The following Scripture passages are offered to aid beginning fellowships. The readings and commentary for this week are more in line with what has become usual; for the following will most likely be familiar observations. The concept behind this Sabbath’s selection is books of life.
Weekly Readings
For the Sabbath of March 9, 2013
The person conducting the Sabbath service should open services with two or three hymns, or psalms, followed by an opening prayer acknowledging that two or three (or more) are gathered together in Christ Jesus’ name, and inviting the Lord to be with them.
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Then those who feared [YHWH] spoke with one another. [YHWH] paid attention and heard them, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared [YHWH] and esteemed his name. “They shall be mine, says [YHWH]of hosts, in the day when I make up my treasured possession, and I will spare them as a man spares his son who serves him. Then once more you shall see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him.” (Mal 3:16–18)
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Yes, I ask you also, true companion, help these women, who have labored side by side with me in the gospel together with Clement and the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life. (Phil 4:3)
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The one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels. (Rev 3:5)
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[A]ll who dwell on earth will worship it, everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain. (Rev 13:8 emphasis added)
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The beast that you saw was, and is not, and is about to rise from the bottomless pit and go to destruction. And the dwellers on earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world will marvel to see the beast, because it was and is not and is to come. (Rev 17:8 emphasis and double emphasis added)
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And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. … And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. (Rev 20:12, 15)
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But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb's book of life. (Rev 21:27 emphasis added)
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The importance of last Sabbath’s Reading was its introduction of the concept that in order for a Semitic language consonant cluster to be read, the reader [auditor] must know the meaning of the consonant cluster before vowel pointing can be added to the cluster to transform the cluster into a word; the auditor must know what is supposed to be there before a consonant cluster can be read as a word. Meaning must be established before a “word” can be read as a word. And this differs significantly from how words in fully alphabetized languages such as Greek work: in a fully alphabetized language, vowels are represented by letters [signifiers], and because vowels are included with consonants the word can be read—is read—before meaning is assigned to the consonant and vowel combination. A word can be read (pronounced) without any meaning being assigned to the word, such as the letter combination <malix>. And this difference makes all the difference when it comes to names in the Book of Life.
To aid understanding, assume that a word’s “meaning” equates to the word being uttered or pronounced—equates to vocalization through the inclusion of breath [life] to the inscribed consonants … when Noah is told that life is in the blood (Gen 9:4), the declaration is understated: physical life is sustained by the dark fire of cellular oxidation of simple carbohydrates. The oxygen molecules needed to sustain this dark fire comes from a person’s breath, with the lungs facilitating the movement of oxygen molecules from the atmosphere to the blood stream of a person. Thus, it is breath that sustains physical life, with breath being linguistically represented by aspiration: <ah> or simply <H>. The Greek linguistic icon <pneuma> “names” breath; thus, the Greek icon <pneuma ’agion> that is usually translated into English as the holy spirit, in reality means <breath holy>.
A consonant cluster in a partially alphabetized Semitic language is not a word until it has been uttered, either aloud or silently; i.e., until life has been added to the consonant cluster. But this is not true of fully alphabetized languages such as Greek: an unknown word exists as a word regardless of whether it is ever uttered. What must be added to a Greek word is meaning, a linguistic object [the thing the word names] that is inherently unrelated to the linguistic icon [the sound or appearance of the sign itself]. And because <cows> are not small four-legged mammals that bark, there is an element of Thirdness [the Interpretant] that loosely links the icon to the object to produce stereotypical associations.
Using a word without meaning to most individuals—a word such as <malix>--all words of a passage need not be understood before a fully alphabetized text can be read. Only key words need to be understood.
A person can read over words that are not understood and go on to the next word/words to see if the meaning of an unknown word is revealed. Or a reader can puzzle out a meaning for a word such as <chiral> … both malix and chiral can be easily pronounced in a fully alphabetized language, but neither word is part of everyday conversational English. However, chiral is a Greek borrowing that pertains to the hand; thus a chirographic text is a handwritten text, and a chiral image is a non-symmetrical mirror image as the left hand is the mirror image of the right hand. But malix is a made-up word used along the central Oregon Coast in the 1950s and 1960s for a deer killed out of season, a word used by parents who didn’t want their first grade children telling school teachers that, Daddy shot a deer last night. Deer became malix, and it was permissible for a first grader to say, Daddy killed a malix last night, especially in an area of the country where “boomers” [Aplodontia rufa] were plentiful.
