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‘That He Should Give Eternal Life to as Many as Thou Hast Given Him’

John 17:2

No one, I think, reading the New Testament, can fail to see that it is the most lyrical document. The great note that runs right through it all, in spite of the tragic things that it has to record, is the note of victory, and rejoicing. You find it in the gospels, and in the Acts of the Apostles, and you find it in the epistles. Our Lord himself, right under the shadow of the cross, spent a good deal of his time showing his followers how, in spite of the things that are about to happen to him, they could nevertheless be full of rejoicing. He has a joy to give them, he tells them, that no man can ever take from them. Temporarily, they will be cast down because of his crucifixion, but soon they are going to receive that joy which the world cannot understand and can never take away, and certainly the Acts of the Apostles is one of the most exhilarating books that has ever been written. In spite of everything those first Christians stood out, dominating the whole world, full of joy and rejoicing, and the great appeal in all the epistles in that those Christians to whom they were written, should rejoice. That is the great characteristic note of the New Testament, and the same thing has been true of all the great hymns of the church throughout the centuries.

Children of the heavenly King,

As ye journey sweetly sing,

says John Cennick, and as these men have contemplated their salvation in every century and every country it has been something that has always led them to ‘wonder, love and praise’. The note of praise is dominant and characteristic, and, therefore, this is what we, who claim to be Christian, should be experiencing. A miserable Christian is, in a sense, a contradiction in terms. A Christian is one who is meant to be rejoicing, full of a sense of wonder, of praise and of adoration as he contemplates this great salvation. Furthermore, he rejoices in spite of his circumstances, for the gospel of Jesus Christ, thank God, not only offers to make us happy when all is going well with us, its great aim is that we should be able to rejoice even in tribulation and in the worst circumstances. That is its plan, and this is something that we all ought to be experiencing. But, it we are honest and frank, I think that many of us would have to admit that that is not our condition, and I am suggesting in these studies that the real explanation of that is our failure to grasp and understand the greatness of this Christian salvation.

Now, so far, we have been concentrating on it from the godward side, and we have been trying to see salvation as conceived in the mind of the eternal God, planned before the foundation of the world, and the work divided up between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And I would say again that if, as the result of doing all that, we are still unmoved, we are still not amazed and astounded, if we still do not feel that this is the most precious and wonderful thing in the world and that everything else in comparison with this pales into utter insignificance, then, as I understand my New Testament, it is high time we examined ourselves very seriously and discovered whether we are Christian at all. If a man can contemplate this salvation as thus looked at from the standpoint of God himself without feeling its greatness, then I do not understand such a person. Surely if one really sees these things even dimly and vaguely, it must revolutionize one’s mind and it must be the dominating factor in the whole of our existence.

But now we must move on to a further aspect of the subject. I feel there is a second explanation of our failure to be rejoicing as we ought to be as Christians, and that is our failure really to grasp this salvation from our side, not only from God’s side, but also from our own. This is surely something that should fill us with a sense of astonishment. If we read our New Testament and consider what the gospel of Jesus Christ really offers us, and then look at ourselves and our life and experience, we are confronted by this tremendous gulf. So we go on to ask the obvious question—why do we rob ourselves like this? We have all this wealth and riches offered us, why are we so poor?

Now I suggest to you that this is really the problem that confronts us all. In a worldly sense, if we were offered great wealth and riches, we would need no encouragement to take hold of them and possess them. But here we are offered the greatest riches of all, the fullness of God, the treasures of grace and wisdom that God has placed for us in the Lord Jesus Christ, the fullness that the New Testament speaks of, that is available for us, and yet we continue in a state of penury and poverty. We are half-hearted and ill at ease and shuffling along, instead of availing ourselves of these greatest of all riches. Why is it? That is the great question. Why do Christian people need these encouragements and exhortations?

And the answer is, according to the Bible, that it is all due to sin. We have a mighty enemy and adversary of our souls, one whose supreme object is not only to rob God of his glory, but to rob God’s people of the things that God has provided for them. And, of course, as he robs us of the blessings, he is most effectively robbing God of his glory also, because, as far as this world is concerned, God’s greatest glory is his people. God expresses his praise and glory most of all in his people, so if God’s people are apologetic, hesitant, unhappy and uncertain, God is being robbed of his glory. Therefore the devil concentrates on that. The teaching of Scripture is that he is ever busy in trying to stand between us and a full realization of what God has intended for us in the Lord Jesus Christ.

He fights, he thwarts us, he dulls our faculties, he holds us down and he binds us to earth. So, as I see it, the great function of Christian preaching is not only to warn us of these things, but also, positively, to present before us the greatness of our salvation. For if once we see it from God’s side and from our side, then we will be able to resist the devil and he will flee from us. We will be able to resist him steadfastly and fully, and all his suggestions and all he tends to do to us personally in the physical sense. The ultimate way of conquering the devil is really to lay hold of this life that is offered us in the New Testament gospel, and that is the thing to which we are referring here.

