There’s an old saying, “kids don’t come with a manual,” and it is certainly true. When we brought home our first newborn, I wished such a manual did exist, equipped with instructional videos and all! There were so many things that I did not know to do, much less how to do them. Thankfully my wife was a natural. But there were days where even she could have benefited from such a guide.

As my kids have grown older, I have learned more about children. But I still think a manual would be helpful. To an extent, it is true that such a manual doesn’t exist. They don’t send you home from the hospital with a manual for the next 18 years. Nor will the local school give you a gender specific, step-by-step guide that is tailored to your child’s personality and can be used in every season of their life. But there is a “manual” for parents that far surpasses all of these.

As Christians, we believe that the Bible is sufficient for all things pertaining to salvation and godly living. In other words, it not only tells us how to find life but also, having found life, how we ought to live. We call this the sufficiency of Scripture, and it extends to every area of our life, including parenting. The Bible is our manual for life, and as such, our manual for raising children.

Now, let me be clear. The Bible is not a how-to book on parenting, but it is an excellent resource for parenting. It answers all of life’s deepest questions about life, death, good, evil, right, and wrong. It shows parents where they themselves can find life in Christ and equips them to share that life with their children.

Therefore, we should expect to find in the Scriptures a cohesive view of what it means to have children and what our goal should be in raising them. To explore such a view, I want to take a biblical-theological approach to the topic of children by beginning in Genesis and tracing the theme of children all the way to Revelation. I plan to write on six sections that summarize the primary chapters in the story of redemption: Creation, Fall, Israel, Gospels, Church, and New Creation.

I hope that this study will enable the reader to see that children are an integral component to the kingdom of God, and that without them, the storyline of Scripture as we know it cannot be shared or celebrated.