Tag: Eternal Life

A.W. Tozer Talks

“What Death Is – Death Says No – Christ Says Yes“

What Death Is – Death Says No – Christ Says Yes Download

What Death Is – Death Says No – Christ Says Yes

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

February 13, 1955

Now, in the 8th chapter of John, verse 51. Verily, verily, I say unto you, if a man keep my saying, he shall never see death. If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.

Now I want to begin with death and go on with the life this evening. I begin by saying that death is a fact in the world. If we were to take the fact or the thought of death out of all literature, there would scarcely be a major work left in any language.

If we were to take the idea of death out of art, some of the greatest, most, I would say, or at least a large percentage of the great masterpieces of the centuries would collapse. If we were to take the idea of death out of music, some of the greatest compositions in all the world would collapse or would never have been written.

If we were to take the fact of death and the idea of death out of history, the whole of all human history would have to be rewritten, and if we were to take the idea of death out of religion, religion itself would be otherwise than what it is. Death is a fact.

Now the Bible makes it very clear what the origin of death is. It says in Genesis 2:17, But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat, because the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. And in Romans 5:12, it says that sin entered into the world and death by sin.

So, the origin of death is sin. Sin is the father, and if the devil is the grandfather, sin is the father of death. We know that death is a fact in the world, a fact that is woven in to all the doings of mankind. And we know its origin, it came from sin.

And then we know something of the nature of death as well. Death is not a substance. Do not try to personalize it and make a substance out of it. If it were a substance, we might discover some way to destroy death. If death were a substance, a thing that we could get our hands on, that we could know how to deal with, we might be able to handle it. But it is not a substance, and it is not a being. Death is not a being.

Now right here you’re going to have to do some thinking, and I recommend that we do some thinking. That is, we really use our minds and try to think ourselves, by the grace of God, free from some things that hold us in bondage. We are, for instance, in bondage on this matter of our concept of death. We think about death as a being, and we preachers haven’t helped it any, and the poets haven’t helped it any, and the artists haven’t helped it any, because we tend to apostrophize death. They show death as a man with a skull for a head and a scythe.

Other concepts of death have been painted onto the canvases. And in Milton, death becomes a being that sits at the gate. And in all of our thinking, we talk about Adam opening the gate and death coming in.

We tend to apostrophize death and make death a being. Death is not a being. Death is not a personality or an individual that you could get a hold of and destroy. That’s not possible, because death is not a being any more than death is a substance.

Death, my brethren, and this is infinitely worse, if death were a substance, we might destroy that substance with an atom bomb or a cobalt bomb. If death were a being, we might send some FBI throughout the universe and run him down and slay him. But death is not a being.

Death is separation. Death is eternal negation. Death is a rending. Death is a separation of the soul from God. Death is a separation of the soul from the body. Death is a separation of the total man from heaven and God.

In the garden there was a rending that could be heard in all the universe when the soul of the man was rent from God and God was separated from man and the light went out in the hearts of mankind. And in that second death yonder, which is yet to be, there will not be a great being walking with a scythe. There will be something infinitely worse than that.

If it were a great being with a scythe, we might call on the archangel Michael, who might come with his hosts and destroy him. But it will not be a being with a scythe. It will be an ultimate separation, a final rending of the soul from God, never to be reunited, world without end, and that is the second death.

The whole being of the man will be separated from heaven, so that he will never unite again with the heaven which in Adam once he knew when he was in fellowship with God.

I say that death is a negation, death is an everlasting, “no.” Death says no to everything.

If it is continuance, and there is something in the human bosom that wants to continue, that wants to go on, a man wants to live on and go on, and death says no. If it is fulfillment, a man feels that he is only a blueprint, and that the great structure hasn’t been erected, and he’s got to go, he gets old before the building is erected. He feels there is work to be done, and he hasn’t finished it yet, and he wants to continue. But death is a negation, death says no.

And he talks about happiness. He feels that he was made of God to enjoy, to let his whole being enter out into something that God has given him to enjoy. But death says no. It says no to light, and it says no to peace, and it says no to life. And the whole being of the man pants after more and fuller life, but death says no.

And the presence of God, which is the heaven of all beings, I do not hesitate to say that if God were to go into the hell below and smile, it would turn into a heaven immediately by the light of that smile. And if God were in his heaven above to turn his holy face and frown, heaven would turn into a hell by the darkness of that frown. It is the smiling presence of God that makes heaven, heaven, and it is the absence of God’s smile that makes hell the hell that it is and will be.

So, to the presence of God, after which the soul of mortal man longs as a fish longs after water, as a bird longs after the freedom of the air, so the soul of man longs after God.

God has made us in His being, in His image, and our beings will never find fulfillment until they find it in union with God. But death says no to that as it says no to everything. Death, I say, is an everlasting negation, an everlasting no.

And death is our enemy, of course, for that reason, 1 Corinthians 15:25, 26, that Jesus Christ must reign until He has put all enemies under His feet, and the last enemy to be destroyed is death. And it tells us, we know from what I have just said, why death is an enemy. It’s an enemy to me, it’s an enemy to my permanence. Everybody wants to live on.

A man builds a building and moves into it and says, I’m going to live here, I’m here permanently. He gets a job and says, I’m here permanently. But when he uses the word permanently, he has to cross his fingers because he knows it’s not so. Death says, no permanence for you.

Here’s a man with his family, his little children, and his good wife around the table, and he dreams, this will never be anything but what it is. This will be permanent, but death is in the world, and death says no. The enemy says this will not be permanent.

And the man stands up on the earth and feels the wind on his cheek and sees the rain as it falls from heaven above, and the surging, leaping life in him, and he feels, I’d like to live on and on.

But death says, no, your body is going to be separated rent from your body with a rending that can be heard in heaven and hell, and your friends will gather around your bed, and you’ll separate from your body. Body and soul will be torn apart with a bloody, ripping, rending, and you will not keep that body of yours.

His mind wants to be at peace, but death says, no, and his soul wants to be his own, but death says, no, it’s to be separated. You are to be shredded and torn and blown.

No, death is an everlasting enemy, an everlasting negation, with an eternal no on its lips. It’s against everything, against God and against man and against life and against peace and against happiness and against permanence and against fulfillment and against fruitfulness and against growth. Death is everywhere in the world and always it’s saying, no, no, no, no.

No wonder then, I say, no wonder that it’s the chief source of all fear. Hebrews 2:14, 15, tell us, those verses tell us, that the devil had the power of death, that all men fear death, that fear brings bondage, and therefore the devil through death keeps men in bondage. That’s what it tells us in Hebrews 2:14, 15.

The devil had the power of death. I said, has, but I change it, had the power of death, and all men fear death, and fear brings bondage, and the devil thus through fear and through death keeps men in bondage to fear.

And we also learn in the Scriptures that death is universal. I read five words in the old King James Version yesterday, five words that are forever and ever to take away any thought of permanence, any thought of this world or the satisfaction that this world could give. It’s these words: so death passed upon all, so death passed upon all, and that is the word that goes throughout all the universe.

There isn’t a tribe anywhere in the wide world that doesn’t have its death and its burial customs. There isn’t a city anywhere that doesn’t have a place where it takes out its dead and lays them respectfully away to await the judgment of the great day. Death passed upon all. This enemy, this negation, this no that follows all the races of mankind.

Yesterday was Lincoln’s birthday. We didn’t say anything about it today. I do not preach Abraham Lincoln. I preach Jesus Christ. But it’s an illustration anyhow. Here’s Abraham Lincoln, the great Lanky, the rail splitter that lived so long in Illinois.

Well, he was a great man and a good man, and I read an article today by Dr. Murch, editor of Action magazine, in which he proved that Lincoln was not only a Christian but that he had been a baptized member of the Campbellite Church. Did you know that? A baptized member of the Disciples Church. Well, Lincoln’s gone.