Boomers are mountain beaver, no relation to North American beaver [Castor canadensis], and the only living member of its genus, Aplodontia, and family, Aplodontiidae, for those who have never heard of the critter that is the mascot for the Toledo, Oregon, high school sports teams. They are rock chuck size rodents whose tunnels are only half underground.
If boomers are real, then malix are also real though not the common name used for coastal blacktail deer; yet the word malix doesn’t have equal standing to the word boomer, why? Both words are easily read; both words pertain to critters found along the central Oregon coast.
In a fully alphabetized language, meaning must be added to a word after the word is read whereas in a partially alphabetized language such as Hebrew, the auditor must possess the word’s meaning before the consonant cluster can be read as a word—and this distinction affects language users’ perception of reality … where meaning must precede word formation, the receipt of the promise of eternal life must precede a name being written in a Hebraic Book of Remembrance.
This reading will necessarily be short as I am under the weather with a respiratory infection [flu]. Plus, readers need to consider the ramifications of the word meaning of a “name” preceding a person’s death, and not following the death of the person: judgment of those names written in the Hebraic Book of Remembrance was made while the person still lived physically; whereas names written in the Lamb’s Book of Life have meaning assigned to them when they are read either upon Jesus’ return as the Messiah, or in the great White Throne Judgment after the Thousand Years.
But back to aspiration representing life: if a consonant cluster must be vocalized to become a word, the word—a name—itself must have life added to it before it can be read in a book of remembrance. In this sense, no name can be written in a Hebraic Book of Remembrance unless the promise of receiving heavenly aspiration/breath exists. But this is not true pertaining to a Greek Book of Life, the Book of Life of the Lamb. A name can be written in such a fully alphabetized Book of Life without that name ever being uttered or vocalized or read aloud.
A name, your name, can be written in the Lamb’s Book of Life without the name ever being vocalized or given life until the great White Throne Judgment, when the Books will be opened and names read, either silently or with aspiration added to these names.
Roughly, fifty-five billion people have lived on the planet. Very few of these individuals have known God. So there will be about fifty-five billion individuals to be judged in the great White Throne Judgment, a number that would prove to be daunting if much time was spent in rendering individual judgments … there is a practical application: because the person who lived the life represented by the name of the person assigned meaning to his or her own name while physically alive (consider Hitler, or Pol Pot), names can be silently read quickly, with no aspiration added to names until a name is encountered where the person added love for neighbor and brother to the meaning of the person’s name. This name is now vocalized: the person is called forth from death, and receives an appropriate reward for the meaning the person added to his or her name.
In a fully alphabetized Book of Life, meaning must be assigned to individual names, not aspiration represented by vowel pointing—and a person can assign meaning to his or her name through how the person lived his or her life, suggesting that the person is responsible for his or her own judgment in the great White Throne Judgment.
Every person knows what he or she has done when no one was looking; when the person was free to do whatever was in the person’s heart because the person could get away with the thing … who is the secret you?
This concept has significance when it comes to the “Book of Life” for fully alphabetized names, and for those names written in a Semitic “Book of Remembrance.” … And if John records his vision with the type of linguistic precision endtime disciples have come to expect in modern documents, then there is a Lamb’s book of life (Rev 13:8; 21:27), and an additional Book of Life that has been kept from the foundation of the world (Rev 17:8), with this latter Book of Life probably being Malachi’s Book of Remembrance.
I had business dealings in the local bank on Thursday, and the banker was ill—and shared her illness with me. There is much to be said for quarantining oneself when ill.
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The person conducting the Sabbath service should close services with two hymns, or psalms, followed by a prayer asking God’s dismissal.
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"Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright ©2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved."