What is Eternal Life?

1 John 1:1-4

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. ^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. ^3 We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. ^4 We write this to make our joy complete.

In less than four weeks we will vote on three motions that will determine if we move forward with a building program. It has been a slow process but we have made progress so far. We have our land and we are paying down the mortgage. We have a building plan, we have a fantastic sweat equity plan through Solid Rock Builders and we have a fundraising plan. Think what you want, but that is clearly good progress. If we don’t vote yes on at least two out of three of the motions we cannot start to build. I am not suggesting that you must vote yes, but merely pointing out the facts. But even if all three motions do pass, it does not mean that we will build next year. If we don’t raise enough money in a capital campaign, then we will not be able to build. But more than the mere facts of finances, brick and mortar, we must be certain of our reasons and motives for wanting to build. Do we as a church and do you personally have a vision for why we should build a church facility? Is it because we are tired of paying rent in this tired, old building where the paint is peeling off the walls and we drip with sweat for half of the summer? Is it because you are embarrassed to bring your friends to church? These aren’t necessarily bad reasons to build, but by themselves they are inadequate at best and selfish at worst.

Might I suggest the right reason to build a church facility? Using the language in verse two, the best reason for building our own church facility is so that we can proclaim the truth. If a building will help us to proclaim the truth then we should do it and if a building won’t help us accomplish this purpose then we’d better not waste our time. After all, this town has a lot of nice church buildings, but not all of them are proclaiming the truth. The last thing Viroqua needs is another church building. If you are not committed to proclaiming the truth, then you should probably vote down all three motions. If our task is to proclaim the truth, an even more fundamental point is what does it mean to proclaim the truth? The apostle John who wrote these three letters—1, 2 and 3 John, also wrote the gospel of John. What is the most famous verse in the gospel of John? John 3:16, right? “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Is that what it means to proclaim the truth—believe in Jesus and you will have eternal life? In its most simplistic sense, this is the proclamation of the truth, but dare I say it is oversimplified? John 3:16 is absolutely true, but by itself it is not the complete truth.

Let me explain what I mean. Suppose you were sent as a missionary to an unreached tribe in South America. Now suppose after about two years of hard work you had figured out their language in a rudimentary way and were able to translate short Bible verses into their tribal language. It would be natural for you to be excited about this so you decide to translate John 3:16 into their language. After you finish translating the verse you are even more excited. You run from the little hut where you live, stop the first native person you can find and you speak John 3:16 in their native language. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Have you just proclaimed the truth to your native friend? Of course what you just said is true. It must be true because it was originally spoken by the mouth of Jesus himself. Every word is true, but the truth of the words will be mostly nonsense to your native listener. You have spoken true words to him but you have not proclaimed the truth. Let’s take this verse phrase by phrase to show you what I mean.

“For God so loved the world” Your friend no doubt has a category for the concept of God, but in that category, he probably doesn’t have just one god but rather many gods. If you tell him that God loved the world, he won’t know which God you are referring to. Second, he probably doesn’t have any idea what it means for God to show love. He may have spent his entire life appeasing the angry gods of sun and rain so that his tribe would have enough food to eat. A God who loves is a brand new idea to him.

“that he gave his one and only Son”  What part of this phrase might be difficult for your friend? How about the fact that God has a son? He might think you mean that one of the gods came down and had sexual relations with a woman who gave birth to a half-man, half-god son. What does it mean for God to have a son, and if he has a son, why would he give him to us?

“that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”  Anything difficult here? Would your friend understand what it means to believe in God? Of course he believes in god or in gods. There are no atheists in his tribe—everyone believes in the gods, in fact, he cannot even conceive of not believing in the existence of gods. He knows he already believes in god or gods, so what does he understand about the last part—“shall not perish but have eternal life?” Most likely the word for “perish” was translated into his language as “die”. He might think that simple belief in the existence of gods would mean that he will never die—that he will live forever. This would not make sense to him because he knows that everyone dies. How can a man live forever and not die?

You successfully translated John 3:16 into a new language and spoke the words to your friend, but have you proclaimed the truth to him? He is left with nothing but a long string of questions. He knows nothing of Jesus or which god you were talking about. Other questions are: what is sin, what is love, why do we need to be loved, how are we loved, what is perishing, what is eternal life? Am I saying that John 3:16 is not true? Let me be clear—John 3:16 is absolute truth, but under normal circumstances, John 3:16 is not sufficient to save a person. If it was, why would John have written twenty one chapters when one verse would have sufficed? Why do we have four gospels instead of one? Why do we have sixty-six books in the Bible?