Why couldn’t they keep a great man like that around? We’ve got rats calling themselves men. Rats boring and chewing and gnawing their way through all Chicago society, everywhere, and a great man like that couldn’t stay. Death said, no, and the world said, we need Lincoln.

But death said, no, negation, negation, he can’t stay, I’m against it. So, separation, negation, no, is everywhere in all the wide world. And it’s the cause of fear. Men are kept in bondage to fear because death, separation, a breaking down, the destruction, annihilation is going, not annihilation, please, for I do not believe in annihilation.

I wonder in the light of this, that there isn’t a spot in all the world where death is not. Death has passed upon all. There isn’t a tribe, however small. There isn’t a city, however large. There isn’t a race, however cultured. There isn’t a group, however pure. But death has passed upon them, death the enemy, death the destroyer, death that yells its everlasting bold, “no” to all the hopes and plans of mankind.

How could this text be? And yet it is, and our Lord not only gave it, but he buttressed it with two of his famous verily, verily, twice. He says it verily, verily, if a man keep my sayings, he shall never see death.

And I looked up some other translations, and I have the Riverside translation, if a man keep my sayings, he will not look on death. Barclay, if a man keep my sayings, he will in no wise taste death forever. And Knox, if a man keep my sayings, to all eternity he will never see death. And another British translation, if a man keep my sayings, to all eternity shall never come in sight of death. That’s what he said, all right, all the translators agree.

I never like to get caught on a possible bad translation. If I’m going to bear it down and make a fact hinge upon a text, I’m going to check that text back into the Greek and out into the translations to see if that’s what He said.

Brother, that’s what He said, all right. And there isn’t anybody that can say anything else. That’s what He said, that if a man keep My sayings, he shall never experience death, he shall never look upon death, he shall never come in sight of death, he shall never taste death forever. Now here’s a solemn promise, a solemn promise, a declaration is here, as trustworthy as God and as good as the One who made it.

I have said a hundred times from this pulpit that a promise is only as good as the one that makes it. It is not the word of the promise, but the character of the one that spoke the word that makes the promise good. And there are many promises in the Bible, and the God who made the promises was not trustworthy, not one of the thousands would amount to anything. But the character of God gives body and meaning and foundation and assurance to all His promises.

So, when He says he shall never see death, the character of God is back to that. The Triune God who made heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible, God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, and also the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, these three persons, the Holy Three, the character of God, all that God is, all that holds up the moral universe, all that makes heaven heaven, all that keeps the vast universe from being hell, is back to this, the character of God is back of this.

God said, if a man keep my saying, he will never see death, he will through all eternity never come in sight of death, they who are the beneficiaries, a man keep my sayings, what do you mean by that? Ah, that’s the Book of John, is a little different from the other books of the Bible. It has a different terminology, and its phrasing is a bit different.

So, what He said here, those who are the beneficiaries of atonement and who confirm it by obedience, the beneficiaries of atonement, oh, there have been some great historic facts in the world, listening friends, great historic facts. One of the great historic facts of the world was the fall of man.

When by sin he was rent from God and a vast gulf separated. That became one of the great epochs of the world and one of the great facts of the world, that sin broke God and man apart and that man, like a little island breaking loose from a continent, began to drift away further and farther from the mainland into the seas. That was one of the great facts of the world.

Another great fact of the world, perhaps the greatest of them all, was that God gave His only begotten Son to make atonement for that sin and to bridge the gulf, or rather not bridge the gulf. That is again where we get into semantic trouble, we get into the trouble that imagery brings us. For Jesus is not a bridge between God and man.

A bridge means that there are two bodies of ground, a bank here and a bank over there and something flowing between, and a bridge to carry across. It is only by straining our metaphors and figures that Jesus Christ is a bridge between God and man, for when He in His atonement is through with the soul, there is no river flowing between God and the soul of a man. There is union there.

If we could build a bridge between Dakar, Africa, and the coast of North Carolina, we would call that a bridge. Two continents lay hundreds of miles apart, but there were now bridges so we could drive over them. In one sense we could say they are one now, made one by the bridge.

But don’t think of Jesus Christ as One who bridged the gulf. He destroyed the gulf, He put it out of the universe, and God and man are now united in Jesus Christ, not by a bridge but by an everlasting union.

So, Jesus, in His atonement, the great fact of atonement. And Jesus said, he that keeps my sayings, he’s my follower, he’s joined himself to me, he’s my believer, he’s given himself to me, and he’s a beneficiary of my atoning work, he shall never see death. That’s what he said, and I believe that. I can die believing that and die in peace.

So here is the solemn declaration. And so, he enters now the world of the everlasting affirmation. Death is an everlasting negation, an eternal no, and life is an everlasting yes, an eternal affirmation. And that’s the difference.

And in Jesus Christ, they that keep his sayings, they that trust in Him, they that have identified themselves with Him in believing union, they have entered a new world, the world of the eternal yes, the everlasting affirmation.

So now, when we cry, O God, my soul longs to continue, and God says, yes! And when we say, O God, something in me wants fulfillment, I desire that this germ within me, this beginning, this bud, should blossom into the vast possibilities that lie in my nature. Eternal life says, yes, it shall be so, it shall be so, for they shall look upon me, and when they see Him, they shall be like Him.

And something in my heart says, I want light, light, darkness is everywhere, gross darkness is upon the people, and I’m a child of the light. I’m not a flatworm or a blind fish or a mole. God made me in His image and made me to inhabit the light, but sin has shrouded my soul, and I cry out of my bewilderment and confusion. I cry to the Son of God, oh, I want light, and Jesus Christ says, yes, to my cry after life.

And when I say, O God, I want peace, I’m not a man of war, I’m a man of peace. I want to live in peace, I want to be in peace, I want to be where there is peace. And I want to inhabit a level of life where there are no keys necessary, and nobody needs to swear an oath, we’ll know he isn’t lying and then suspect that he is; where we don’t need policemen and don’t need armies and don’t need navies.

I want to inhabit a world where I can be at peace and fulfill that for which I was created. And Jesus Christ says, it shall be so, life, ye shall have life, and life is the everlasting, yes, and the everlasting union, and death is the everlasting separation, negation, and life is the everlasting affirmation and union. So, life is not a thing either.

We think about life as a thing, and we, the artists, draw pictures of death as a miserable looking old fellow with a sepulchral smile on his teethy face, and he’s dead, and he’s got to scythe, and he’s out getting a crop of men. And over against him is a smiling feminine looking fellow, and he is called life. And they say, which way will you take? I understand they mean well by all that, but it’s certainly reducing spirituality to a woefully physical level. We ought to get loose from those physical images and remember that life is not a thing at all. Life is a person.

He said, I am the life, Jesus Christ is the life, and when He joins the soul of a man, a believing, returning man to God, He closes the gap between man and God, and there is no bridge needed, no gap needed. He has knit them together by one union of life and has bound them up in the bundle of life with God, and all the spirits of just men made perfect.

So, life is a relation to God, as death is a relation to God or the absence of it. Death is the breaking of a relation between soul and body, physical death. Spiritual death is the breaking of a relation between God and the soul.

Life is the maintaining of the relation between the body and soul. As long as your body and soul hang together, we won’t bury you. You will be alive, you will live. But when body and soul separate and rend apart, you will be buried out of sight, for your soul will have fled the body.

And life, then, is the reunion of severed parts. When God in the new birth unites himself back to the soul of a man, the spirit of a man, that is life.

This is eternal life, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. Know is almost the same word here as, see. He shall never experience death, but he shall experience Thee, the true God in Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. So, when it comes to permanence, we want something that will live.

