How the Snake Crusher brings us back to the garden
by Kevin De Young
120 pages / 2015
I read this over three nights to my kids but if it had been up to them we would have finished the whole thing that first night! In the space of ten chapters Reformed pastor Kevin De Young summarizes the whole Bible.
On every single page of the book illustrator Don Clark squeezes in more vibrancy and color than you’d ever thought possible. His highly stylized illustrations grab young eyes. Clark is very careful and reverent when it comes to illustrating Jesus. We see, for example, the silhouette of a man with a crown of thorns, but not his eyes, nose, mouth, etc. In other pictures we see only His hand or his foot. So, the pictures are very well done.
The text is even better. Kids can easily mistake the Bible for a book of stories, some about judges, some about kings, some about Jesus. What Kevin De Young does in this overview is make it clear to even the youngest kids that the Bible is one story, all about Jesus and God’s plan to bring “us back to the garden.”
This would make a fantastic supplement to daily Scripture reading with your kids – you can use it, maybe every year again as a reminder that the passage of the Bible being read that day is tied into a whole over-arching narrative – just one part in God’s big story! You can watch the book trailer below to get a feel for the art, and to hear how it reads, you can listen to the first chapter, done as an animated movie here.
