Lesson for the Lord’s Day
And this is the promise that He hath promised us, even eternal life. 1 John 2:25
Sadly, there are some who call themselves Christians who are terrified every day of committing a sin that will cause them to lose their salvation. They are even more terrified that, should they commit such a sin, and they die before they have time to confess that sin and restore their relationship with God, they would be forever lost. How thankful we should be that God has given to us the clear and plain revelation of His Word that salvation is neither conditional nor temporary. I encountered a web page recently that listed 101 Bible verses that prove the eternal security of the believer. There was much comfort in reading through those verses and being reassured that God doesn’t want us to have any uncertainty about our salvation. Our text gives us two great reasons for resting on the reality of our salvation. First, it is a promise of God. Second, God calls it eternal life.
Salvation, or eternal life, is just one of God’s many proposes to us. Mind you, it is the greatest promise of all, because it includes every blessing, both temporal and eternal, that God has brought us into. Peter describes the nature of these promises in 2 Peter 1:4: ‘Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust’. The more we learn of God’s promises, the more we realize how exceeding rich and precious they are. Through His Word and the Spirit’s guidance, we receive promises as individuals, promises that may mean nothing to others but to us are rich treasures. And all of these promises both great and small are established on the Word of a God Who cannot lie and Who has never, and can never, break a promise. Including the promise of eternal life.
What does the word ‘eternal’ mean? We sometimes use the term ‘the unending ages of eternity’. But that is not exactly right because there are no ages in God’s eternity. We sometimes say eternity is a very long time. Again, that is not accurate, because time does not exist in eternity. We are so tied to the concept of time that we have great difficulty understanding the nature of eternity. The clock and the calendar govern our earthly existence so absolutely that we can’t imagine being without them. But they will be meaningless in the eternal state. I am unable to describe it. But I do know that I have a life there, and so do you. That life was placed in God’s eternity at the moment we first trusted Christ. And because God placed it there, we cannot remove it even if we would, nor can anyone or anything else. That is why our salvation is called eternal life.
When it comes to our salvation, we cannot improve on the words of the apostle Paul: ‘I know Whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day’ (2 Timothy 1:12) – Jim MacIntosh