You will notice that there are three acts of giving.
In verse 2 we've already looked at the first one.
Tonight, with God's help, we want to look at the last two.
That to all whom thou hast given him, he may give eternal life.
You will notice that there are two acts of giving in the last part of this verse, and
they are ones in which you can, and I hope will, have a personal part.
The first gift is the gift of the Father to the Son, those whom thou hast given him.
The gift of the Father to the Son is an elect people, a people that God the Father has chosen
to belong to his Son.
Just as the Lord Jesus Christ is God's love gift to us, so in the fathomless grace of
God, we are God's love gift to his Son.
This phrase, to all whom thou hast given him, suggests to us that not absolutely everyone
is included in these who are given to him.
In other words, there are some who are not given to the Son.
That implication is there, and that implication is true.
There are some who intellectually stumble over this bit of revelation that God has chosen
some and not chosen others.
But the fact is that the other side of the truth is that anyone who chooses to come to
him is free to do so.
Those are not contradictory concepts in the mind and the purposes of God, although we
ourselves struggle with them.
As we study the Bible, we see that God has always chosen a remnant out of the larger
hole to which remnant he is pleased to reveal himself, and he is pleased to save them.
We see this, for example, in the choosing of Noah and his family.
It is true that Noah walked with God, but it was previously true that Noah found grace
in the eyes of the Lord.
Why?
Just because he did.
Not because he was a neat man, not because he was some faithful person, but just because
God was pleased to pour his grace, his undeserved favor, upon Noah and his family.
And to that small group of eight out of the millions who inhabited that antediluvian world,
that world before the flood, to that handful of eight, God manifested himself and he saved
them.
He was condemned, only a remnant.
And of the population in the world in Abram's day, God overlooked most and revealed himself
to this man, in Ur of the Chaldees, and called him as an act of grace.
Out of all the population of Egypt, God was pleased to reveal himself through Moses, but
to the people of Israel, and to call them out.
And likewise, out of all the people in the world, even the exiles of the Jews who were
scattered everywhere, only a minority were chosen to return to Palestine.
God has always been pleased, for his own purposes, to choose a remnant, and to that remnant reveal
himself and to save them.
And it's still true today, isn't it?
Of the four and a half billion people, almost five billion people in the world, only a remnant,
only a few out of the many are saved.
Does that not coincide with what our Lord Jesus himself said when he said, enter by
the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction,
and many are those who enter by it, for the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads
to life, and few are those who find it?
We sometimes wonder, why didn't God choose to save everybody?
Have you ever wondered that?
I don't know the full answer to that question, but there is a surprising answer that I think
is consistent with the Word of God, and that is that God is just as pleased to reveal his
wrath as he is his grace.
Because that is part of God's nature too, his justice and his righteousness.
The apostle Paul writes, what if God, although willing to demonstrate his wrath and to make
his power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction?
Those seem like strange words to be in the middle of the book of Romans that deals with
salvation.
But what that verse says is that God is perfectly willing to demonstrate his wrath, just as
he is perfectly willing to demonstrate the riches of his glory upon the vessels of mercy.
He demonstrates his wrath upon what he calls vessels of wrath prepared for destruction.
Prepared by whom for destruction?
Well I think the better question is prepared by what?
Because that which prepares them for destruction is their own sin.
But God intervenes on behalf of vessels of mercy, and the verse goes on to say, and
he did so in order that he might make known the riches of his glory upon vessels of mercy,
which he prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom he has called.
And I don't profess to understand very much about all of this doctrine, except that the
word of God teaches it, and I believe it.
The Bible teaches us that God is at work in our world in this age, and he is taking out,
first of all, from among the Gentiles a people for his name, Acts 15, 14.
In addition to that, he is calling out a remnant, but only a remnant, of the Jews.
As Paul says again in Romans, quoting Isaiah, though the number of the sons of Israel be
as the sand of the sea, it is the remnant that will be saved.
What is God doing in this age?
He is calling out a remnant from Gentiles and from Jews, making them a body to present
to Jesus Christ.