Why was Pentecost so wildly successful? Why were three thousand souls saved on the day of Pentecost in Acts chapter two? The simple answer is that the Holy Spirit was poured out on the people and they repented and believed in Christ. That is true, but the other reason three thousand souls were saved on Pentecost is because they were Jews who had a full understanding of the promised Messiah. They had a background and a context for receiving Jesus as their Messiah. When Peter preached to them he quoted from no less than three key passages from the Old Testament. Those three thousand souls were saved because they understood the gospel and the Holy Spirit granted them repentance and eternal life.

This last winter I was sitting in my office and got a phone call from a young man living in Readstown whom I had never before met. In brief, this is what he said to me: “My life is a mess and I need to find God—can you help me out?” How do you think I answered him? I said, “You know, at the corner of Hwy 12 and Maple St. there’s a nice little building that’s home to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Why don’t you stop in there? Maybe they can help you out.” No, I said, “How fast can you get here?!” We talked for a while on the phone and he came by the office at his earliest convenience. We talked for over three hours that first day and over the next several weeks we talked for about twenty more hours. Most of that time was spent listening to him and pouring over the Scriptures together. I shared the gospel over and over again using a multitude of Scriptures, answering his questions and filling in missing gaps in his understanding. He moved to Minneapolis before he was at the point of receiving Christ as his Savior. Was our time together a failure because I did not get a conversion out of it? Absolutely not! We needed to spend that much time together because he had extremely little knowledge of the Scriptures and the gospel. At Pentecost, the Jews had a full container of understanding that helped them receive Christ, but this man came to me with an empty container that needed to be filled with Scriptures and a fuller understanding.

This morning we are starting a new series through the book of 1 John and I share all of this as background to the book because John’s readers had probably read the gospel that bears John’s name. Many of his readers were believers and many were not, but despite their good beginning, there were still false teachers and false beliefs about the gospel. Other than the gospels and Acts, isn’t that what the rest of the New Testament is all about—correcting false teaching about the gospel? Sound Biblical teaching leads to saving faith and produces right living and the reverse is true also—false beliefs leads a person away from faith and right living. How many times (7) in 1 Corinthians did Paul say, “Do you not know?” For example in chapter six he wrote, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?” The believers in Corinth were visiting prostitutes, at least in part, because they had poor knowledge about the gospel. If the believers really would have understood this teaching about their bodies, they probably would not have been regular customers with the prostitutes. Sound doctrine leads to faith and right living and false beliefs lead away from faith and right living.

But how can right belief alone lead to right living, because we all know people who seemed to have all of the right beliefs and they still did terrible things and abandoned the faith. Is correct doctrine enough? This may surprise you, but I think this is one of the main messages of 1 John. Correct doctrine will always lead to right living, but one with caveat—you can’t merely have a mental agreement with the truth but, as John said, you have to be able to bear witness to the truth. Those who can bear witness to the truth, those who are touched by the truth in a special way will remain in the faith and pursue right living.

When I read the first four verses in 1 John, did it sound like John was repeating himself? It sounds like John is repeating himself because he actually is repeating himself for emphasis and clarity. If we put these four verses into a table format I think we can understand it better and we won’t get bogged down in the repetition of words.

John begins by describing his subject matter but he does not explicitly identify his subject right away. His first description is “that which was from the beginning.” Whatever John is describing, this thing had been around since the beginning. Do you see how this is an echo of John’s own gospel? “In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God,” which is itself an echo of Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Do you see why we need to have containers of entire Biblical truths? Because with the first phrase of this letter, John quickly tied together the entire message of the Bible, from Genesis through the gospels into this late first century letter. If you have little or no knowledge of the Bible you cannot possibly understand what John means. This truth John is describing was not only present at the beginning of all things, he actually means to imply that this truth is itself eternal.