According to this statement of our Lord here in his prayer to his Father, one of the objects which he had in view, in doing all the things that we have been looking at in so much detail, was that you and I might have eternal life. The plan in eternity, the laying aside of the glory, the incarnation, the birth in Bethlehem, all he endured for thirty-three years, all his preaching all his miracles, his death upon the cross, his resurrection, the ascension, the sending of the Holy Spirit—one of the great objectives for which all that was designed was that you and I might have eternal life. Here he is at the end, and he prays the Father, ‘The hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: as thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him.’

What then is this eternal life of which he speaks? Anyone who reads the New Testament must know at once that it is one of the central themes of the New Testament itself, and especially of this gospel of John. It is the theme above all else which is emphasized by John, not only in this gospel but also in his epistles. Take that well-known verse, John 3:16, ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son’—why?—’that whosoever believeth in him should not perish’—that is the negative, and here is the positive—’but have everlasting life.’ That is it! Again we read of the Lord saying, ‘I am come. . .’ Why did he come from God? Why did he leave the courts of heaven? Why did he humble himself? Why was he made in the likeness of sinful flesh? The answer is ‘that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly’ (Jn 10:10), And in John 6 you will find that he repeats it frequently: it is the great emphasis.

Paul, too, puts the same point when he says, ‘The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord’ (Rom 6:23). Thus, you see, it is the great central message of the New Testament. Paul is constantly dealing with it: ‘Reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord’ (Rom 6:11). This therefore is surely something which we must look at a little more closely, though I can only introduce the subject, because it is, as I have shown you, the great central theme of the New Testament, and obviously no man can even attempt to deal with it fully in just one discourse. I am going to show you certain things which are laid down here concerning the matter, before we go on to attempt to define it in detail.

The first principle that I would lay down is that the essence and the end of salvation is that we should have eternal life. What is a Christian? What is Christianity? The definition of the New Testament is that a Christian is a man who possesses eternal life. Perhaps the best way of emphasizing that is to consider how it is that we hold such a low view of Christianity and the Christian life. What is the average person’s conception of a Christian and what makes one a Christian?

There are many strange answers to that question. Some people seem to think of it in terms of country. They still speak about Christian countries and non-Christian countries, as if the whole country could be Christian. Then others think of it in terms of being christened when you were a child, or even baptized when you were an adult. Others think of it in terms of church membership, some action which is taken, some formality, a name on a register showing that you belong to a society or an institution, and they say that makes you a Christian. Others think of it as living a good life, following Christ and his teaching, trying to apply it personally, and getting other people to do the same, imitating his example, emulating the perfect specimen which he has provided for us. I am going up the scale, and that last, I think, is the highest, the best definition of a Christian that man by his own unaided understanding can ever arrive at.

But according to the New Testament, all that does not even begin to make one a Christian, and the world is very often quick to detect the hollowness of the claims in such people who call themselves Christian. I was reading of a distinction which I think was common among many Chinese people in past years. They called all the ordinary foreigners Christians, but others they called ‘Jesus people’. What they meant was that they regarded everybody who went to China from the West as Christians, because they came from so-called Christian countries, and most of them claimed that they were Christian. But the Chinese saw that they were often drunkards, and immoral and so on, and they felt that if that was Christianity then they did not want it. But then they found that there were other people who came from the same countries who also called themselves Christians. But these lived a pure, holy kind of life, they seemed to be out to help people, and were altogether different, and the Chinese began to call them ‘Jesus people’, because they seemed to be like the Lord Jesus Christ himself.

Now that is the way to make the distinction, so I want to go one step further and suggest that to be a Christian (and to know the very essence of Christian salvation), it is not even enough just to believe in the forgiveness of sins. The people I have been describing may not even have talked about forgiveness of sins, that was not the distinguishing feature. Because a man talks about forgiveness of sins in the Lord Jesus Christ, he is not of necessity a Christian, or at any rate his definition of a Christian is very imcomplete. The essence and the end of Christian salvation is the possession of eternal life: ‘As thou hast given him power over all flesh’—Why?—that their sins might be forgiven? No—‘that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him.’ That is what makes the difference, we must never stop short of that.