We are builders, we humans. We build. We build bridges. We build battleships. We build pyramids. We build hanging gardens. We build skyscrapers. We build, and we want to leave something behind.

MacArthur went out to the West Coast to see unveiled a statue of himself. MacArthur won’t be around too long, but there will stand out there in the park a statue of that handsome old man who fought so well and nobly for his country. He won’t be here. But something in him says, I want to exist on, and if nothing else, I want to exist in the memory of my countrymen.

And life says, yes, yes, yes, yes. You can exist on. Continuance is the word. It’s yours. It’s yours. Affirmation. Declaration. Annunciation. Yes, yes, you can live on. God says you can live on in Him, live on in Christ. There shall be permanence. And Paul said that the promises of God are yea and amen.

And I, for my part, though I by nature am not a happy man, and by nature I am not even an optimist. By nature, I am a pessimist, and by education a skeptic. But by faith I am a Christian. And instead of pessimism and skepticism, I hear the everlasting, yes, ringing through the universe. The affirmation, it’s true, permanence, continuousness.

I want to do at least one lasting thing before God is through with me down here, want at least one lasting thing, to come into the world with all our powers, to come into the world with this strange, beautiful instrument we call our hand, with its four fingers and opposed to it the thumb. That thing that gave us the tool and the musical instrument and the artist’s brush and the writer’s pen, to come into the world with a set of such, to come into the world with imagination and creativeness and vegetate like a beast and propagate like an animal and go out and leave nothing behind. I say that that is to fail, that is to fail forever.

We ought to remember that we are here to leave something. We are here to do at least one thing that will not die with us, one thing that will not die when heaven and earth is on fire, at least one thing, one soul to be won into the kingdom of God, one mind to be purified by our teaching, one sinner to be won by our testimony, one missionary to go out by our money and prayers, one student in school learning the deep ways of God sent by our money and our prayers. There ought to be at least one thing that we do to come into the world and claim we are Christians and then go out and have nothing to show. I tell you; God never meant it.

And I don’t want you to think that I’m cracking up, and I don’t want you to think that I’ve gotten so mystical, as the man said who reviewed one of my books, he said, he’s so mystical as to be absolutely incomprehensible. I don’t believe that, but anyway, I don’t want to be too mystical on you.

But I want to say this, that I hear the “yes” ringing through the universe. I hear the affirmation; he shall never see death. He shall never experience negation. He shall never hear the “no” that stops everybody and stops everything, that puts a period behind every general, that kills a Mozart and destroys a Beethoven and cuts down a Bismarck and slays a Gladstone and brings an end to a Bryan and will soon lay low a Churchill and an Eisenhower and a MacArthur.

We’re not hearing that. The child of God isn’t hearing that. He might in his weak moments, when the physical takes over for a little while, he may feel his pulse and look at himself and pity what he sees. But if he lets his faith mount and says, I believe in the words of Jesus Christ, if any man who hears My sayings believes Me and keeps My words, he shall never experience death, the negation, the end, the period, there’s always a flow.

As something of an amateur tank-town writer, I know the difference between a period and a semicolon. A period means you’re done, let’s go have dinner. But a semicolon says, hey, go on there, you haven’t finished. Finish your sentence, bring it to an end.

So, this world that I inhabit by the grace of God hasn’t appeared in it, not once. Not a place where God says, this is it, finis. We’re always in flow, always in motion, always moving on, and instead of being surrounded everywhere by an everlasting chorus of no’s, in Russia they say it’s nyet. That sounds still worse. Nyet, nyet, they hear it all the time in the United Nations. Let’s do something decent, nyet, says the Russian. Let’s bless somebody, nyet, says the Russian. No, veto, no.

They remind me of hell and death and hell itself, their everlasting nyets, their nos, their negations. But there isn’t a one in the kingdom of God, not a one anywhere. It’s all yes, yes, yes. Life? Yes. Peace? Yes. Happiness? Yes. Fruit? Yes.

So, Jesus Christ is the everlasting affirmation, no question marks, but affirmations, so that separation has given place to union. Oh, why don’t we preach it anymore? Why don’t we preach salvation to be the union of the soul with God? Instead of that, it’s ten cents’ worth of life Jesus Christ gives you when you put a dime in the slot and pull the lever down, and then you can go play golf. It’s all done, thank the Lord, we say. Pray for me that I may hold out faith alive, and I’ve accepted Him. Oh, what a shoddy, low view of Christianity that all is anyhow.

Brethren, accepting Jesus Christ, if it’s right and done right and really effective, means that I am reunited with God again, that God isn’t angry anymore, that the old enmity has been destroyed by the blood of the everlasting covenant, that I am back in my Father’s house. You can’t see it, but I wear the ring of His forgiveness. And the new robe of His acceptance, and it’s yes, yes, yes, the promises of God are yea and amen.

Now, how could He say this? How could He say this? How can He say this? Why in that same chapter He said, before Abraham was, I am. No Mrs. Eddy could say it, no Father Divine could say it, no Mohammed could say it, no Buddha could say it. They all came up and died like others.

He came to the world and didn’t die like others. He never could have died, but He gave His life. Death had no dominion over Him. Death had no mortgage on His holy body or soul. He was born into the world, and He could have been as immortal as they were if they’d eaten of the tree of life in the garden. He developed, but He never died, until the day came that He knew that He must lay His life down for His sheep, and then of His own free will He went out and paid a debt He didn’t know and gave up a life hell couldn’t claim, and took it back the third day and said, now I share it with My people. I share it with those who hear my sayings and keep them, who follow Me and believe on My name. Before Abraham was, I am, and you can’t kill that kind of life. I saw Satan as lightning fall from heaven, and you can’t kill that kind of life.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men, and you can’t kill that kind of life. It can’t die, for it’s the life of God.

So, He could go out and give Himself up His human life, His human soul, and make His soul an offering for sin. And when He died, it’s right in one way to say that God the mighty maker died, but in another we must understand what we mean. For the life of God was not damaged on the cross, it was only the life of the holy man in whom God had united Himself in the Incarnation—the life, the deathless, immortal life of the Triune God was not damaged nor injured on the cross. It was a Lamb that died there, not the Deity, though the Deity certainly was in the Lamb, united forever in a holy bond of mysterious union in the Incarnation.

So, if that seems mysterious and self-contradictory, I do not apologize. It is mysterious, it is self-contradictory, it’s an everlasting dilemma, how He could be God and man, and man and God, and could have the ability of a man to die, and yet the virtue of a God and the merit of a God, all that I can never know.

I can only bow and say, O Lord God, Thou knowest. Make room for mystery, open the door for wonderful mystery, and stand breathless and full of wonderment and cry, my Lord and my God. That’s the best the theologians can do. They can reason and reason and call biology and science and philosophy to their aid, and when it’s all done, there is still a vast, yawning sea of mystery. But I believe it.

In Him was life, and God gave it to Him to have life in Himself, and it says in Hebrews through death that He might destroy him that had the power of death.

So, Jesus Christ offers you life. If you’ve had enough of death, Jesus Christ offers you life, that if a man keep My sayings, he shall not see death.

But you say, doesn’t a Christian see death? He may go through it, but the Lord never lets him look on its dirty face.

And there I am personalizing it just like I told you we did, apostrophizing it, yet it’s not really there. A man can’t see death when there’s no death there. If death is a rending loose of the soul from God, if that’s real death, then the Christian in one sense never dies at all.

But if death is the departing of the soul from the body, then the Christian dies. If the Lord doesn’t come, the Christian will die. But the Lord will never let him see it. He just puts His kind hand over the Christian’s eyes and says, it’ll be over in a minute, son, come on. He leads him across and takes the hand off, and the next thing he sees is the spirits of just men made perfect, an innumerable company of angels, the Church of the Firstborn, and all the saints and God Himself.

