DON'T FOLLOW THE CROWD

ETERNAL LIFE

He that believeth on the Son hath eternal life. JOHN 3:36

THE FIRST WORD OF JESUS IS, REPENT. WHEN MEN, hearing that call, indeed change their mind, and ask, “What must we do to work the works of God?” He answers, “This is the work of God that ye believe on Him Whom He hath sent.” Believe that you were one of the people He came down to die for. The question then arises, if a man accepts that need and believes this was a personal trip on his behalf, what is the issue of such belief? Is your life in such ruin and need? The answer is, “He that believeth on the Son hath eternal life.” Life of a new quantity and quality.

        No question can be more interesting or more vital than that which questions the meaning of this phrase, “eternal life.” A partial definition narrows the outlook and gives half a conception which may be false because partial. For instance, eternal life has been thought of too often as though it were a quantity. It is a quantity; but if we think of eternal life only as a quantity we miss the profoundest and most wonderful truth about it.

        Eternal life is a quality, and therefore a quantity. A man who has eternal life never dies, he cannot die; death for him is abolished, made not to be, is swallowed up in victory. He may fall on sleep (“she is not dead, she is asleep”) with regard to one manifestation of his life, the purely earthly and physical, but he never dies. Jesus proved that fact for us. They put Him in a grave as they shall one day for us but we will not stay there as He didn’t. John says more about eternal life than any other of the New Testament writers. Let us take two parentheses, one in the beginning of his gospel, the other in the beginning of his first epistle.

        That in the Gospel reads: “And we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father” (John 2:14).

        That in the Epistle reads: “And the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you the life, the eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us” (1 John 1:2).

John declared in each of these passages that if we would know what eternal life is we must know Jesus Christ. He declared that he saw eternal life in a Person, in Jesus. Very remarkable are the words he used, suggesting a merging of the tangible and the intangible. “The Word of life,” seen, touched, handled, all which means that John came to know eternal life by knowing Christ. Eternal life is no more a mystery, but a revelation, no more something concerning which we have to speculate; it has been revealed in a Person. Those words from the great intercessory prayer of Christ contain the same thought: “This is life eternal, that they should know Thee, the only true God, and Him whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.”

Get His book out and get to know Him, the Word of Life, which by the way is eternal in its makeup. I will continue on this blog to make Him known to all who read. His call to follow Him starts on a very narrow road but it widens vastly as you near the end He takes you. Not so for the sinner who is on a wide path that goes to solitary confinement as Judas displayed for us. He went to his own place in Acts 1.

Matt 7:13 Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leads to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat; Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leads unto life, and few there be that find it.

Don’t follow the crowd!!!!