INTRODUCTION:

We have all grown up with "hymnal theology". That is, we tend to remember theological thoughts written by hymn writer more than we do doctrine that grows out of systematic theological study. It is after all, much easier to sing than to study. In addition the words are often written in phrases which when put to music are almost grafted into our memories.

One such song which is part of almost everyone’s’ "hymnal theology" is THERE’S A NEW NAME WRITTEN DOWN IN GLORY. There is a poetic license, which is given to the writers of poetry and music, and is not permitted in other fields of thought. In most cases it does little or no damage and the intent of the writer is valid and useful. The hymn refereed to certainly is one of the hymns used to express the joy of a person who has recently received Christ as their savior and God then added their name to the Book of Life. No harm is done with this hymn and it certainly encourages everyone to receive Christ. Yet, it doesn’t, in my mind, come close to teaching any biblical method of getting ones name into the Book of Life. If my understanding of the book of Life is correct, there never has been a name added.

I. TWO IMPORTANT BOOKS, Revelation 20:12,13

If the Book of Life is the record of God the Holy Sprit’s work of regeneration (giving new life, John 3:6,8) and it is thus the list of redeemed people who will populate heaven, then it is the most important book in all of history in which to be listed. In fact no other book will have any eternal consequence in terms of getting to heaven.

A. BOOKS FOR THE UNBELIEVERS

The passage in Revelation 20:12,13 makes reference to a "book" and "books". They are very different. The book (singular) is a book, which lists all those who are redeemed by God’s grace through their faith in Jesus Christ as their savior. They are the ones exempt from being "cast into the lake of fire",(Revelation 20:12-15).

Conversely, those listed in the "books" are and remain in an eternal lost state in a literal place, namely hell. The purpose of the "books" is to determine the extent and degree of their eternal state. Clearly the bible teaches degrees of punishment in hell as well as degrees of rewards in heaven. Certainly justice could not do otherwise. Mass murderers such as Hitler and even more so Stalin will be punished more for their sin and inhuman acts than others with much, much less sins both in number and severity.

B. BOOK FOR THE BELIEVER

The "book" contains names of people who have received the gospel of God’s grace and their names remain in the book. The names were place in the book before the creation of a time, space, and material universe.

1. THE TESTIMONY OF THE APOSTLE PETER, I Peter 1:20

Peter writes of this as "before the foundation of the world", I Peter 1:20 and speaks of those names which remain in the book as the "elect" I Peter 1:2. The best we can understand election, is that all names of all people were once in the book of life and those who receive Christ have their names remaining in the book while those who do not receive Him are removed. As far as I know, there is no mention of adding names to the Book of Life, only removing them.

2. THE TESTIMONY OF DAVID, Psalms 69:27,28

Even the most wicked once had their names in the book of life Psalms 69:27,28. David’s prayer was, let the wicked-ones who add sin upon their sins-be blotted out of the book of life and don’t let their names remain with the righteous. The righteous here as in all the Bible’s use of righteous people implies they are individuals who have received a substituted righteousness from God through Christ. Certainly the Bible never teaches that anyone can ever establish a righteousness equal to God’s demands through their own efforts.

3. THE TESTIMONY OF MOSES, Exodus 32:32

Moses so love his people that he argued with God to the effect that if God would not receive them, he did not want his name to remain in the book of life Exodus 32:32. He wrote,"...if thou wilt forgive their sin… and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of the book which thou hast written".

4. THE TESTIMONY OF THE APOSTLE PAUL, Philippines 4:4

Paul wrote of great Christian men and women who were "fellowlabourers" who never had their names written in books of history, but who did have their names in the "book of life". Philippians 4:4.

History seldom records God’s great men and women. However the only book that really counts is the Book of Life. The records of secular history has very limited time frame. Most great people are forgotten before the next generation is over. Most people are forgotten before the own generation is over!

Life as a history book is very transitory. Life in the Book of Life is eternal. It seems so incongruous to work so had for what will be remembered for such a little time. It seems very wise to make sure our names remain in the Book of Life, which, lasts for eternity.

5. THE TESTIMONY OF THE APOSTLE JOHN, Revelation 3:4,5; 13:8

The Apostle John wrote about the faithful few who were "suffering saints" during the great persecution age of the Sardis church, Revelation 3:4,5. They remained faithful when the most others of that period made names for themselves through remaining religious in works not approved by God, 3:2. The believing remnant remained in the Book of Life while the others had their name blotted out. We know of this period as the Reformation days when the state churches persecuted and killed many of our forefathers.

John again made reference to those whose names no longer remained in the Book of Life. They are those who during the seven-year tribulation choose to follow the Anti-Christ, Revelation 13:8. Apparently, their names will be removed even before their death as with other unsaved people. When they choose to become followers of the Anti-Christ they seal their eternal doom. It must be understood that when the Anti-Christ comes on the scene, he does not take the appearance of a monster person, which he later becomes. His appearance at first is like an angel of light, an individual so Christ like that even true believers will be tempted to receive him as the resurrected, returned redeemer!

