A recent newspaper article described a local high school celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. This year’s senior class dug up the time capsule left by the first graduating class in 1971. It contained various items those teens thought would be interesting or important for a future generation to know about their life and times.

Fifty years seems like a long time to an eighteen-year-old, but it’s a drop in the proverbial bucket. I ought to know. I graduated from high school in 1971 too. And there’s no way to distill an era down to its essence, small enough for a time capsule. The future-finders can only surmise what it really means without a lot more information for context.

It’s sort of like the treasure hunters on the History Channel’s show about Oak Island, Nova Scotia. In digging up every shovel-full of the past, each artifact is carefully analyzed and compared with other information to try to understand the big picture.

This week, my first Twitter post each morning focuses on each day of creation from Genesis chapter one. It was a challenge to choose one aspect and distill it down to two hundred and eighty characters.

In everything we write and in every conversation, there’s always something left on the table. Many words are unspoken, and some thoughts are never expressed. Most of them are unimportant, but some are crucial to what we are trying to communicate. Perhaps they can be stated later, but it’s impossible to dump the complete contents of our heart out at once.

You may have heard, “The Old Testament is the New Testament concealed and the New Testament is the Old Testament revealed.”

I’ve also heard that the Torah contains God’s entire story of redemption. Finding the pieces is like searching for Easter eggs. And you can also find it in the first book alone.  Moreover, the first three chapters of Genesis lay out God’s grand Divine Plan. The hints are also sprinkled through chapter one.

The first sentence of the Bible hides salvation in plain view. The middle word, “et,” is the Aleph-Tav (Hebrew). That word in Greek is spelled Alpha-Omega. The gospel in a nutshell. Distilled further, our redemption is summed up in the first three Hebrew words, “Beginning God created.” In the specific letters of the first word, “Beresheit,” there are more layers of meaning that point at God’s whole point in His redemptive acts.

These are all artifacts. They are communications from long ago. The loving, living, eternal God left His Word to tell us who He is and what’s important to know about life. There’s a lot to it – so much to find and learn. But it’s pretty simple too.

I love how Dr. Sandra Richter puts it: This is God’s grand Rescue Plan so that the People of God could dwell in the Place of God to forever be in the Presence of God.

The Class of 1971 couldn’t fit it all into one time capsule. Hundreds of years of Oak Island history are taking several years and millions of dollars to uncover. How much more exciting is it to find bread crumbs from the Bread of Life strewn across every page of Scripture? And with every discovery, it leads us closer back home.

Shalom, Dottie