How can it be said that we have everlasting life when we still die?

But eternal life is distinct from immortality. Eternal life is what a man may possess here, and not have "immortality" at all as yet. "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life." (John 3:36.) Does this mean "hath it in promise" merely? It does not. He has the life itself, is quickened from the dead, and passed from death (that is, out of death, literally,) into life. (John 5:24-25.) In contrast, we are told that "no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him: " eternal life, then, the saint has abiding in him.

The risen Lord lives to die no more; He is our life in His position of glory on high, therefore there is in the children of God in this day a reaching-out to Christ who is in heaven, and a dwelling with Him in spirit beyond death. When death comes, it finds in the child of God one who has already passed from death unto life, and whose life-source is in glory. Very beautifully was this expressed by a dear youth, now with the Lord, in his dying moments. His mother was watching him with that tearful solicitude which none but a mother's heart can know; she was leave-taking, when her beloved boy, fixing his eyes upon hers and looking into them, said, with increasing emphasis, "Mother, I have everlasting life, everlasting life, everlasting life." He had already in spirit passed beyond death, and being on the very borderland of eternity, and death to the body being present to him, this dear youth fully realised life was his where Christ is. There is no severance of the Life from those who live in Him. "God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in. His Son." (1 John 5:11.)

Christ is our life, and should death touch the body of the child of God, no change is made to the eternal life itself, which he possesses. The circumstances of glory, in which he will be in heaven, will not alter the nature of the eternal life which he now possesses. In time and in eternity the life is the same, and the holy enjoyments, heavenly delights, and the fellowship pertaining to it, ever alike. But what the fulness of this holy enjoyment, and what the depths of the fellowship with the Father and the Son will be, we know but in part.

That in eternal life, according to its very nature, there is the setting aside of death, is too plain to be denied: yet here also, strange mistakes are possible; though to any one who has grasp of the doctrine they should not be possible. First, we are told, and rightly, — "I am made alive now in my soul together with Christ, after His order, and eventually I shall be made alive in body after His order." And yet with the most entire forgetfulness of this limitation, we are told elsewhere "A person cannot say that he has actually eternal life, unless he is clear of death. If he is going to die, how can he say that he has actually got eternal life?" And this is made the ground for saying that while in Rom. 8 life is the consequence of the Spirit in the believer, yet the experience of Rom. 8 comes to an end. "It is not eternal life, and yet life is there!" and much doctrine is built upon this; — a mere and extraordinary piece of forgetfulness: for the experience is not the life, but the result of the life in the present circumstances. The death of the body brings this to an end, and the life is transferred to another sphere; but how does this prove that the life so transferred is not eternal life? Yet he must not say, it seems, that he has actually got eternal life (in his soul), because he has not yet got it in his body! A pebble indeed, to turn one from the path of truth!

Let us remember the words of Him who said, in the consciousness of what He is for men as the Resurrection and the Life, "He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and he that liveth and believeth in Me, shall never die" (John 11:25-26). Against the life, then, that He gives, which is eternal life, death has no claim, over it no sovereignty. The body still awaits its change and its redemption; none the less is it true for the present partaker of His resurrection life, that death is behind, and not before him. For him, Christ has abolished death, and brought life and incorruption to light through the gospel.

We know but little of all that the death of the body involves, and it becomes those who feel that they are justly liable to it, to speak of it with that reverence with which it should be treated as the judgment of a holy and righteous God. Short of the coming of Christ it is the most blessed thing that could happen to a believer, for it is “to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8); but this does not alter the fact that it was brought into the world by sin, and that it is sin’s wages, and the just conclusion of a life which is in its nature enmity against God. Thank God we have a life in Christ which is beyond its power. Were it not for this it would be an unparalleled calamity. Through the mercy of God it is gain to the saint (Phil. 1:21).

305 Thirdly, if death comes in fact - the death of what? Of what is mortal, of the old man. Does the new risen life die? It has passed through death in Christ, and this has been realised in us. It cannot die. It is Christ. Hence, in dying, it simply leaves death behind. It quits what is mortal. We are absent from the body and present with the Lord. It was previously outwardly connected with what is mortal; it is no longer so. We are absent from the body, and present with the Lord. We depart and are with Christ. It is true faith that looks for a greater triumph - we shall be "clothed upon": still this is God's power. The old man, thank God, never revives. God, because of His Spirit that dwells in us, will quicken even our mortal bodies. The life of Christ will be displayed in a glorious body. We shall be conformed to the image of God's Son, that He may be the first-born among many brethren. This is the fruit of divine power. But meanwhile death itself is always deliverance, because, having a new life, it is our being disencumbered from the old man which hinders and hems in our way. It is our being with Christ. How sweet and refreshing is the thought! When once we have seized the difference of the old and new man, the reality of the new life we have received in Christ, the death of the old will be known and felt to be true and real gain. No doubt, God's time is best, because He alone knows what is needed in the way of discipline and exercise to form our souls for Himself, and He may preserve us to know the power of this life in Christ, so that mortality should be swallowed up without our dying.

First of all, the glory, in such a power of life, that he who realises it does not desire death, because he sees in the power of life in Christ that which can absorb whatever in him is mortal, and he sees it with the certainty of enjoying it — such a consciousness of possessing this life (God having formed him for it, and given him the earnest of the Spirit), that death if it arrive to him is but a happy absence from the body in order to be present with the Lord.

But while the believer waits for the full glory of eternal life, he has it now as a life that triumphs over the power of death, if he is called to die. The body of the Christian is still subject to death, but not his spirit, for eternal life is an overcoming life. Death is the king of terrors to them that believe not, but it is not that to those who are God's children through faith in Christ, for death has met its Master; it is a defeated, throneless, crownless king; wrenched from its grasp are the keys of its stronghold; annulled is its power; and delivered from the fear of it are those who were once in bondage to it. The believer shares in the triumphs of Christ, who is his life, and can say, even in view of death, "Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

Paul had eternal life, having got hold of it in Christ; and he has such a sense of the power of life, that he longs to be in the enjoyment of all its consequences. He is always confident: "Absent from the body, present with the Lord." If I drop the body I have life, eternal life, in my soul, and I am looking for the glory if I die. Blessed as it is to see a saint die (and it is the most lovely sight in the world), that is not the hope of the saint. Our only hope is, when Christ shall appear "we shall be like Him." We shall not all die, but we shall all be conformed to the likeness of God's Son.

If, then, His people enter into death, they shall be raised up, for" he that believeth on me" (are His words) "though he have died (kan apothane), shall live." Clearly He is speaking of physical death; the death of one who already has everlasting life by believing on Him. If such an one dies, he shall live. On the other hand, we learn for the first time that a saint may never die, that is, never be separated from his body, as Lazarus was at that moment. "For he that liveth, and believeth on me shall never die." Mark here the order of thought, "Liveth and believeth," not believeth and liveth. The never dying has respect to the body, between which and the soul there shall be, under the circumstances indicated, no separation. The living after death must refer to the body likewise, the reuniting of soul and body, which is here called resurrection, anastasis. Till resurrection takes place, the one viewed as about to be a subject of it is not said to live. For resurrection and living are in this passage corresponding terms. As risen the saint lives. Till risen he does not live. And this will be true of all the dead saints, Lazarus, as raised up, being a kind of illustration of it; a kind of illustration only in one way, because Lazarus was raised to die again, but the dead will be raised to die no more. An illustration in another way, because it teaches what resurrection involved, the calling out of the tomb the body which had been laid in it and, as in his case, his body was raised up again, and till then, after death had come in, he was not regarded as living, so, with the sleeping saints, their bodies must be raised up for them to live.