An Unchanging Promise

(“This is exactly what Christ promised: eternal life, real life!” 1 John 2:25 [The Message])

Anyone can make a promise. There are promises of health if you just drink someone’s juice product. You can lose 50 pounds in 2 days if you use the most recent weight-loss gimmick. Men and women promise to live together as husband and wife, “forsaking all others”. Friends graduate from High School, and, before moving off to college promise to make sure they will stay in touch.

Some promises are mere gimmicks, never meant to be fulfilled. Others, either with the withering of time, or through lack of resolve, one day seems less important than when they first were made. Yet others are well-meant, but life with its demands, carries our forgotten promises down the river of years.

God made a promise through Jesus Christ, His Son. He promised everyone who puts their trust in Jesus, the Perfect Son of God, will receive eternal life. This promise can never be broken, God will never take it away, and it is simply and beautifully irrevocable! Why? Because it is made upon this one certainty: Jesus, God’s Son, is also Divine Himself.

In the foregoing verses John has dealt with the false teachers who tried to say that Jesus was simply an emanation from God, perhaps even a lofty angel, but he was not God. If Jesus is not divine, then there is no weight behind His promises. And, besides that, if He is not God, that makes Him also a liar. People may argue it, but every document we have that record’s Jesus’ life has Him testifying to be “equal” with God. Even His enemies hurl the accusation that “this man call’s Himself God.”

That is the basis of our security. God has promised by nothing other than His own Son. Jesus proved the validity of the promise of “eternal life” by allowing Himself to suffer and die brutally at the hands of mankind. Three days later he gloriously rose from the dead, presenting Himself alive to several within the first hours and over 500 within the next 40 days.

That all makes for nice theology, but I get to see it played out in all of its strength when I visit a husband and wife in their late 80s. She is in the hospital several weeks after suffering a stroke. She cannot yet walk, struggle to swallow, and speaks only a handful of words at a time.

He, just four short years ago, decided to follow Christ. They will celebrate their 71^st wedding anniversary in just a week from this writing. He tears up every time we speak. He does not know if he will have his dear bride with him much longer. She is a petite, spunky lady, and I wish I had known them in their teens.

Now, what was once petite is now frail. Her words come slow, but her eyes are alive as she lays in the hospital bed, always looking for his face. He rubs her back, her legs, caresses her fingers; they touch with the sort of love that teenagers do not even imagine. Married nearly twice as long as myself, I watch them in wonder. He loves her deeply, and seems to fall more in love with her as each day of her recovery passes by.

We all hope it is a recovery. We dare not speak, quite yet, of her passing. But she is ready, and so is he. That is the difference this “eternal life” makes in real life; at least for this precious couple just now. If she were to breathe her final breath tonight, he knows he will be crushed, but he will not be defeated. He knows, as he knows the sun will rise tomorrow, that he will see the same sparkle in her eyes again, if she were to leave him tonight.

For me, the best theology is played out in the depths of human experience. I watch these two lovers who, only in the last few years, have added a living faith in Jesus Christ, and I am witnessing the miraculous. There is nothing more supernatural than two people so deeply in love, knowing that God is good on His promise. They have placed their bets, all in, for eternal life. Real life!