Do you know what Eternal Life is?

This is another draft chapter from the book I’m working on… I’d appreciate any feedback.

I in them and you in me—
so that they may be brought to complete unity.
Then the world will know that you sent me
and have loved them
even as you have loved me.
John 17:23 NIV

Do you ever feel powerless?

Do you ever feel like you don’t have what it takes?

Jesus understood that his disciples simply would not have the capacity to glorify God, which is why he prayed what he did in John 17:23.

His prayer points to another much-misunderstood aspect of Christian teaching: Eternal Life.

My Father, Mal, often told the story of a moment when the board of Australia’s first Christian radio station (2CBA FM, which became Hope FM) invited one of the country’s most successful advertising agents to a meeting to advise them on how best to connect with people in Sydney.

John Singleton was not a Christian, far from it, but was very excited to dialogue with a room full of Australia’s top Christian leaders.

Mal relates, “One of the first things he said to us was ‘You guys have the product everyone wants, but you have a lousy job of selling it. You say you have the secret to eternal life, but you have never been clear on what it is or how a person gets it. Can you tell me now so I can help you?'”

As Dad told the story, a deafening silence fell over the room as everybody avoided eye contact.

No one could give the man the answer he was looking for.

Most Christians agree that Eternal life is an essential aspect of our faith, but most have no real clue what it is.

Do you?

Many wrongly assume the answer is ‘living forever after you die,’ however, for Jesus, eternal life was a present-tense thing. It was something we experience now.

Or, to put it another way, if you don’t have eternal life before you die, you won’t have it afterwards

To understand the connection between God’s glory, Jesus’ prayer in verse twenty-three and Eternal life, we need to jump forward from the moment Jesus prayed his prayer, to the moment the disciples began to realize what it all meant.

The short description of Jesus’ appearance to his disciples in John 20:19-23, embedded in the middle of that chapter, could easily be overlooked. However, those five verses describe a moment when human history is turned on its head.

Back in the upper room

As we begin to engage with the story, it is essential to allow the disciples to be human and imagine what the journey of following Jesus for three years must have been like. There would have been so many moments of complete disorientation as what they saw Jesus saying and doing challenged everything they thought they knew.

Few moments of disorientation, however, were like this one.

It is hard to picture the degree of bewilderment the disciples felt as they sat quietly in the upper room where, only a few days earlier, Jesus had washed their feet.

John and some of the women would have had the images of Good Friday seared into their consciousness. The others were coping with the knowledge that when things got tough, they ran away.

Peter would have been in his own personal hell. His last interaction with Jesus was one he would have been trying hard to forget. While yelling for the third time, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Peter looked up, and his heart sank. As the words echoed around the courtyard, the one to whom he had only hours earlier promised to be faithful, no matter what, was being led by guards across that same courtyard.

Jesus didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. Luke tells us, “The Lord turned and looked straight at Peter.”[1]

Those eyes would have bored portholes into Peter’s soul.

In an instant, the bravado disappeared, and a deep and overwhelming grief engulfed the burly fisherman.

Peter would have been in that upper room two days later with the others. I guess that he was in the darkest corner, staring into space, exhausted by grief and continually re-living that courtyard moment.

It seems the disciples had largely ignored Mary’s news that she had seen Jesus. Perhaps they assumed she was made delusional through grief. They were all scared. The Bible tells us that much. They had the doors locked from fear that the Jewish leaders might come looking for them.[2]

Then, all of a sudden, something happened that no one was ready for.

Jesus appeared.

Let that sink in.

How would you feel if someone you knew was dead appeared in the middle of a locked room?

Terrified?

Probably.

According to John 20:19, Jesus says, “Peace be with you.”

That sounds a little too formal. In the tone of Jesus’ voice and the look in his eyes, what he said with those words was something like, “Calm down, boys and girls, it’s ok. I’m not a ghost.”

The next thing he does is to show them his hands and his side. The wounds would have been horrific.

Rather than express concern for Jesus’ welfare, which might have been an appropriate response, the disciples are overjoyed at the sight of the wounds.

Why?

John 20:21 tells us why, “They saw the Lord.” The wounds were what they needed to have their eyes opened to who it was that was standing in front of them.

All of a sudden, all that Jesus had told them in the leadup to Good Friday started to make sense.

I imagine the disciples, now excited, remember all the times Jesus had told them he was going to Jerusalem to suffer and die and then be raised on the third day. [3] They are now realizing that’s what he really had meant by those words. It wasn’t some profound metaphor, after all.

Again, Jesus tells the disciples, “Peace be with you!”[4] but the exact words mean something different this time. This time, he is telling them something like, “Be quiet for a moment. I know you are excited, and we can talk soon, but before we do, I need to tell you something important.”

