Well, this evening, our text is taken from Nehemiah 7, beginning in verse 5 and reading through the verse 73. Nehemiah 7, beginning in verse 5. Then my God put it into my heart to assemble the nobles and the officials and the people to be enrolled by genealogy. And I found the book of the genealogy of those who came up at the first, and I found written in it. These were the people of the province who came up out of the captivity of those exiles whom Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, had carried into exile. They returned to Jerusalem and Judah, each to his town. They came with Zerubbabel, Jeshua, Nehemiah, Azariah, Ramiah, Nahamani, Mordecai, Bilshan, Mispereth, Bigvi, Nahum, Banna. The number of the men of the people of Israel, the sons of Peirosh, 2,172, the sons of Shephetiah, 372, the sons of Ereh, 652, the sons of Pehath-Moab, namely the sons of Jeshua and Joab, 2,818, the sons of Elam, 1,254, the sons of Zatu, 845, the sons of Zachi, 760, The sons of Binui, 648. The sons of Bibi, 628. The sons of Asgad, 2,322. The sons of Adonicum, 667. The sons of Bigvi, 2,067. The sons of Aden, 655. The sons of Eter, namely Hezekiah, 98. The sons of Hesham, 328. The sons of Bezai, 324. The sons of Hereph, 112. The sons of Gibeon, 95. The men of Bethlehem and Netopha, 188. The men of Anathoth, 128. The men of Bethazmaveth, 42. The men of Kiriath-jearim, Kephira, and Beoroth, 743. The men of Ramah and Geba, 621. The men of Mikmas, 122. The men of Bethal and Ai, 123. The men of the other Nebo, 52. The sons of the other Elam, 1,254. The sons of Haram, 320. The sons of Jericho, 345. The sons of Lod, Hadad, and Ono, 721. The sons of Sina, 3,930. The priests, the sons of Jedi and namely the house of Jeshua, 973. The sons of Emer, 1052. The sons of Pasher, 1247. The sons of Haram, 1017. The Levites, the sons of Jeshua, namely Kadmiel of the sons of Hodevah, 74. The singers, the sons of Asaph, 148. The gatekeepers, the sons of Shalom, the sons of Ater, the sons of Talmon, the sons of Aqab, the sons of Hatita, the sons of Shobai, 138. The temple servants, the sons of Zihah, the sons of Hasophah, the sons of Tabaoth, the sons of Kiros, the sons of Sihah, the sons of Padon, the sons of Lebanon, the sons of Haggabah, the sons of Shalmai, the sons of Hainan, the sons of Gedel, the sons of Gehar, the sons of Reaia, the sons of Rezin, the sons of Nakoda, the sons of Gazem, the sons of Uzah, the sons of Passia, the sons of Besai, the sons of Munim, the sons of Nafushasim, the sons of Bakbuk, the sons of Hakufa, the sons of Harher, the sons of Basileth, the sons of Mahita, the sons of Harsha, the sons of Barkas, the sons of Sisera, the sons of Tima, the sons of Nezahiah, the sons of Hatipha, the sons of Solomon's servants, the sons of Sotai, the sons of Sofereth, the sons of Pereda, the sons of Jala, the sons of Darkon, the sons of Gedel, the sons of Shephetiah, the sons of Hatil, the sons of Pokereth-Hazabayim, the sons of Ammon, All the temple servants and the sons of Solomon's servants were 392. The following were those who came up from Tel Malah, Tel Harsha, Cherub, Adon, and Emer, but they could not prove their father's houses nor their descent, whether they belonged to Israel. the sons of Dellaia, the sons of Tobiah, the sons of Dakota, 642. Also of the priests, the sons of Hobiah, the sons of Hacaz, the son of Barzillai, who had taken a wife of the daughters of Barzillai, the Gileadite, who was called by their name. These sought their registration among those enrolled in the genealogies, but it was not found there. So they were excluded from the priesthood as unclean. The governor told them, that they were not to partake of the most holy food until a priest with Urim and Thummim should arise. The whole assembly together was 42,360, beside their male and female servants, of whom there were 7,337. They had 245 singers, male and female. Their horses were 736, their mules 245, their camels 435, and their donkeys 6,720. Now some of the heads of father's houses gave to the work. The governor gave to the treasury 1,000 derricks of gold, 50 basins, 30 priest's garments, and 500 minas of silver. And some of the heads of fathers' houses gave into the treasury of the work 20,000 derricks of gold and 2,200 minas of silver. And what the rest of the people gave was 20,000 derricks of gold, 2,000 minas of silver, and 67 priests' garments. So the priests, the Levites, the gatekeepers, the singers, some of the people, the temple servants, and all Israel lived in their towns. And when the seventh month had come, the people of Israel were in their town. So far, the reading from God's word this evening. May He add its blessing to our hearts. Please be seated. Perhaps you have at times been in a situation where you are the only one who doesn't know the language that is being spoken. I think in our own context, maybe it happens in an ethnic restaurant. Perhaps there's a particular Indian restaurant or a Mexican restaurant or something along those lines where all the staff is speaking the language, the native language that they grew up with and you are in there As a patron and you can hear the