How grateful that you and I can be that we serve a God who is a deity who does not leave
all of mankind in its deserved misery and death.
But God is a God who seeks to save the lost and does.
And these whom he chooses, the elect people in this age, those whom he has chosen from
Pentecost up until this day and until the day of the rapture, belong to an entity that
we call the church.
According to Ephesians 3 verses 4 through 6, this entity was not known in ages past.
It was a hidden mystery that God has now been pleased to reveal to man.
We are not the same thing as Israel.
As much as I appreciate the course Perspectives on Missions and the ministry of Don Richardson,
who was here recently, that course and Don Richardson and some others are confused on
this subject because they see Israel and those of us saved today as being all the same people.
And that is not what the Bible teaches.
The Bible teaches that the church of Jesus Christ is a distinct body called out during
this age to be presented to Jesus Christ as a gift.
The church is composed of all those saved from Pentecost when the Holy Spirit began
to indwell believers until that day that the church of believers is called out from the
world.
It is an elect body of Jew and Gentile, but neither Jew nor Gentile, but those who belong
to Jesus Christ.
The church, a chosen constituency from the nations, called to faith throughout this age
is God's love gift to his precious Son.
As God says to his Son prophetically in Psalm 2, 8, ask of me and I will surely give the
nations as thine inheritance and the very ends of the earth as thy possession.
All of those who are given to the Son by divine choice will come to the Son in faith and not
one of them will be lost.
We are in John, just turn back a few pages to John chapter 6, and notice the words of
our Lord Jesus himself when he says, All that the Father gives me shall come to me, and
the one who comes to me I will certainly not cast out.
Notice that.
And by the way, we see the delicate balance between divine sovereignty and human responsibility
just in verse 37, All that the Father gives me shall come to me, election, and the one
who comes to me, there is the human response, the one who comes, whosoever will may come,
the one who comes to me I will certainly not cast out, for I have come down from heaven
not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me.
And this is the will of him who sent me, that of all that he has given me I lose nothing,
and raise it up on the last day.
For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who beholds the Son and believes in him may
have eternal life, and I myself will raise him up on the last day.
Again in verse 44 he says, No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws
him, and I will raise him up on the last day.
Again in verse 65, and he was saying, For this reason I have said to you that no one
can come to me unless it has been granted him from my Father.
So we get the point here, Jesus is saying those who come to me have been given to me
by the Father, and those who come I will not lose.
Those who come I will raise up on that last day.
And there he's speaking about that future day of resurrection.
But not one of those that belong to him will miss that day of resurrection when he calls
them forth from the grave.
Here we have the gift of the Father to the Son.
It is a people, a people purchased by his own precious blood, a people called out during
this age to belong uniquely peculiarly to him as his own.
Are you one of those?
The will of the Father is that you believe on him whom he has sent.
Have you believed on Jesus Christ?
If you will you may come to him in faith tonight and trust him as your Savior.
Know this that if you come, and I hope you will, that you come because the Father has
chosen you and given you to the Son.
That's the truth of the Scripture.
But in our text in John 17 there is another gift that correlates to this.
There is the gift of the Father to the Son, those whom the Father has chosen to give him.
But then the two, those who are his own, the gift of the Son is eternal life.
That's the second aspect of the giving here in the verse.
Eternal life is first mentioned in the Gospel of John in the third chapter.
And I'd like you to look at this because whenever you find a phrase or a word in a
book that you want to explore.
It's helpful if you go back in the book and you find where it was first used and see the
context there and try to trace that phrase through the book.
Tonight we're just going to look back in John chapter 3 where the term eternal life
is first mentioned in the Gospel of John.
That is in verse 15 where it says, John 3.15, that whosoever believes may in him have eternal
life.
Notice the context.
As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
that whoever believes may in him have eternal life.
These are the words of our Lord Himself.
He is pointing back to that time in the wilderness when the nation of Israel was under the judgment
of God and God sent fiery serpents among them so that they died.
That God graciously provided for them escaped from that judgment in the form of that brass
serpent.