So, He’s not even going to let us look upon that ugly beast, because really there won’t be any ugly beast there. It’ll only be a temporary separation of body and soul in death, and then when He comes, they’ll be reunited in a perfect, immortal union that can never again be divided.

Isn’t Christ worth your investigating? Isn’t He worth your believing on? Isn’t the Christian life worth living? Isn’t it worth giving up the foibles of the dying world to believe on Him and take His cross? I think it is. And that is why the Bible calls the man the fool that doesn’t make provision for his soul.

The man who knows all this and does nothing about it is ten thousand times a fool. And how wise is that man who hears His sayings and believes them and identifies himself in faith with that Jesus Christ who was before Abraham was, who was in the beginning with God. And he passes out of the realm of the recurring negation, the everlasting no, into the world of the everlasting, eternal affirmation.

He hears God saying, yes, until it echoes from the stars. And he hears it while he lives and while he sleeps and while he breathes and while he eats and while he labors. He hears it coming down from God, yes, yes, yes, I’m on your side. You’re on my side, all is well. No man shall pluck you out of My hand, nothing shall separate you. And he can live, and he can die.

In the sense we just explained, the separating of the soul from the body, when we end our lives here, he can do all that, and he can do it without any self-pity, and he can do it without a trembling chin, and he can do it without fear, and he can do it without a wide-staring eye. He can do it cheerfully. Arise my soul, arise, shake off thy guilty fears. The bleeding sacrifice in thy behalf appears. Before the throne thy surety stands, my name is written on his hands. Amen? Amen.

Thank God.

Tags Death, Eternal Life

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date January 19, 2025

“In Hope of Eternal Life“

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In Hope of Eternal Life

Pastor and Author A.W. Tozer

January 26, 1958

At the young people’s hour tonight and the senior young people, I expect to be present and will give a short message. I want all my young friends to be there to hear what I have to say. I want to give a practical talk on how to make the most of your present spiritual privileges and means of grace. And then I’d like also to accent the family night, Wednesday night, 7:45, this Wednesday night. It will be Family Night, Reports Lecture.

Now, we are in Titus, where Paul says that he is a servant of God and apostle, sent to declare the faith of God’s elect and acknowledging of the truth, the promotion of the truth, which is after godliness, in a hope of eternal life which God that cannot lie promised before the world began. Now, I think that’s probably as far as we’ll get.

I talked last week on this phrase, in hope of eternal life, now, which God that cannot lie promised before the world began. If you people who don’t preach want to know how humiliated we preachers feel, why, I’ll whisper something to you. That an apostle, inspired by the Holy Ghost, can write a letter to a church or to a man and pack it so tight with truth that four or five words will be enough for us. That’s rather humiliating. I’d like to think that I could paddle right along beside Paul, but Paul has to wait for me to catch up, wait weeks, months for me to catch up with him. So, he said, in hope of eternal life, and that was last week, which God that cannot lie promised before the world began, that’s this week.

Now, we look at that, God that cannot lie, of course we know what God it is, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, whom Paul has said to be the only God. We have one Father, one God. And he told us here of the hope of the promise. We have the hope of eternal life, we have eternal life now, and we have the hope of eternal life in its broader aspects in the world to come. Now, we have this as a promise. We have this as a promise. And I would rather have some people’s promise than to have other people’s gifts.

A long time ago, a great preacher was in this city, I think one of the greatest preachers of the first fifty years of church history, Paul Rader. He said that a man, a businessman that he personally knew to be rather windy, and not too much given to fulfill his promises, who allowed his imagination to run away with his ability to produce, promised him he was going to give him, I think, if I recall, a hundred thousand dollars for missions. Rader said, have you got a dime? He said, Sure. He said, could I have it now for missions? He said, yes. Now he said, Thank you. He said, I know God will get this. But he wasn’t sure about that promised hundred thousand, but the dime, he knew God would get that.

Well, that was his half-humorous but profoundly meaningful way of saying that some people’s promises are not too valuable. And I would turn it around and say that I would rather live by some people’s promise than by other people’s gifts. And here we have a promise, not yet that full eternal life, but the promise of eternal life.

And always remember this, that a promise is only worth whatever the character is of the man who made it, so that the God that cannot lie, promised, and this promise is worth just as much as God, no more, no less. All truth rests down upon and begins with God. A promise is only as sound, I repeat, as the one that made it. It is amusing, if it were not so obviously painful, to see people struggling to have faith, on their knees struggling and writhing to have faith.

A frantic struggle to believe only indicates that the person who is thus struggling has lost sight of God and has got involved in God’s promises. God’s promises are made by God, and they are as good as God and as sure as God, and they are to us whatever God is, and they cannot be less nor more. They are whatever God is. And when a person is struggling to believe a promise, it’s obvious that he has detached the promise from the God who made it and is for the time in a state of mental confusion.

Remember, you only have to ask who made the promise, and if you can get a satisfactory answer, who made the promise, then you’ve gone a little way. Then if you say, what has the record been of this person who made the promise, and if examination shows the record to have been 100 percent sound, that he always came through the promise, if further investigation shows that this person has never been known to be anything but honest and true, and if further investigation shows that this person is able to make good on the promise, then why worry about the promise? Think first about the man who made it. You get a letter promising you something, and you say, now, Lord, help me to believe this. Help me to believe this. Oh, I want to believe this, Father. Help me to believe this.

Well, you don’t want to believe it if it isn’t so. If a man wrote me a letter and said, Mr. Tozer, I’m going to give you a Cadillac. Well, I don’t, my wife, I guess, could learn to drive it, but if somebody gave me a Cadillac, or was going to give me a Cadillac, first I’d look whose signature was at the bottom of the letter. And I would then quietly decide, or try to find out, whether the man was used to making promises.

One dear little old brother who’s long ago gone to heaven, who used to be in our church years ago, and whose mind began to break, and I never noticed it, never noticed anything wrong until one day he came up to me and said, did you get the car? And I said, what car? And he said, why, I have given 40 automobiles to missionaries and preachers this last month. And he said, I wonder if you got yours. And I shook his hand and said, no, not yet, and I knew. Dear little old brother, he, not long after that, he went off to be with his Lord. His mind was breaking. And what do they call it, blood shut off from the mind and it doesn’t function? Some great men, including Emerson, and Dr. Simpson, and Dr. Zemmer, and many others have gone that way. Their minds wouldn’t work toward the last.

Well now, if I investigated and I found that this was simply a kindly promise by a man who was beginning to slip, then I’d smile it off. But if I looked at the bottom of the letter and I knew that that letter was signed by a man who not only had always kept his promises, but was fully capable of keeping them, why, I wouldn’t worry about it. I’d be looking up on which lever to pull to start awaiting the curb, because I know I’d get it. And it’s this way with the promises of God, God who cannot lie promised.

Now that’s all you have to know. Grant me God and the promises are all right. The struggle to believe promises, I insist, is psychologically and mentally off. It’s not sound, because it is a wanting a thing to be true, but not being sure that it is and trying to make yourself feel that it is. That’s not the way to approach it. Who made the promise? Is he able to make good on it? Is his character such that he will make good on it? Find that out. And when you’ve found that out, your promise is as sound as the throne of God.

God that cannot lie promise and all truth begins with God and rests down upon God. So don’t struggle to believe God and don’t insult God by asking, help me to believe thee. God, that’s saying, help me to have confidence in thy character, O God. Help me to stop thinking that you’re crooked. Help me, Lord, to believe that you’re honest.

Well, that would insult your father if you’d go to him and say, Dad, you promised to see me through college, but I can’t believe you. Help me to believe you. Well, your father would say, have I lied to you in the past? And you’d say, never. And have I always made good on all my promises? Yes. Well, why do you doubt me now? And he’d feel bad about it because it would be a reflection on his fatherly kindness and his basic honesty.