chatter But because it's a foreign language, it just sounds like noise to you. It's none of the words are registering with you You're not making sense of the things that they're that they're saying and and as a result you end up tuning out You don't really you're not really trying to listen to that conversation because you know, it's a hopeless business You know that when you're trying to listen to that conversation, you won't come away with any kind of understanding at all And I think a text like this one can be that kind of a text. That the names are so foreign to us We don't track with the numbers. We don't see the significance of it. And so if a text like this perhaps comes up in our private Bible reading, when we're reading personally at home, we make a short day of it, so to speak. We view it as an opportunity to kind of scan this and okay, here are the numbers, here's the names. I'm not gonna bother reading all those names because I can't pronounce them anyways. And here is the end result. The end result is that I've not paid attention to what God in his word has written down for my benefit. And so what I want us to do here is slow down a little bit and try to see something orderly in it. Try to see something definitive in this text. I want to look at this list in terms of the inclusion of God's people. And from there, I want to make some observations which warn and guard us against a fairly popular movement that would say, Does it really matter if you belong to the church? Is church membership really something that is important? And so what we want to see from this text is that to belong to the number of the saints on earth is a good thing, but it's not the only thing that we should be aiming for. To belong to the number of the saints on earth is a good thing, but it should encourage us to consider carefully whether or not we belong to the number of the saints who are in heaven. And so as we think about this number of the people of Israel, we want to think about the benefits that we have as belonging to God's people, but then seeing that ultimately that should be driving us to consider whether or not we are belonging to the saints in heaven. And so to learn that lesson, we want to trace this list of names in three ways. First, we want to think about what is going on particularly in this text. Why is Nehemiah putting this list of names in the middle of his narrative. What's the aim of it? And from the aim that we see in the Old Testament, do we see any kind of similar patterns in the New Testament? So there's lists of names in the Old Testament. What happens to the lists of names in the New Testament? Do we see anything like that? And then finally, we want to think together carefully beyond the list of names in the Old Testament and the New Testament to consider the list of names that is referred to in Revelation 20. This list of names that is found in the Lamb's Book of Life, which is ultimately the list of names that we must belong to if we're going to have any kind of hope, any kind of joy in our Christian walk. So let's think together first about the list of names as they are recorded here in this text. The list that we have before us is, in a sense, the membership role of the returning exiles. This list is a repetition, really, of what was in Ezra 2. If you go to Ezra 2, verse 1 through 70, by and large, you find the same list. Now, they're in these books for different reasons, but first and foremost, we have to recognize that a roll call is being done here. Nehemiah is recording, he's reciting this roll call that took place during the time of Zerubbabel, when the people of Israel were first able to return from exile and settle again in the Promised Land, in Judah. and in Jerusalem. Now, as we come to this membership role, let's look a little bit at the structure of it so that we can see just how thorough this role call is. First of all, in verse 6 and 7, you see the list of names of the leaders. And then in verses 7 through to verse 38, you have a list of kind of what we would talk about the men, the people of Israel, the lay people, so to speak. And then if you total all of those up, that's 25,406 people. And then you have this second group in verses 26 through, well, if we look at that group of people, the first group is classified by family name, second group is classified by hometowns. Then you have the second group. So first group is ordinary people divided into two groups. Second group is the priests, and you find that in verses 39 through 42. And 4,289 priests returned. Then you have the Levites in verse 43, the most underrepresented group of the lot, with only 74. people returning. And then you have the singers in verse 44. More singers returning than Levites, 148 of them. Then you have the gatekeepers in verse 45, 138 of those. Six, we have those who lacked genealogical records. They couldn't prove whether or not They were members of the household of Israel. There's 642 of those. And if you add all of that up, you have in those six categories 31,000 or so Israelites, but the whole assembly that returned from verse 66, we know to be 42,000 and change. And