THAT ETERNAL LIFE

In opening this epistle with a particular reference to the incarnate Word, who was seen and handled, John now reminds his readers that the Lord is without ‘beginning of days, nor end of life’, Heb. 7. 3. He is eternal!

It is worth pondering the significance of the word ‘eternal’ as it is ascribed here. J. J. Lias has described it as ‘not so much the endlessness of life as its stability, its fixedness, its vastness from every point of view, that of endurance and every other, its unchangeableness as contrasted with the shifting conditions of everything in time’. This is the very nature of God.

This eternal life ‘was with the Father’, v. 2. Here is the phrase that determines this as a title of the Lord Himself, for no quality or attribute could be described as ‘with the Father’. ‘The life here referred to is a Person, for it requires a person to have fellowship. A mere abstraction can have no fellowship’, Kenneth Wuest.

The one described is distinct from, yet in active communion with, the Father. The preposition ‘with’ denotes the closest face- to-face fellowship that John used of the Word in John 1. 1. It is the word used to describe living relationship and intimate converse. ‘It is not predicable of angels or of saints but of deity, of the Son alone’, R. C. H. Lenski. John’s use of the past tense ‘was’ also emphasises the continuous existence of the Lord in this position and bond.

But the truth that John imparts is one of intensely practical import. We are brought into the fellowship of divine persons for ‘our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ’, v. 3. What a tremendous privilege! We may have no link with the famous and honoured of this world. We may be insignificant as far as society is concerned. However, we have personal association with the Father and the Son, and what a quality of fellowship it is! Our responsibility is to manifest the character of the One into whose presence we are able to come, vv. 6-10, to develop the Christian walk befitting our fellowship, ch. 2. 4-6, and to maintain the basis of fellowship with other believers, ch. 2. 9-11.