This Is Life Eternal

W. Carl Ketcherside

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     The Christian religion is perfectly adapted to the needs of man as he is. As man is a creation of the Word of God, so the religion he requires is a revelation of the word of God. It is not a discovery made by man but an uncovering of the thoughts of God for man. It is not so much the result of man's search for God as it is a revelation of God seeking for man. While man is in the flesh he exists in three time dimensions--past, present and future. He lives in the past by memory and in the future through expectation. This exalts him above the animal creation and demonstrates his rationality. It also emphasizes his need of religion.

     The Revised Standard Version has the psalmist saying, "What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him? Yet thou hast made him little less than God" (Psalm 8:4, 5). This is correct. The word here rendered "God" is elohim, the same as found in Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." One who is "little less than God" must be a responsible being and thus ever aware of shortcomings and frailties in the flesh. At the same time, he must revolt against the thought of the utter termination of his existence and the extinction of his personality. Crushed between the sins and failures of yesterday and the dread of death tomorrow, he has no present. He is here in the flesh but his mental self, the real being, is elsewhere, existing in one of the other dimensions. Man is said to be depressed when he is compressed or crushed between two weights. The guilt of the past creates anxiety and the fear of the future produces anxiety. Caught between these he becomes a helpless victim with the walls closing in upon him. As the present shrinks and he dwells more and more in the past or future, both of which are now unreal, he eventually withdraws from all reality. He then has no real existence except the physical and even this is affected and impaired in his morbid state. The whole purpose of Christianity is to enable man to recapture the present, for only the present is life.

     It is true that Jesus Christ is said to be "the same yesterday, and today, and forever," but that is accommodative language. There is no past or future for that which is uncreated and eternal. The purpose of the Christian revelation is to make man more like God, to fit him for fellowship with the divine, and this requires making man ever conscious of the present. When Moses watched the flock of Jethro in the wilderness about Horeb, and his mind reverted to the circumstances of his exile and contemplated the possibilities of freeing his people from slavery, his reveries were disturbed by the voice of God. But before God could arrest his attention he had to arouse him from the distractions of the past and future.

     The record of the event is very enlightening. The angel appeared in a flame of fire in the midst of a bush. First, Moses looked, then began talking to himself, "I will turn aside and see this great sight." "When God saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, 'Moses, Moses!'" Moses replied, "Here I am." God then instructed him to go to the slaves and say, "I AM has sent me to you." When a man can truly speak to God and say "Here I am" then the I AM will be there. God can never be "I Was" or "I Will Be" for Deity has no past or future tense.

     If man is to have fellowship with God and with the Son he must recapture a sense of the present, that is, he must experience eternal life. He must be freed from the burden of guilt in the past and from his fear of death in the future. It was to accomplish precisely this state that Jesus was manifested to the apostles who heard him, saw him and handled him. "The life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us...so that you may have fellowship with us; and our fellowship is with the Father and

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with his Son Jesus Christ" (1 John 1:2, 3). It is ridiculous to talk about eternal life being merely a future prospect, for there is no such thing as living in the future. When the future arrives it is the present. If a man does not have eternal life in the present he will not have it in the future. "And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who has not the Son has not life. I write this to you to believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life" (1 John 5:11-13).

     One who has the Son has life for the simple reason that he has recaptured his present through Christ. Guilt and anxiety shrink our horizons to nothingness and the world closes in upon us. Our guilt is simply our past "open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do" (Heb. 4:13). It becomes a complex because we are able to do but are unable to undo. Our problem is that we have not the power to regard the past as past, we project it into the present. We cannot simply stop and start over because every time we start we are stopped by thought of our past.

     Only God can remedy this and he does so by making us a new creation in which the past actually passes. "Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old has passed away, behold, the new has come" (2 Cor. 5:17). Note that the new is present, not future. It is not something "to come" but a state that "has come." It is present. But, can we forget our past, so long as we can think? It is not necessary that it be forgotten by us but that we have a consciousness it has been forgiven by Him. The sense of guilt stems not so much from the act committed as from the fact that it is unremitted.

     Jesus took our past by assuming our guilt. "For your sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor. 5:21). Paul recalled that he ''formerly blasphemed and persecuted and insulted" Jesus (1 Tim. 1:13) but he could say, "Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal" (Phil. 3:13). The reason is clear. "I received mercy because I acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus...but I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience for an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life" (1 Tim. 1:13, 14, 16).

     Just as Jesus took our past upon himself by being made sin, so he removed our anxiety for the future by becoming our hope (1 Tim. 1:1). This be accomplished by devitalizing death. "Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise took part of the same nature, that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage" (Heb. 2:14, 15). It is an incongruity to think of a son of God being frightened by death. Only the sons of men have such fears. So the Son of God became the Son of man that the sons of men might become the sons of God. Through him we are "more than conquerors."

     The cross of Christ removed our fear of the past, the open tomb our fear of the future. The grave is not the end but the beginning of a richer experience. A Christian does not leave home at death; he goes home. So Jesus can say, "Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself" (Matt. 6:34). The world no longer closes in upon us but opens up before us. Our horizons are pushed back behind and before us so that there is no setting sun "and night shall be no more" (Rev. 22:5). "Forgetting the past" and "having no anxiety for tomorrow" we live in the divine present as well as in the divine presence, and we live in the first because of the last.

     The pressures of the world are still there. They are all about us but they are rendered helpless by a superior force

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within us. "Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world." The reason is given by Jesus, "In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world" (John 16:33). It is true that we are in the world but it is also true that we are in Christ and he is in us. So long as we are in him the world cannot overcome us; so long as he is in us we can overcome the world. We are protected because we are in him; we are powerful because he is in us.

     "We know that we ourselves are children of God and we also know that the world around us is in the power of the evil one. We know too that the Son of God has actually come to this world, and has shown us the way to know the one who is true. We know that our real life is in the true one, in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the real God and this is real, eternal life" (1 John 5:19, 20).