Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
John 8:58
“Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’”
Eternal life is promised to us in the gospel, and we receive it by believing on the Lord Jesus Christ, trusting in Him alone for salvation (John 3:16). Knowing that truth, however, moves us to ask an important question: What, exactly, is eternal life?
Many Christians would answer something like this: Eternal life means that we will continue to live on after our bodies die and that we will not suffer the pains of hell. This definition captures an important truth. Eternal life means that we continue to exist after death and that we will escape the wrath of God. Nevertheless, the definition needs to be expanded. John 17:3 is a key text. Eternal life is to know “the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom [God has] sent.”
Ultimately, eternal life is knowing the personal, self-existent God of the Bible who has life in Himself and who has revealed Himself supremely in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ (John 14:6). We will spend all eternity growing ever deeper in our knowledge of the triune God through our ever-deepening knowledge of Jesus. The kind of knowledge of which Jesus speaks in John 17:3 is that of a personal relationship that involves trust and communion. Through trust in Jesus, we enter into communion with Him and thus into communion with the triune God, and our communion deepens over time for all eternity.
This must be so because Christ is God Himself. Now, the Son of God is both truly God and truly man from the incarnation into eternity. Still, that He is truly God means that our movement from one degree of glory to another that begins in this life continues forever. We are finite human persons in a relationship with an infinite divine person—the Son of God—who has assumed a human nature (a true body and a reasonable soul, as Westminster Shorter Catechism 22 puts it) into personal union with Himself. The process of finite persons’ knowing the infinite is by necessity never-ending.
Having a personal relationship with anyone is more than knowing facts about that person, but it is certainly not less than that. Perhaps the most important fact of all to know about Jesus is that He is God. He has the same divine name—Yahweh, or “I am”—as the God of Israel (John 8:58; see Ex. 3:14). Jesus is the one true God in human flesh and is thus worthy of our worship.
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
Because Jesus is God, His work as the only Mediator between God and man, though accomplished in time, effectually saves all the elect whether they lived before or after the incarnation. John Calvin comments on John 8:58, “The efficacy which belonged, in all ages, to the grace of the Mediator depended on his eternal Divinity; so that this saying of Christ contains a remarkable testimony of his Divine essence.”
For further study
- Psalm 99:5
- Isaiah 45:22–25
- John 1:14
- 1 John 5:20
The bible in a year
- Job 23–24
- Acts 10:23b–48