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.

God and Time in The Epistle of 1 John

The apostle John tells us a great deal about the nature of God in his first letter.  And he wastes no time getting to it.

I John 1:1 – “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched — this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.”

‘That which was from the beginning…”

This first phrase begs the question: The beginning of what?

Possibly John is referring to the beginning of his experience with Jesus on the shore of Lake Galillee.  It’s more likely, however, that he’s thinking much farther back.  All the way back to creation.  That was the beginning of all human experience.  This view can be inferred by his use of the phrase ‘the Word [logos] of life’.  The Genesis account says that God spoke the universe into existence, after all.  So, the word existed even before the universe which it brought into being.

In my mind, this prompts another question: What is time to God?  In 2nd Peter 3:8, the apostle Peter writes, “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.”  What an Einsteinian statement for someone with little to no formal understanding of physics!  Time is relative.  To the physicist, time is relative to velocity and the speed of light.  To God, time is relative to the confines of His creation.

The least we can gather from this verse is that God doesn’t perceive time as we do.  He does not experience it in sequential, linear fashion.  He created time, along with space when He said, ‘Let there be light!’  This is implied in Genesis 1.  The Bible doesn’t claim to be a science textbook and its writers could hardly have conceived of space and time as separate things.  Even we, in the sophisticated 21st century, have difficulty thinking of them as separate without some rather convoluted mathematics.  Without space, time is meaningless – there is no thing the duration of which can be measured; space without time is completely static.

If follows that, if God created space and time, He existed before either.  God exists beyond time, outside, not within it.  Although He acts within it, He is independent of it.  Time, like everything else that was created, has its source in God and exists within Him, dependent upon Him.  We may suppose then, that God perceives all of time at once, as a whole.  When He told Moses His name, it was ‘I Am’ – the eternal now.  Everything to God is present tense.

This lends some new perspective to the concept of God’s omniscience.  He sees all that is, all that has been, and all that ever will or could be throughout the universe.  If the apostles and prophets didn’t understand Einsteinian physics, they certainly couldn’t have conceived of quantum physics; yet here it is.  The future is packed with unknown possibilities from where we see it  But if God see all of time holistically, perhaps as a gestalt, then He sees all possible paths, all possible choices.
There is new perspective about His omnipotence here as well.  The God of the Bible is one who sees every conceivable alternative of the future, and His will encompasses all of them.  Nothing any man, movement or nation can do, nothing Satan can do, can possibly deflect God from His purpose.  He saw (as expressed from our vantage point) every possibility when He conceived of creation, before He ever uttered a word.

Although He was not addressing this particular issue, Jesus spoke of possibilities.  ‘With God, all things are possible.’ (Matt. 19:26; Mark 10:27).  This is so because every possibility, every choice, every outcome is seen by God and accounted for.  Nothing surprises God.  There is no mistake which cannot be overridden.  There is no sin excluded from the redemption of the cross.

Later in this epistle, John talks about sin and our propensity for rebelling against God to do things our own way, for our own selfish motivations.  If we understand God’s omniscience and omnipotence this way, sin can be seen for what it is:  completely pointless because it in no way diminishes God or thwarts His purpose, and foolish because the only thing it does accomplish is to separate us from the source of life and any chance for the fulfillment we so deeply desire.

Why would we intentionally waste one more second of our time on such useless, self-destructive thought and behavior?  The God who knows all, sees all, sustains all, controls all and encompasses all has so much more for us.