The God who spoke the world into being wrote your name in his own blood on his hand. One day, when the heavens are ripped away and the earth remade in fire, you and I can sit with him and look at them together. We will find…our names, written before time, written in time, written forever.

Recently, my wife’s Step-Grandmother died. Along with a plethora of other things, we inherited from her house stuffed with treasures a very large Bible.

It’s about the size of a PC tower—they don’t make them like they used to. It’s the Step-Grandmother’s family Bible, it has all her family’s names written in it going back many generations, culminating in her name at the end.

There’s space, we’re quite tempted to add our own names. Which got us thinking. You see, it’s sort of scandalous for us to write our names in this Bible. Not because it’s old or because it’s a Bible or because you shouldn’t write in books (I prefer a pencil, but if you don’t write in a book how do you carry on the conversation the author started?). It feels scandalous because it’s not our family.

There’s no blood relationship between us and her, and she married into the family after my mother-in-law had left home, so there’s not such a strong familial relationship either. We’re connected on a family tree, related by law, but it’s a relation that feels estranged and technical rather than real.

But we could write our names in, because she is family, despite it all being a bit nominal. Writing our names in could mean we join the family.

Which, by way of analogy, is what Jesus has done for us.

Jesus & His Book

In Daniel 7 we are told a magnificent vision of the Ancient of Days, and that he opens ‘the books.’ What books? By Daniel 12, the mighty Michael is poised to deliver all whose names are found in the book. So, it’s a book of names.

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