John 17:2–3
In the light of our two preceding studies, the question which each one of us should be asking before we go any furher is this: do I possess eternal life? Have I received the gift of eternal life? It is the most momentous question we can ever ask ourselves in this life, because our eternal destiny depends upon our answer to it. That is the message of the Bible everywhere, from beginning to end. It emphasizes a Day of Judgement when certain great books will be opened, and unless our names are written in the Lamb’s book of life—which means that we are possessors of eternal life—we go to destruction, to damnation and to eternal punishment. Clearly, therefore, this is the most important matter of all, and not only from the standpoint of our eternal destiny. Of course, we have to put that first, because it is the most serious matter, but it is also important from the standpoint of our life in this world, and the enjoyment and the success of that life, in the highest sense.
So, then, we have found that this life becomes possible to us only in and through a knowledge of God in the Lord Jesus Christ, and we have seen, too, that he enables us to know God by imparting himself to us, through the Holy Spirit. By entering into us and giving us life, he enables us to know God, and that is the point at which we start, when we discover the way to this life, the way in which it is obtained.
It is necessary, perhaps, that I should emphasize this word ‘know’—’that they might know thee’—in order to bring out clearly that that does not mean merely an intellectual awareness. This word ‘know’ is a strong and powerful word. It does not just mean that you are acquainted with or aware of something; it does not even mean an intellectual acceptance of a number of propositions; it is much deeper than that. When God spoke to the Children of Israel through the prophet Amos, he said, ‘You only have I known of all the families of the earth’ (Amos 3:2). Obviously that does not mean that God was not aware of the existence of other nations; this word ‘know’ is a word which means ‘you only have I known in an intimate way’, you are the only people, in a sense, in whom I have been particularly interested. That is how this word is constantly used in Scripture and that is its meaning here. The knowledge of God about which our Lord speaks here means an actual living realization of him, not just believing in the being and existence of God, but knowing him as One who is living and dwelling in us. It is a living knowledge, and we must be careful that we do not attach a meaning to this word which falls short of that exalted conception.
Having said that, we now go forward to consider exactly what that means. We have seen the way in which we obtain eternal life. If a man really does not know God in Christ in that intimate sense, he has not got it. But what is this life which is claimed in that way? The first thing which we must emphasize is that it is a quality of life. Eternal life must be conceived of in terms of quality rather than mere quantity, or duration. That does not mean that the element of length and duration does not enter in, because it does. But over and above that, is this question of the quality—the thing that is always emphasized in the Scriptures. Our Lord puts it like this: ‘I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly’ (Jn 10:10). So we see that, according to Scripture, what is offered to us is a type and kind of life which is available to us at this present time and which will go on right through the remainder of our lives in this world, and, still more important, beyond death and the grave and into eternity. That is really what is meant by eternal life.
Now both these aspects need to be emphasized. The astounding thing, in other words, is that the Christian is one who can receive here in this world, now in the present, something of the very life of glory itself The apostle Paul speaks of that in Romans 8:23, where he refers to himself as one of those who have received the ‘firstfruits’, or, as he says, who have received a kind of foretaste. You see what is in his mind?
It is like the first gleanings of the crop. You go out into your garden and you pick the first raspberries, the full crop will soon come, but here is a preliminary instalment. You have the first fruits, the foretaste; you do not have it all, but you have a handful of what you are going to receive in an ultimate, complete fullness. And that is the way in which the Christian comes into eternal life, and it is surely one of the most remarkable and astounding things we can ever realize, that here on earth we can begin to experience something of the life of heaven, something of the life of glory.
Now the time element comes in like this. Though we receive the life itself here in this world, because we are in the flesh, and because of the imperfection that sin has introduced into every part of our being, there is a kind of limit. The apostle Paul makes this plain in writing to the Corinthians, ‘For now,’ he says, ‘we see through a glass, darkly. . .’ (1 Cor 13:12). Some people say it should be translated, ‘we see in a sort of riddle’, but that does not matter, both show that we do see after a fashion. But then note the difference: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.’ There is a certain amount of distortion in what we see at the present time we are seeing the real thing but ‘darkly’. Then we shall see it even as it is, ‘. . .then shall I know even as also I am known.’ ‘Now,’ Paul says again, ‘I know in part’; it is the difference, says the apostle, between the knowledge of a child and the knowledge of a grown up person. The child has, in a sense, a real knowledge, but it is an elementary and an imperfect one. ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things’ (1 Cor 12:11). That is exactly the difference, says Paul, between eternal life in this world and eternal life as we shall enjoy it in the glory. The life is the same, only here it is partial, and imperfect ‘as in a glass darkly’. But thank God that this is what is offered to us even in this life and world. We can begin the life of glory here on earth: ‘Celestial fruits on earthly ground may grow,’ says the hymn writer, and that is the thing that our Lord would have us realize constantly as Christian people.
