answer: By His Spirit: His Spirit fills heaven and earth.

5. What is His Spirit?

Answer: His invisible power of which all things are made.

6. What is God Himself?

Answer: He is a being of glorious spirit substance.

7. What is He called?

Answer: The Father

8. Why is He called the Father?

Answer: Because all things are of Him and from Him. He made them all.

9. Is the Father separate from the Spirit?

Answer: No: they are both one, like a fire and its warmth, or the sun and its light.

10. Can the Father see us, although He is in heaven?

Answer: Yes. He can both see us and hear us. His Spirit is everywhere; and all things are in it, so that He knows everything that happens. Nothing can be hid from His eyes.

11. Does He know even our thoughts?

Answer: Yes, He knows the very thoughts of our hearts, even if we say nothing about them.

12. What does this teach us?

Answer: To be very careful of what we do or say or think.

13. Does God desire us to act in a particular way?

Answer: Yes. He desires us to obey Him.

14. Has He told us what to do?

Answer: Yes.

15. Where?

Answer: In the Bible.

16. What is the Bible?

Answer: It is a book written by a number of men who were inspired by the Holy Spirit what to say.

17. What do we learn from the Bible?

Answer: We learn what God has done and said in the past: what He wishes us to do now: and what He intends to do with us in the days that are to come.

18. What has God done in the past?

Answer: He made man upon the earth.

19. How long ago?

Answer: About 6,000 years

20. What was the name of the first man and woman?

Answer: Adam and Eve.

21. Where did God put them when He had made them?

Answer: In a beautiful garden in Eden, where there were many fruit trees.

22. What did He tell them they might do?

Answer: He said they might eat of all the trees but one that stood in the midst of the garden: they were not to touch that.

23. Were they obedient?

Answer: No: they ate of the tree in the midst of the garden.

24. What was the consequence of their disobedience?

Answer: They were sentenced to die, and they were driven out of the beautiful garden, to get their living by labour.

25. Are we under this sentence?

Answer: Yes, because we are their children. We have come from them. It was a sentence that cursed their bodies, and we have the same bodies.

26. What did God say to Adam?

Answer: "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

27. Had God made Adam of the dust?

Answer: Yes: "The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul."

28. Is it true what people say that God breathed into Adam an immortal soul that cannot die?

Answer: No; that is not true. Man is mortal because of sin.

29. What is sin?

Answer: Disobedience of the law of God.

30. Does man die?

Answer: Yes; man dies and returns to the dust, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.

31. What is the spirit that returns to God?

Answer: It is the life-power of God, without which we could not be living beings. It is not we, but the power by which we are.

32. When God takes life away, can we live any longer or think any more?

Answer: No; we become dead, and unable to know or think anything, until we are made over again at the resurrection.

33. Is it true that when we die, we go to heaven or hell?

Answer: No; that is one of the many fables taught to the people in this day of darkness. It is the resurrection we have to look to.

34. What is the resurrection?

Answer: The raising to life again of people that have died.

35. Is there going to be a resurrection?

Answer: Yes: God has promised to bring again His people from the grave.

36. Who are His people?

Answer: Those who know and love Him; who believe His promises and obey His commandments.

37. Will none but His people rise from the dead?

Answer: The unjust will rise as well as the just.

38. Will all people rise that have ever died?

Answer: No: those only will rise from the dead who are responsible.

39. Who are those that are responsible?

Answer: Those who know the will of God, whether they do it or not.

40. What will become of those who are not responsible?

Answer: They will never be seen or heard of any more. When they die, they pass away as if they had never lived.

41. What will be done to those with whom God is well pleased at the resurrection?

Answer: They will be changed. Their corruptible bodies will become incorruptible. They will no longer be mortal beings but immortal. It will not be possible for them to die any more.

42. What will become of those with whom God is not well pleased?

Answer: They will be driven away in shame and disgrace, to suffer evil, long or short as God may see to be just; and then to die again.

43. Who will do this great work of raising the dead and judging them?

Answer: God.

44. But will God do it himself or through another.

Answer: Through another.

45. Through whom?

Answer: Through Jesus Christ.

46. Who is Jesus Christ?

Answer: God's own Son.

47. When was He born?

Answer: A long time ago.

48. How long?

Answer: Nearly 1900 [2000] years ago.

49. Where?

Answer: At Bethlehem.

50. Where is Bethlehem?

Answer: In the Holy Land.

51. Where is the Holy Land?

Answer: At the east end of the Mediterranean Sea, in the land of the Turks. [modern day Israel]

52. Why is it called the Holy Land?

Answer: Because God chose it and promised it to the fathers.

53. Who are the fathers?

Answer: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob

54. How long ago did they live?

Answer: About 3,700 years ago.

55. Did they live in the Holy Land?

Answer: Yes; but Abraham was not there at first. He lived before that, in the land of the Chaldeans, further to the east.

56. What made him come to the Holy Land?

Answer: Because God told him.

57. What promise did God give to Abraham when he came to the Holy Land?

Answer: That God would make a great nation of him.

58. Anything else?

Answer: That God would bless all the families of the earth in him and in his seed.

59. Anything else?

Answer: That God would give him the Holy Land for an everlasting possession.

60. Have those promises been fulfilled?

Answer: Only part.

61. What part?

Answer: Abraham became a great nation, and some blessedness has come to some part of man through Christ, His seed; but Abraham will become a greater nation yet, and blessedness untold will yet come to all men through Him.

