Thoughts for the Day

… but the righteous to eternal life.                Matthew 25:46

My latest Bible search for the phrase ‘eternal life’ found it 44 times in the New Testament.  That’s not surprising, it is a phrase packed with such extravagant promise and potential, and it is of course one that Jesus himself used.   John uses the phrase where Luke and Mark tend to use Kingdom of God and Matthew Kingdom of Heaven.  They are broadly interchangeable.   ‘Life’ is a word we understand.  It is so much more than merely ‘living’.  We may not know completely what ‘living’ will be like, what activities we will undertake, in this ‘eternal life’ – in fact we know rather little about that – but Jesus used many parables to describe this Kingdom and we can be confident that ‘life’ will be fulfilled, abundant and good.  ‘Eternal’ is a rather more complicated word.

The Greek word aionios has the same root as our word aeon, meaning an Age, and can have three different meanings.  Sometimes it simply means pertaining to eternity.  For example, Jesus speaks of eternal dwellings in contrast to our temporal dwellings on earth. At other times it can convey a sense of permanence.  Hebrews refers to eternal salvation, judgment and redemption.  It doesn’t mean saving and judging and redeeming will go on for eternity, but they will have happened, and they will never be revoked.  Thirdly, eternal may convey the sense of continuing throughout eternity.  Everlasting might be a more appropriate translation for this, which leads me to note that the NIV translates aionios as ‘everlasting’ only twice, whereas the King James translators used it 25 times.

All this may seem rather academic, and frankly I could not agree more when considering eternal life.  It pertains to eternity. Amen.  It will be permanent.  Amen.  It will continue … in whatever way time operates in eternity.  Amen

But it will be far from academic when we consider eternal punishment tomorrow.