C. TWO APPLICATIONS

I want to make two applications about the Book of Life. All people's names are originally in this book. This includes babies, even aborted babies. God considers them as people at conception and their names have already been recorded.

A) UNBORN BABIES

Zacharias was told his son was already named John. This was before his wife, Elizabeth conceived. Even more significant, Zacharias did not have any family by the name of John and when it was time to officially name him, on the eighth day, the priest named the boy after the father, Zacharias. The mother, Elisabeth, immediately stopped the priest and clearly said his name must be John. We know the son as John the Baptist, the one who would announce the Savior with "behold the Lamb of God" John 1:29. In eternity past, God had determined the very name of the announcer! Don’t let the humanistic abortionists win in the argument that only begins at a healthy birth. Every child is identified by name by God as a living person well before they are even conceived!

B) UNBELIEVING ADULTS

Rejection of the Savior and thus removal of a person’s name from the Book of Life is based on the rejection of even the simplest matter-- the rejection of God as revealed in general revelation through nature, Romans 1:20. Evolution has turned the minds of several generations away for the need to know the Lord as Savior. This teaching has an eternal damming effect and should not be treated kindly and lightly. Unfortunately, even the Christian world is now embracing evolution.

Clearly, God is making a universal offering of redemption by placing everyone’s name in the Book of Life. The most important action for everyone is to make sure their names remain there eternally by receiving Christ as their Savior!

GAA/1/24/2007

"Man works, sweats, dies. He is forgotten before the sweat dries." So goes a toast from the unregenerate mind. This toast would be true if man is just the end result of a long period of evolutionary chance mutations and death is the end of everything. In fact, if one dies lost in his sin, this would be a good toast. It certainly would beat an eternity in hell.

The immortality of the soul and the eternal state of the lost, however, requires accountability for a life of rejection of God’s free gift of forgiveness. Eternal accountability is most likely the major unconscious reason for otherwise logical minds preferring the philosophically impossible teachings of evolution (nothing equaling everything through the process of time), over the origin of matter by creation.

If evolution would be considered as untrue, then the only possibility left would be creation and thus accountability to the creator as the moral governor of everything and everyone. Everyone would then be answerable to the creative God.

This passage does not give even the smallest possibility for evolution to be true. Conversely, it is most certainly a clear passage teaching total and justifiable accountability to a holy and righteous God.

If human history teaches one major failure, it is that when the certainty and severity of judgment is removed as a condition of moral government, then there will be no end to the depravity that one person will do to another and no end to what the powerful will do to those without equal power. Justice certainly is not accomplished nor completed on earth.

There is no concept of justice without an eternity. Only eternity will justify all the injustice of this earthly life. Justice requires eternity and without eternity really it does not have meaning.

Justice based on law (what is culturally correct) will end, as it must, in a constant generational lowering of social mores. This is the only way to be at peace with ourselves when we live below our own laws. New lower laws must be written and in doing so, adjust them to make lesser legal living. Much of what was illegal in all our history is now legal, honorable, profitable and almost universally permissible. What was criminal and not socially acceptable is now often normal behavior. Somehow wrong became right.

To say the evil is always punished and is never profitable is little more than empty sociology. Put it in the textbooks, teach it to the young intellectuals, but no thinking person believes it! History in all cultures is a story of power oppressing people. Witness the slave culture of every great society in humanity. Witness the often prosperity of probabilism (action as one thinks best for himself and without a guiding authority) This will always be the end conduct directed by "let conscious be your guide." Without absolutes, conscious will change in favor of lesser conduct and then write laws to legalize the conduct—often even when it is criminal.

We are now in our second academic generation in which it is been pompous and popular to declare, "there are not absolutes" and to consider archaic those to think otherwise. God is absolute and so is His expected conduct for all his creation. His truth, as with all truth, must be constant and remains unchangeable and non-cultural. For something to be true, it can never change. God is not in the process of changing His character to adapt to the conduct of the crowd.

There are some sad things taught in the Bible. God’s justice is always true and fair, yet, when His offer of free forgiveness and total pardon is ignored, then the eternal state of the unforgiven is very sad indeed.

This is a good time to write about the Biblical concept of paying for a wrong. Contrary to what is often taught, the Bible does not teach "retribution"—punishment for wrong. Instead, it teaches "restitution"—payment for wrong. The proverb, "an eye for an eye" teaches that no payment can be required greater than the wrong and no punishment can be enacted when the payment is justly achieved. Some where we got the idea that we can build jails and prisons fast enough to meter out punishment greater than societies ability to invent crime. Well, it isn’t working and we can’t build fast enough, nor can we rewrite laws fast enough to make wrongs legal and permissible. We can't catch every criminal and we can’t convict those who can out maneuver the courts.

