A few years ago, my church offered a 34-week youth Bible study. Five high school students, four girls and one boy, signed up for the course. The curriculum was more detailed than the regular Sunday School material, and it covered about 60% of the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation. As their study leader, my role was to facilitate discussion rather than to teach the class in the traditional manner.

Children of the 1990s, these young people had been raised with modern attitudes about such things as equal opportunity and gender bias. The patriarchal society and agricultural practices of the Old Testament were totally foreign to them.

One lesson dealt with the animal sacrifices that were a part of the Israelites’ worship. The animal had to be a male without blemish, perfect in every way. The girls joked about the statistical likelihood of finding perfect males. The young man in the group blushed in silence.

One of the girls took offense. “I don’t understand why the sacrifice had to be a male. Aren’t the females good enough?”

“Yeah!” said the other girls. The boy broke a wide smile.

“Well,” I said, “in animal husbandry circles, females are more valuable than males for other things.”

“What other things?” asked the offended one. “I don’t get it.” Since she was not a country girl, I believe she asked the question in all innocence.

So I said, “Each male animal can father many offspring. Take sheep for example. One female can only have one lamb at a time, sometimes two. So, you see, males are more dispensable than females. If you have eight sheep and four are males, you can dispose of three because one ram is all you need for reproduction. That’s why God specified that the sacrificial lamb should be a male. Because the females were more needed.”

By this time, everyone was blushing. They got it.

The group learned many more life lessons from their Bible study. And I learned that facilitating is harder than plain old teaching.