God that cannot lie made these promises, this promise of eternal life. And I, for one, don’t intend to lie awake nights wondering if he can keep it. I know God will keep it all right.

Now, Paul here uses a negative, I want you to notice. He said, the God that cannot lie. Saint Dionysius said, we know God more perfectly by negatives than we do by affirmatives. That is, we can know what God is not better than we can know what God is seeing that the name of God is secret, and the nature of God is so infinitely removed from ours that we fallen men find it very difficult to visualize what God is like, but we can know what God is not. And the theologians have always had to follow that more or less. To understand God’s perfections, they have to go to negatives.

For instance, if you were preaching on the self-existence of God, you’d say God had no origin, and I don’t know how else you would say it, because human language won’t go any further than that. That’s it. God had no origin. Everything else had an origin, including the very seraphim and archangels, but not God. Therefore, if God had no origin, therefore, He must exist in Himself.

And so, we get the positive by means of the negative. If you wanted to preach on God’s self-sufficiency or meditate on it, you could say God has no support, and if God has no support, if nothing holds him up, then he must hold himself up. Therefore, He must be self-sufficient.

And so, by a negative, you would have arrived at a positive. If you wanted to think on the eternity of God, you’d say God had no beginning, and if God had no beginning, he always must have been. And if he always must have been, therefore, he is eternal, and you’d have the eternity of God.

If you wanted to meditate on the immutability of God, you’d say that God knows no change, and if God does not change, He always must have been what He is now. And if He always was what He is now, it’s easy to reason that He will always be what He was and is. And infinitude, if you wanted to meditate on God’s infinitude, you could say God has no limitations.

Well, if God has no limitations, then it can only mean that there is no boundary anywhere, that God is limitless. This is, of all thoughts, the most difficult to grasp, so we’ll skip over it pretty fast. And if you wanted to think on the omniscience of God, you’d say, well, God cannot learn. God cannot learn. Why? Because he already knows all there is to know. Knowing Himself perfectly and containing all things, He knows all that can be known.

That is the negative. So, Paul used it here, God that cannot lie. And the Scriptures, not only the theologians, but the Scriptures also follow this method. He says in Isaiah about Himself, the Lord fainteth not, neither is weary. And He says, I, the Lord, change not. And He says, He that keepeth thee will not slumber nor sleep. And He says, He cannot deny Himself. And He says, with God, nothing is impossible. And He says, with God, it was impossible for Him to lie.

So, there we have all these passages from the Scriptures showing that we can know God by what He is not. And so Paul used it freely and said, God that cannot lie. If he had simply said the true God or the God of truth, you could have figured that out, all right, but it’s more powerful put negatively.

And the gentleman who believes in positive thinking might learn a lesson here, though he never will. That sometimes you can back into the station better than you can pull ahead in, in this terrible day. And this is true, that sometimes God is able to tell us what He is by telling us what He’s not, better than by telling us what He is.

So this hope of eternal life was promised by this kind of God. What are you going to do? Go home and sweat it out and wonder if it’s true and pray for faith. No, get acquainted with God and be at peace. Acquaint thyself with Him and you will not worry. And then he says He promised before the world began. That is, other versions say before eternal ages He promised.

Now, if He promised before the world began, He must have promised somebody who was present. And if He promised before the eternal ages, He must have promised somebody who was before the ages were.

Now to whom then was the promise made? Well, I wouldn’t have thought of this myself, but there lived about 200 or more years ago, a brilliant and godly Presbyterian preacher by the name of John Flavell. I’ve always called him Flavell, but I see that the dictionaries of biography call him Flavell. John Flavell, he was an English Presbyterian preacher.

And when I was a boy on the farm, for the sheer paucity of reading matter, I read everything I could get a hold of from the time I can remember, calendars, anything, railroad schedules, anything, even the writing material or printed matter on cereal boxes. I read everything. And we had nothing around there to read, nothing. We didn’t even take a daily paper. I couldn’t read that, nothing. My mother borrowed a book occasionally and I’d read that.

And somewhere there fell into my hand a book of sermons by John Flavell. Now, John Flavell was an old Puritan, old Presbyterian Puritan type of preacher. And though I was only a boy, maybe 12, I read his sermons. And I remember to this day after the passing of the years, some of the brilliant and wonderful things John Flavell said.

And he was preaching in one sermon on the text, therefore, from Isaiah 53:12. Therefore, I will divide him a portion with the great and he shall divide the spoil with the strong. And he was preaching on that text, therefore. And he said, this indicates, this indicates that the Father made a covenant with the Son before the world was and before man was, and that the covenant rests not upon poor man, but upon God. That man’s salvation was a compact made between the Father and the Son. And incidentally, John Milton puts that same thing into Paradise Lost. We’ve forgotten to read Paradise Lost.

Well, my brother, I think we ought to read Flavell and Milton. I believe we’d get more out of it than we would out of reading Moon Mullins. And he says that the Father made a compact with the Son, back there, and therefore shall He divide a portion with the great and divide the spoil with the strong. And he went on brilliantly to set before his readers in heavy language without illustration and without any side remarks. They weren’t supposed to have illustrations and side remarks. They had gone to church in those good old days, or the “Kirk,” they called it in Scotland. They went there, not to hear stories, but to hear theology, an hour long, two hours long.

And John Flavell’s sermon on, therefore, from Isaiah 53, that God made the covenant with the Son before eternal ages. With whom else could He have made a covenant before the worlds began? Before there was a seraphim to stand by the throne of grace or the sea of fire, before there was an angel, before a man ever breathed, with whom did He make His compact and to whom did He make His promise? He made it to His Eternal Son, who later became flesh to dwell among us, so that the God who cannot lie promised before the world began.

Now your certain hope for the future rests upon this kind of God, this kind of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the promises depend upon the covenant, and that’s why you don’t have to worry. Your certain hope for the future absolutely rests in God, and I want to say this to you. It’s independent of anything you can see or touch, independent of anything you can see or touch, this covenant, anything that you can see, touch, taste, smell, hear, anything that is sensible, that belongs to the senses, is completely divorced from the things we tie it up to.

We try to tie Christianity up to democracy, civilization, politics, financial conditions, and all the rest. Never, never, never, never. Your hope for all the ages doesn’t rest upon democracy. What do I think about democracy? Do I think that democracy is a good way of life? Yes, I do, but I don’t think it’s the best, but I think it’s a good way of life.

I think the best government is theocracy. When Jesus Christ comes back to rule the earth, that will be theocracy, the rule of God over the world, that’s the best. I think second best is democracy, the rule of the people.

And I am quite satisfied with our republican form of government, our American way of life, and I have nothing to say but good about it. But I would only say this, that Christianity has flourished under every sort of political system. It flourished in the court of Caesar. It flourished in the Middle Ages, in the days of chivalry and the days of manors and lords of the manor and serfs and slaves. It prospered in the day when men were slaves, as Paul said he was a slave of Jesus Christ, drawing an illustration from current society.

It flourishes now in Korea. It flourishes now under Chiang Kai-shek, out on that little island of Formosa. It flourishes in tiny little places in some of the hard, tough countries of South America. And Christianity rests upon God and it antedates not only all political systems, but all politicians, all statesmen and all men. And it goes back before eternal ages and links itself like a mighty chain to the very throne of God. Therefore, political systems don’t change anything. But you say, well, political system can soon stamp out Christianity.

That’s what we think, my brethren, but I don’t believe it for a moment. I am not, I am not for these Russian and other church men who come over here and try to pull our legs and tell us that they have religious freedom in Russia. I know that they don’t, but I also know that the Holy Ghost hasn’t permitted the seed of God to die in Russia.