Maybe, just maybe, it is time to realize that "if you do the crime, you do the time" is a sociological failure and we should consider changing it to "if you do the crime, you pay the price". You steal and destroy my car, you—not the insurance company—must work to pay for a new one for me, makes more sense that going to jail for 30-90 days, watching color TV, working out in a gym and playing cards with "buddies". "Three time and you’re out" doesn’t seen to cut it either. This teaches that only the third time you are caught is serious. Maybe God’s plan of restitution is better. We won’t know until eternity, but we certainly will know then. The BOOK OF REWARDS will not be rewritten.

The BOOK OF REWARDS teaches that all wrong is recorded and unless pardoned, they must be paid for. They can however be pardoned by being paid for by a substitutionary payment. This is the gospel. Christ’s death on Calvary is sufficient payment for the wrongs of all humanity. This payment can be substituted to ones debt of sin against God by an individual's repentance, acknowledgment of their helplessness and hopelessness in any act of self- redemption and by receiving God’s acceptable payment of His son as a sole and sufficient substitute for the debt of sin. A debt that is impossible to personally pay. This must be a personal act calling for forgiveness through repentance and not a redemptive religious ritual administered by the church.

The BOOK OF REWARDS teaches that all wrong will be reward in kind. Certainly, degrees of punishment for evil is taught in this text as elsewhere in the Bible. (Luke 12:47,48; Matthew 11:22-24) Death is a great definer. It defines both where we spend eternity and how we spend it. Death makes everything definite, definable, fix and final.

The BOOK OF REWARDS teaches that God keeps a complete biography on file for every person who dies without deliverance from their sins. This book is not written to determine who is saved from hell or who goes to heaven. It is written to declare the eternal state of lost. Be careful of the religious fable that God keeps a record of our good and bad thoughts and action and when we die, if our good out numbers our bad we go to heaven.

Unfortunately, I was taught this early in life, as are so many others. This teaches that we can redeem ourselves and all "good people" go to heaven. Self-redemption and self-regenerate makes the death of Christ of no effect and really nonsense. Self-redemption would really be an affront to the very God with whom we are eternally accountable.

The BOOK OF REWARDS teaches that individuals who die without having their sins pardoned by God spend eternity in hell. Hell is a very unpopular subject to preach on today. People want only messages that are positive, entertaining, about happiness, healthiness, prosperity and how to live like the world and still be pleasing to God. This kind of message has changed our churches to more like of theaters rather than places of truth. In doing so, the church with the best entertainment for the day often gets the best crowd and the biggest offerings. Biblically, offering religion and redemption without repentance toward God is the gospel a Charlatan. Such a message certainly is not preached by good and godly men. No one leading people to hell while they are convincing them they are going to heaven is a "good person." In fact, they may very conceivably be about the worse person you will ever meet! Leading one's sons and daughter to hell while keeping them happy is hardly a "good thing" done by a "good person."

Hell is not a popular subject. It never has been, never will be and no thinking person wants it to be. It existence as a place is terrible. However; it also eternal and a place of punishment. It will not go away by bringing the Seventh-Day Advantage/Jehovah-Witness teaching "soul sleep" into orthodox theology. The doctrine of "soul-sleep" is heresy and should be received as such. It teaches that an unsaved person goes into an unconscious state for eternity and never knows that they even continue to exist. About the only good thing I can think about hell is that its existence is a very good reason for not wanting to go there. It is the single reason I received Christ as my savior sin fifty-nine years ago! It was also the subject of my first attempt to preach as a teen-ager. My message was titled, HELL IS HOT, BUT HEAVEN IS NOT! The title was the only good thing about my first attempt to preach. I have now preached, taught and shared about 15-16,000 messages and I still have not improved of the title of the first sermon.

No one has to go to hell and everyone can go to heaven. God has made the gospel available without cost. I didn’t have a nickel on November 27, 1947 when I asked the Lord to forgive my sins and accepted Christ’s death a payment for me. I still stand before God without anything in my hands to pay for my sins or pardon my soul from hell, but so does everyone else!

When God declared He will only accept His Sons’ death as payment for sin, then to offer Him anything else is totally an unwise act. By doing so, it would be the same as saying,"your Son is not sufficient, so I have something better". Why attempt anything so foolish? Any by the way, just what is it that we have to offer God? Will we offer him our baptism? Our religious rituals? Will that replacement be greater than His Son?

Hell is a certain place. When the unforgiving are resurrected, they have to go some place. Everyone must be some place even in eternity. One reason the Sadducees were always rebuked by Christ was because they taught there was no such thing as the resurrection of the body. They also rejected the doctrines of eternal punishment and rewards. Their emphasis was "humans freedom".