It is perhaps important that we should hurriedly glance at the relationship between these two matters. I feel that many go astray, and that many heresies have crept into the church at this point, because of the failure to see this. There is indeed a direct relationship between the forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Perhaps the best way to put it is that we must never think of the possession of eternal life as something in and of itself, as something that is directly possible. We must never think of the possession of eternal life unless we have first of all considered the forgiveness of sins. I know of many people today who say they are not interested in the terms justification and sanctification. But you ignore them at your peril, because the New Testament teaches us that justification and forgiveness are an absolute essential before you can receive eternal life. If you try to forget that this love of God first of all came by the way of forgiveness and justification, you will find that you are indulging in a false mysticism, and that you are deluding yourself and doing something that has often led people into the greatest misery and unhappiness. So while Christian salvation does not end at forgiveness, it does start there; there is no short cut to eternal life except via grace, repentance, justification, and acceptance in the sight of God. Eternal life is not the same as justification, it is based upon it. Justification is the preliminary cleansing of the ground.

Let me illustrate this. Take any of the buildings that were damaged during the war. There they were, crumbling and ruined, bits of wall standing here and there. Now before a new building could be put up on that site, the ruins had to be cleared away, the remaining walls pulled down, the rubbish taken away, and the site cleared. It is exactly like that in the Christian life, in this spiritual experience. You cannot possess eternal life from God, until the ruins caused by sin have been dealt with, and these can only be dealt with by the death of the Lord Jesus Christ upon the cross. We need to be reconciled to God before we can receive life from God. We must be justified from our sin and guilt in the sight of God before he will give us this blessing. It is in this way that we establish the relationship between the two. If you begin by seeking this life from God without forgiveness, that is the false way of mysticism. But on the other hand, you must not stop at justification, it is the basis on which we are entitled to ask God for this divine life, which is the essence of Christianity. John Wesley, for example, found his favourite definition of Christianity in the title of a book that was written in the sixteenth century by a Scotsman called Henry Scougal: The life of God in the soul of man. That is it, the possession of the life of God in one’s own soul. That is the essence and the end of salvation.

But we must proceed to lay down a second proposition, which is that by nature we all lack this life and are entirely without it. You notice how our Lord puts it here: ‘that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him’. The obvious implication there is that apart from this gift we are all without this life, and here again is something that is absolutely basic and vital to the whole of the New Testament position. We can see this, for example, in Ephesians 2:1–3: ‘And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.’

That is the condition and the position of the whole of mankind, until we receive this gift from the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now the question that obviously arises at once is this: how did mankind ever come into such a condition? It is important that we should realize that that is the truth about us, for if we do not realize it, then we are utterly dead in trespasses and sins, and the gospel has nothing to say to us, except to convict us of that fact. So the question is, how did man ever get into such a state? And the answer is to be found in Genesis 3—a vitally important and essential chapter. I find there are so many Christian people today who seem to think you can be fully a Christian and shed the first chapters of Genesis. ‘There is no need to believe in all that,’ they say, ‘because scientific knowledge has made it quite impossible.’

But let us see whether that is a tenable position or not. It seems to me that the biblical doctrine all hangs together, and that we will never see the true greatness of Christian salvation until we fully see and realize the nature of man. According to Scripture, the trouble with man by nature is not that he is incomplete but that he is dead. Now evolutionism tells us that man is just evolving out of the animal stage; he obviously has still a great deal of the bestial in him, but he is advancing up to perfection. The trouble is that he has not climbed high enough yet. But if that is true, then I have to cut out a great deal of my Bible, I have to eschew a great deal of that talk about being ‘the children of wrath’, for the Bible tells me that I am not only incomplete and inadequate, I am positively evil, I am under the wrath of God, I am subject to perdition because of something that is true of me. That is the meaning of the wrath of God. And that is not just Paul’s teaching. The Lord Jesus Christ said, ‘He that believeth on the Son of God hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him’ (Jn 3:36). No one taught this doctrine more clearly than our Lord himself, and that is why he said, ‘I am come that they might have life.’

All this, therefore can only be explained truly in terms of what we are told in Genesis. God made man and made him perfect, and then, we are told, God breathed into man the breath of life and he became a living soul. God thus breathed into man something of his own life, and in that state and condition man was a living soul enjoying the life of God and in correspondence with him. But God, you remember, told man that if he wanted to maintain that life he must be obedient. He could eat of all the trees of the garden, except the particular tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But man disobeyed, even though God had warned him what would have to happen. God had said, ‘But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die’ (Gen 2:17); and, remember, death does not only mean physical death, it means, still more, spiritual death, falling out of relationship with God, and out of correspondence with him.

And the account goes on to tell us what happened. Man disobeyed and though hitherto he had delighted in hearing the voice of God in the Garden, the moment he disobeyed, the link was broken and the voice of God frightened him. But God did not stop at that, he threw man out of the Garden and placed cherubim and a flaming sword to prevent man from going back to that perfect life. Left in his own strength and power, man is condemned to a spiritual death. He loses the voice of God, and the possession of life eternal. From there on man is a creature without a knowledge of God. He lives in ignorance, indeed he becomes an enemy of God. He is, the Bible teaches, dead to spiritual things. He does not enjoy or see any point in prayer; doctrine is mere theory to him, not in any way relevant to his life; and, the Bible tells us, he is now of his father the devil, manifesting in his nature and life the characteristics of the devil, the worst of which is enmity against God, and a hatred of him.