I heard the other night on FM a beautiful, beautiful choir. It was a Russian choir. The recording was made in London, and it was made recently. It was sung by Russian voices. I lay in my bed after I’d gone to bed. I lay and listened to the FM, to this wonderful music of the Russian choir. And in my heart, I had an indignation. I said, people like this, that have genius like this and ability like this, that have the warmth and the emotion and the feeling of passion that they have, that they have to be ruled by those devils in the Kremlin. That these fine, warm-hearted, friendly, religious-minded Russian people have to be ruled over by these communistic, atheistic devils.

In my heart, I’m indignant that it should be so. And I pray that the day may come, even in Russia, when God will destroy this octopus and will take from the hearts and brains and bodies of the Russian people the chains that are there. For all you have to do is destroy the ruling classes in the Kremlin and destroy communism. And you have the finest and most emotional and passionate and friendliest people.

Now, don’t misunderstand me and go ahead and say Tozer made an impassioned speech in favor of Russia. Never in favor of communism. It is the breed of the devil. It is the vomit of hell. It is the seepings from the sewers of limbo. And I hate it with everything in me. And all of its sneaking devilishness and all of its evil chicanery. I hate it. But I pity the people upon whose hearts and minds it’s been clamped down like a vice. They’re better than that. They don’t deserve it. But you say, then, why don’t they rise and throw it off? They tried that in Hungary, didn’t they? You know what happened there. Only God can deliver them.

So don’t you believe for a minute that the ancient seed of God that was planted in the minds of the common, plain people is dead in Russia. There are still Christians. They are operating under difficulties, but they’re still there and they’re still in China. Don’t think that the 40 or more years that our Alliance missionaries labored and sweat and struggled and suffered in China is for nothing. There are still Christians. The God who cannot lie promised before the world began and He promised before Marx and Lenin and He promised before Mao Zedong and Khrushchev.

Well, some others would say, well, Christianity must go along with civilization. No. Civilization is simply a combination, application of science to man’s life. And it’s given us this we call civilization. Christianity, philosophy, and science are combined. That is the top froth of Christianity that’s combined with science and philosophy to create this civilization that we have now. That civilization can disappear, and we can go back to the ox cart. And still, it won’t change anything in heaven yonder. It won’t change anything inside of men. It won’t change the covenants of God and the God who promised His Son in holy compact before the ages began. He will not fail us if our civilization is destroyed. It goes back to the Constitution of the United States.

I believe in this constitution of the United States. I hold it to be one of the greatest documents, as the English said, ever struck off by the hand of man. For all these years it has kept us free, the freest people in the world. And I grieve when I see Supreme Courts interpreting the constitution so as to shield the communistic vermin that crawls in Washington. But nevertheless, before the Constitution of the United States was written, the cross stood high above all time.

And so, it doesn’t depend upon it. It doesn’t depend on politics, nor wars, nor financial situation, nor space travel, nor churches, nor denominations, nor the Christian and Missionary Alliance. God that cannot lie promised before the world began. And there is our hope. God never does anything new, said Meister Eckhart. By that he means that God never does anything suddenly or impulsively.

He says, behold, I will do a new thing, and I make all things new. But he’s talking about our new. He only talks from our side. He said, behold, I will do something that from your standpoint will look new. Behold, I will do something that to you will seem new. But He does nothing that He hasn’t covenanted to do with His eternal Son before an angel wing trembled by the sea of fire.

He never does anything new. And the old German theologian is right. God never does anything new. And if He blesses you today, He promised it before the world was. And if He saves you today, He does it according to a covenant He made with His Son before the eternal ages. And if He answers your prayer, He answers it according to a compact He made with His eternal Son before the world was.

So, God never does anything new. God never adds any codicils to His will. When God made His will, He made it and sealed it in blood and settled it in the God who cannot lie, swore by Himself because He could swear by no other. And He never adds any codicils. Our assurance is in Him.

Let me read 2 Timothy 1.9, and we’ll close. Who has saved us and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began. Maybe we could read yet a little passage from Ephesians 1. To the praise of the glory of His grace, wherein He hath made us accepted in the beloved, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, wherein He hath abounded toward us in all wisdom and prudence, having made known unto us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure, which He hath purposed in Himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of times He might gather together all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth, even in Him in whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of Him who worketh all things after the counsel of His will, that we should be to the praise of His glory who first trusted in Christ.

Ah, my brother, you don’t have to worry about the promises nor about the God who made them. All you have to be bothered about is whether you are living as you should live, whether you love Him as you should, whether you are living as clean as you should live and as right and as good, and whether you are as useful and as fruitful as God wants you to be. You can think about that and pray over that all you want to, distrust yourself all you want to, never insult the Majesty in the heavens by doubting Him. For He is the God who cannot lie, and He promised eternal life before the world began. And we who have believed Him become part now of that eternal compact which He made with His Son for eternal ages. Amen and amen.

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Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date October 20, 2024

“Eternal Life is a Supreme Treasure“

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Eternal Life is a Supreme Treasure

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

January 19, 1958

In the book of Titus, first chapter, first two verses, Paul, an apostle or servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, according to the faith of God’s elect and the acknowledging of the truth which is after godliness, the hope of eternal life, which God that cannot lie promised before the world began. I’m going to pick out five words, in the hope of eternal life, and talk about that. In the hope of eternal life.

Now, eternal life, I don’t think there would be anybody, anywhere, who would deny or even attempt to argue that eternal life is not a supreme treasure, for it is that, eternal life, eternal life. If you don’t appreciate those wonderful words, eternal life, think what they would mean if they were uttered in hell.

Think if it should be by some strange and unknown act of God that down there, where is the rich man and all other men who forget God, it should suddenly be announced, God has declared eternal life. There would be joy that would amount to hysteria there, eternal life. May we not overlook how valuable, how precious it is and what a supreme treasure lies in those words, eternal life.

And this is the life that was lost in the disobedience of the fall and brought again to us by the coming of Christ. I am come, said Jesus, that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly. And everybody knows, John 3, 16, that God loved so the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish but have everlasting life. So, this supreme treasure, lost once to us, is now brought back to us by Jesus Christ and given to faith.

Now, the question that arises here where Paul says, in hope of eternal life, for you see, hope is a future thing. Paul said, what a man hath, why does he yet hope for it? You hope for that which you don’t have. You cannot hope for that which you have. I think that’s so plain that it need not be labored, that we hope for that which we don’t have, and if we have it, we cease to hope for it. Hope is lost in realization.

So, in hope of eternal life says that eternal life is future to the church. Paul, now hear it, Paul, a servant and apostle, according to the faith of God’s elect, in hope of eternal life. There we have it. Now is eternal life present or future? Do we have it now or are we looking for it? The fact that it says in hope of eternal life indicates that we’re looking and hoping for it, for if we had it, why would we yet hope for it?

Now in this, the Bible seems to contradict itself, but I think I’d better put a take notice sign here and say that the word eternal and the word everlasting, when it modifies the word, life. The two words are I look this up very carefully and I find that where the Bible says hath everlasting life or hath eternal life, it’s exactly the same word in the lips of Jesus or from the pen of Paul or John.

So, I don’t know why our translators in one verse said eternal life and, in another verse, said everlasting life, unless it’s for euphony. There is such a thing, you know, as language that’s musical and there would be places where the word eternal life wouldn’t fit in musically, so they changed it to everlasting, since everlasting and eternal mean the same thing in English and the original means the same thing in Greek, so that if we say eternal or everlasting life, I don’t think that there is any difference.

Bible teachers gain reputations for making distinctions where there are none and laboring those distinctions for 45 minutes. But there’s no distinction here, so let’s accept this as the fact and any Greek scholar or any lexicon will show you that eternal and everlasting is the same in the original and of course they are synonymous in English.

