The software and format was excellent. I’ve done online learning before and it involved lots of downloading of material from this place and that place, lots of opening Word documents and MP3 files, and all the rest. Ligonier packages it all up very nicely and makes it very intuitive. It was a great learning experience.
Dr. Sproul loves the Bible and it shows in the way he teaches this material. He may have saved the best for last as his lecture on Job was a passionate exploration of the problem of suffering. You couldn’t help but sense how much the book of Job had ministered to Dr. Sproul in hard times in his own life.
“The big picture” helps us to understand the “small pictures” better. We usually focus on a few verses at a time in our sermons and Bible studies. Sometimes we might look at a whole chapter. Only rarely might we study a whole book in one session. Yet that’s what this course did as week after week we sped through the prophetic and poetic books. At times we wanted to pause and go a bit deeper. However, by taking this 33,000 ft. view, we saw truths we would not normally have seen closer up. And we saw the connections between the “small pictures” better.
It is fun to learn in a large group-online context. This kind of teaching can be a helpful complement to the other ways we learn: preaching, reading, formal classes, and so on. It was a joy to learn alongside people from all around the world. Their answers and questions cast new light on many Scriptures. It was also great to read of the Lord’s work in so many different lives as students shared their varied spiritual experiences with the online class.
