Week 7 - Eternal Life
This week in summary| Day 1 : Eternal Life | 1 Thessalonians 1-2 |
| Day 2 : Then and Now | 1 Thessalonians 3-4 |
| Day 3 : Death and Life | 1 Thessalonians 5 |
| Day 4 : Prepare | 2 Thessalonians 1-2 |
| Day 5 : Planning | 2 Thessalonians 3 |
| Day 1 : Eternal Life | 1 Thessalonians 1-2 |
| Day 2 : Then and Now | 1 Thessalonians 3-4 |
| Day 3 : Death and Life | 1 Thessalonians 5 |
| Day 4 : Prepare | 2 Thessalonians 1-2 |
| Day 5 : Planning | 2 Thessalonians 3 |
"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." - Jesus (John 3:16)
In this statement from Jesus to a man named Nicodemus we have perhaps the most powerful and succinct description of the good news that He brings. There is a God who created the world, watched as that world separated itself from Him, and still reacted with a sacrificial love by sending His Son to ensure that world's restoration. We are invited to respond, to accept that sacrifice, and as a result are saved from condemnation and get to enjoy the rewards of the Kingdom, eternal life.
The Bible speaks about life and death both as physical and spiritual realities. Physically, there is no shortage of reminders of the frailty of our earthly existence. As we prepare our gardens we understand that some plants will return every year and some will only survive for one. Even the remains of a squirrel or possum that miscalculated either their own dexterity or the velocity of oncoming traffic reminds us that death is part of the comings and goings of daily life and that how we interact with the world and the decisions we make in it can have the ultimate physical consequence.
This frailty though, our greatest physical weakness, is transformed by the sacrifice of Jesus. When we are reconciled to God, we are reconciled to life as God created it to be. Death is a consequence of our own sin and life is an outpouring of God's love, as it has always been. The deterioration of our current bodies, although still an inevitable event, is stripped of all the accompanying fear, uncertainty, and finality.
Spiritually, life and death represent our standing of either being eternally under the care, protection and love of God or being forever separated from that love and protection. Eternity need not carry with it the question of whether we continue to exist; we are all beings who, once created, will always exist. The relevant question is in what way. Will we have eternal life in God's Kingdom or eternal death separate from His Kingdom? In this way we understand the spiritual descriptions of life and death not as existing vs. not existing but as descriptions of the type of existence we will experience.
Understanding this dual nature of life and death as both a physical and spiritual reality helps us to better comprehend some of the interesting things that Jesus had to say when it comes to life and death:
Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?" (John 11:25-26)
Notice what Jesus said earlier to Nicodemus is re-framed here with the same promise accomplished in the same way from the same source. As before, what remains is our choice to accept or reject this promise.
Often times when we speak of eternal life we do so as a gift yet to be given for a time that has not yet occurred. Although there is some truth in that, it is also true that the very nature of eternal life makes it just as real and relevant to our day to day physical lives as it does to the experience that is to come afterwards.
Towards the end of his life, John, one of the disciples of Jesus, wrote a letter to be shared among the churches in Asia Minor. The other 10 disciples of Jesus had long since died, martyred for their refusal to deny Jesus. John himself had been boiled alive in oil but survived only to be forced into exile. The churches John was writing to found themselves under not only physical and sociological persecution for their belief in Jesus but also under constant pressure to conform to the norms of the society around them, norms that ran counter to the life Jesus was calling them to. These were very real pressures that many of those in God's Kingdom still face today.
John's letter reminded these churches, as it does us today, how the eternal life found in Jesus informs how we react to the circumstances around us. When faced with trial and persecution in the service of the Kingdom, we do not shrink from death, for in death there is nothing to be feared. We cannot be threatened or coerced or brought to our knees for the greatest threat against our mortal bodies was stripped of its power. No man may end our existence any more than a mere man can claim the honor of creating it. Eternal life means that which mortal man will go to any length to preserve, a citizen of the Kingdom will go to any length to sacrifice if in the service of the King.
