Life Without End, Amen!

The question posed is this; 'what is Eternal Life?'  'When does it begin?' Does it HAVE a beginning, or is it, like its Giver & the One who personifies it, without Beginning or End; in other words, Eternal?! Scripture tells us that to know Him who is the Life itself is Eternal Life; if we know Him, we have Eternal Life, but does Eternal Life begin when we come to know Him who is Life, or do we simply enter that Who Is, Was & Will Always Be?!

The Creator, although eschatologically the Alpha & Omega, the Beginning & the End, is without beginning or end; the Creator of all that is always was & always will be! Most Christians seem to have swallowed, hook, line & sinker, the notion that eternity, for the believer especially, begins at physical death, that when their biological clock runs down & their individual body ceases to function, they have entered the Eternal State! In some sense, when the spirit is separated from the body, with those distractions, for lack of a better term, gone & forgotten, there will be what might be a closed or deeper communion with those that have already shed their flesh. However, though our individual bodies do not, in that sense, ever enter Eternity ( just as the apostle Paul said that flesh & blood would not inherit the Kingdom of God ), our spirits have become One with Him who is Eternal, who in fact is Eternity!

For the individual believer, their entrance into Eternal Life does, in that same sense, come at their conversion, with their acceptance of their blessed condition within the Family of God & their surrender to their Father's will for their lives! However since the Body in question, according to Scripture, though it included individual human bodies, was & is the Body of Israel, or more to the point, the Body of Christ; we should note that our entrance into Eternal Life began, not at the moment of our individual conversion, but when the Body of Israel became One with the Body of Christ!

Our biological bodies will perish, there should be no question there, but our spirits return to Him who gave it, to Him who is both Eternal & Eternity! When we, that is, our spirit, enters that Eternity, that Eternal Life which is our Creator, through His Son, Jesus the Christ, we enter that which has always been! Eternal Life is just that, eternal; the Life that comes through blessed relationship with our Creator will never cease & though this biology will cease, just as Lazarus undoubtedly died again, our spirit will persevere!

Charles Haddon Shank