Well, I started to say that the Bible appears to contradict itself here, and in this it does appear, I say, to contradict itself. This has been charged against your humble servant a few times, dating way back to my early ministry. I remember I was very badly hurt because a member of my church, a rather important man, told me that I contradicted myself in my preaching and that bothered me at the time, but it doesn’t bother me anymore.

In fact, it could, in a way, sort of puff you up a little to say that, because you know, a man said that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little politicians, philosophers, and divines. And this idea that always you ought to keep saying the same thing and become, get in bondage to one line of thought, it isn’t scriptural because, you see, the truth is so vast and so many-faceted that it can rarely be stated in one proposition.

That was why when the devil said, it is written, Jesus said, again it is written. If He had listened to, it is written; if Jesus had been a textualist, He’d have turned those stones into bread. If He had been a textualist, He’d have jumped off that tower. If He had been in bondage to the words of some of my brethren now, He would certainly have played straight into the hands of the devil for fear of contradicting Himself.

But the fact is, truth is so vast that it can rarely be stated in a single proposition. And a single proposition usually is false in that it overstates the thing. Let’s remember this, that truth is a declaration plus what seems like a contrary declaration and then a getting together of the two. In philosophy they call it thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Those are hard words when you list them. But a thesis is something that you state. The antithesis or the antithesis is a contrary of that. Then, the synthesis is the getting of the two together, and there’s where the truth lies.

Now, that’s always so in the Bible. But you know, people, our minds are like rings. We get a hold of the truth, and we get a childish desire to close the ring and weld it. And as soon as we close it and weld it, we never get any larger, never get any larger.

A Baptist preacher one time stood white-faced with anger when he heard a man talking, and he said to me, why, he said, that man claims he changed his mind about something, opinion he had about the Bible. Why, he said, I haven’t changed my mind about a single thing in ten years. Now a man actually said that to me, brother. He had welded his little mind shut, and it was so small you couldn’t have got it on your finger, I’m sure. Take a baby finger to get that little mind on there if it was a ring. We insist upon closing our minds and welding them shut, and they never grow after that.

You see, we can have a mind like a ring or like a horseshoe. A horseshoe stays open, and as long as it stays open, it can expand. But as soon as it’s welded shut, it can’t get any larger. There we have it.

Now, the problem with us is that we get a hold of a truth, and then we consider that truth to be all there is to it, close our minds and weld it, and then turn our backs on anybody that says anything different. Where the fact is that there always ought to be another passage somewhere found that seems to contradict it, you know, if we’re going to get at the facts.

Now it’s like this. God’s sovereignty, for instance. One man says, I believe in God’s sovereignty. So, he closes his mind and welds it shut, and he believes in God’s sovereignty. Another man stands up boldly and says, I believe in man’s free will, and he closes the ring and welds it shut, and the two men turn their backs on each other and walk away and build two churches. One dedicated to the little ring, I believe in God’s sovereignty. The other dedicated to the little ring, I believe in man’s free will.

But the wise Christian takes thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. And the wise Christian says, now just a minute, isn’t it possible that we can take both of those and rise above them and look down on them and see that they’re both right and get a third truth that’s bigger than both of them? But you can’t get people to do that. We’d rather build churches and be known as founders of something. So one fellow has, he’s the God’s sovereignty man.

I was talking rather in fun to Brother Knighton up here in the study. We were looking at a certain hymnal of a certain church, and it happened to be a hymn that I love very much, the hymn that the trio sang last Sunday night. And I said, look here. They actually, this particular hymn book is a strongly Calvinistic hymn book, being of a strongly Calvinistic organization, which does not believe, or at least not supposed to believe, I think some of them are better than their doctrine, but they’re not supposed to believe that Christ died for everybody, only for the elect.

And one of the verses, one of the stanzas that Zinzendorf wrote, and Wesley translated, says this, Lord, I believe we’re sinners more than sands upon the ocean shore. Thou hast for all a ransom paid. Thou hast a full salvation or full atonement made.

You know, they skipped that one. They actually skipped it. They didn’t put that one in. Now, it could have been they didn’t have room for it, but knowing humanity, knowing humanity, I think I know why they skipped it. Because they say Jesus died only for the elect, not for everybody.

And Wesley said, Lord, I believe we’re sinners more than sand upon the ocean shore. Thou hast for all a ransom paid. Thou hast for all atonement made. They couldn’t take that, so they closed their ring and shut that verse out. But I believe that verse. I believe that stanza with all my heart.

Well, you see, now I want to present two propositions from the Scripture that seem to contradict each other. John 5:24, he that heareth My words and believeth on Him that sent Me hath everlasting life. Now that’s there, isn’t it? Hath everlasting life in the present tense. John 6:47 says, verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on Me hath everlasting life. John 5:12 says, he that hath the Son hath life.

Now there I have three verses of Scripture, and these three verses of scripture establish the thesis. Eternal life is the present possession of all true Christians. Now there we have the proposition with the proof texts. The true Christian has eternal life. He that hath my words, heareth my words and believeth on me hath eternal life. He that believeth on me hath everlasting life. Now there we have it. We don’t have to explain those verses. They’re there and they establish the proposition that eternal life is the present possession of Christians.

But you know, there are some church people that teach that eternal life is future and that you do not have it now, you’ll have it then; you’ll get it then. Well, shall we close the ring and reject everybody that teaches anything else but this? We have one thesis; eternal life is the present possession of Christians.

Now I want to read you some more passages. Matthew 25:46. Then shall the righteous go away into eternal life. That’s future. Then this passage, where do I find it here? Luke 20:35, 36. Listen to this. But they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world and the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, neither can they die anymore for they are equal unto the angels. For they are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection. There is a life which is future. It is something that we are to attain or attain unto in the day ahead. Luke 18:29,30. There is no man that hath left house; oh, and then He says, or property and husband, wife, children, anything. He names everything we can leave.

For the kingdom of God’s sake, who shall not receive manifold more in this present time and in the world to come, life everlasting. Then Romans 2, 7. He says to them who by patient continuance and well-doing seek for glory and immortality, they shall have eternal life. Galatians 6, 8 says, he that soweth to the Spirit, shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting. Now, that establishes the proposition that eternal life is the future possession of the Christian. So, there we have thesis, antithesis.

Now what do we do? Throw up by our hands and say the Bible contradicts itself. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know what church to join. Then go get drunk. Shall we just give it all up and say a religion such a confusion that I know nothing to do, only go out and live, eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Well, that’s the way foolish people do. So, we close our minds on one ring or the other.

But there is a second thing we can do. We can rise above both of these and look down on them and see them in their perspective and see that instead of their contradicting each other, they complement each other, supplement each other, and explain each other.

Now, let’s look at the synthesis. The thesis is, the Christian has eternal life now. The contradictory thesis is, that the Christian lives in hope of eternal life. The synthesis, that is the truth, is that eternal life is the experience, is to experience God in the soul. John 17:3, this is eternal life, that they might know, that is, experience Thee, the only true God in Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. And it is therefore a present possession.

And we possess this eternal life now in this world, in a state and world of death. Eternal life grows here in the bosom of redeemed men, surrounded by death everywhere. For the world is asleep, says John, in the lap of wickedness, and all is death around about us. And the Bible tells us that men are dead in trespasses and sins and that they lie in the depth of iniquity and wickedness and in bondage. Now in the midst of all this mortality and death and bondage and wickedness, there are some who have eternal life, now, as a possession. For it is to know God and to know his Son, Jesus Christ.

But further, eternal life is also a future state. It is the kingdom of the blessed. It is where death is banished forever. It is where the Triune God is visibly present.

