Eternal Life is a promise, not to all mankind, but to certain styled “heirs”.
Paul terms “eternal life”, life which is in Christ Jesus; therefore, in another place, he styles Jesus in relation to the saints, “the Christ our life”; which life, he says, “is hid with Christ in God”. Hence it follows that the life of the saints being in Christ and hid with him in God, the life or soul they are to have eternally is not in themselves.
The life or soul possessed by all mankind in the present state is not hid. Its operations are manifest; for, wherever there is motion in the system, there is life. In the tissues of a dead man there is no motion, therefore no life; and, consequently, no vital manifestations. Hence, the dead neither know, think nor do- “the dead know not anything”, as Solomon declares.
Yet, in a certain sense, the man believing into the Son has life Aionio. He has it now in the sense of Christ dwelling in his heart by faith (Eph. 3:17; John 3: 36). If this faith have led him into Christ by being immersed into his name, Christ dwells in him and he in Christ, and he has the life aionian in the sense of having a right to it. “Blessed are they who do his commandments, that they may have right to the Tree of Life, and may enter in through the gates into the city” (Rev. 22:14). To have a right to a thing, and to possess that thing, are distinct ideas. People may have rights, but be for a long time debarred from those rights; while others may possess things and have no right to them; while others again may have both right and possession. All in whose hearts Christ dwells by a faith which has led them into him, have acquired rights to the Tree of Life and the City; but for a time they are debarred from the possession of them both; but when sinners, who now possess “all things” to which they have no aionian right, shall be deprived of their usurpation and robberies, the dead—in whose hearts Christ dwelt by the One Faith and One Hope of the calling, when they were alive—and the living, in whom he dwells in like manner, shall have right and possession aionian. The saints walk by faith; sinners, by sight: the former have aionian life by believing unto “justification of life”; the latter, not believing into Christ, “shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides upon them.”
This life, to which those sanctified by the Abrahamic Covenant dedicated by the blood of Jesus, obtain a right thereby, is styled aionian; in the Common Version, “eternal” and “everlasting”, because it belongs to the aion or dispensation to be founded by Messiah. The life of Messiah’s cycle is the life promised to the saints. Because aionios is added to God, life, punishment, times, fire, doors, people, the dead, servant, joy, laws, etc., it does not, therefore, follow that all these things are eternal in the ordinary acceptation of the word, that is, without end. “The terminus ad quem, as it is called, is to be determined from the nature of the subject”; and we may add, as that subject and its nature are, for the most part, defined, not by Gentile theology, but by the testimony of God. In the case before us, the duration of the life is defined by the compass of Messiah’s cycle, which is indicated by the saying, “His name shall endure, for the course”; the duration of which course of things, or aion is 1,000 years, but being succeeded by another aion, the continuance is illustrated by the sentence immediately following, saying, “His name shall be continued as long as the sun” (Psa. 72:17). Now, as the sun is to exist always, the cycles of Messiah’s name will never be closed; so that the life of his an will be aionian in the sense of being without end.
Let not the reader, however, jump to the conclusion that, because aionios signifies without end in the case before us, that eternal or everlasting are its meaning when it stands absolutely or alone; and that whenever added to a substantive it imparts the idea of eternity thereto. The Mosaic law declared that the servant who would not accept of his discharge from his master, would be his aionian servant –eyed olam—that is, as long as he lived. Hence, it is manifest, from the nature of things, that aionian does not mean absolutely duration without end; but limited duration as well as unlimited, as the case may he. No man is doomed to eternal ‘servitude; though it might be so argued with as much propriety from aionian servants, as that the wicked will be subject ‘o unending torment, because their “punishment” is styled aionian kolasis.
The life of Messiah’s cycles, which will never close, is a matter of promise, and therefore of hope.
Paul says he was “an apostle according to the promise of life which is in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 1:1). In another place, he says that he was “an apostle separated unto the Gospel of God which he had promised before by his prophets in the Holy Scriptures” (Rom. 1:1). He preached the good news of life and incorruptibility in the kingdom of God restored again to Israel, for all who believed the things covenanted to Abraham and David, and the things concerning the Name of Jesus Christ, and were baptized into the name of the Holy. This prospective abolition of death, and bringing to light of life and incorruptibility through the gospel of the kingdom, was a novelty introduced to the Jewish nation by Jesus, and by his command proclaimed to the Gentiles by the apostles. The proclamation set up incorruptible life the gift of God to obedient believers of His promises, in opposition to the wisdom of the world, which taught that “Death is the separation of an immortal, or deathless, spirit from the body, whose immortality and essence were originally breathed into man from the Divine Substance, and hereditarily diffused through every individual of the race without exception”. Thus, in the first century of our era, two theories of immortality divided the attention of mankind—the one from God; the other from the Serpent. God promised immortality of body to His friends at their resurrection; the Serpent denied it, saying that the body was of no account. The spirit, or soul, was essentially and hereditarily immortal. That immortality, consequently, was independent of faith and obedience, so that they should not die, but be the subject simply of a separation of spirit from the body, which was all the death that would ever happen. But we reject this philosophy of the Serpent and his seed, and accept the words of God. He says, “He will render aionian life to them who, by patient continuance in well doing, seek for glory, and honour, and incorruptibility” (Rom. 2:7). Men only “seek for” things they have not got; and seeking, they hope to attain the things sought. But “hope that is seen is not hope”; seeing, therefore, that we do not now possess incorruptible life, “we with patience wait for it” (Rom. 8:24, 25).