so there were some names that aren't included in this list, but this list represents a roll call of sorts to show who belongs to the people of Israel. Now, this is challenging to work through. As a preacher, this text is a nightmare text. If you could skip, if there's ever a time where you want to say, well, yes, it's good to go through books verse by verse, line by line, except for Nehemiah 7, then it's okay to skip. If we could simply skip over, it would be much easier, particularly because only several months ago did we work our way through Ezra 2, which is the same list. It's the same list of names with maybe some minor variations. Maybe Ezra organizes it a little bit different. So for example, Ezra clumps together the Levites and the singers and the gatekeepers. He makes that one category, but basically, It's the same list with the same final number 42,360 people returning from the exile. And so basically, Our challenge then is to think about what would the Lord be teaching us? And to understand that, it is first incumbent on us to understand the nature of this list in Nehemiah. When we looked at this list in Ezra, it's a different context. In Ezra, it's kind of a live event. It's who is coming back with the people of Israel. And when we looked at the list in Ezra 2, let me remind us of the three things that we concluded as we looked at that text. We looked at the definite shape of Israel, that there were names and numbers and people. Second, we saw that the returning exiles looked to the Lord for help. So in verse 70 and following, or sorry, verse... Verse 61 and following, there were those who didn't have their names. And in verse 65, they were told not to partake until the Urim and the Thummim should arise. Well, that was a way of discerning God's will. And so the returning exiles were relying on the Lord for help by using the Urim and the Thummim to resolve this lack of genealogical evidence. And the third thing that we looked at in Ezra 2 was the effect that sin had had on the size and strength of the people of Israel. When they came out of Egypt, where they had been enslaved, there were 600,000 men. And so we extrapolated that could be anywhere from 2 million to 3 million to 4 million people that came out of Egypt. While you have 42,000 people returning from exile, Israel has been greatly weakened because of the guilt of their sin. Now, today, there are several things that we could do with this text, because this list of names is given to us right after we have this account of how the people of Israel themselves were siding with Tobiah. and how Tobiah had intermarried with these important families. You remember in verse 10, the sons of Ara, well, there's 652 sons of Ara. Tobiah had married into that important family. And his partner in crime, Sanballat, we saw from Nehemiah 13, he had married together with the high priestly family. And so we could do some work in terms of thinking through these people who are part of the number of Israel and yet we're working against Israel. Instead, what I want for us to do tonight is to have a little bit more of a deliberate consideration of that first aspect of what we thought about in Ezra. That the people of God have a distinct number. That they have a definite shape. The people of Israel, according to this text, can be identified and can be counted. So there is a definite group of the people of Israel. And this has been how the Bible has described the people of God from the beginning. From the beginning, if you read through the Old Testament from start to finish, you will see repeatedly the people of God are specifically identified and counted. It begins with Abraham. It's not complicated when it's Abraham. It's Abram and Sarai, two elderly people who are the recipients of the promises of God. And as they're waiting, they wait 25 years for God to answer His promise to them. And they grow weary. And they come up with their own solution to God's promise. And they have Hagar come into the mix. And from Hagar, Abram has Ishmael. And Abram and Sarai think this is the answer. These are the people of God. But according to God's amazing providences, he establishes his promise not through Abram and Sarai's creative solution, but through his own unlikely interference in the regular course of natural life. So God establishes through Abram and Sarai his seat. Now Abram has his own plans. And his plans are for Ishmael. But God says, Ishmael is not my son. Abraham pleads with God. When God said, you're going to have a son, listen to Genesis 17, verse 18 and 19. Abram said to God, oh, that Ishmael might live before you. And God said, no. But Sarah, your wife, shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him. as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him. Right from the start, with Abram's family, you see particular identifications of who belongs to the people of God and who does not belong to the people of God. Those who are included in the covenant and those who are excluded. And that, of course, continues with Jacob. Jacob's family It starts to become a little bit more complicated, but it is specifically known