It is where men shall look on the face of God and with no death present and without the graveyards and the bones and the mortuaries and the undertakers and the hospitals and the ambulances and the doctors and pain and woe and old age and death. We are to look upon the face of God, the first time in human history, look upon the face of God. For it’s written, now He dwelleth in light unapproachable, to which no man can come or ever is able to come and nor can see him.

But then they are going to see Him, says the book of Revelation, and look on His face. That is an expansion of eternal life. Now we have eternal life in our bosoms. Then we will dwell in eternal life. Now we have, as it were, the little diamond of eternal light set in our heart. Then we shall dwell in a mansion of diamonds. Now we have a little bit of the blue sky of eternal life to gaze upon like a prisoner looking at the blue sky through a narrow window. Then there will be so much of it and we’ll be surrounded in it and we’ll swim in it and fly in it and live in it. Eternal life. We live in hope of eternal life, says Paul.

So, you see, my friends, the Bible doesn’t really contradict itself. It simply states a proposition. Then it states another proposition. And it gives us credit for having too much sense to get out on either end of the log and say, I believe this, and I believe this. The most pitiful thing I know is to see two saints sitting on the same log with their back to each other who won’t speak. One of them out on the end that says eternal life now. The other one out on the end that says hope of eternal life. If they would just get off that log and get a little perspective, they would see that both of those facts are true.

A Christian has eternal life now, but he doesn’t have all the eternal life there is now. He has the life of God in his soul, for Peter says that we have the very nature of God in our souls. That a Christian has now. So, when you hear a man in the mission tell the poor fellows from Skid Row, believe in Jesus Christ and you’ll have eternal life, they’re telling the truth. When you hear the serious Bible expositor saying we’re living in hope of eternal life to come, he’s telling the truth too. Only what they mean is that the believer gets eternal life now as a, what does Paul call it, foretaste, an earnest; and that earnest which we have now is the beginning.

It’s like this, it’s like this. Suppose that I were a rich man. That’s a supposition that’ll really strain your brain bad, but suppose that I were a rich man.

And suppose that I had a couple of million dollars salted away down here in the Continental Bank. And I’d say to a son, I only had one, that’s another supposition. And I’d say, son, you’re going to have this. I’m not going to be around long. I already begin to feel the tug of mother nature and I’ll be leaving it, and I can’t use it and I want you to have it. Here’s $10,000 to start. See if you can invest that well. See what you can do with it. I’d like to have the pleasure of seeing what you can do with it while I’m around. So I give him $10,000. But there’s still two million salted away and he says, here’s the will.

And he talks to his friend, and he says, my dad has just made me rich. I have money. I have money. Then the next breath he says, I’m in my father’s will. And when he dies, I’ll have money. And they say, well, now just a minute, you’re contradicting yourself. Now you say you have money. Now you say you’re going to have it. Now you say your father’s already given it to you. And the next breath you say you’re waiting on it. Which is true. Both are true.

And why should, why should they start two churches over that? But if they get together on that and understand what they mean. Now I say I have eternal life, thank God. And then the next breath, I say the gospel, which is in hope of eternal life. And people say, oh, there he goes again. Can’t understand the man. He contradicts himself.

There’s no contradiction there, my brethren. It is simply that you got to know what you mean. He has given us now a little earnest of what we’re to have, but the great glorious inheritance waits for us there. So, that’s why the Bible often talks about looking for eternal life and hoping unto eternal life. The righteous shall go away into eternal life, but eternal life is in the righteous now. The righteous has eternal life in Him, but he’s living in a world of death. Then he’ll not only have eternal life in him, but he’ll move into eternal life.

Well, I hope that that’s clear and that we’ll ask God to help us not to rule each other out, and not to close our minds. Keep your mind open. I know all the cracks that have been made about the open mind. They say that all these flies get into open vessels, and they have all sorts of things. That’s to excuse the fellow who hasn’t got moral courage enough to say, I don’t know.

But when the Lord lays down a fact, believe that fact. When the Lord lays down another fact that seems to contradict it, believe that fact. For they’re both true. And in a short time, you’ll see a third truth that’ll show how they both fit into each other.

So, we Christians have eternal life. Now that’s the thesis. We look forward to eternal life and that’s the contradictory thesis. But the synthesis is that that eternal life has two meanings. It has the meaning of what we have now. It has the meaning of what we’re going to have.

If any of you Christians think that what you have now is all God can do for you, you’re going to have to rethink this whole deal. Because the happiest Christian and the most holy Christian that ever lived is only a beginner. He’s just in the kindergarten, that’s all. He’s just playing on the shore with a sandbucket. There’s yet an ocean lying before him, an ocean of glorious truth and an ocean of riches which Christ has ready for him, yonder. So that eternal life which Paul talks about, says, in hope of eternal life. So, Paul didn’t contradict John after all. It is that toward which we look, and the hope of the church.

I had the pleasure last night, indeed, the pleasure last night of giving a talk to a Methodist church. Methodists they were, old Methodists. Some of those old Methodists. And I started to speak. They all sat there, and they said, who’s this whippersnapper? And I wondered if I was going to get past their guard. And then slowly, one at a time, I saw them melt up and their faces begin to lighten up. And pretty soon I was preaching to those old Methodists. Because I can quote about as much Methodism as any man who isn’t a Methodist, there is. And we Methodists got along beautifully well.

And I told them that we were sharers in a common hope. And they weren’t going to make any charts about it, nor fit Mussolini in. And I don’t know what to do with Khrushchev. He’d probably drink himself to death one of these days. But I don’t know what to do with all of this, this, all of this chirography and all that. Is that what you call making map making? I don’t even try to remember where any country is anymore. I quit 10 years ago. Because about the time I get it memorized, somebody comes in, takes it over and changes his name. You don’t know what anything is doing anymore, much.

But there is a God who has appointed the nations and who rules in the affairs of men. And you know what I believe? I believe that just as one time God looked down and saw some men busy building a tower. They were building a tower. God said, I’ve had enough of that. And he just went down and just made up the whole affair. Leveled their tower and confused their languages and said, I’ve had enough.

Do you know what I think? I may be wrong, but I think one of these days God’s going to look down and see all this hardware circulating around up there reflecting the light and beep, beep, beep, beeping. And God’s going to say, I’ve had enough of that. And he’s just going to wipe the whole mess out. I hope so. For when He does it, that will be what we’re looking for, the coming again of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. Not the eternal life we have now, but that vaster, deeper, grander eternal life which we’ll have when we arrive there.

Oh, sweet and blessed country, the hope of God’s elect. Oh, sweet and blessed country that eager hearts expect. Jesus in mercy bring us to that dear land of rest Who art with God the Father and Spirit ever blessed. Oh, sweet and blessed country, shall I ever see thy face? Oh, sweet and blessed country, shall I ever win thy grace? I have the hope within me to comfort and to bless. Shall I ever win the place itself? Oh, tell me, tell me, yes.

Then the old brother closes his hymn with a shout, exalt, oh, dust and ashes. The Lord shall be thy part, His only, His forever thou shalt be and art. That was the answer. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. An everlasting, eternal, yes. That sweet and blessed country under which we look, the eternal life, which is to come, which is one with the eternal life we have dwelling in our bosoms. As when the little lagoon suddenly fleshes over and joins the ocean, so all the little lagoons we call eternal life in men down here, deepest calling unto deep at the noise of God’s waterspouts.

And one of these times, all the little lagoons that we call Christians, little puddles of eternal life, so to speak, shall suddenly burst over their dikes and rush out to meet that great vast ocean of eternal life, which we call God. That’s what we hope for. So Paul says, unto the hope of eternal life, and he wasn’t contradicting John, he was just explaining John. Amen? Thank the Lord.

Tags Eternal Life