As Laurin Zilliacus reminds us, the Book of Esther describes ‘the use of posts to order the slaughter of the Jews throughout Persian-ruled territory, and then the swift sending of the counter-order that saved them and turned the tables on their persecutors…
All of the books of the New Testament, save the Gospels, are written in the form of letters.
– John Freeman, The Tyranny of E-mail, p. 27
It is worth noting that most of the books of the New Testament are letters (it’s debatable if his exact summary is correct). I do hope that social media and email do not completely destroy the ancient tradition of writing letters, and of postal services. Our future descendents will have no trace of our past correspondence. Bye bye paper trail. Will there be future anthologies of the emails and tweets of the greats of the internet age? Will future anthologies of blog posts be published in the place of good old fashioned published essays? Let’s hope so, and pray the internet never crashes for good.
It is interesting that God chose to reveal himself in the writings of Scripture (on actual physical objects like stone and paper) rather than other forms of media. Could he have waited for radio? The telegram? Television? The internet? You betcha. But he didn’t. Are there implications to this fact? You betcha. What are they? You tell me.
And, as a side note, I remember that Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones mentions, in Preaching and Preachers, a preacher who made a point about the ‘antiquity of saddlery’ from Numbers 22:21 (‘Balaam rose up early and saddled his ass’). You could make a similar point (understand I am mostly kidding here) from Esther about the antiquity of letter writing and the postal service.
