The only names in the book of life are the saved. How many does that represent when compared to the untold trillions not written there?
I am just trying to wrap my head around some concepts; God is the only perfect being and is incapable of sin. God loves to create; it is part of His nature, but when God creates He doesn't create another God He creates something that's less than Himself that has the capacity to sin, degrade.
God makes a way for His creation, which is created in His image, to be free of sin by adoption into His son, Himself.
Because God is omniscient He knows His entire plan and knows who will be born even though sin and death will be part of the equation.
God supposedly in advance determines who will be elect and who will be damned and writes the elect peoples names in a book, except I don't see where people in the Book are called elect? 1 Peter 1:2 is the closest i can find, but that doesn't say anything about the Book. Rev 17:8 is a lot closer but still doesn't specifically say elect and neither does Rev 20:15. Is it an assumption that the Book only contains the names of the elect? If only elect people's names are said to be in the Book that would define the Book's function.
If this is only an assumption that leaves room to define the Book of Life as something else and that would undercut what some people assume about God's intentions when it comes to saving and making people elect. If you don't believe people are made elect, but have always been elect, then the process of becoming elect is a useless formality; why pay the blood price for a person's sin and adopt them into your family if they have always been part of that family. This concept says elect can do nothing but be elect and the damned can do nothing but be damned and surprisingly I have to partially agree. If God is omniscient then He has always known who is elect and who is damned, but I can't agree that God's intention was to create good people and bad people and He succeeded on both accounts, literally making God the creator of evil people. I believe God made humanity imperfect so that they have a capacity to sin but aren't directly created for evil. Instead, God created humanity and some failed to be good, due to the imperfection inherent in anything that isn't God. God didn't create good and evil people and they both worked perfectly, but God created humanity good, and humanity failed to be good.
With that said if God created humanity initially good, and everyone that God knows will be born wasn't declared bad until Adam actually sinned, then maybe everyone that God knew would be born had their name in the Book of Life because it was a book declaring everyone who would live through Adam, who was the creation of Jesus Himself; hence the name "The Lambs Book of Life. Then it is a book of creation and not a book of salvation.
If it is a book of creation, and everyone's name starts out in it, then when Jesus in Rev 3:5 discusses blotting someone out of the Book it could be He is talking about people who haven't been declared elect and you have one reason now that people can have their names blotted from the Book; that being someone who doesn't overcome. Another reason that I see would be getting the mark of the beast.
Now you don't have to take Rev 3:5 out of the context of a warning to the worst church and say that Jesus was actually encouraging the Church that He would never blot anyone's name out of the Book; a stretch that you are forced to make if you believe only the elect have their names in the Book.
As far as names not being written, God also says "depart from me I never knew you"; why, because when your name is blotted from His Book there isn't a record of your creation any longer...
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