What is so vital that Jesus needs to tell them?

“As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”

What has he just shown them?

His hands and side.

Now, effectively, he says, “This was my turn. Now it’s yours.”

Jesus’ words should not have been a surprise. He repeatedly told the disciples that following him meant being willing to die[5]. 

Jesus’ disciples are to be those who step into the gap between grace and truth, not letting go of either, and as we do, we often discover that God seems to have led us to a place of cross-shaped sufferiN.T.T.T. Wright puts it like this:

“Because Jesus bore the cross uniquely for us, we do not have to purchase forgiveness again; it’s been done. But because, as he himself said, following him involves taking up the cross, we should expect, as the New Testament tells us repeatedly, that to build on his foundation will be to find the cross etched into the pattern of our life and work over and over again.” [6]

Where we are up in the John 17 prayer, Jesus has just told his Father, “I have given them the glory that you gave me.”[7]

The glory of God is a tension. God responds with grace and truth in a world of light and darkness because the darkness needs the light of truth, and the light needs to be fanned into flame through grace.

On the cross, grace collides with truth, and two days later, Jesus tells the disciples that he is sending them in the same way he was sent.

This helps us understand a little of what Paul writes in Romans:

^[2] And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. ^[3] Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; ^[4] perseverance, character; and character, hope.[8]

Somehow, there is a direct connection between our willingness to suffer and our characters being transformed in a way that reflects the glory of God and produces hope.

We will explore more deeply what it means for our lives to reflect God’s grace and truth in the shape of a cross as we continue our journey with Jesus’ prayer. However, imagine for a minute you are Peter hearing Jesus’ words.

I do not doubt that a heaviness descended on the room as Jesus told the disciples they were sent in the same way he is.

I am sure that the whole thing would have felt like a cruel joke for Peter.

I imagine he thought, “Jesus, you heard and saw how much you can trust me in that courtyard. I imagine some of these other guys might have what it takes, but you and I both know you can’t send me anywhere. I buckled the moment a 12-year-old girl asked me a question.”

Do you ever feel God asks you to do something beyond your capacity?

Do you ever feel like your past mistakes disqualify you from a different future?

Welcome to the club.

If you have made it this far in the book, you already know that Jesus’ John 17 prayer seems to set a bar well beyond our ability.

We have already seen that we need to be ‘in him’ and that we need the glory of God for Jesus’ prayer to come anywhere near fruition, but if we are to be honest, we know that none of us can do either of those things.

Neither could the disciples in that upper room. The moment that the possibility of suffering became apparent, all but the women and John ran away.

Fortunately, Jesus had more for them and us in that upper room.

The moment that reshapes history

We now come to the verse that changes human history and yet is often overlooked:

And with that he breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit.[9]

He what?

He breathed on them.

The mechanics of the moment are unclear, but what is not unclear is what Jesus is saying with this action and these words.

There had been one other moment when God breathed on Man. The moment that started it all:

Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. (Genesis 2:7 NIV)

That moment in the Garden of Eden had been the start of everything.

This moment in the upper room was the renewal of everything.

As he breathed on his disciples, Jesus inaugurated what the Apostle Paul called “the new creation,” of which Christ, himself, was the first fruit.[10]

Many Jews were looking forward to the moment that the Messiah would usher in the promised renewal of all things since Isaiah wrote his poetic description in chapters 65 and 66, which starts with the clear statement in verse 17:

“See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind.”

No one expected those verses to point to a moment like this in the upper room.

No one anticipated the Messiah coming and then, through the power of the Holy Spirit, sending New-Creation people out into the world, but that is precisely what is happening here.

The Bible clearly states that the New Creation is not entirely here yet, and there will be a moment when the Messiah will return, and everything will be made new. This is the future we all look forward to and is described in Revelation 21 and 22:

^[3] And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ^[4] ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” ^[5] He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new !”[11] …

The upper room reality, though, is that the New Creation is here now, and we are ambassadors of that creation in a world longing for it.

The New Creation is an entirely different “order of things”[12] from the world. It was introduced as Jesus cried, “It is finished” on the cross, echoing the completion, or finishing, of the first heavens and earth in Genesis 2:1 and passed on to the disciples in the upper room and through them to us.

Paul asserts in 2 Corinthians 5:17 that if we are “in Christ”, the new creation has come.

With this new creation reality in view, Paul describes himself (in 5:20) as an ambassador. That’s a very helpful analogy. Ambassadors are official outposts of their home nation. Their embassies are literally governed by all the laws of their home countries and are subject to those laws rather than the laws of their host country.

What does it look like for us to be governed by the laws of our home country? It means living lives of Grace and Truth, of the Glory of God.