In our day, truth is relative and is being changed to fit neatly and easily into our personal lives. The modern man is not changed by an absolute truth, rather he creates his own truth. But John will not allow such a category as relative truth. The truth he is describing had no beginning. This truth is eternal an unchanging. Next John said that he heard this truth which he repeats in verse three. Many people claim to have heard their version of the truth. Mohammed heard his truth from an angel. Likewise, Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, claimed to have heard his truth from the angel Moroni. Jim Jones heard his truth and forced 800 of his followers to drink poisoned Kool-Aid. David Koresh heard his truth and dozens of woman and children were burned alive in Waco, Texas. All cult leaders and false prophets hear some form of truth. Hearing is important, but it is not enough.

John further describes this truth by claiming to have seen it. He makes this claim not once, but four times in the first three verses. Moreover, John twice claims that this truth appeared to him. I suppose that Joseph Smith could say that he saw the angel Moroni. Thousands of people claim to have seen visions of Jesus or the Virgin Mary on everything from a tree trunk to a piece of burnt toast. Do you remember that mage of Jesus on  apiece of toast that was for sale on Ebay a few years back? Hearing and seeing are important, but they are not enough.

Next John claims to have touched this truth with his own hands, and not just him, but he claims to be one of only many witnesses who touched this truth. Now this is a unique claim. Mohammed never claimed to have touched an eternal truth. Joseph Smith never claimed to have touched an eternal truth. To my knowledge, outside of Christianity, no one has ever claimed to have touched an eternal truth. What is this eternal truth which broke into history? What is this eternal truth which allowed itself to be heard with human ears, seen with human eyes and actually touched with human hands? In verse one John calls this eternal truth “the Word of Life” and in verse two he calls is “the eternal life”. What is the Word of life which is also eternal life? It’s not a what, is it? It is a whom. It is Jesus Christ. The eternal truth Jesus Christ broke into history in a fantastic way and allowed himself to be heard, seen and touched.

What I want us all to grasp this morning is this: John calls Jesus “eternal life,” therefore, eternal life is not a thing. Eternal life is a person. This eternal Word of life moved from the immaterial, and eternal Spirit realm in unbroken fellowship with his Father, and he appeared to us, not as a thing, but as a someone who could be heard, seen and touched. John was literally a witness to this eternal truth and also bore witness to this truth. Our normal way of thinking about eternal life is that it is something that awaits us in the future. Eternal life means that our spirits will never die and when Christ returns, we will receive new glorified bodies and we will live forever. This is one aspect of eternal life, but eternal life is not just a thing we get, it’s not just an eternal existence, no matter how wonderful that is, but eternal life is Jesus Christ. Eternal life is a person, not a thing.

This is so necessary to understand because we so often depersonalize the Christian life. The thing we like most about being a Christian is that we will live forever in Heaven which also means we won’t live forever in Hell. In that sense, we have eternal life, but when we think this way we have depersonalized eternal life and made it into a thing instead of a person. The rest of the world claims to believe some kind of impersonal truth, but we bear witness to the eternal truth which is a person. But when we depersonalize our faith, the rest of our Christian life is also depersonalized.

For example, we know that we have eternal life, so we follow God in the hope of getting more impersonal things. We try to follow the Bible in the hope that God will help us quit smoking or lose weight. We want our husbands to love us. We want our wives to respect us. We want our children to obey us. We want our job to be fulfilling. We want enough money to buy certain things. We want our past to be forgotten. We want our future to be assured. We want our families to be safe. We want to overcome our anger. We want to have victory over lust. We want, we want, we want. It’s not that these are necessarily bad things Most of them in fact are good things, but the problem is that we have depersonalized Christianity to the point that what we want is things. We want eternal life and the benefits of being a Christian, but what we miss out on is the person of Jesus. Eternal life is not a thing—it is a person. The gift of salvation is not the fact that we live forever. The gift of salvation is a person. We cannot hear, see and touch an impersonal truth, but we can hear, see and touch a person. Perhaps not in precisely the same way that John heard, saw and touched Christ, but no less real. We bear witness to a person. Christ himself must be our treasure, not just the gifts that he gives us.

Why does John want us to understand this eternal Word of life? In verse three he wrote, “so that you too may have fellowship with us.” We are going to stop here, but let me leave you with this thought: until I studied this passage, I never really understood the meaning of fellowship, or the Greek word you might know which is koinonia. If you can be here next Sunday I promise you that you will never look at fellowship the same way again.

Rich Maurer

May 27, 2007