Something's Different
It’s a New Year – and a great time for changes. Our newsletter has a new look and new content. Here’s what to expect:
- Project updates
- Special events on the LLT Calendar
- Reports of our continuing research on topics of particular interest to our LLT partners
- Historical gems from the story of the seventh-day Sabbath
- Current news and quotes from the experts we interview
- Brief personal messages from Pat Arrabito, LLT’s president and executive producer
Something’s different. We hope you like it.
Project Updates
Hell and Mr. Fudge is on track for completion of final post-production touches -- so close, in fact, that we are submitting the movie for exhibition at several film festivals. The events could help as we continue our search for the “right” theatrical distributor.
Award-winning composer Lee Holdridge is working on the film score. Here is an overview of his work, taken from his website at www.leeholdridge.com:
“Lee is completely at home in film music, concert music, opera and songwriting. Lee’s recent film scores include Walking With Destiny, Brothers at War and The Shunning.... Concert works include the orchestral suite Scenes of Summer and the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra #2. Operas extend from Lazarus and His Beloved to the more recent Concierto Para Mendez. Songs include the classic Moonlighting and The First Time I Loved Forever, the theme for the iconic television series Beauty and the Beast.”
Our producer/director, Jeff Wood, met with Holdridge early this month to review the initial draft of the score.
The Seventh Day is now available with Arabic and Turkish subtitles! Both languages are available on the same DVDs, which has English audio. This brings the number of completed language versions of The Seventh Day to thirteen.
Loma Linda Broadcasting Network is set to begin airing the Arabic version on its Arabic channel.
The Seventh Day will soon be available in Swedish. Kristoffer Sandström and two or three of his friends took on the challenging task of preparing Swedish subtitles for the entire series. Last month Jim Wood traveled to Sweden to work with Kristoffer on a final edit of the script.
Since we already had complete scripts in Finnish and Norwegian, we should soon have the Seventh Day videos in the native languages of all the Scandinavian countries. Sweden’s Lifestyle Television, which can be seen throughout much of the area, already airs the Danish subtitled version of the series.
Happenings |
|
| Jan. 10 | Gulf States Pastors' Meeting: Camp Alamisco, AL (Jim Wood, Edward Fudge) |
| Jan. 15-18 | Ministries Convention: Tampa (Exhibit booth: Jim and Linda Wood) |
| Feb. 18-21 | National Religious Broadcasters Convention: Nashville (Attending: Jim Wood) |
| Feb. 24-25 | Sabbath History Seminar - Floral Crest Adventist Church: Bryant, AL (Jim Wood) |
| April 18 | Illinois Conference Pastors Meeting: Hinsdale, IL (Jim Wood, Edward Fudge) |
| May 1-4 | Pepperdine Lectures: Malibu, CA (Pat Arrabito, Jeff Wood, Jim Wood, Edward Fudge) |
| June 7-9 | Christian Scholars’ Conf.: Nashville (Pat Arrabito, Jeff Wood, Jim Wood, Edward Fudge) |
| Aug. 8-11 | ASI Convention: Cincinnati (Exhibit booth: Pat Arrabito) |
Rumors and Apocrypha
National Sunday Law? While in Sweden recently I slipped into an English Sabbath School class. The group was primed with questions for me about Sabbath-related topics. One dear lady was excited about urgent news she had received hours before from family members in the Philipines: The United States government had passed a National Sunday Law and the countries of Europe were about to do the same. Her question to me: Was this news true?
Now, if such a thing had actually happened, both my wife, Linda, and Pat would have kept me updated on the events. Since I had no such updates from home, I could assure that sister that her news was just a rumor without any basis in fact. Isn’t life today exciting enough without ramping up the stress levels with make-believe, apocryphal news? (jw)
Sabbath History
Letter from Heaven. The Irish Law of Sunday includes the so-called Epistle of Jesus – purportedly a message written by the Savior Himself and discovered either in Rome or the environs of Jerusalem. Its purpose was “to restrain men from transgressing Sunday.” It describes the horrific manifestations of heaven’s vengeance on all who do not keep holy the first day of the week.
It seems to have first come to light late in the 6th century, when Vincentius, bishop in the Balearic Islands (off the east coast of Spain) shared it with his congregation and passed it along to a fellow bishop in Cartegena. It eventually showed up in widely separated parts of the medieval world, from Ethiopia to Ireland.
Interested in a careful study of the history and content of this fabulous fraud? Try to lay your hands on a copy of Robert Priebsch’s Letter From Heaven on the Observance of the Lord’s Day, published in Oxford (England) by Basil Blackwell back in 1935. Ellen G. White had access to older historical sources when she penned her account of this spurious epistle in The Great Controversy (see pages 576-7)
Experts Speak
“Justice in the Bible, in particular, is fundamentally about making things right again. It’s fundamentally about restoring relationships to a condition of rightness when things have gone wrong. And one of the problems of eternal torment is that that is never achieved. There is never a sense in which God’s relationship with those who are lost is ever put right. There’s a perpetual hostility involved, which is very hard to reconcile with the notion of God’s justice finally achieving its goal.” (Christopher Marshall, Ph.D., Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)
Pat's Paragraphs
Happy New Year! One year closer to Jesus coming! We wait in earnest anticipation, our hearts consumed with both hope and fear – hope for a quick end to the agonies of this earth, and fear lest it be so quick that some people are not prepared.
We don’t know our future, but we have today. Today we can pray. Today we can live in Jesus. Today we can be His helping hands and His arms of love, His voice of Truth.