Towards a solution to our society's problems: please support this animated musical Bible kickstarter

Lack of knowledge of the Bible today is a real problem in Western countries.

One real problem in the West today which has meant our societies have been ignorant, vulnerable to tyranny and which has made many people blind to the events that are happening right in front of our eyes is, I believe, a general lack of knowledge of the founding document of the Western World, the Bible. Sadly, this ignorance is prevalent, even among Christians and Jews.

Some people might say the Bible is irrelevant today: it is actually highly relevant. Everything that’s happening now in international relations and in the minutae of our own lives has a corollary in the Biblical text, and the Spirit of God still speaks through that text today, often in an increasingly miraculous way in our dark times.

Paul wrote to Timothy in the First Century about the scriptures, which by then included the very letters Paul was writing (for proof of this see 2 Peter 3:16).

But as for you, continue in the things you have learned and firmly believed, since you know from whom you have learned them. From infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for instruction, for conviction, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, fully equipped for every good work. 2 Timothy 3:14-17

On thing I am working on is a series of animated musicals, in which the text is taken directly from the Bible. The series will be called “Awake the Dawn.”

The first episode will be an animated musical setting the Book of Ruth; you can see some of the video and the existing recordings and animation and find out more about this project by clicking here or on the image below.

This is a big project that I have been working on for quite a few years, one way or another, and the Book of Ruth is such a lovely story of human love, faithfulness and providence; it is one of the books in the Bible that barely mentions God, and yet to me, it is one of the most comforting stories.

I have also finished the musical setting of Revelation, which is a very large piece of music, for an outstanding book of the Bible with amazing, dramatic imagery and beautiful descriptions of heaven. Revelation will take about 7 episodes of the show. I have also recorded parts of the book of Daniel as well.

Both Revelation and Daniel have a lot to say about the tyranny and coercion we endured under the Covid era, and both books have encouraged Christians through the past two thousand years of history.

I have not said much about my musical and writing pursuits on this substack; in a sense I’ve kept that separate. But my first degree was in musical composition. I subsequently did a postgraduate diploma with units in research methods, statistics, philosophy, educational methods and computing, and the excellent teaching I received I realise now in retrospect informed a lot of the writing I have done on this blog: I learned about the Stanley Milgram experiments, the Nuremberg Code (which has a large bearing on ethics in human experimentation), and a lot more; that study gave me a sensitivity to research design and statistics.

But the music degree and my subsequent studies in Alexandrian Greek are not without worth as well, and like the “scribe who is instructed unto the Kingdom of Heaven” who is “like unto a man that is a householder, who bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old,” (Matthew 13:52) I am bringing a lot of treasures out of my storehouses in these days, because I truly believe the solution to everything we face as individuals and a society is found in faithfulness to our Lord Jesus Christ our Saviour, or in Hebrew, “Adonai Yeshua Meshiach Moshiaynu”, whether it is in scientific endeavour, basic honesty, doing our work well, knowing and trusting the Lord more deeply, or loving our neighbours in the small things of life.

There is only a day or two left to support Ruth — if I don’t get the full amount in, the Kickstarter won’t kick in, and we won’t get a penny.