Very well, let us hold these two elements in our minds. It is a quality of life, and that quality is the life of heaven, the life of glory itself. We start it here, we can have it now and it will continue, it will grow, it will increase, and ultimately it will blossom out into that life of perfection when we shall see with an utterly open face and ‘know even as also we are known’ by him. I think that this is one of the most thrilling things a man can ever learn in this life, so I summarize it by putting it like this: It is possible for us as Christian people, to receive here and now something of that life which the Lord Jesus Christ himself enjoyed. He enjoyed this eternal life while he was here on earth, and what he offers and what he gives, he tells us, is something of that life—‘that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him’.
So, then, having described it in general, let us try to understand it a little more personally and see what exactly is true of this life. Let me give you some of the New Testament definitions of it. We are told that as a result of having this life we become sons of God, or children of God—‘For ye are all the children of God,’ says the apostle Paul in Galatians 3:26. Another phrase, used by John in his first epistle, is that we are ‘born of God’ (1 Jn 5:1) and in John 3:8 we read that we are ‘born of the Spirit’. The apostle Peter describes it by saying that we become ‘partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Pet 1:4)—an astounding statement. In another place he tells us that we are ‘begotten again’ (1 Pet 1:3), we are regenerated. Now all those terms, and others too, are used in the New Testament in order to give us some conception and understanding of the quality and nature of eternal life. And it was in order to give us this marvellous life that the Lord Jesus Christ came into the world. That is why he went to the cross, that is why he was buried and rose again, it was that you and I might become sons of God, children of God, born of God, partakers of the divine nature, that we might be regenerated, and made anew, and receive a new life. But, I must hasten to add, it is very important that we should not misconstrue any of these great, exalted terms.
Not one of them means that you and I become divine. We do not cease to be human. We are not turned into gods. We must never put such a meaning to those great terms. It does not mean that the divine essence, as it were, is infused into us. I put it in this negative form because some of the mystics have crossed the line and have taught—indeed you will find it very often in Roman Catholic teaching—that the divine nature is infused into us. That is something which is in the background of their doctrine of transubstantiation. Now there is no such teaching in the Bible and it savours of the monastic, and of Greek philosophy; we must be careful not to interpret those terms as meaning that we actually become divine. We are still human, though we are partakers of the divine nature.
I would even go beyond that. When you and I are in heaven and in glory, when our very bodies shall have been glorified and every vestige of sin shall have been purged out of us, when we shall see him face to face and be like him, even then we shall still be men. The Lord Jesus is God-Man. We never become God-men. We still remain man, but glorified man, perfect man. We are not transfigured or transformed into God.
This is obviously a very high and difficult doctrine to understand, and I suppose that we are not meant to understand it fully in this life and world. The safe way of expressing it is to say that what happens to us when we receive eternal life is that something entirely new comes into us and into our life and experience. The Scripture says we become new men, a new creation. The New Testament refers to a new man and an old man, and we are told to put off the old and to put on the new man. A new principle of life comes into us which produces a profound change in us, and gives us, therefore, a new quality of life and being. This new principle produces in us a new nature, a new outlook, so much so that having received it, we are able to say with Paul—and he knows exactly what he means when he says it—‘If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature’—a new creation—‘old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new’ (2 Cor 5:17). It is all because of this principle that enters into our lives.
