Amazing Gates
Access control is everywhere and it’s getting more complicated. We wish it wasn’t necessary but we’re probably all grateful for it’s protection, even as we’re constantly striving to make it more efficient and effective. It’s nothing new either. Walls and gates have been around for as long as humans have been plagued by the desire to take stuff that doesn’t belong to us – longer actually. In 2003, Peter Agre was awarded the Nobel prize for identifying and describing gates that have always existed in biological cell walls.
It used to be no more than a weak joke, teasing residents of areas a tad too far outside our comfort zone, that we needed a passport to visit them. Now it’s not so funny. Gone are the days too, when it was simply a case of providing details and awaiting our host’s confirmation. Now, we need to scan our driver’s license, vehicle disk, fingerprints, eyes and perhaps even a spot of DNA, and that, just to get into the gated community around the corner.
Cell walls keep undesirables out while these gates let pure water molecules in. Agre identified these gates as a family of proteins, now called Aquaporins. They are essential to the existence of plants, animals and bacteria. Their design is ingenious and supremely efficient. God makes awesome stuff. Each gate admits thousands of millions of water molecules per second and nothing impure gets past them. They restrict access based on what’s actually coming through, not on how it’s behaving, or what it appears to be.
There’s another set of gates that’s also the subject of jokes, the so-called Pearly Gates. There, after we die, we are supposedly welcomed or refused eternal access based on whether our good outweighs our bad. This idea may have been derived from the Bible, but is not what it teaches. Jesus teaches that we enter into an eternal loving relationship with God based on what we are, not on what we’ve done. What we’ve done, is merely evidence of what we are (Matthew 25:31-46).
He shows us that by faith in Him and what He’s done for us, He transforms us into a new creation, (John 3:1-21) one specifically designed for eternal life with Him. A beloved creature that has passed from death into life, one who knows that we are undeserving and guilty of awful offences against God and others, imperfect, but humbly yearning for perfection. A creature who knows that God, by His grace, will eventually completely purify us. Eternal paradise is only a paradise if there is nothing impure in it. Thank God that by His grace, He’s made a real way for us to enter, not through a gate, but through a person, His Perfect and Pure Son, Jesus Christ.
