This is another in a series of excerpts from The Book of Life: What the Bible Says about God’s Registry of the Redeemed from High Street Press and available at Amazon. This except comes from Chapter 2: A Real Book.

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When studying biblical realities we’ve never seen with the naked eye, it’s good to ask whether a writer of Scripture is expressing his divinely inspired thoughts literally or figuratively. For example, is the millennium a literal one thousand years, or simply a long stretch of time (Rev. 20:1-7)? Is “the arm of the LORD” a muscle-bound appendage of God’s, or an anthropomorphism – an expression of God in human terms (Isa. 53:1)? And is the book of life an actual scroll-and-pen publication, or a way to explain God’s unrestricted knowledge of people and events (Ps. 69:28)?

To address the last of these questions, and to better set the tone for our study of the book of life, it may help to briefly explore how Scripture uses the words “book” and “life.”

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