Eternal Life

"He who hears my word, and believes him who sent me, has eternal life; he does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life" (John 5.24).

That is one of the many New Testament statements that declare that the gift, or power, or quality, of eternal life is the present possession of every true believer. The submission of the heart and life in loyalty and dedication to Christ, the acceptance of him as Saviour and Leader, the conscious deliberate alignment of one's life with the will of God, insofar as that will is understood, result in a real change of state in the individual. This is where the life of that individual is changed in its quality from one that is essentially transient to one that is essentially permanent. "He who has the Son has life: he who has not the Son has not life" (1 John 5.12); "He who believes in the Son has eternal life; he who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him" (John 3.36). The life that is here spoken of is not one that is conferred after death as reward for a lifetime of piety and good works. It is one that results from acceptance of Christ and his ways and it precedes the piety and good works rather than succeeds them.

It must be admitted, though, that many other Scriptures do refer to eternal life as an object of hope and future attainment, as though it were conditional upon the attainments of this mortal life. There is no man who has left house, and so on, for the sake of the Kingdom of God, said Jesus "who will not receive manifold more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life" (Luke 18.30). That seems quite clearly a promise for the future, conditional upon present actions rather than present belief. Paul, writing to Titus, extolled his mission "to further the faith of God's elect. . . in hope of eternal life which God promised ages ago" (Titus 1.2), and again, to the Galatians, "he who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption but he who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life" (Gal.6.8).

One might conclude, hastily, that there is an element of contradiction in these two presentations and that room exists for debate as to whether eternal life is in fact a present possession or a future hope.

Perhaps this seeming contradiction is due to the rather natural tendency to think of eternal or everlasting life ‑ the same word in the original is used for both terms ‑ from the standpoint of that perpetual, never-ending life of the future that the Christian believes is his destiny after human death.

"There shall be no more death"; this to him is synonymous with eternal life, a condition of existence in perpetuity amid all the splendours of the future world that his theology has taught him to visualise. Now whilst all this may be very true it is not the meaning of the Scriptural term 'eternal life'.

The word "eternal", with its idea of time-perpetuity, came from the Latin versions, but in the original manuscripts, the Greek word so often rendered "eternal" and "everlasting" has the significance of enduring, of the permanent as opposed to the transient. It is true that the eternal life will endure for ever, but it is because of its quality that it endures for ever, and it is to its quality rather than its duration that the term 'eternal' applies.

Perhaps John 6.54 is significant in this connection. "He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day." Leaving aside for the present the mystic significance of the flesh and the blood, here is a clear intimation that one who possesses eternal life here and now in consequence of his vital association with Christ must nevertheless pass through the gates of death and emerge into the after-life by means of resurrection, "at the last day". The possessor of eternal life, then, dies as a human being even though the life that is in him endures in the Divine care and is afterwards manifested in a new body fitted to the new environment into which he has entered. The logical conclusion would then seem to be that a man does not enter the future state in order to receive eternal life. He enters the future state because he already has eternal life.

What of those who do not possess this quality of life? It is a manifest fact that of all earth's millions, past and present, only a relatively small proportion come within the requirements of our Lord's words. Most of the remainder have never even heard of the "only name given under heaven whereby we may be saved". They live, in a biological sense, but they do not have eternal life. In that state, and unless they eventually come within the scope of our Lord's standards, they must inevitably die, and be no more. The life that is in them cannot sustain them indefinitely. This, says the Scriptures, is because of sin, sin which is the element of disorder in God's creation, the continued presence of which in the individual life makes continued life impossible, just as its continued presence in any part of the creation ‑ in this earth, for example ‑ must ultimately render the continuance of that part of creation impossible. The story of Eden is the record of the entrance of that disorder into this world, and the sentence on Adam "return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. You are dust, and to dust you shall return" its consequence. The position is summed up by Paul in the cogent words "the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life, in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. 6.23).

