The Biggest Story

What The Biggest Story is

The Biggest Story is a children's picture book by Kevin DeYoung, illustrated by Don Clark and published by Crossway in 2015, that retells the entire Bible as a single connected narrative. Its subtitle — "How the Snake Crusher Brings Us Back to the Garden" — names the through-line: the promise of Genesis 3:15 that an offspring of the woman will one day crush the serpent. The book follows that promise from Eden, through the patriarchs and the exodus and the kingdom, to Jesus, and on to the new creation. It is short — a read-aloud aimed at roughly ages four to eight — and built around one storyline rather than a sequence of separate Bible stories.

It is not a confessional document for any single denomination, but it does carry a clear shape. DeYoung writes from a gospel-centered, redemptive-historical perspective — the conviction that the whole of Scripture is one unified story climaxing in Christ — and Crossway is a Reformed-leaning evangelical publisher. The book works from the 66-book Protestant canon. None of that is presented as argument; it is simply the frame the story is told inside. Families drawn to the single-arc, one-Story approach will find it the book's central strength; families who want a different scope or a story-per-character format will want to weigh that going in.

Why families reach for the one-Story approach

Most children's Bibles are anthologies. They give you Noah, then Joseph, then Moses, then David, then Daniel, then Jesus — each a self-contained story with its own moral, its own two-page spread, its own clean ending. That format has real strengths: it is browsable, it is modular, and a child can meet a new hero every night. The Biggest Story deliberately does the opposite. It treats the Bible as a single plot with a single problem introduced in chapter one and resolved at the end, and it asks the child to follow the thread rather than collect the characters.

The payoff is a sense of the whole. A child who reads The Biggest Story comes away not with a folder of separate hero stories but with a shape — the garden lost, the promise made, the promise kept, the garden restored. For parents who grew up able to recite the individual stories without ever seeing how they fit together, that connected arc is the entire appeal. It is a different teaching goal than the anthology format serves, and which one fits your family depends on what you want your kids to walk away holding: a cast of characters, or a single unfolding story.

The snake-crusher thread: one promise, traced across the whole canon

The organizing idea of the book is a single promise. In Genesis 3, the moment things go wrong in the garden, God tells the serpent that an offspring of the woman will one day crush its head — the "snake crusher" of the subtitle. DeYoung takes that line and makes it the spine of the entire book. Every subsequent scene is framed as a step in the long search for the promised one: is it this child, this rescuer, this king? The book keeps asking, and keeps answering "not yet," until it arrives at Jesus and then looks ahead to the new creation where the garden is restored.

This is the feature that makes the book work as a teaching tool rather than just a pretty retelling. A four-year-old can hold the question "who will crush the snake?" across two dozen pages in a way they could never hold an abstract theological summary. The thread gives the child a job — to watch for the promise being kept — and it gives the parent a built-in way to connect any individual Bible story back to the main plot. It is a concrete, repeatable hook, and it is the single biggest reason families who use this book recommend it to other families.

Don Clark's design-forward art: the reason it ages up

Don Clark is a working graphic designer, and The Biggest Story looks nothing like the soft pastel cartoons that dominate the children's-Bible shelf. The pages are dense with pattern — geometric tessellations, layered color, gold and deep jewel tones, intricate borders that reward close looking. Faces are stylized rather than rounded and cute. The overall effect is closer to high-end illustrated design than to traditional kid-lit, and it is the most-discussed thing about the book in either direction.

That choice has a practical consequence: the book ages up unusually well. A typical cartoon storybook is outgrown by seven or eight; The Biggest Story tends to keep its appeal because the art reads as art, not as baby illustration. Older kids notice the detail. Adults reach for it on the coffee table. It also makes the book a strong gift — keepsake-quality, the kind of thing that survives multiple children. The flip side is real: a subset of families simply prefer warmer, more representational pictures, and those families should look at a spread before buying, because the style is the experience here.

The broader ecosystem: from board book to a full storybook Bible

The Biggest Story did not stay a single picture book. It grew into a small family of products built around the same one-Story frame. There is The Biggest Story ABC, a sturdy board book that walks toddlers through the storyline an alphabet letter at a time. There is an animated DVD adaptation that puts the arc on screen for younger kids. And in 2022 came The Biggest Story Bible Storybook, a much fuller 104-story volume that keeps DeYoung's redemptive-historical approach but finally gives the story-by-story coverage the original book intentionally skips.

For a family, this ecosystem matters because it lets you scale the same approach as your children grow. You can start a two-year-old on the ABC board book, read the original picture book to a five-year-old, put the DVD on for a rainy afternoon, and graduate a seven- or eight-year-old to the 104-story companion when they are ready for more breadth. It is a rare case where the spinoffs genuinely extend the original rather than just monetizing it — each piece serves a different age and a different reading appetite while keeping the storyline consistent across all of them.

Pricing

Where The Biggest Story falls behind

Breadth of stories. By design, this is not a comprehensive storybook Bible. It follows one arc and lets most individual episodes go by without stopping — kids won't meet Noah, Daniel, Esther, or Jonah as standalone characters here. That is the right call for the book DeYoung set out to write, but families who want their children to know the individual stories will need the companion volume or a different storybook Bible alongside it.

Art that doesn't suit everyone. Don Clark's stylized, geometric look is the book's signature and also its most common sticking point. A meaningful slice of families prefers softer, more representational children's-book illustration, and for them the art is a barrier rather than a draw. It is worth seeing a few spreads before buying, because the style is so central that it largely determines whether a given household will reach for the book again.

Value per page. At roughly $18 for a short hardcover, the cost runs higher than thicker storybook Bibles on a per-page basis. The production quality justifies a lot of it, but families on a tight budget comparing shelf options should note that the companion 104-story volume, at around $25, delivers far more reading per dollar.

A specific frame. The book is told from a gospel-centered, redemptive-historical perspective and works from the 66-book Protestant canon. That shapes which storyline gets emphasized and how the whole is framed. None of it is argued on the page, but families who want a different canon scope or a more neutral retelling should know the lens before buying rather than be surprised by it.

The Biggest Story vs. The Jesus Storybook Bible vs. The Big Picture Story Bible

These three are the shortlist for parents who want the one-connected-story approach, and they are closer cousins than most kids' Bibles. The Jesus Storybook Bible (Sally Lloyd-Jones, 2007) is the best-known of them — a fuller collection of individual stories, but with a famous refrain in every chapter that every story "whispers his name," tying the episodes back to Jesus. The Big Picture Story Bible (David Helm, 2004, also Crossway) is the simplest and youngest-skewing, built around God's people in God's place under God's rule. The Biggest Story (DeYoung, 2015) is the most tightly single-threaded of the three — one arc, one promise, far fewer individual scenes.

Different strengths. The Jesus Storybook Bible is the best at giving you both the individual stories and the connecting thread, which is why it is the most-recommended starting point for most families. The Big Picture Story Bible is the best for the very youngest listeners and for the simplest possible version of the arc. The Biggest Story is the best at making a child feel the single sweep of Scripture as one story, and it has the most distinctive art of the three. If you want one book that does the most, start with the Jesus Storybook Bible; if you specifically want the tightest single-arc telling with standout illustration, The Biggest Story is the pick.

All three sit in the same gospel-centered, redemptive-historical, 66-book tradition, so the choice between them is mostly about format and art rather than framing. The Jesus Storybook Bible is the broadest. The Big Picture Story Bible is the gentlest on-ramp for toddlers. The Biggest Story is the most design-driven and the most committed to a single storyline — and DeYoung's own 104-story companion volume is there for families who later want the breadth the original deliberately leaves out.

Alternatives to The Biggest Story