who is a part of Jacob's family. So, for example, in Genesis 46, when Jacob and his household finally do travel down to Egypt, to meet Joseph again after his presumed death, it's very specific to mention for us how many people are in Jacob's family. So Genesis 46, second part of verse 27, all the persons of the house of Jacob who came into Egypt were 70. The number is known. The people who are part of their family can be identified. And as that family grows, the care of keeping track of who is included in that family has not decreased. Now you don't have the full list of all the names, all the two million people who are part of the family of God when they come out of the exodus, but listen to Numbers 1 verse 18. On the first day of the second month, they assembled the whole congregation together who registered themselves by clans, by fathers' houses. The people of God are counted. The people of God are distinctly known. Here is the list. Here is the genealogy. Here is my clan. Here is my family. This is how I am counted to be among the people of God. And that continues in other places as well. No shortage of lists of Hebrew names in the Old Testament. 1 Chronicles 1 through 7, a careful identification of the members of the 12 tribes. And that culminates with chapter 9, this genealogy, also in 1 Chronicles of the returning exiles. Why are all those names there? Why are all those names in the Old Testament? Because in the Old Testament, The list of Hebrew names isn't just there as noise, isn't just there so that your daily reading can be shorter that day, can take less time that day. It's there because there is a continuation of the promise of God on this one special family on the earth. And it's saying these are the ones. These are the ones that are counted as part of Abram's family. It's a statement. It's a statement that says God has promised to be faithful to these. Now let's come to our particular list in the book of Nehemiah. Why is the list inserted in Nehemiah? It's different than what David does at the end of, oh boy, is it 1 Kings or 1 Samuel? When David numbers the fighting men. It's different than that genealogy because there David is numbering the fighting men so that he can say, look at my army. Well, what's Nehemiah doing? It says so in our text. In verse 5, God put it into his heart to assemble the nobles and the officials and the people to be enrolled by genealogy. This is what's taking place in Numbers chapter one as well. When the people of Israel gather to register themselves. Here also the people, Nehemiah is beginning the work of a census. But it's not a census of man's pride. It's a census that is in some way updating the membership role of the family of God in the Old Testament. Genealogy in the Old Testament is always a matter of belonging. It is always tracing your family back to Abram's family. It's always showing that you are one of the promised people. And so in this sense, in this way, as Nehemiah is preparing for this new registration, as he's organizing for this census, he finds the founding members of the people of Israel after the exile. He finds the people who came a hundred years before him. And so when it's happening live in the book of Ezra, it's more like, these are the people who come down. This is what's happening right now. And when it comes to Nehemiah and his list in his book, it's more saying, these are the people who came and God has been faithful to us for a hundred years. So this particularly is necessary since Sanballat and Tobiah are trying to divide up this family of God. They're trying to worm their way into the ruling class and the genealogies would say Sanballat is not one of the people of God. He has no genealogy that connects him to the people of God. Tobiah is not one of the people of God. These are the people of God and these are not. And you see as a reminder, perhaps, in verse 70 to 72, this giving that the people of God do to the rebuilding of the temple. That's what's taking place at the time of this list of names in Ezra 2. They're rebuilding the temple. That's what happens when they first return. And the people who are part of the names of the Israelites, they're giving to the rebuilding of the temple, which is, of course, the place where the God of the Israelites is worshipped. So here are the people of God, and they give to the worship of God, and they rebuild the temple of God, and they are working to rebuild the walls of the city of God. These are God's people. They're defined in the Old Testament. Now, the question we want to ask ourselves is, has that suddenly changed when we come to the New Testament? Certainly, we can all agree that in the Old Testament, the Israelites are very concerned with proving who is part of Israel. But do we see those kinds of lists of names in the New Testament? Or does church membership not exist anymore in the New Testament? Is there no longer a concern in the New Testament about who belongs to God's people? Well, it's true. We don't see long lists of genealogies. There's genealogies in the New Testament that show the lineage of Christ, of course, but not a lineage that shows