The Getting and Giving of Eternal Life

“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.” – John 3:16
What kind of life is eternal life? Some people mistakenly think it is pretty much the same thing as our ordinary lives here and now, but the difference will be instead of ending at death it will go on forever. When Jesus and the authors of Holy Scripture talk about “eternal life,” though, they have something else in mind—a life that shares God’s own life. In other words, if we want to think about the meaning of eternal life, we must begin with the meaning of God’s own life. For God’s own life is what we look forward to sharing in Christ’s kingdom and what we strive to share in limited ways here and now as we live with God’s Spirit within us.
Whatever God’s life is like, we know it will be different than the ordinary living we have today that is marred by sin and its ugly consequence of death. Ordinary life is steeped in fear because ordinary life thinks in terms of possession and ownership. We think we own our own lives. Likewise, we think we own our possessions. And we fear losing either or both. But God’s life isn’t that way at all.
Long ago God’s people fought long and hard over what Christians should believe about the God who spoke through Jesus Christ. Some people argued god must be independent, above all else. They could not imagine a god worthy of human worship who could sully itself with limited beings or things like humans and the created universe. No. The independent god must also be the alone god. Were god to interact with us mere mortals it would only do so indirectly through some created agent who represented its interests. This god could never share himself. This god could never give of himself.
As reasonable as a god like this might be, God’s people concluded that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who is also the God of Jesus Christ has revealed himself to be different in his Holy Scripture. Although there is just one God, this same God has revealed himself to be Father, Son, and Spirit. Jesus says that just “as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (John 5:26). Or as John opens his Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Jesus revealed that God indeed shares his own life. God is at his very core a giver. And he gives of himself.
The early church concluded that Jesus’ promise of the gift of eternal life offers us the same kind of life Jesus has. “What he is by nature, we are by grace,” they would say. If Jesus’ life is one of sharing and giving, then our eternal life in him is also one of sharing and giving. No longer are we to be steeped in fear of losing what we think is “ours.” No longer do we approach life as our own possession that is intended to get more possessions. Life itself is no longer about what we can get, because eternal life is about what we can give. Arthur McGill says, “That is why a person’s turning to Jesus has been called a ‘birth,’ since it is believed to involve his entering a new life and not simply his enhancing the life that he already possesses. And because the new life is God’s own, this birth makes him a ‘child of God’ in a very precise sense. Now he is not only made by God, like other creatures, as a vase is made by the artisan, but he is made alive by God’s own vitality, as a child is informed by the life of his parents.”
God gives. God’s mission is to share his own life with humans made in his image by graciously saving them from sin, death, and the Devil through the good news of Jesus Christ. God’s people, his church, are to share in his mission and give of themselves in doing so. They are not to be focused on what they can get, because what they got was eternal life—the giving kind of life.