This is what Jesus means when he prays about his followers: “They are not of the world, even as I am not of it” in John 17:16 and, two verses later, “I have sent them into the world.”[13] We will explore more of the implications of what it means to be ambassadors of new creation in Chapter 7.

At this stage, we just need to hear that the New Creation is the most important thing in the world, at least according to Paul:

“May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation.”[14]

Rediscovering the power of Eternal Life

The launch of the New Creation project in the Upper Room was made possible through the eternal life given at that moment.

Again, what is Eternal Life?

Jesus himself gives quite a clear definition in John 17:

Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.[15]

According to Jesus, Eternal Life is quite different from living forever when you die. His definition is present tense. However, this definition is limited by our ability to understand the depth and breadth of the original Greek. We hear the word “know” and can’t help but assume it means intellectual knowledge. For Jesus, the term was much stronger than that.

D.A. Carson writes that when Jesus uses the word “know”, he means a mixture of fellowship, trust, personal relationship, and faith. [16] You can’t know Jesus and God in the way Jesus is talking about without radically changing your life.

The Eternal Life Jesus is talking about is a deep knowing of Him that comes not through study (although that is not a bad thing) but through openness to the most intimate kind of relationship.

How is that even possible?

We find out in the upper room.

When God created human beings, he did something he didn’t do with anything else. He made us in his image. That same idea is expressed with the unique method of creation described in Genesis 2:7, where God breathed the breath of life into his nostrils.

The words for spirit and breath are interchangeable in both Hebrew and Greek.

As man received life, he also received the human spirit, which is part of what it means to be created in the Image of God. As Ecclesiastes says, God “has set eternity in the human heart.”[17]

When Jesus breathes on the disciples in the upper room, he says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”[18] In the same way God breathes his life into human beings in Eden, God again breathes his life into human beings in the form of the Holy Spirit.

This is the clue to understanding the nature of Eternal Life.

The surprising truth of eternal life is that the eternal life we are talking about is not ours but Jesus’.

1 John 5:20 tells us that:

The Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true. And we are in him who is true by being in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.

Did you catch that? Jesus is eternal life.

Eternal life is the life of Christ in you.

When Jesus breathed on the disciples, he breathed his life into them. It wasn’t that suddenly, they were super-human but that now they had the life of the resurrected Christ in them through the power of the Holy Spirit.

As we catch the truth that Eternal Life is Jesus’ life in us rather than simply living forever after you die, a lot of verses take on new meaning:

• Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.” (John 3:14-15)
• But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:22-23)
• Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. (Galatians 6:8 NIV)
• Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses. (1 Timothy 6:12)
• And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. (1 John 5:11-12)

We also begin to see why, directly after Jesus prays that he has given his followers the glory so that they might be one in 17:22, he immediately prays that “I in them” will enable us to be brought to complete unity. It is Jesus’ life in us that makes glory possible, which is precisely what the Apostle Paul writes in Colossians:

To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.[19]

Paul wants us to see that through Jesus, we now stand in the New Creation because we have the Life of Christ in us.

Can you see the mistake we have made? We made Eternal Life about us!

We based a whole approach to evangelism on asking people about what will happen when they die, and in doing so, we overlooked the fact that the gospel itself focuses far more on how we live now in relationship with Jesus.

In reality, the Bible spends very little time on the afterlife. We have majored on one of the Bible’s most minor themes.

Christians tend to forget a fundamental truth at the heart of our faith: The carpenter who walked the shore of Galilee, the same one who flung stars into space, is now in us if we have invited him in.

As we love Jesus and his life increasingly becomes our life, we find that it’s also increasingly possible to live from a place of grace and truth that enables us to be one with others.

To this point, all the aspects of Jesus’ prayer have built on each other and form one whole vision for the church. We are called to be one, which is only possible through the Glory of God, which itself is only possible through Jesus’ life in us.

We glimpse how all this works in practice as we see how the Apostle Peter comes to terms with the worst moment of his life.

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[1] Luke 22:61

[2] John 20:19

[3] Matthew 16:21 NIV

[4] John 20:21

[5] Matthew 10:38-39, 16:24; Mark 8:34-5, Luke 9:23-24, 17:33; John 12:25-26, 15:12-14

[6] N.T. Wright The Challenge of Jesus (1999), page 188

[7] John 17:22

[8] Romans 5:1-5 NIV

[9] John 20:22 NIV

[10] 1 Corinthians 15:23

[11] Revelation 21:3-5 NIV

[12] Revelation 21;4

[13] John 17:18

[14] Galatians 6:14-15 NIV\

[15] John 17:3 NIV

[16] Pillar New Testament commentary on John 17:3

[17] Ecclesiastes 3:11

[18] John 20:22

[19] Colossians 1:27 NIV