Faith In Life Everlasting
Minister: | Rev. Ronald Van Overloop |
Date: | 7/15/2012 PM |
Text: | Romans 6:23; Lord's Day 22 |
Psalters: | 259, 247, 202, 30 |
- Knowing God.
- First, our understanding of eternal life is helped by seeing it contrasted with “eternal death.”
- This eternal death is everlasting punishment; it is to be under God’s wrath as punishment for sin!
- God’s wrath does not wait until after physical death (hell), but is already abides on them (John 3:36).
- Those experiencing God’s wrath do not even see life (John 3:3), let alone enter it and enjoy it.
- Life is God’s gift of being able to know (in love) God (John 17:3).
- Life (eternal life) is perfect bliss, light, and joy; not just unending life.
- God’s life is harmonious activity of perfect fellowship.
- To know God is personal, conscious experience of God as the highest good.
- First, our understanding of eternal life is helped by seeing it contrasted with “eternal death.”
- God realizes eternal life only in Jesus Christ.
- Adam could know God by virtue of creation, but he lost it.
- He was created with a mind which could react in love to the revelation of the mind of God.
- But Adam lost this life when he fell away from God into sin, and then he experienced only divine anger.
- Eternal life is a new life because it has its source in the incarnated Son of God.
- The incarnation is God dwelling with man in perfect friendship and fellowship.
- Eternal life is to know God in Jesus, so only in Jesus does God realize and reveal eternal life.
- Also, eternal life is resurrection life, i.e., it is life on-the-other-side-of-death.
- This bliss is reached through the deep and dark way of sin and death.
- Eternal life is resurrection life because eternal life is forgiven life - life in Christ, without God’s wrath.
- Adam could know God by virtue of creation, but he lost it.
- Believers experience this eternal life by means of the gift of faith.
- We experience eternal life already now by believing (John 3:36; 11:25).
- Regeneration is that life, for it is the power of Christ’s resurrection (I Peter 1:3).
- Faith is the union of one to Christ, so the recipient partakes of Him and abides in Him.
- The joy and blessedness of eternal life is found in being forgiven.
- In heaven this beginning of eternal life will be changed into a fullness of joy.
- Believe, embrace Christ as the fulness of all your emptiness, and live forever.
- We experience eternal life already now by believing (John 3:36; 11:25).