the belonging of, say, for example, Peter. We don't see anywhere in the New Testament a list of names that connects Peter to a certain family and so on. That's because even though the method may be different and even though Well, let's say it this way. In the New Testament, because the method is different, you don't see a list of names anymore. In the Old Testament, belonging to the family of God came through a biological line. His promise rested on an ethnic group in a particular place. In the New Testament, that's different. And so belonging to the people of God is reported differently. In the New Testament, lineage isn't traced biologically. Lineage is traced spiritually. The people of God are not defined through natural birth, but through spiritual birth. And so the reader of the New Testament is not looking for a geopolitical nation anymore with its borders and its rules and its laws. It's presenting a spiritual nation which is identified by profession of faith under the governance of God's law. We want to be careful. We're in a Presbyterian church, and we baptize our babies, and we do that because we believe that the promise of God is for you and for your children. That's still true. It's for all who are far off, but you can see how the way of identifying the Christian no longer comes by generation. I can't trace my line back to my great-grandfather to prove that I belong to the people of God. The promise is for you and for your children. Now, if you're like me, you can trace your spiritual lineage. You can think back in your own mind and think about the people who have spiritually been your fathers and mothers. For some of us, we're fortunate enough that our biological fathers and mothers and our spiritual fathers and mothers are the same thing. And yet, though the genealogies are gone in the New Testament, the delineation of the group is not. The New Testament is still concerned about saying, these are the people of God, and these are not. There's still a pattern of defining who belongs to the church. Now, let's look in Acts 2.47 for an example of that. And so we have Acts 2, Peter preaches his Pentecost sermon, calls the people of Jerusalem to repent, And then afterwards, they disperse. They have what looks like a church meeting where they devote themselves to the apostles teaching the fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayer. Day by day, they're teaching in the temple. They're sharing with each other. They're praising God. And it says in verse 7, the Lord added to their number, day by day, those who were being saved. Now, you're saying that's not even close to a genealogy. And you're right. But there's a number and somebody knows what it is. There is a number and people are being added to it. Who's adding to it? People are deciding on their own to add themselves to it? You can look in Acts 4 verse 4. It says, there are many of those who heard the word believed and the number of men came to about 5,000. Who's saying that is 5,000? Who's keeping track of that? Where's that number coming from? Somebody's evaluating who believed. Somebody's saying 5,000 of them are added to the number of the people of God. You can also look in other places in the New Testament. It's not a list of names, but it shows that there's a definitive shape to the people of God. It's in the illustration that the New Testament uses with regards to God's people, where it describes the people of God as a body. And there's different parts of the body and they're identifiable. There's hands and there's feet. And the point of the text, of course, is not that because the body has a shape that therefore the church has a shape. The point of that text is that not everybody has the same function in the church. But belonging to that number. and belonging to that body is still pointed out as a reality. So 1 Corinthians 12, 27, you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. It doesn't mean members in the sense of what we had this morning. You are one of the members of the body of Christ, but there is a definitive body of Christ. There is a definite number of the people of God that somebody's keeping track of, There are people being added to that number every day. There's a definitive body with different functions, and you are part of that. And then you see in other places in the New Testament how leaders are being appointed. Elders and deacons, they're being appointed for the church. Well, whose leaders are they? Are they leaders of somebody who decides on their own that they're a Christian now? Or are they the leaders of those who are particularly identified as belonging to God's people? They are shepherds, and they have particular sheep, and they are to lead that particular body. And the sheep must know who their leaders are. Think of Hebrews 13, 24. Greet your leaders, it says there, and all the saints. Who are the saints? Can we identify these people? Or is that just a personal conviction? There is a number of the people of God. People are being added to that number. There's a definitive shape to the people of God. The people of God have leaders. There are identifiable