Bookends II: Reflections on the Last Verse of Each Book in the Bible

By P. D. Gray

This a comprehensive yet short book in which all sixty-six books of the Bible are covered, reflecting meditatively on each book's last verse. It is this writer's hope that more and more Christians and spiritually-minded people open to the Bible will indeed read the whole Bible for themselves, without relying on paraphrases or summarized knowledge. I believe that a personal, prayerful, cover-to-cover reading of God's word will be an immense blessing to those who accomplish it. Hopefully this short volume will be an encouragement to that end.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Apr 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666757521

P. D. Gray

P. D. Gray is the Head of English at a prestigious high school in the United Kingdom. He has written poetry for a number of years, and gives Bible talks at his local church, Ebenezer Baptist Chapel. He sees both poetry and meditations as vital for the modern age, an age in which we in the West make so much money yet make so little time for the eternal things of God.

Book preview

Tahv

(the last letter in the Hebrew alphabet)

Section 1ת

Pentateuch or The Law (Torah)

187

chapters

1ת Genesis 50:26—a coffin

So Joseph died, being an hundred and ten years old: and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.

Joseph is arguably the fullest type of Christ in the entire Bible; from his piety as a youngster to his father’s favouring of him, to his visions of the future, figurative death and resurrection from a dark place at the hands of hateful brethren, glorious, privileged rule as supreme shepherd of the then world, and yet . . . he died! Even though all goes according to God’s sovereign plan, it is in another sense upsetting and tragic. This was not God’s purpose for man, made in His image. Neither is it man’s destiny, for His people will dwell forever in a place of deathless glory.

There is perhaps some relevance to the age of 110 as opposed to 111. Despite being the closest type of Christ in the pages of Scripture, he was not divine. Joseph, like the rest of us, needed a Saviour to pay his monumental sin-debt; sin-nature as well as actual sins. While we greatly admire and elevate him as a prime example of leadership—in but not of the world—we must not make a Jesus of Joseph. The Lord Jesus must ever be at the forefront of our minds whenever we read about great heroes of the faith AD, as with great patriarchs, prophets, and preachers BC.

Embalmed is a term which carries a mixed blessing. It is right and proper to have due respect and reverence for the bones of an image of God. However, the normal Egyptian way of things was to seal up the body and earthly treasures of their revered ones, that they might accompany them to the next world. We may embalm our earthly treasures, even great artifacts and books in vast museums and libraries, but they will all come to nothing in the end. The first judgement was by water, the last will be by fire; only spiritual treasures will endure; in what form we know not, but certainly all material substance will be dissolved and reconstituted in a far more glorious way.

Joseph was put, nb. passive voice, so his hope was in the fact that he was raised in the spirit by Another, regardless of any external blessings he enjoyed while here on earth. We strive and strain for every bit of gain; nevertheless, the things we most need lie completely outside of our control. Beyond our daily doings, the important things of life have been done by a higher power; our physical conception, our birth, our spiritual birth and ongoing hope, our physical death, our burial, our spiritual ascent, our bodily resurrection to come—none of it is of us.

We dwell in the coffin of our mortal body, in Egypt; a type of this world’s doomed system, awaiting the day when we will be carried far away, to enter the heavenly promised land. To further mine this seam of thought, typifying Christ as Sovereign Ruler, Joseph’s bones were raised and transported by Moses who typified Christ as Valiant Deliverer. The Jews of old, spiritually speaking, did not really reach their true promised land but only the outward representation of it. Their true promised land would be realised in the Messiah; however, their Messiah came and they did not receive Him!

You, dear reader, must realise that you are living in a coffin of mortality; that the Egypt in which you live has nothing of eternal blessedness about it. While God has seen fit to bestow upon this Egypt such blessings as birds, trees, oceans, mountains, food, family, friends, we are each only a step away from the sarcophagus of an earthly coffin, there to await the terrifying Judgement to come. This is no fantasy but the very truest of warnings. You must repent of sin and be born again before the end shall come. Worse than the prospect of death, there exists another resurrection—that of the unjustified and damned, who will face a completely just and final punishment.