I am tempted to say a word at this point about the relationship of this new principle to the natural qualities and faculties of man, because people are often in trouble and difficulty about that. They wonder what happens when a man receives this new life, what happens when he is born again. Is he given an entirely new faculty or a new set of faculties? The answer, of course, is, no. What he receives is a new principle that affects all his faculties. Let me explain what I mean. This new principle is something apart from our faculties but it affects all of them. It is, as it were, something that comes in and enlivens them and enables us to use them in an entirely different manner. Now that is very important for this reason: the Christian life, the receiving of this eternal life, is absolutely independent of our natural faculties, and qualities—and let us thank God for that fact. We all differ, for example, we all differ intellectually some are born with a greater ability to understand, with better brains, than others; some are able to read and understand what they read better than others. There is an endless variety and variation in people by nature, from the standpoint of propensities and abilities. The glory of this eternal life is that it can come into the life of any kind of person, and it really does not depend in any sense upon their individual qualities and faculties. The result is that a person who is unintelligent can receive this principle of new life quite as much as the most intelligent person in the world. And, furthermore, he can be as spiritual as that intelligent person. It is a principle apart from the natural faculties.
But of course it is at the same time a principle that can use the natural faculties. That is why when God wants a great teacher of the Christian gospel, he chooses a man like the apostle Paul. Yes, but Paul was no more a Christian than the most ignorant person in the church at Corinth. It is the principle that matters—we must not merely consider this in terms of understanding and ability, it is something much more wonderful and glorious than that. And that is why Paul was able to say in 1 Corinthians 1:21: ‘For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.’ God, he says, takes the ignorant and by means of them he confounds the wise, and he takes the weak and confounds the mighty—because of this new principle which he introduces. What, then, is the effect of the introduction of this principle? This life eternal, about which we are speaking, is, as I have said, something which affects the entire man. But it is especially interesting to observe the way in which it affects a man’s understanding and apprehension of spiritual things. And the way to look at that is to contrast the natural, unregenerate man, who is not a Christian, with the man who is a Christian. According to Scripture, the natural man is spiritually dead. May I be so bold as to put it like this: if there is anybody to whom these things about which I am speaking are really utterly meaningless, then, as I understand Scripture, it means that such a person is spiritually dead and has not received eternal life, because, as Paul puts it, ‘The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him’ (1 Cor 2:14). They are meaningless to him, they are like a foreign language, and he is bored by them.
Paul works this out in great detail in 1 Corinthians 2. He says that we, as Christians, have not received ‘the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God’, and we will never know them until we receive the Spirit. ‘Eye hath not seen,’ he says, ‘nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him’ (verse 9). And these things about which Paul is speaking do not refer to heaven, but to things here on earth. However, Paul goes on, we understand because ‘the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God’ (verse 10). Now that, I think, is something wonderful and glorious. The princes of this world do not understand these things, and let us remember that when he is talking of princes, he is not only referring to people who are crowned kings, he is including the philosophers, he is talking about the Greeks who sought and worshipped wisdom. When Paul says that the princes of this world do not know the Lord Jesus Christ, he means they do not understand or grasp the truth because they are spiritually dead. Living in terms of their natural powers and faculties, they come to these spiritual things with their natural intellect and they see nothing in them. And he goes on to say that they never will see anything in them until they have received the light of the Spirit. But, he says, ‘he that is spiritual judgeth’—which means he understands, he can evaluate all things—‘yet he himself is judged of no man’ (verse 15). The Christian is an enigma to the non-Christian, the Christian does not really understand himself! He has an understanding and an insight which the other man does not have.
Then there is the wonderful statement at the end of the chapter, ‘For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him?’ And Paul gives this amazing answer—‘But we have the mind of Christ.’ He does not mean by this that we have the perfect knowledge that Christ has. He means that we have the spiritual understanding of Christ himself. He has given it to us, and we have received it as a gift from him. It is one of the aspects of eternal life—the mind of Christ. And this means that the new man, the man who has received this gift of eternal life, has an interest in spiritual things. The other man has not got this, but the new man has, and he begins to look at himself in a new way. He realizes that he is not merely an animal sent into this world to eat and drink and sleep and make money. No! He realizes that he is a spiritual being. He knows within himself that there is something which lifts him up beyond the whole universe, that he is meant for God and that he has God’s Spirit within him. He did not know that before, but he knows it now. He has an entirely new view of death as well as of life and he faces his life in this world in an entirely new way.