saints who can be greeted from the pages of the New Testament. So have you run into someone who doesn't believe in membership, who says it's not present anywhere in the New Testament? It is there. It is there. There is a number. There is an addition. There are leaders. There is the function of the body. There is a shape to the body. Those people who claim there is no membership, they've misunderstood this continuity from the Old Testament to the New Testament. There are people who are named. They can be identified, and they particularly are governed by Him. So that's the list of names in the Old Testament, looking ahead to the list of names in the New Testament. Now let's think together about the list of names as we find them in heaven. It's not my aim here to make little of the visible church or to slight the visible church. To be a member of the visible church can be, and usually is, of great benefit to its members. But to be a member of the church is in and of itself of no benefit to you. In fact, at times, if you are a member of the church as a hypocrite, your membership in the church purchases for you a more severe judgment. The health of your soul can be greatly enhanced by the means of grace, the preaching of God's word, the prayers of the saints, the administration of the sacraments. These things God uses to build up his people. And yet at the same time, we have to be very clear that the aim of God in establishing his church here on earth is not so that there can be a bigger group in the building. but so that there can be more who hear new life in the Lord Jesus Christ, who trust in him and who find their names written in the Lamb's Book of Life. That's the other list. That's the most important list. It's not kept in a session room. It's not in an archive. It's not on an Excel spreadsheet. It's the Book of Life which God himself has written. And this book is to be opened at the judgment day, and the names that are found in this book will be identifiable, will be numbered, will be named, and will be treated accordingly. In Revelation 20, verse 15, it says, if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, He was thrown into the lake of fire. There are those who belong and there are those who do not. There are those who are named as the people of God because they believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. There are those who are cast from the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ because they deny his name. So then the question, of course, becomes, how do I know? How do I know? if my name is in the Lamb's book of life. And it can be determined by one thing, if you are found to be in Jesus. The gospel of John tells us that. The gospel of John tells us that the whole of his purpose in writing this gospel is so that there can be certainty for you whether you belong whether your name is written in the Lamb's book of life, as John is giving his summary of why he wrote the gospel. This is what he says, John 20, starting in verse 30. Now, Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book, but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in his name. The Lamb's Book of Life, with the names that are written in it, are filled with the names of those who believe, those who trust in Christ. And so this text, John 20, verse 30 to 31, has four implications that I want us to consider in light of what we've thought about of the list of names in the Old Testament, the list of names in the New Testament, particularly grounding our attention to the Lamb's Book of Life, this ultimate list, the most important list. And the first thing that we learn from John's gospel about how to be included in this Lamb's Book of Life is found in his purpose statement. John writes this book, so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ. Now, in order to believe about Jesus, first you have to know about Jesus. First you have to hear about him. John's gospel is a record of Jesus' teaching and his miracles so that he can be known. You cannot trust in a God that you do not know. So the question for us, first of all, as we think about our inclusion in the Lamb's Book of Life is whether or not we are making sure that we know who the Lord is. If you think superficially about the things of God, you will have a superficial response to the God who you find. If you think deeply about the things of God, You will marvel and wonder about the God of scripture and his mercy to you, a sinful man. Knowing about Jesus isn't the same thing as faith, but you cannot have faith without knowing about Jesus. And so the first thing we learn from John, he gives his gospel that we may believe. Well, to believe, we have to know. And then once we know, we have to believe. So we have to trust what John is saying about the Lord Jesus Christ. John writes these things down that can be known so that you may believe. Not just that you would agree that these are important things, Not just that you might be able to say, I can list a whole bunch of facts about Jesus, and I actually think that he was a fantastic, he was the greatest teacher. I think that the things that he taught