And if those who were bitten would but look at that brass serpent that was lifted up,
they would live, they would be healed of that poisonous bite of the serpent.
That brass serpent, brass in the Bible speaks of what?
I know many of you know judgment, that's right, it speaks of judgment.
And so the brass serpent speaks of judgment.
And as they would look at that brass serpent that was judged as it were in their place,
they were healed.
Jesus is saying here that He will be lifted up too.
Judged in the place of sinners and that whoever believes, whoever looks to Him in faith will
have eternal life.
He goes on to say in this most beloved of all verses, for God so loved the world that
He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have
eternal life.
And let's read verse 17, for God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world
but that the world should be saved through Him.
And let's continue to verse 18.
He who believes in Him is not judged, he who does not believe has been judged already because
he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
Then verse 36, he who believes in the Son has eternal life but he who does not obey
the Son shall not see life but the wrath of God abides on him.
Notice in that verse that belief and obedience are equated.
Now why is that?
Is Jesus here suggesting that works are somehow added to faith to bring eternal life?
No.
He is simply pointing out that to believe on the Son is to obey what God tells us to
do.
That is the will of the Father.
And so to believe is to obey the Son.
And not to believe is not to obey the Son.
Well here we see that term eternal life.
What does it stand for?
Well at least three statements can be drawn from the verses we've read.
In the first place eternal life, whatever it means, stands as opposite of what it means
to perish.
Notice in verse 16 that whoever believes should not perish but have eternal life.
So eternal life is an apposition to perishing.
What does it mean to perish?
Perish is not to die physically.
It can be used in that way, but it means more than that.
To perish is not annihilation, that is to cease to exist, to no longer be a person.
But rather to perish means to come under divine condemnation or wrath.
Verse 17 suggests that.
God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world.
He who believes in him is not judged.
But the other side of the coin is that he who does not believe is judged and therefore
perishes.
So to perish means to come under divine condemnation and wrath.
To be utterly ruined.
To lose purpose for which one is created.
Perhaps the most frightful aspect of hell is not the flaming fire and the torment.
But it is to be cut off from God and to lose the meaning of one's existence.
And to have no purpose and to face eternal ages without any meaning.
For that is what it means to perish.
Commentator Hendrickson says, as the context indicates, the perishing of which this verse
speaks indicates divine condemnation, complete and everlasting.
So that one is banished from the presence of the God of love and dwells forever in the
presence of a God of wrath, a condition which in principle begins here and now, but does
not reach its full and terrible culmination for both soul and body until the day of the
great consummation.
That's why it says in verse 36, the one who does not obey the Son shall not see life,
but the wrath of God abides present tense on him.
See that?
In principle right now the condemnation, the judgment, the wrath of God is upon the one
who does not believe.
Well, whatever eternal life is, it's the opposite of that.
It's the opposite of what it means to perish.
But then what does it mean?
Well, again if we look at the context, it stands as synonymous with what it means to
be saved.
What it means to be saved from condemnation and from wrath and from sin according to verse
17.
God did not send the Son to the world to judge the world that is in his first coming.
Eventually he will judge the world.
But that the world through him should be saved.
So to have eternal life means to be saved.
This eternal life then becomes the possession of the one who believes on Christ.
That is the one who places abiding trust and confidence in Christ who was given for him.
Keep in mind that believing involves accepting and not doing.
Believing is not a work on our part.
It's simply accepting.
It is simply responding to what God offers to us in Christ.
But we still haven't answered the question of what does eternal life entail?
What is eternal life?
This gift that the Son gives to those who are his own.
Well there are two thoughts that seem bound up in the idea of eternal life.
On the one hand there is a quantitative idea.
It says eternal or everlasting.
So there is quantity that is involved here.
It's something that is never ending.
It can never be exhausted in any measurable quantity of time.
However you measure it, it can never be exhausted.
That's one thought that is bound up in eternal life.
We had a beginning, but we have no ending.
It is to live on and on and on.
How do you measure time?
