Kevin Swanson: We really wanted to teach our children the word of God. Deuteronomy 6:7 is sort of the key verse on education, "Teach your children God's word as you sit in the house and you walk by the way as you rise, if you lie down." Well, God wants us teaching his words first and foremost. It would be a shame if our kids knew Saxon math and their geography and their spelling, but they really didn't know God's word, and we raised them over 18 years and they didn't know God's word inside and out. So one of my goals in the Family Bible Study Guide series was to be sure that they knew God's view of the world, God's view on history. And that's what you get in the Book of Genesis. It's God's book on history. It's about half of world history contained in one single book.
Daniel Craig: That's a good point. You should probably read it then.
Kevin Swanson: A few of the other books pick it up about 3,000 years into it. But you get history from God's perspective. Now, world history as presented from the humanist perspective is a completely different approach. They start with the amoeba and then man sort of evolves into this ape-form creature, then in the caveman and then on to other things. Well, from a biblical perspective, man starts actually doing very well, thank you very much. He's in the Garden of Eden.
Daniel Craig: I think he was perfect?
Kevin Swanson: He was perfect. In fact, he was very, very good. In the beginning. And then things sort of went downhill from there. So it's a whole different approach to history. And if our children do not understand the Book of Genesis, they're not going to understand redemption. They're not gonna understand why Jesus came. They're not gonna understand basic anthropology, basic psychology, basic cosmology, basic origins, metaphysics, even epistemology. All these different things are really summarized and wrapped up in that Book of Genesis. So I wanted to be sure our children knew the Book of Genesis from chapter one to chapter 50, and so that's why I wrote this. We've been through it several times with our children.
Daniel Craig: A lot of young people have these gnawing questions of, "Why am I here? What is my purpose in life? What was I meant to do? Is there meaning to life? Is there meaning to my life?"
Kevin Swanson: It's in there.
Isaac Botkin: As Danny was talking about those gnawing questions, "Why are we here? What is the purpose of man on this earth?" God's priorities in explaining that history come out. He spends more time talking about Abraham than he does about Nimrod and Mizraim and Cain and the great city builders. They're not as important as Abraham is.
Kevin Swanson: Right. He's focused in on one family building little altars and doing family worship out in the plains of Canaan while the great Egyptian Empire are building their pyramids and developing this gigantic empire. God's not interested in that.
Isaac Botkin: His priorities are different.
Kevin Swanson: Yeah. We don't even learn much about what's going on in Egypt except for this guy Joseph who's hanging out in this jail somewhere in the middle of Egypt. But that's God's focus. God's got something going on there. That's his kingdom. And so what you get in God's perspective on history is a whole different set of priorities. And if God is up front of the classroom by the whiteboard teaching history, you're gonna get a different perspective than you get in your standard world history book. That's why you've got to be sure you give them History 101 from God's perspective. That's the Book of Genesis.