Host
Corey Hopkins
Podcast Content
This is eternal life; that we know you, and that we know the Lord Jesus Christ, who was sent by God as Savior for humanity. This prayer is for men to know both that God himself is an exclusive, true God, and that He sent Jesus Christ, the second Person in the Holy Trinity, to be his particular messenger. We cannot know you apart from the Son, because it is through Jesus God speaks to mankind at present.
If you have not made this choice, do it right now, and you will be saved from your sins, and Jesus Christ will grant you eternal life, which begins now, when you personally come to know Him and God the Father. Since knowing Jesus personally is eternal life and this life and relationship with Him has already started, let us accept the eternal life that Jesus has given us by getting to know Him better now and let us be as close to Him as we possibly can.
Through the perfect life, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Jesus has earned for us the forgiveness of all of our sins, and the eternal life of knowing God personally, both now and for eternity after our deaths. Jesus Christ then went to the Cross as our perfect representative, and willingly laid down his own life to pay for our sins forever, and take the spiritual death that we had earned.
Here, Christ does not use the terms immortality or endlessness to define eternal life, but describes the type and quality of life as knowledge and a relationship to Father and Son, a relationship that is extremely close. Here, when Jesus has an opportunity to define what is eternal life, he does not say that eternal life is going to be going to heaven, though that will be a part of it. Rather than being a metaphor in and of itself, Jesus says aionios/divine life is the kind of life in which one has a relationship to you, as opposed to less forms of life.
Either eternal life is the term of art to refer to knowing God, or the term aionio is meant in qualitative terms, meaning sacred, not everlasting. Along these lines, if aionios zoe means divine life, as opposed to literally eternal life, it opens the possibility that numerous other uses of aionios in the New Testament, when applied to non-saved, are not speaking about eternality at all. All this is to say, no interpretation in which Jesus defines aionios zoe as knowing you is without problems.
Beliefs in eternal life for everyone are not up and down with aionios zoes meaning. The fundamental argument here is that if aionios zoe does not in fact mean eternal/everlasting life, and is instead meant for something else, then this is said to negate the central Christian doctrine of everlasting life for the saved. Eternal has nothing to do with lifes length, because life going on eternally is not necessarily going to be a good thing.
Just as Jesus is the source of salvation, you--and knowing Him--are the source of eternal life, and the only way you can get it. Eternal life is the free gift of grace which all believers in him now possess as their present possessions - it is what they get when they trust in Lord Jesus as Savior, and are born into the family of You, and are baptized with the Spirit.
To possess Gods life, to be entered into Him, is to experience something of the magnificence and the grandeur, and the joy, and the peace, and the holiness, that characterizes the Fathers life, right here and right now. To know God, then, is not simply to possess intellectual knowledge of Him, but to enter into an intimate, personal relationship with Him, as close as a dearest bond can be between two persons.
When we know God, we properly understand ourselves, our own tendencies to idol-worship, run away from God, and pursue our own comforts at the expense of real life. We should not grow too used to the great news that the God of the universe wants to know us, wants us to know God. The Biblical perspective is that this is the quality of life, not an infinite expansion of time; this is knowing personally God himself.
Or, although the mans lack of knowledge of electric power does not kill him, his quality of life may be greatly diminished by the injury that mutilates, disables, and debilitates. A person who does not know about the powers of electricity, nitroglycerin, carbon monoxide, drugs, or some medications. Electricity, nitroglycerin, carbon monoxide, drugs, or some medications can pay the price of their ignorance with their lives.