God's Essence - Eternal Life
God is eternal and His life is eternal. He does not have a beginning or an end. He has always existed and will always exist (Revelation 1:8, 22:13). God is above all creation, including time. 2 Peter 3:8b tells us that to Him, “one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” He is the only living and true God (1 Thessalonians 1:9). He does not possess life; He is life, eternal life. Jesus Christ is the source of all life (Hebrews 1:2). He brings everlasting life to all who believe in Him as Savior (John 1:4; 14:6; 10:28; 20:31). At the moment of faith alone in Christ alone, God gives His eternal life to every believer (John 3:16, 36).
Time for us is measured in minutes, hours, weeks, months, and years. It has boundaries of sunrise and sunset and the different seasons of the year like winter and summer. We cannot measure eternity since there is no start and no end to it. God created time and gave it to us for our benefit. Through time, we have a better appreciation for eternal God and the eternal life that He offers. God has allotted to each one of us a certain amount of time on this earth (Psalm 139:16). God gives us one day at a time (Psalm 118:24). God commands the believer “to redeem the time” (Ephesians 5:16; Colossians 4:5). We redeem the time by setting aside a portion of each day to learn God’s Word so we can come to know God, appreciate His grace toward us, see all that His grace supplies to us, and fulfill His plan for our lives. Time spent learning His Word is our daily spiritual bread, the daily nourishment for our souls that we all need (Matthew 4:4). We all start out conformed to this world. Once we are saved, we must begin the slow process of spiritually renovating our thinking (Romans 12:2) so that we can think with the mind of Christ (Philippians 2:5; cf. 1 Corinthians 2:16b). The only way we will ever grow up spiritually is through Bible study (Proverbs 2:1–5; 2 Timothy 2:15; 2 Peter 3:18). God provides us time to do that. Ecclesiastes 3:1 tells us there is an appointed time for everything. Most important is the time we spend fulfilling God’s plan for our lives. That all begins with the daily study of His Word. If it is not daily, it will never become spiritual muscle memory; it will never become reflexive when we need it in the many adversities of life.
Even though God is not restricted by time, He has laid out a chronological time plan for mankind which we call human history. From the creation of Adam, the beginning of human history, to now, God’s plan has unfolded exactly as He planned it. In fact, the Lord Jesus Christ controls history to ensure that His sovereign will is carried out and His plan is fulfilled.
For mankind, death is one of the greatest fears in life. As a believer in Jesus Christ, we do not need to fear death. In fact, the Bible compares the death of a believer to sleep (Matthew 27:52; John 11:11). Who is afraid to fall sleep? When we breathe our last, we will wake up face-to-face with our Lord. God has already determined the time, manner, and place of our death. We will die at His perfect time, the time of His choosing, and not a moment sooner. The testimony of all who have believed in Jesus Christ is found in Philippians 1:21. “For me, living is Christ, and dying is profit.” To understand “dying is profit,” you must understand what death means to a believer. Death means we are “absent from the body and face to face with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8b). For the believer, death is not the end of life. It is the beginning—the beginning of eternal life with great joy forever and ever.
Memory verse: “And the testimony is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. The one who has the Son has the life; the one who does not have the Son of God does not have the life” (1 John 5:11-12).