62. Has Abraham yet possessed the land as an everlasting inheritance?

Answer: No; Abraham is dead; and while he was alive, he was a stranger in the land of promise.

63. Will God fulfil His promise about this?

Answer: Yes; God's promise cannot fail. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will rise from the dead and possess the land, when Christ reigns in power and great glory.

64. Who was Isaac?

Answer: Son of Abraham.

65. Who was Jacob?

Answer: Son of Isaac.

66. How many sons had Jacob?

Answer: Twelve

67. What were their names?

Answer: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulon, Joseph, Benjamin, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher.

68. What became of them?

Answer: They went down to Egypt, and there they multiplied till they became a numerous race.

69. Did the Egyptians treat them well?

Answer: No; Pharaoh, the king of Egypt made them slaves.

70. How long were they in Egypt?

Answer: Between two and three hundred years.

71. Did God deliver them?

Answer: Yes.

72. In what way?

Answer: He sent Moses to plague the Egyptians and bring the Israelites out of their land.

73. Why were they called Israelites?

Answer: Because Israel was a name that God gave to Jacob their father, meaning a Prince of God.

74. How many plagues were there?

Answer: Ten great and dreadful plagues.

75. What happened when Moses brought them out?

Answer: The Egyptians chased them with soldiers and came near catching them and bringing them back.

76. What did God do to prevent the Egyptians catching the Israelites?

Answer: He opened the Red Sea for the Israelites to pass through, and when the Israelites had done so, the Egyptians followed them into the path in the sea, and the sea then came back upon the Egyptians and drowned them all.

77. Why did God perform all these mighty deeds?

Answer: To show His power to the Israelites and all the world, that Israel and all the world might know that He was God, the Creator of heaven and earth.

78. When the Egyptian army was all drowned, what happened to them?

Answer: Moses led the Israelites into a desert place among great and high mountains, called Sinai; and there God shewed Himself to them in fire, and cloud, and smoke, and tempest, and delivered to them a beautiful law to keep.

79. How did so many people get food in a desert place?

Answer: God rained manna from heaven every night, and the people went out every morning and gathered it in baskets.

80. How long were they in the wilderness?

Answer: Forty years.

81. Where did they go to then?

Answer: To the land of promise. Joshua was their captain after Moses died, and under Joshua they marched into the land of Canaan and put all the wicked Canaanites to the sword, and dwelt in the land in their place.

82. Did the Israelites keep the law that God gave them?

Answer: For a short time. Then they became disobedient, and God punished them by letting the surrounding nations come and drive them out. At last, they were entirely driven away, and are now scattered in all the lands of the earth.

83. Are there any of these scattered Israelites in our country?

Answer: Yes; they are called Jews. Nobody loves them but those who love God. Those who love God love the Jews for God's sake.

84. Why are they called Jews?

Answer: It is a name they got when their nation was divided into two parts. One part consisted of ten tribes, and became broken up and lost. The other part consisted principally of the tribe of Judah, and this part continued 800 years longer than the other. From Judah they were called Ju-s, or as it is now spelt, Jews.

85. Will the Jews always be scattered?

Answer: No; God will gather them again into their own land when Christ returns, and make them a great and a blessed nation with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets in their midst.

86. Was it before the Jewish nation was broken up and scattered, that Jesus Christ was born in their midst at Bethlehem?

Answer: Yes, just before; seventy years before.

87. How old was Jesus when he showed himself to the Jewish nation?

Answer: About thirty years of age.

88. What did he do among them?

Answer: He went about preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, and healing the sick and raising the dead.

89. How long did he do this?

Answer: Three years and a half.

90. What did the Jews do to him at the end of that time?

Answer: They killed him by nailing him to a cross.

91. Why did they kill him?

Answer: Because the great men among them did not like him finding fault with them.

92. Why did God let them kill him?

Answer: Because Christ had to die for our sins that God might forgive us and admit us through Christ to life everlasting.

93. Did God let him remain dead?

Answer: No; God raised him from the dead at the end of three days.

94. Where did he go after he rose from the dead?

Answer: He stayed in the Holy Land about six weeks, seeing his disciples now and again, and at the end of that time, God took him up to heaven where he has been ever since.

95. What is Christ doing now?

Answer: He is a high priest to make intercession for the sins of all those who have believed on him and have put on his name.

96. How do believers put on his name?

Answer: By being immersed in water.

97. Will Christ always remain where he is now?

Answer: No, he is coming back to the earth again, to raise the dead, and set up his glorious kingdom in the promised land, and bring mankind into blessedness throughout the whole earth.

98. Will it be a happy age when Christ reigns?

Answer: Very; Christ will be king, his people will be kings and priests with him, dying no more. All the people will be well, and have no trouble and no care. Every one will have plenty, and be happily occupied in doing the will of God. At last from all the obedient, death itself will be taken away, and there will be no more curse, and no more pain and no more tears.

99. What must you do to have a place among such blessed people?

Answer: I must do as God wants me to do.

100. What does He want you to do?

Answer: To believe the truth, to be baptised for the forgiveness of my sins, to break bread every first day of the week in remembrance of Christ: to pray and to read the Bible daily; to give thanks to God in everything; to speak the truth always; to be kind to every one; to do good even to those who hate me; never to return evil for evil; never to speak harsh words back for harsh words spoken; to be gentle and merciful; to be honest and faithful; to be patient and kind-spoken; to be wise and forgiving; to do to all men as I would that they should do to me; not to keep company with evil men, but to join with the good in doing the will of Christ, and waiting for his coming again to set up the glorious Kingdom.

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