After many weeks, we come to the end of our theme about God’s great salvation with a look at a common expression usually associated with discussions or sermons about salvation, namely eternal life.
Churchgoers hear these two words practically every time they attend a worship service. If we have ever memorized a Bible verse, we have probably memorized John 3:16, which ends with “shall not perish but have eternal life.” Many of us likely share the same earthly understanding of eternal life as life that lasts forever. While this is a valid and true understanding, it is not the total meaning of eternal life. So we end this series with a fresh look at what the Bible wants us to understand about eternal life.
The core of salvation
Eternal, of course, does speak of something or someone that never ends. The word describes God, whom the Bible says is “the eternal God” who is our refuge and whose everlasting arms are underneath us (Deut. 33:27).
Psalm 90:1–2 puts God’s eternal nature like this, “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” Just as God is eternal, so is the life that He offers through the gospel. Salvation has eternal life at its core.
Eternal life, of course, is so much more than the mere extension of earthly life for all eternity. The challenges and problems of our earthly days are so significant that the extension of this life forever would not seem like a very gracious gift. Rather eternal life speaks not only of the duration of life but also of the kind of life. Eternal life has both quantity (endlessness) and quality (fullness). Eternal life is God’s kind of life in that it is full and abundant, meaningful and fulfilling, inclusive and outgoing, fruitful and purposeful.
Eternal life also is life in the present time for believers. In a very real and biblical sense, the onset of eternal life is not immediately following physical death. It begins at the moment of Christian conversion.
Full life in Christ
With due stress on the present tense of the verb “has,” 1 John 5:11 declares, “This is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life, whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.”
What begins at the time of personal faith in Christ continues beyond earthly life into eternity. In eternity this life takes on added fullness through inexpressible and unimaginable expansion. Rather than indwelling bodies of clay, the life that is eternal inhabits and finds expression in and through resurrection bodies. For Christians, death loses the sense of being an ending and takes on the sense of a doorway that opens to a life of unlimited enjoyment.
Jesus spoke of eternal life when talking with His Heavenly Father in prayer: “This is eternal life, that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3).
The possession of eternal life is inseparably connected with possessing Jesus as one’s Lord and Savior. Jesus embodied the life of eternity when He came in His incarnation. He brings that same life to us when He comes into our hearts.
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