My dear friends, if you want to know whether you have eternal life, that is a simple way of deciding it. When you think about yourself do you stop merely at the point at which the man of the world stops, or do you remind yourself every day of your life that you have a soul, a spirit; that what really matters is not this brief span of life in this world, but that destiny for which we are meant, that life that is awaiting us with God, that glory to which we are going? The Christian views himself with a spiritual mind and he faces God in an entirely different way.
The Christian also has an entirely different view of the world in which he lives, it is a spiritual view. What is your view of the world at this moment? Are you troubled or grieved about it? Are you hurt by it? Paul says of the Christian that ‘we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened’ (2 Cor 5:4). Or again, even we ‘which have received the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body’ (Rom 8:23). Does the world trouble you? You see, if you have received eternal life you become like the Lord Jesus Christ. In this world he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief because he saw what sin had done to his Father’s great and glorious world, because he saw men and women in the shackles of sin and dupes in the service of Satan. It grieved him at heart and the man who is spiritually minded knows something of that view of this life and world, and of the men and women who are in it.
In other words, spiritual things become real to the man who receives eternal life. These things are not theoretical to him, they are not merely philosophical or academic. He does not feel that they are something he has to force himself to take up. They are the centre of his life, the most vital things of all to him. Do we have to force ourselves to think about these things? Do we have to say, ‘It is Sunday again and I suppose I had better do so and so?’ Or do we delight in it, wishing, in a way, that we could spend every day looking into these things? Do we hunger and thirst after righteousness? Are these to us the most vital, momentous, central things? They are to the spiritual man, and they must be, because of what has happened to him. The principle of the life of Christ has come into him and he becomes like Christ.
And the last thing I would say about him is that he has an understanding of spiritual things which he never had before. John, in his first epistle, warns those first Christians against certain dangers and heresies. There is, he says, a sense in which he need not keep on reminding them, because they ‘have an unction from the Holy One’ (1 Jn 2:20). It is true of the Christian: he has a spiritual understanding of spiritual things, he knows the truth about the Lord Jesus Christ. There are people who are always arguing about the person of Christ. They are always in trouble and want to understand this, that and the other. But the spiritual man is not like that. I do not mean that he can necessarily explain everything to you. Look at those Corinthian Christians, the people of whom Paul said that they had ‘the mind of Christ’. They were not great philosophers, for, he says, ‘not many mighty . . . are called’. And yet you know they could see the Lord Jesus Christ in a way that the princes of this world could not. The Christian is the man who does not understand intellectually, he understands spiritually; he knows because of this principle of life that is come into him—life recognizes life.
The knowledge which is given to the Christian is almost an instinctive knowledge. I think the best analogy is this. It is comparable to the knowledge which a man has who is in love with a woman. It is not possible for him to sit down and write out a philosophical account of his love, he cannot explain it rationally: he knows it, but here his reason ceases. The great love which reason and knowledge do not understand—that is it. We know, because we have love and love recognizes love, and love attracts love. The little lamb cannot give you a rational reason why it should pick out one sheep as its mother but it knows that sheep is his mother. The Christian’s knowledge of his Lord is something like that, he knows and he knows the way of salvation. People say, ‘I cannot understand why one man had to die on the cross for all,’ but the Christian does understand. He cannot fully understand the doctrine of the atonement, but he is not in any trouble over the fact that the sins of the world were laid upon the innocent body of the Son of God. He has the mind of Christ and an understanding of these things by means of this unction of the Holy Spirit. Spiritual truths are not strange to him, they are life, they are everything. He delights in them, he lives by them and his one desire is to know more and more. Have you received ‘eternal life’? It is a gift, he gives it, he has done everything so that you may have it. You find that the things that used to interest you now carry no meaning to you, and these other things become the only things that matter.
Perish every fond ambition,
All I’ve sought, and hoped, and known;
Yet how rich is my condition—
God and heaven are still my own!
Henry Francis Lyte
The moment a man receives this life he becomes a kind of stranger in this world. They are pilgrims, strangers, sojourners, men who have their eyes set and fixed upon ‘the glory that remains’, though living still in this world of sin and shame.
God grant that we all may know that we have eternal life. If you know that you have not, confess it to God and ask him to give it to you by his Spirit. If you have it, dwell upon it that you may grow in grace and in the knowledge of God, and be changed from glory into glory even as you look at it and contemplate it.