Fallen image bearer of God, arise now in Christ, or forever rue the day you were born.

2ת Exodus 40:38—throughout all their journeys

For the cloud of the LORD was upon the tabernacle by day, and fire was on it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel, throughout all their journeys.

A Christian is not left alone after conversion but is continually accompanied by the Holy Spirit within, the Lord Jesus Christ among (brethren), the Heavenly Father above. Nothing less than the Godhead is superintending us throughout our various journeys; not a day goes past in which we are forgotten by Him. The extent to which we might feel His presence and sense that we are pleasing Him by faith may wax and wane, due to our own slippings and slidings, as well as His parental training of us; nevertheless, the God whom we trust is gradually drawing us, threading us through time into eternity.

Where the blazing light of this world bears down on us, He shields us from the worst of its glare through the cloud of His promises, consolations and encouragements. While by night our fears might threaten to swallow us up, He remains an abiding fire, enlightening our minds and warming our hearts. He is all things to all men.

Christ is the antitype of the tabernacle, which is a type of Him, just as he spake of the temple of his body (Jn 2:21) to those who sought to place the temple above its Architect and Maker. In Christ alone you have a shelter, a holy tabernacle to which you may resort at any time of the day, through repentance and faith. We may have been having a great or a terrible day; what really counts is the tabernacle of Christ, for in Him you are holy.

We may wonder at how some have seemed be so close to God. Look not to them but to the tabernacle—Christ. The key to their strength lay in their looking to Him. As they turned to Him through prayer, seeking guidance and direction through the cloud and fire of His Word, their lives went from strength to strength. We shun the type of monasticism which characterised the latter half of the 1st millenium AD; while it may have had certain merits in certain situations, it is not the essence of Christianity in which the Word of God is accessible to all, preached to sinners and saved-sinners in the sight of all.

There are no tricks in true Christianity, no secret codes or magical conundrums to be decoded; all security and resolution is found in Christ, our tabernacle.

3ת Leviticus 27:34—in mount Sinai

These are the commandments, which the LORD commanded Moses for the children of Israel in mount Sinai.

The notion of commandments doesn’t sit well with us in the modern West, for we are living through a relentlessly hedonistic, individualistic, rebellious age in which false freedom and bogus equality are poisonously proselytised through our numerous media outlets.

The moral law is perpetual, eg. violating the Sabbath principle is always wrong, stealing never right. Moreover, the ceremonial law divinely sprouted from the 1st table of the moral law, revealing how the believers of those days were to organise their corporate worship; meanwhile, the civic-judicial-dietary laws divinely sprouted from the 2nd table of the moral law, in that those societal penalties of not keeping them were to be enforced centrally. Since the Lord Jesus alone successfully kept all of those 613 laws; every jot and tittle, the ceremonial and civic-judicial-dietary have been fulfilled in Him. ‘It is finished’, were those famous, epoch-changing words proclaimed to the world at Golgotha.

What about us? We are certainly ever to strive to uphold the moral law; remembering the Sabbath, not stealing, etc. etc. However, to really keep these laws at the core, in the heart, is the challenge for the most experienced, godly believers who know deep down that such things are impossible. Christ has kept them on our behalf and we are completely forgiven and cleared of guilt through Him. This is the good news.

Nevertheless, it is for God’s glory and the honouring of His name (His manifold, holy attributes) that we strive to keep His law, revealed for us in the 10 commandments; fully, deeply explained on a practical plane in the Sermon on the Mount. That blessed mother of all practical sermons represents our looking unto Jesus, recognising that He alone has kept the Law and lovingly commanded us to be better today than we were yesterday, better tomorrow than today.

We no longer quake with fear at that awful majesty, holiness, and awesome power in mount Sinai. Those 613 commandments have been completely fulfilled through Christ. The essence of the 613 boils down to 2; love God & love man. We cannot keep these 2 apart from through the 1 who did.

In this way we who believe whole-heartedly in the promised