300. Eternal Life
Titus 1:2 In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began.
God promised eternal life before He created the universe. The promise is ancient; the promise goes back even before time; the promise is even older than I am. I was promised eternal life even before I was born. My life and I myself was always in the mind of God. His plan was that there would be one of me who would live forever, life without end. God’s plan was thwarted by Sin, hindered but not ended. God’s promise from the beginning will be fulfilled: I have the hope of eternal life; I have eternal life.
God worked out His purpose in the history of the world and in the history of my life. He gave His Son (really, God Himself) to become a human like me to take my sin upon Him and die for me; He sent the Holy Spirit to give me faith in that promise so that I might believe in Jesus and have eternal life. A sinless man had to die in my place; and a sinless God had to die for me. It is impossible for God to die since He is eternal life, but He found a way for God to die by doing the impossible: the Son of God became a human being (the Word became flesh and dwelled among us). This was God’s plan from eternity and He completed it in time.
God cannot lie, by definition, for if God lied or did not keep His promise He would not be God, and we certainly could not trust Him. But the promise of eternal life is as sure as God is sure. God did not lie: He promised we would live forever. Sin, Death, and the devil tried to stop God’s true promise from being fulfilled, but they failed. These evil thwarters of God’s promise were violently defeated by the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
We are pretty certain we are presently alive. “I think, therefore I am.” We are pretty certain we are going to die. “The only things certain are death and taxes.” But as certain as we are about our life and our death, we can be even more certain of eternal life, God’s life, a life that goes on after death. This promise is old; and this promise if new every morning.