It is worthy of observation that we find only one mention of everlasting or eternal life in the Old Testament—Dan. 12:2, where it refers to those who “sleep in the dust of the earth.” We are indebted for the revelation of it to a later dispensation. It is a New Testament doctrine, and, blessed be God, a present fact.
Passing over Matthew, Mark, and Luke, who rarely mention it, and always connect it with the future, it is only in the writings of John—the Gospel and First Epistle bearing his name—that we find it revealed and unfolded fully. Paul speaks of it, as recorded in the Acts and in Romans, &c, but the Holy Ghost has evidently made John to be specially the exponent of this personal, heavenly, divine doctrine of our eternal life in Christ, while Paul gives us some additional revelation in Timothy and Titus, as to its being the subject of promise before the world.
Turning to John’s Gospel, we find the Lord, for the first time, presenting the doctrine to Nicodemus, and in the most striking way—the lifting up of the brazen serpent by Moses had been the typical rehearsal of this gift of eternal life, the determinate purpose of God’s heart, with a view to which, and for its fulfillment, He had given His Son in fullness of time to the world, the incontestable demonstration of a love which finds its only adequate expression in the bestowal of eternal life upon the dead, and its only just measure in what it cost His heart to entrust that blessed One to those who would hate Him without a cause!
At the close of that third chapter, John the Baptist, who had doubtless gathered the doctrine from Christ, is seen communicating it in the most definite way in connection with faith, to his own disciples and certain of the Jews. In chapter iv., to the woman at the well, the Lord presents it in connection with the Holy Ghost—the living water. And to His own disciples in relation to the ingathering of the fruit by those who toil for Him in the ripe fields that wait for harvesting. In chapter 5:24, the Lord emphatically and solemnly, as indicated by the words “Verily, verily,” presents it as the immediate, present, and necessary result of faith in Him. The following chapter, which gives us the feeding of the five thousand, and the teaching of Christ as to the truth of His own person being the true manna, the true bread, bread of God, and bread of heaven, shows the connection between feeding upon Him and everlasting life which He was giving—who was the sealed one of God the Father—for that object. The 40th verse goes on to the personal act of Christ in raising up at the last day those who have the everlasting life—which here He pledges Himself to supplement with resurrection.
But this same chapter deepens the subject to our souls in the 53rd and 54th verses, in its manifest connection with the redemption work of Christ—the alone basis for God’s wondrous purpose of grace, so blessedly laid in the death of His Son; the lesson taught us evidently being that the possession of eternal life synchronizes with our personal association with Christ in the knowledge of Him in redemption who is the Son of the living God, who has the words of eternal life, and other than whom we have none to go to, as Peter confesses in verses 68 and 69.
In a remarkable scripture in chapter 12, the Lord teaches us that in sending Him, His Father had given Him “a commandment” (v. 49) adding “and I know that his commandment is life everlasting:” What a blessed picture of grace is this, the Father gives His behest to the Son whom He is sending into the world; and what is it? Not the exaction of His rights from ruined debtors. Not the execution of His sentence on rebels against His authority. Not reproach, and reproof, and denunciation, and threatenings of judgment and wrath. No! but one word, but one commandment, and that alike for all. God’s be-best to Christ concerning a lost world, God’s commandment concerning those who are dead in trespasses and sins, is summed up in this one blessed word—“Life everlasting.” “Whatsoever,” Christ adds, “I speak therefore, even as the Father said unto me, so I speak.”
So in communion with His Father in chapter 27, He speaks of the power given Him over all flesh, “That he should give eternal life” to as many as had been given Him, more fully spoken of in the next verse —“This is life eternal that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent”—together showing out the connection between the eternal life as the plenitude of divine power and as the revelation of the Father and the Son.
Full of the same thought, in 1 John 1:2, he says, “For the life was manifested and we have seen it and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us.” But a marked advance is seen here, the eternal life being identified with Himself, who in the gospel is seen as the revealer of it only. In chapter 2:24, 25, continuance in the Son and in the Father is predicated of the eternal life according to promise. In the last chapter (v. 10, 11) he sums up the record that God gave of His Son—“That God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son;” affirming too, that he had written these things to believers in the name of the Son of God, that they might know that they had it—the eternal life, closing the epistle as he began it by identifying that life with the Son Himself: thus, “And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life.”
We have thus traced the subject through these writings of the apostle John. Let us in conclusion ask the reader if, through faith in Him around whom every aspect of it clusters, who is its center and its bounds, he has possessed himself of that eternal life concerning which God has spoken in His own word, and about which, in character with its deep significance, He speaks to us in so blessed and varied a way. Its nucleus is the person of the Son of God, and its circumference the infinite value and eternal efficacy of the work of Him who was also Son of man! He who has by the Holy Ghost presented it as an evangelist in the Gospel that we should understand it, takes pains, as an apostle, in the Epistle that our hearts may be fully assured that we have got it. We see it connected with the will and purpose of God before the world; alike with His promise and His commandment; and in the gift of His Son in grace this was the avowed object He had in view, manifested alike in the person and in the work of Christ—even life everlasting! Have I got it?