Now it seems to me that this doctrine of the fall which I have been putting to you, is an essential part of the biblical doctrine of salvation. Man has lost this eternal life, which is why he is under the curse and wrath of God, and needs to be given this gift of life. This is not something that I have deduced from the Scriptures, you will find it stated explicitly in I Corinthians 15: ‘For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive’, and you will find it also in Romans 5. So I suggest to you that the work of the Lord Jesus Christ—the work of which he says here, ‘I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do’—cannot be truly understood until we understand this doctrine of the fall. We do not need some human knowledge telling us that we just have to be raised up and so drawn up a little bit higher. No! We need to be delivered from the wrath of God. It is because of the fall that man is dead in trespasses and sins; he is spiritually dead and that is why he is in that condition.

Let me go on to my next proposition, which is that eternal life is a gift from God. That is made very plain by our Lord’s words: ‘that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him’, and I think that this follows very logically from what I have just been saying. There is, indeed a perfect logic and wholeness in scriptural doctrine, and if you trip up over one part, then the whole of the doctrine is going to be involved. Man, though spiritually dead decided to live the life of God, but he could never produce or generate that life for himself. It is impossible, he was not allowed to do so—there was that flaming sword to bar his way back to that life from which he was dismissed. It cannot be done, no man can ever make himself a Christian, for no man can ever produce the Christian life within himself.

Not only that, it is something that we never arrive at, it is something that we never merit. It does not matter what good you may do, you will never win eternal life. You may have spent the whole of your life in doing good works, but I say that you have no more right to eternal life than the most dissolute vagrant in the world today. You say you believe in attending a place of worship and doing good, but I say that if you are trusting to these things you are condemning yourself. All our righteousness is but as ‘filthy rags’, our greatest virtues are ugly and foul in the sight of God, because they are all tainted by sin. ‘The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord’ (Rom 6:23): we are saved by grace ‘through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God’ (Eph 2:8). The whole message of the New Testament is the message of the grace of God, the gift to undeserving sinners, and we only have eternal life when we receive it as a gift.

There is one further point, which is that there is only one person who can give us the gift and that is the One who is praying: ‘As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him.’ It is Christ alone who can give us this eternal life. Once more we see the terrible danger of mysticism, or at any rate of the mysticism which does not make Christ central. There are many people in the world who are anxious to possess this life of God. You will find them writing about it, and one of the most remarkable examples of this has been Aldous Huxley, who used to be a complete sceptic, but who came to believe that nothing can save the world but mysticism, and who became a Buddhist for that reason. Such men believe that there is this eternal life of God to be had, that what we need is that life of God in ourselves and that our trouble is that we have not got it. They are using the same definition as Henry Scougal, but notice the difference: these people think that they can get this life of God in themselves without mentioning the Lord Jesus Christ at all. You get it, they say, by contemplation of the Absolute, by increasingly sinking into the eternal and being lost in him, because as you do so, you are receiving life from him.

I do not want to sound unsympathetic. I think it is a good thing that men and women are beginning to see that man alone is insufficient. It is all right as far as it goes, but the vital question is, how do you see it? It is possible to talk about sinking into the heart of the Eternal, but it takes many forms and assumes many guises. There are those who tell you that you can know God and begin to share his life immediately just as you are. They say that the moment you begin to feel your need of God all you have to do is to turn to God and he will begin to speak to you. They do not mention the Lord Jesus Christ at all.

But, my friends, it is he and he alone who can give eternal life. He claims it here and Scripture says it everywhere: ‘As thou hast given him power over all flesh that he should give eternal life. . .’ There is no one else who can give eternal life to man except the Lord Jesus Christ. If it were possible in any other way, why did he ever come to earth? Why did he work as a carpenter? Why did he endure all he endured? Why the death on the cross? Why the agony and the shame and the blood-stained sweat? There is no other way—the whole plan of salvation centres on him. He alone is the giver of eternal life, and we seek life from God in any other way at our greatest and gravest peril. I am not denying that you may have had experiences, but it is my business to proclaim that whatever happiness you may find, whatever release and freedom, whatever guidance, whatever magic, whatever miraculous things may seem to be happening to you, unless you obtain them directly and only through the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, it is not life from God, and you are the victim of a terrible delusion. One day you will awaken to find that that is a fact; it is he and he alone who is the giver and the transmitter of the life of God to the souls of men.