
  John 3:5,6 Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.


Jesus here is instructing Nicodemus, which in verse 10 He says: “Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things?”  The interesting thing here is that Jesus is chastising Nicodemus for not knowing that one has to be “born again” before His (Christ’s) completed work on the cross.

In the book of Hebrews chapter 11 we know that those that lived before the cross received a good report by faith. 


  Revelation 20:12 And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.
  
  First Corinthians 3:13-15 Every man's work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is. If any man's work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.


The Book of Life appears to be an eternal genealogy, where the “books” seem to record ones life works, either born of the Holy Spirit or conceived and born outside of the will of God the Father and of the Holy Spirit. 

So in answer to the question: Fire is the agent that separates eternal substance from temporal substance, this is also true with our life works as well.  Fire typically depicts God's judgement.  

How does our work on this earth transfer into the new earth when God returns?
My iPhone app sends data persistently over the network, and can handle having the network completely unavailable for a time. However I do my dev on an ipod and have difficulty testing 3G connectivity issues; My question: is there  period of non-connectivity, while an app is in the foreground, after which the iphone will stop checking for the network, such that there are no bars and reachability returns 0 until the user "wakes" the phone, e.g. by locking/unlocking? Or can e.g. 1 hr without data network pass and the iphone will recognize that the network is back and reachability will start returning true (I am polling every 1 minute while there is not connection to my server). 

This is my experience with wifi: if, while running my app, the ipod hasn't connected to a wifi network for 1/2 hr, it stops looking for networks, and I need to lock and unlock it to stir the device into looking again. 

One other thing: the iPhone has the screen dimmed by the proximity sensor while all this persistent network use is happening.