We now have the teachings of the Sadducees in our theological schools and pulpits almost everywhere. It was popular preaching in Jesus’ day also. The Sadducees were the enemies of Jesus and God the Father in the first century and such religious leaders remain so today. The enemies of Christ should also be the enemies of every Bible believing Christian today. We should not support their teaching with our person, our program nor our pocketbooks!

I personally appreciate the heart of God, which causes Him to write a Book of Remembrance. Actually, according to the contexts of the passages about this book, it is really a book recording the repentance of individual following their sins or and failures.

Repentance is an act that God looks for and which He takes very seriously. It is essential in salvation and is a simultaneous occurrence with an individual believing the gospel, ( ). It is also what God looks for in the individual before He forgives and restores one who has errored in his conduct or character. It is a vital part of confession, which really means to agree with God about the nature of sin. This is the meaning of the word," homologeo " used in I John 1:9,-- to speak the same thing, or to agree. Restoration to fellowship with God only follows sorrow, repentance, and confession that one agrees that sin is a violation of God’s standard of holiness and must be forsaken.

Repentance is more than sorrow for sin. It finds its Biblical meaning in the Greek word "metanoeo". This word means to "think after" and implies that a change takes place when one reconsiders, reflects. Because of regret, a moral and mental sorrow leads one to a new attitude regarding and action. In the word is consistently used in repentance from sin.

The Book of Remembrance is mentioned in Malachi 3:16. In this historical setting, Israel as a whole had decided there was really no profit for them in serving God. They spoke strongly (stout) against God. The idea of the passage is that people rebelled against God and if they were strong themselves and did not need God, nor did they need to obey Him. They were courageous and careless in their talking about God. Their obstinate disposition implied they had declared themselves to be independent of any need for God in their lives. What is very noteworthy about this passage is that while most had become rebellious, many had become remorseful. They feared the Lord (3:16) and sole openly about the sadness of the situation of their times.

Three actions are recorded in Malachi 3:16. The first action was the people feared the Lord and spoke to each other about their spiritual plight. The second action was God heard their conversations of concern and repentance. The third action was that God recorded their repentance in a book of remembrance.

The book recorded they, "feared the Lord" as well as their every "thought upon His name". The book will be used as the base for God’s rewarding those who repentance brought them back into relationship with God, "… as a father spares his won son", 3:17. It will also demonstrate the difference "…between the righteous and the wicked," 3:18.

The Book of Remembrance is also mention in book of Psalms. It is used as the summary of Psalms 56 in which David declares his confidence in the Lord during a time in which he was consumed by his constant enemies.

The base for David’s confidence is recorded in the first verse, namely, God is a God of infinite mercy. ( Psalms 56!) Mercy is the way God acts as a result of His attribute of love demonstrated through His attribute of grace. God acts because He is a God of love. He acts favorably because of his attribute of grace. The result of His action will always be in keeping with His attribute of mercy. This action will be in a benevolent manner. It will always be in a manner that is good for the believer. While God may correct his children, He will never punish them. The punishment for our sins and disobedience was part of the judicial work of Calvary. Do will not have his Son, Jesus, take the punishment in a substitutionary manner and then require a second payment for the same sins. Mercy is the one fountain of all of God’s promises to us and thus the base for all our expectations.

David knew the Philistines were his continuous enemies and there would never be a truce nor armistices with them. His single solution to his daily fears (56:2) was to maintain his confidence in the Lord. Notice that fear and faith can exist together in the same person and at the same time. Notice also, that it is fear that often drives us to a greater faith. (56:3) As in every spiritual matter, the Word of God is the source of our confidence. God will always keep His word. He cannot lie and still be God.( Hebrews 6:16-19)

Often the nature of a believer’s fear is a result of uncertain situations. We fear most when we do not know what things are working against us nor how they will work out. (56:5,7) David did know that God would always judge in direct ratio to evil brought against His children. (56:7)

David was well aware that omniscience God would know about all his sins (wonderings) 56:8 In fact, God had record of them in His book of Remembrance. What David was concerned about was that God would also record his repentance, sorrow and tears. The statements, put my tears in they bottle" and "are they not in thy book" are references to the custom in that day of saving ones tears of sorrow in a small "tear bottle" and they recording their grief in a book of remembrance as a memorial of their repentance. David’s concern was that his sins would be canceled out the by his sorrow and repentance.

God records all our sorrow about our sins and every act of repentance in a Book of Remembrance. This is more than good news, it is great news. It is often hard for others to forgive our failures and it is even more difficult to forgive ourselves for all the acts of "wondering", but the one who really counts has paid for our sins, pardoned them and when repentance is presence He both forgives and forgets them!

We do not all sin alike, but we are all alike sinners. We need the effects which accompany the Book of Remembrance"