In this issue:
i)    Doors of the future - J. Carattini
ii)   The Book of Review (Deuteronomy) - Part 4 - C.E. Wigg
Doors of the future
Jill Carattini

While thoughts and resolutions for the year ahead are crossing many of our minds, Matt Sly is thinking 30 years into the future.  Sly is the mind behind a website that allows people to send messages to themselves decades from the time they were written.  In the year 2015, a man named "Adam" is set to get an e-mail that asks, "Do you still write?  Do you still draw?  Does Radio Shack still exist?"  Writes Sly, "We want people to think about their future and what their goals and dreams and hopes and fears are.  We're trying to facilitate some serious existential pondering."

A quick overview of publicly posted messages shows some are pondering dreams they hope to have accomplished by the time they hear from themselves in the future-"I hope you are moving up in your job. I also hope you are making more responsible choices."  Others are taking it as a moment to remind themselves what they were up to years earlier or make record of what they hope will be beyond them in the future-"I hope you're better, because as I'm writing this letter, you're doing terrible."  It is a time capsule wrought in an e-mail, readily drawing in participants all over the world.  At the very least, it extracts in many a sense of intrigue.  At most, sending words to future selves seems to draw a sense of nostalgia, accountability, apprehension, or hope.

I have a journal that largely holds thoughts and events consumed with present days.  I find I am most prone to write in it when something is happening or has just happened, when something is on my mind or on my heart now.  But there is one page far in the back that differentiates from the norm.  Scattered sentences now crammed on a page full of thoughts speak to days far ahead of me:  "Remember that you wanted to be the kind of woman that grows old gracefully."  "When it's time to let go of certain freedoms, take it with poise."  "When it's your turn to face disease, you wanted to do it with faith; you wanted death never to scare you more than resurrection gives you hope." While I like to think of these mental notes as prayers for the future-and many of them are-among them are notes that more closely resemble a listing of fears, an anxious warning at what I might forget or what might go wrong.  Though I am looking ahead, it is as if I am still looking behind me.  

In an essay titled "Please Shut This Gate" English author F.W. Boreham describes signs carefully placed by landowners throughout the landscape of New Zealand.  "Please shut this gate," was a message one could read often throughout his countryside, signs placed by fence owners intent on keeping some things from wandering away-and some things from wandering in. 

Boreham then draws a parallel to the importance of shutting similar gates in our own lives, closing the door that keeps things both in and out.  He writes, "[W]hen Israel escaped from Babylon, and dreaded a similar attack from behind, the voice divine again reassured them. 'I, the Lord thy God, will be thy rearguard' (Isaiah 58:8).  There are thousands of things behind me of which I have good reason to be afraid; but it is the glory of 
the Christian evangel that all the gates may be closed.  It is grand to be able to walk in green pastures and beside still waters unafraid of anything that I have left in the perilous fields behind me."(1)

Whether looking down roads to the New Year or the coming decades, it is the glory of the follower of Christ that there are gates that may be closed.  We need not worry about the future, nor look to resolutions with fear of failing, or tremble at what Christ has put behind us.  In the words of a seventeenth century Puritan, "To suppose that whatever God requireth of us that we have power of ourselves to do, is to make the Cross and grace of Jesus Christ of none effect."  Christ has written a message across the future to be delivered to our laboring souls each new day.  In a loud voice he cried out on the Cross, "It is finished," forever offering a door to shut, forever promising the strength to shut it.  He has gone before us, he walks among us, he is our rearguard, he is our strength.
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(1) F.W. Boreham, "Please Shut This Gate," in The Silver Shadow (New York: The Abingdon Press, 1919), 118-119.
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[* Copyright(c) 2005 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission.]

 
The Book of Review (Deuteronomy) - Part 4
Moses' famous last words and unique funeral
Charles E. Wigg
 
In chapter four of Deuteronomy Moses repeats the absolute necessity for Israel to live a life of obedience to the word that God had committed to them. He drew their attention that those who clung to Jehovah, in the temptation connected with Baal Peor, not one of them had died, but all were alive as a testimony to the great goodness of God.
 
In chapter five the Law is repeated once again. This was to show that nothing had changed; God’s standards had not altered in any way over the forty years since He spoke from Mount Sinai. As at that time they still needed a mediator, and Moses the man of God was that mediator. Though he died and was buried by God, yet our Mediator, “The Man Christ Jesus”, ever lives to make intercession for us. A human mediator is no longer required by men to come between man and God. Nevertheless once we come to God through Christ, are expected to live a life of obedience to God’s word. But our Mediator is unique, in that He rpse from the dead. He now lives in the power of an endless life, and He ever lives to make intercession for us. He is the ONE MEDIATOR between God and man, we need no other.
 
In chapter six of this book, Moses gives a most enlightening view of his knowledge of God, and his knowledge of the trinity. It is in verse four that we have the Jewish ‘Shema’ is presented to us. The following comment taken from the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge is most interesting.
 
Shema Yisrael, Yehowah, Elohainoo, Yehowah aichod. “Hear, Israel, Jehovah, our God, is one Jehovah.” On this passage the Jews lay great stress; and it is one of the four passages which they write on their phylacteries.  On the word Elohim, Simeon ben Joachi says: “Come and see the mystery of the word Elohim. There are three degrees, and each degree is by itself alone, and yet they are all one, and joined together in one, and are not divided from each other.”
 
In these words we have perhaps the clearest statement as to the nature of God, being a Trinity. The Hebrew word aichod, means a plurality in unity, not a single entity as claimed by some Jewish authorities.
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[Reproduced with permission of the author] 



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