Incorruptible life, with glory and honour in the kingdom of God restored again to Israel at the resurrection of the just, is the hope set before us in the gospel, “the one hope of the calling”. Being promised in “the Covenants of Promise”, those who obtain a right to the promise in obtaining that right become “heirs” of this inestimable gift. Hence the phrase, “heirs together of the grace of life” (I Peter 3:7). An heir is one who hopes to possess; and, at the same time, his hope is according to law, or he is not a lawful heir, however earnestly he may hope. An heir of immortality, the kingdom, etc., is not a present possessor of these things, but one who has obtained a scriptural right to the Tree of Life and the City.
Our proposition, then, is a great truth, namely that Eternal life is a thing promised to certain soled heirs. This being irrefutable, it follows infallibly that all mankind. not being lovers of God, and consequently not “heirs of God”, have no right to eternal life, and therefore “shall not see life”. Now, a man that hath no right to a thing, and shall not see, or be the subject of, that thing, in no sense possesses that thing. It is therefore certain that immortality in no sense is the attribute of mankind in general; and being a matter of conditional promise, it is only a thing of the future, attainable by those who fulfil the conditions. Hence, in relation to the present possession of immortality as a thing physically connected with the human organization, the words of Solomon arc a divine oracle, that “mankind hath no preeminence over a beast”; they all have one spirit; all go to one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again”. This is very humiliating to the proud and pharisaic, and to those who regard men “as gods, knowing good and evil”; but it is the nature of God’s doctrine to humble “the proud in the imagination of their hearts”, and to bring the high thoughts of man into subjection to his.
“The spirit of man is immortal because it is spirit”, say the wise of this world. Be it so. Then the spirit of the beast is immortal, too; for, says the Scripture, man and beast have all one spirit! At death, saith the Gentile philosopher, the spirit of man goes to heaven, because it is written, “the spirit of man goeth upward”. Be it so. It is not unusual for the Devil to quote Scripture. But it is also written that man and beast have all one spirit, and all go to one place, so that if one goes to heaven, the other goes there also! That cannot be, saith the philosopher; for it is written again, “the spirit of the beast goeth downward to the earth”. Be it so. It therefore follows, that Solomon was not speaking of “going to heaven at death”, but of something else, which our contemporaries no more than his, understand; for he inquires, “Who knoweth the spirit that goeth upward, etc., and the spirit that goeth downward, etc.?” The philosophers do not. They do not perceive that Solomon speaks, not of a physical principle, but of disposition: “The spirit of the sons of Adam”, which once prompted them to reach heaven by a tower, and the spirit of beasts, which is prone to the earth, having no ambition for “above”. “All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.” The “spirit” and “breath” of men and of beasts are God’s, which He lends them for the purposes of their organized dust, which constitutes the man and the beast, according to its form. They, that is, their organisms, are formed of the dust of the ground, and their dusty forms are animated by the spirit and breath of God. While they possess these, men and beasts live and move, and have their being in God; and thus, as Moses says, “Jehovah is the God of the spirit of all flesh”; so that, as Elihu says ix Job, “if he gather unto himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again to hi dust” (chapter 34:14, 15).
What rational man, unprepossessed with Gentile traditions, and unprevented by their college sophistry, miscalled “logic”, can fail to see from God’s testimony, that constitutionally, man has no immortality of body, soul, or spirit, an that the immortality promised by God is deathlessness of transformed animal bodies, or of reorganized dust; that this corporeal immortality is limited to God’: friends, who are defined to be those “who do whatsoever he commands”; that right to it is all that can be attained now; and that the thing itself cannot be attained until the resurrection, and the appearing of Christ in his kingdom, that is, in the Holy Land? Of the rest of man kind, characterized by a “stumbling at the word, being disobedient” (1 Peter 2:8) God plainly and positively declares, “they shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on them”.
But concerning those of whom this spoken, it is written, “they shall come forth from their graves to the resurrection of judgment”. They will, therefore, see a life after death and resurrection; but it will not be life of Messiah’s cycles, which never close. In their present life-time “they sow to their flesh”; therefore, saith Paul, “of the flesh they shall in due (oi the appointed) season reap corruption” They rise from the dead, then, at the time appointed for their resurrection, as dust reorganized on a corruptible basis; so that the life they again temporarily possess is a destructible life, being developed through corruptible flesh—or soul and body which God will destroy in hell, on more pro pertly, in “Gehenna”. This destruction, or “of the flesh reaping corruption”, is “the wrath of God that abide upon them”; it abides upon them as sentence of “Death ending in death” ( Cor. 2:16)—”death, unto death”; which is the scriptural form of the phrase, “the extinction of being”; for what “being’ can he more perfectly, completely, on totally extinguished, than the being, the winning and sinful being, whose death ends in” death, as President Campbell, after MacKnight, renders it? The gospel Paul preached was an odour of this “in-hem that perish”, so that his idea of per-;h, destroy, reaping corruption, etc., was or that which sinned to die after resurrection, and to continue dead unendingly —death ending in death.
Immortal soulists admit that it is the soul that sins; it is the soul, then, that must die; and this death of the soul must end in death”. “The soul that sinneth, hall die”, saith the Scripture. Now, is it not folly to tell us that such a soul whose death ends in death, is immortal or deathless? Yet such is the wisdom of the world; the adored nonsense of colleges and schools, in whose service their babes and sucklings chop their “logic” for the confusion of “heretics” and the salvation of souls!
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One