The life appeared ; we have seen it and testify to it , and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. – 1 John 1:2
What was it that made Jesus so extraordinary? It was the eternal life he held within him. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” (John 1:4,9) For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. (John 5:26) As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will not hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst. (John 6:57, 35) “…the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us. (1 John 1:2)
The life within Christ was no ordinary life. It was eternal life.
Through his relationship with his Father, who supplied all his needs, Jesus was quite independent of the world around him and dependent on his Father alone for all his physical needs. He had a separate life source then that world provided, and as a result he was complete within himself. His life source was eternal. The world’s life source was temporary.
Christ knew who sustained his life and who held His time in his hands. It wasn’t the world, or anything the world had to offer. He trusted in his Father alone to maintain the life he embodied until the appropriate time came for him to lay it down. The threats of the world through various circumstances never threatened or dictated his life.
Instead, he ordered them and submitted to them according to his Father’s will. He commanded the waves to be still and the diseases to be gone. He walked on the water. [John 6:19] He was the Bread of life, the Living Water [John 4:10, 13-14 6:33-35, 57] No one took his life, he willingly laid it down. [John 10:11, 17-18] He knew he would pick up his life again for His life wasn’t temporary, it was eternal. It was without beginning and without end. It could never be broken or snuffed out prematurely.
Without this basic truth, Christ would have been an ordinary man like anyone of us. He would have lived and he would have died. His life would have been temporary as our own. The life he held within himself, wasn’t temporary, it was and is eternal.
People had been raised from the dead before, by prophets and even by Jesus Himself. Those were indeed miracles, but unlike those miracles, nobody beside Christ ever had the ability or authority to raise themselves from the dead and ascend straight to Heaven. Everyone else who had been raised eventually died again submitting to the final authority of death. Their life was still as temporary as ours, and their resurrections were only temporary reprieves.
However the life inside of Christ was eternal life. His resurrection was an eternal resurrection. His authority is now an eternal authority. Everything about Christ is eternalized. This is what makes his life so extraordinary; everything about his life is eternal, unbroken, whole, complete and unlimited because he himself is eternal life. This is what he offers us, to those who believe in him, eternal life. (1 John 2:25, 5:11 Romans 6:23, John 6:40) But it only comes to us through an abiding relationship with God and Jesus Christ who he has sent. (John 17: 3)
To live without Christ, without any relationship and attachment to God the Father, means that we are temporary. To be temporary means, we have a beginning and an end, we are broken, we are limited, we can never know unity, and we can never know what it means to be complete, because everything about our lives is incomplete, broken and temporary. Our joy, our love, our relationships, our work are all things in our life that were meant to be eternal. Our suffering comes from our temporariness, as those things which we love are continually taken away from us through their own temporariness because of sin in this world.
God has put eternity into the hearts of men. (Ecc. 3:11) When something is broken, you know it’s broken. You may not know exactly what is wrong with it. You may not know why it is broken or what it was intended to do. But you know it is broken and something is wrong. You know there is something more to it. It was designed for more. You were designed for more. Your life was designed for more, to hold more joy and more love then your earthly mind can fathom, but your more is only found in connection to eternal life through Jesus Christ, without him, everything in life, everything in this world is limited, temporary and incomplete.
Christ still lives today, and because He lives He ensures that those who believe in him and attach themselves to him in a dependent relationship will live also. “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only son into the world, so that we might live through him. ” (1 John, 4:9) As Christ depends on the father, we depend on him to meet all our needs and he becomes our life source. The world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. (1 John 2:17)