If the quality of life that man has when born cannot take him into the illimitable future, then God provides for him to have knowledge and opportunity sufficient to accept this free gift of God in Christ. Many have lived their lives and gone into death without that knowledge and opportunity. In some way and at some time every human being who has lived will be brought face to face with these eternal verities and make his choice, for good or evil, for life or death. Repentance for the past and acceptance of Christ for the future must be just as possible after death as before. The Divine response to such will always be on the same principle "a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise."

So the period of time in history during which it is possible for the individual to turn from "dead works to serve the living God" and receive his gift of eternal life is limited. This is not by the end of that individual's earthly life, but by the close of the time-span that God in his wisdom foresees will be adequate for the whole of the race of mankind to realise the issues and to make the choice. It must remembered that God, having created men as independent living beings having powers of free-will, cannot possibly compel them to the good life, to a forced conformity with the system of order which is his creation. There must at least be provision for a man to refuse the blessings of conscious life on the only terms on which it can be offered. It is at least conceivable that a man could be so wedded to the principles and practice of evil that he could not endure life in a system in which evil has no place and such an attitude is indicated by the Scriptures. They show that in the final outworking of things God withdraws the gift of conscious life from those who cannot accept and make use of it aright. There must come an end to the period of human probation and a time when only those who have attained to eternal life will remain to take their appointed places in the Divine scheme.

This is where the Messianic Kingdom of God upon earth becomes an important theological factor. The Scriptural presentation of a thousand-year period, following the Second Advent and the disintegration of the existing world order, during which Heaven's rule will prevail to the infinite betterment of earth's peoples is fairly generally known, with many variations, among Christians. It is perhaps not so generally appreciated that this period provides the very means necessary whereby the "unsaved dead" of past times may receive that knowledge of Christ which is essential to their salvation but was denied them in the past life. Jesus said that the day is to come when all who are in their graves will hear his voice "and come forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment" (John 5.28-29). It is easy to see in those that come forth to the "resurrection of life", Christian believers of this Age who have already received the gift of eternal life and have not subsequently repudiated it. In their resurrection they enter into the heavenly realm in the full glory and power of celestial nature and in eternal association with the Lord Christ their Leader and Head. The others, who come forth to a resurrection by judgment, have not yet reached the point where acceptance of Christ gives them, in their turn, the gift of eternal life. They have not yet made their decision. In many cases they have not yet received the knowledge necessary to making a decision. No wonder this is called a resurrection by judgment. The entire Messianic Kingdom is a process of trial and judgment to those who are its subjects; by its close all will have come to the crisis of decision and made their choice for or against God and his ways.

That decision is necessary, final and irrevocable, because we as finite terrestrial beings cannot begin to understand that continuing, eternal life, can only come to us through Christ. He is the centre and pivot of all creation and on him all things depend. "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together" (Col.1.17). That is why the New Testament insists that acceptance of the Lord Christ and union with him is essential to salvation, a dogma that would seem unnecessarily severe were practice of the good life and the repudiation of evil all that was necessary. The whole living creation is a unity, each individual constituting a personal identity in his own right, an identity preserved by God through death of the organism in one world to resurrection in a new organism in another world. Yet the sum of all created individuals are all joined together to constitute a harmonious living union animated by the life which comes from God, through Christ. Said the Apostle Paul to the Christians at Ephesus, in the endeavour to expound this truth, "he has made known to us. . . the mystery of his will, according to his purpose ... a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Christ, things in heaven and things in earth" (Eph. 1.9).

This is as far as human mind can penetrate. The possibilities and certainties of the distant future are hidden from us, until in the fullness of time we have powers of thought and perception the range of which can take in the scope of those transcendent worlds which lie beyond and above the terrestrial. We can only rest ourselves in that conviction that possessed the great Apostle's Spirit-filled mind when he wrote "what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived; what God has prepared for those who love him, God has revealed to us through the Spirit" (1 Cor.2.9). There is a spiritual understanding of a life and a world yet to be in our experience, which is impressed upon our minds, by the power of the Holy Spirit, and becomes conviction, whilst as yet we cannot visualise its nature and appearance. Says the Beloved Disciple (1 John 3. 2) "It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is".

Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version.

AOH