The Narrow Path Ministries

As I think about the meaning of the word "eternal" in its strictest sense, it means;

1. without beginning and without end
2. always in existence
3. timeless

An eternal truth, for example, is one which has always been true and always will be. "Light overcomes darkness" is an example of an eternal truth. God is Eternal as He is without beginning and without end - He has always existed and will always be.

Our lives can not be considered eternal because they have a beginning (we are born) and an end (we die). We have not always existed. Even those who are in Christ die. It might be argued that those who are in Christ have their spirits remain consciously alive after physical death, but even this isn't eternal because we have a beginning. When Christ returns we will be resurrected and put on "immortality" - the term the Bible uses to describe living forever (not eternal life).

Eternal life then is a description of a kind of life that has always existed. It is the kind of life that God aways intended for His creation - one in which God and man are in harmony with one another. It is a life that brings joy, peace, satisfaction, and great sense of well-being. When we put our trust in Christ and follow his example and the leading of the Holy Spirit, we can have the kind of life God aways intended us to have - an eternal life.

John 17:3
Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.

Todd

Todd wrote:As I think about the meaning of the word "eternal" in its strictest sense, it means;

1. without beginning and without end
2. always in existence
3. timeless

What if time really had a beginning? What if there was no "before the beginning of time"?
Then what meaning would "eternal" have?

This is the way I see it:

Certainly God didn't have a beginning since He was there at the beginning of time when He begat His Son. But everything else had a beginning. The Son of God had a beginning. Yet there was no time at which He did not exist.

"Aidios", the true Greek word for "eternal" as in "His eternal power and Deity" means "unending". However, "aionios" as in "aeonion life" (John 17:3) means "life which goes from age to age".

Or, one could say that only an immortal believer can experience the sort of life that never ends, but they do begin to experience it in part from the moment when their spirit has entered into that new (eternal) life. Or -- the new birth of the soul into the "new" or "eternal" spiritual life (and not the time after Christ returns) is the beginning of the immortality that will last even beyond death and Christ's return.