in the Sermon on the Mount, I think they're all, I agree with all of them. They're all true. The demons can say that. The fallen angels can say that. They know of God. They've lived in heaven. They know that he's God. They agree that he's God. They know his word, but they do not believe. They will not trust in him. What's the difference between knowing and agreeing, and then that last part of trust? Well, when you trust, you organize your whole life around what you believe to be true. Since it is true, that God Almighty has sent His Son to judge Him instead of you, therefore, because you believe that to be true, because that motivates every fiber of your being, so that no longer are you flippant about the life of the Christian. No longer are you flippant about His name and His holiness. He is everything to you. And your trust in him shapes all of how you live. To know truth about him, even to agree that it's true, you can keep that at a very cerebral level. You can have debates and discussions and conversations. But if you trust in him, that shapes your life. It changes your whole world. Well, not only are we to trust what the Bible says, but we're to trust particularly what the Bible says of the Lord Jesus. And if you still have your finger in John 20, verse 30 through 31, you see particularly what we are to believe about the Lord Jesus. We are particularly to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. John's aim is specifically belief in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God. Now, I want to challenge this on that point, because I think so often as Christians, and particularly our Christian culture today, seeks to hold on to Christ in his humanity. It seeks to hold on to Christ as a man. That's the consequence of making images of Christ. Always when the church has represented Christ, it has done so in his humanity, so that the Christian church is holding on to Jesus the man. We're teaching our children with children's Bibles filled with cute pictures of Jesus the man, to think of Jesus as the man. What does John say that we must believe about Jesus? We must believe that He is the Son of God. Yes, He is a man. And the Gospels make that abundantly clear. He is a man, but He is the Son of God who dies on the cross so that your sin is forgiven. to focus on Christ. I know people probably think, oh, he's on a soapbox again. We cannot miss this, people. If we think of Christ only as a man, the response of the Apostle John at the beginning of Revelation is unexplainable. He walked with Jesus. He knew Jesus. He saw Jesus. He talked with Jesus face to face. And when he sees Him among the lampstands of the churches, he falls down on his face because he is in awe of Him. Do you have that kind of awe of the Son of God? Do you marvel that this Son of God rescued you from the guilt of your sin and took your name and wrote it in the Lamb's Book of Life? We're to believe this. That's what John's writing about, so that we would see this is who we belong to. We're not in that group of people. We're in the Lamb's Book of Life. We belong to Christ. And to know that, John says, to believe those things, John says, is to have life in his name, to belong to the people of God, not just in terms of membership in the visible church, the place where people confess that they believe. but those who have the true inclusion in the Lord Jesus Christ by faith, what we would talk about as the invisible church. All of God's elect, everybody who truly calls on the name of the Lord, you have life in his name. And as we saw this morning, that life of faith in His name culminates in the defeat of the world and the flesh and the devil and gives the ongoing peace on every side for His children. To have life in His name is to know that God Almighty has defeated all His and your enemies. It's to know that your King keeps your enemies at bay and therefore you enjoy peace. Yes, there is a list of Hebrew names in the book of Nehemiah. And we stumble over those names. We read them sometimes. And we can't pronounce them right. And there's 68 verses of it. And you begin to tune out at the end. But it's a beautiful picture. These are the people of God. In the New Testament, these are the people of God. In Revelation 20, verse 15, these are the names of the saints who are written in the Lamb's book of life. They are Abraham's children, not by blood, nor the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. So Old Testament Israel lived under the promise of God by birth. And the New Testament church lives under the promise of God by profession of faith. But in heaven, the reality of eternal peace is fully applied. There is life in the name of Christ given to those who are written in the Lamb's Book of Life. In that place, there will be no voice of the devil. And in that place, there will be no draw from the world. And in that place, there will be no sinful wishes of the heart. There will be only perfect peace, enjoyed in the perfect worship offered up to God. And every person whose name is in that Lamb's Book of Life will join together. and worship the living God forever. Let's pray together.