Are you good at Geography? I remember trying to learn the names of countries, oceans, rivers, mountains when I was a boy; but I imagine your teachers make it much more interesting for you in these days. I used to wish I had one of those big globes of the world, because then it was easier to see that Australia and New Zealand were on the other side of the world.

The world that we know today, thanks to people like Christopher Columbus, is a much larger place than the world that was known in the times of the Bible, but I want to talk to you about the big wide world in which the people of Bible days lived. The Bible refers to places as far away as India (Esther 1:1) and Spain (Romans 15:24). There are some who think that there is a reference to China in the Old Testament, but we are not quite sure about that. It‛s just possible that some of the people of the Bible times went as far as England.

But to a boy in Palestine, in Old Testament times, places such as India, Spain, China and England did not mean much. They must have seemed as far away as the moon.