This sacrifice is not exclusive to physical persecution, it also means giving up the way of living that honors ourselves and our kingdom for a life that pursues the work of the Kingdom of God. Jesus at one point reminds a group of religious leaders that God is not God of the dead but of the living. His Kingdom is here, right now, and it brings with it eternal life that has already begun! Although we can take comfort in knowing what comes after our physical death, we are not called to simply put our heads down and "make it through" life until that time comes. We are to live and live abundantly with what remains of our physical existence under the confidence that doing so is just as much part of our eternal life as what follows.
I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse. - Isaac Asimov
One of the great deceptions in the world is that our physical death is the end of all things. This deception is rooted in a misguided faith in our own experiences. Our limited perspective is that of a physical being existing on the earth. We cannot speak to an afterlife that we have never experienced and the very nature of it means that we are not privy to the experiences of those that have gone before us. Using a standard that says what we can physically perceive is true and that anything outside of that is not true logically leads to the conclusion that there no such thing as eternal life. If we see a world around us that experiences death and cannot see it living again we conclude that it remains dead and life stops for good at that point.
However, there are complications with this understanding. It is far too simplistic to say that things we can physically perceive are true and that anything outside of that is not true. It is widely agreed upon that the atom is the basic building block of ordinary matter yet it has never been seen. Like gravity, although physically imperceptible, there are compelling reasons to believe in the atom's existence based upon how it behaves and impacts the world around it, just as a proper understanding of eternal life and God's presence in our lives can be evidenced in not only how we live but how our lives impact those around us.
To adhere to this belief we must also understand truth to be something that is able to change over time. The men who believed that the earth was flat were working with what they could perceive and calling it truth. However, their perspective was limited; they did not know that what they were seeing wasn't the whole picture and couldn't comprehend what information would need to exist for that perspective to be wrong. For us to accept that what is true is a product of what we can perceive, we would have to accept that truth itself changes with our perceptions. The fact is that the earth has always been round even when all mankind could perceive and understand was a flat earth. In the same way, the fact that an afterlife, an eternal life, cannot be perceived or experienced in our current state is not an appropriate basis to reject the possibility of its existence.
Finally, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There is simply no factual basis to reject the possibility of eternal life because of the belief that there is no evidence for it in this life. And even that requires us to reject the reality that the story of God presents. The experience of a rich man and a beggar named Lazarus shows us a man who has died who both seeks relief from his situation and for his family to be warned of its reality. Further, Jesus can be nothing if not a liar if eternal life does not exist as it is one of His explicit promises of the Kingdom. We cannot accept his wisdom of how to live if he we accept that he is so foolish to believe in a false reality after death.
Certainly, even if we can accept the reality of eternal life, it leaves a vast unknown ahead of us. Or does it? Isn't the God that gives us life today the same God that rules over the eternal life of tomorrow? Won't the character of our King, who presides over the real and present Kingdom, continue as his Kingdom comes into its fullness? And don't we know from the story of God that He created a world that was good; a world with many of the same things that we experience in creation today, just in a fallen state?
The story of not only our eternity but the eternity of the creation we exist in is one of transformation. Through God's love and justice we are redeemed and made new, but not in the sense of being replaced with something altogether different. We are made new in the sense that we are restored to what we were always meant to be. In that way, although it is likely true that eternal life will carry with it things we have not yet been able to comprehend, it seems unlikely it will be altogether foreign, for what was good once will be restored to being good again.
Take time today to prepare to facilitate your study group.
Identify 3 opportunities facing you right now that may advance your purpose and vision
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Identify 3 threats facing you right that hinder your purpose and vision
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3
| Strengths | Weaknesses | |
| Strengths - Opportunities | Weaknesses - Opportunities | |
|---|---|---|
Opportunities | Prayer: Plan: | Prayer: Plan: |
| Strengths - Threates | Weaknesses - Threats | |
Threats | Prayer: Plan: | Prayer: Plan: |