Eternal Life

I John 1:2 – “The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.”

In verse 1, John establishes God’s rational and communicative nature through His use of words.  The Word is the sum of what He has communicated, the total of His thought and character.  This totality is extension of God as our words are an extension of us.  This Word is what gives and reveals life in all its depth and breadth.

So powerful is God’s expression of Himself that it realized its ultimate revelation (so far) through incarnation.  ‘The Word became flesh…’ (John 1:14) so that we could not only observe its effects in creation, not only hear it as relayed by prophets, but so that we could experience it as lived in and through a human like us.

The specific purpose for John’s writing this epistle appears to be to counter the heretical teachings of Gnostics who had insinuated themselves into the churches of Asia Minor.  He begins to develop his argument with verse 2.

For emphasis, John repeats, ‘the life appeared, we have seen it and testify to it…’   In the King James Version, the word ‘appeared’ is rendered as ‘was made manifest’).  Something made manifest is there for everyone to see.  It was obvious.  It appeared openly, not in secret.

One of the hallmarks of Gnosticism is its claim to have knowledge of God hidden from the average believer, access to a deeper level of spirituality.  John says the disciples saw Jesus and the life that He brought and openly testified to everything that they experienced.  There is no hidden knowledge.

“…we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.”

Eternity, as we discussed earlier, can be a difficult concept for us, trapped as we are in a four-dimensional universe where everything is bounded by the sequential flow of time.  Because of our experience, we tend to think of eternity merely as endless time.  It may be, however, that eternity is a state that transcends time altogether, a state where time – if it exists at all – is simply irrelevant.

Whatever the final truth, John is speaking here of ‘the eternal life’.  The definite article is used:  there is only one eternal life.  It is the life of the Word, which was with the Father before creation.  It is the life of God Himself.  It is the life observed and investigated by the disciples as they lived with Jesus.

So, if there is only one eternal life and it has been made clearly manifest in Jesus and faithfully reported by the apostles, there can be no secret knowledge, no deeper spirituality than connection to Christ.  This is not to say that there is no growth to this relationship.  Maturing spiritually takes an entire lifetime.  But it is to say that the gospel holds back nothing we need to know in order to have that relationship and growth.
Gnosticism drew (and still draws) upon Greek philosophy for its version of the truth.  Its most prevalent 1st century form offered the ‘secret knowledge’ that the body and the spirit are two distinct things.  From this, two conclusions were reached –

1.  That Jesus the Christ was a spirit being, like an angel, and not truly human.
2.  That it was possible to indulge the appetites of the body without compromising the holiness of the spirit.

It’s easy to see why this was popular among those with little spiritual maturity.  It gave license to do anything, to participate in any sin.  It is less easy to see why it is a false teaching, totally antithetical to the real gospel.

The gospel depends on a correct understanding of who Jesus is (Christology).  There are three possibilities –

1.  Jesus was wholly human and not God.
2.  Jesus was wholly God and not human
3.  Jesus was both wholly God and wholly human.

In the first instance, if Jesus was not God, then He was not perfect and sinless.  If He was not sinless, then His death on the cross was for His own sins and has not impact whatsoever on yours and mine.  He cannot offer us salvation.  Even if God did raise Him from the dead, that is on a par with what happened to Lazarus.  Resurrection, in that context, offers us no hope.

In the second instance, if Jesus was not human, He couldn’t really die.  As God, He would be sinless, but that is useless to us because He only appeared to die on the cross.  There is no substitutionary sacrifice for our sin.  And, if He didn’t die, the resurrection is meaningless.  Again, He cannot offer us salvation.

Only if Jesus is both God and man do His death and resurrection make eternal life available to us.

This is one of the most difficult things to understand about the Christian faith.  Another reason why so many found, and continue to find, some flavor of Gnosticism attractive.  It is nearly impossible for our reason to come to grips with the idea that God could express Himself to us in this way.  It poses numerous questions.  If Jesus was God, was it even possible for Him to sin.  If He was human, was it possible for Him not to sin.

We must fall back on the words of Jesus (Matt. 19:26) ‘With God, all things are possible.’   If we start there, with the absolute omnipotence of God, we may be able to get a glimmer of an understanding that in Jesus we have a human being born in the same state as Adam was created – without original sin.  As far as His humanity goes, the only difference between Jesus and any other human being is that He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, not a human father.  He was, therefore, born without the necessity of sinning.  He was tempted, but He did not have the baggage of an inherited fallen nature.

But how can He also be fully God?  To begin to answer this, we must ask, what do we mean by ‘fully God’?

Obviously, Jesus did not display some of the characteristics that we normally associate with God.  He was not, for instance, omnipresent.  He did not display the overwhelming Shekinah glory of some of His Old Testament appearances, though this is hardly an obstacle.  He appeared in less devastating form to several of the patriarchs without ill effects.  He did display knowledge, wisdom and insight that went beyond any of His contemporaries.  We might, I think, say that His resurrection and ascension, displayed His eternality.  His miracles certainly demonstrated His power and authority, but He did not display the type of omnipotence we equate with God.  Had He done so, He certainly could have avoided the cross.  But we might remember at this point that God often restrained Himself in the past.  In the story of Noah, what is the rainbow except His promise to restrain Himself from ever destroying the earth by flood.  So we may conclude that, in revealing Himself in Jesus, God restrained certain of His attributes.

What He did not restrain was His character.  John talks more about this later in the epistle, but for now, suffice it to say that in Jesus we see the whole character of God – the love, the holiness and righteousness, the justice – completely in balance within a human.  Jesus lived the life that Adam might have lived had he passed the test of temptation.  A life completely immersed in and in tune with the character of his Maker.

This is who Jesus was and is.  And because of Him, this is who we can become.  We can have His eternal life.  There is no other revelation from God.  There is no need for any other revelation.