Well somebody has said that the shortest measurement of time is that between when the light turns
green and the guy behind you honks his horn.
That's the shortest measurement of time.
What's the longest, billions and billions of years?
Is that the way you do it?
Well eternity is even longer than that.
There is no measurement to it, that's the point.
It's never ending.
It's ages and ages and ages and ages.
I heard someone illustrate it this way one time and I thought of it when I was walking
a beach in Florida a while back and I looked at all this beautiful white sand.
One way to illustrate eternal ages would be that a bird flies down and picks up a grain
of sand in his beak and then flies off, if it were possible, to the moon to deposit that
grain of sand on the moon and then turns around and flies 250,000 miles back to the earth,
picks up another grain of sand and flies to the moon and deposits that sand and keeps
up that round trip and that process until the beaches of the world are emptied of their
sand.
When that bird has finished, eternity will only have begun.
When you sit down and try to imagine eternity, you quickly get lost in thought because there's
just no way that finite creatures can comprehend that which is never ending, eternal life.
There's that idea, the quantitative idea, but the second idea that's bound up in eternal
life is the qualitative idea.
It's an existence, and I quote Henderson, which pertains to the future age, to the realm
of glory, but becomes the possession of the believer here and now that is in principle.
In other words, just as the wrath of God in principle abides on the one who does not believe,
even now, so even now you and I possess in principle eternal life, a quality of existence.
We share the life of the eternal one, and so to enjoy the qualities of love, peace,
and joy that are found in him and which come to us through a personal knowledge of him,
that is eternal life.
Sometimes the choir does that famous song, poem, the words by Saint Francis of Assisi.
He was not Assisi by the way, but his name is A-S-S-I-S-S-I, something like that, right?
Close to that.
Saint Francis of Assisi.
Saint Francis wrote eternal life, and in that he does not depict eternal life so much as
never ending, but as a quality of a way to live.
You see, because you and I now possess eternal life because we belong to the Son, we are
able to enjoy a quality of life that belongs to the future age.
We are able to reach into the future and to bring in by appropriation to our very life's
manner and mode right now the life of God.
That makes us distinct from the average worldling who does not know Christ.
Because we have a quality of life, now we don't have to enjoy that, some people are
actually rather miserable in their Christian life, it's too bad.
Because God has given us his life really to enjoy.
That we might live now in the fullness of it, that we might experience love and peace
and joy and all of those other characteristics that come through a personal knowledge of
him.
The qualitative idea, the Son gives to those who are given to him eternal life, his own
very life essence to enjoy even here and now.
And it does not even begin to appear what that's going to be like when we're with
him.
What kind of life we will have in his presence when we are conformed to his image and can
fully experience that life.
The glory that awaits cannot possibly even be imagined at this point.
But at this point we do have the reality of that life to enjoy as much as we can in our
present flesh.
John 17, 3 is sometimes looked upon as a definition, it's really not a definition.
And this is eternal life, that they may know thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom
thou hast sent.
This is not a definition of eternal life, but rather it explains how that eternal life
is experienced.
To know the Father and Jesus Christ refers not to merely abstract knowledge, but to joyful
acknowledgement of his sovereignty, glad acceptance of his love, and intimate fellowship with
his person.
Again I quote Dr. Hendrickson, God's gift to his own is the joyous privilege of spending
eternity with him, sharing all that he is and has, of being in heaven and in his glorious
presence and of ever coming to a greater knowledge of him.
Now as we look at the good gifts of John 17, and when I began tonight I said that these
are two gifts in which you can have a personal part.
I hope you see how.
It is by coming to know Jesus Christ and God through him by faith.
You see the gospel presents a choice to man, and that choice is no more clear than in John
chapter 3.
The choice is to believe or to perish.
There's no alternative.
If you believe, you will not perish.
If you do not believe, you will perish.
Aren't you glad for those words of our Lord right here again in the same gospel in which
he says, my sheep hear my voice, and I know them and they follow me.
Who are they?
They're the ones the Father gives him.
He says, and I give eternal life to them, and they shall never perish.
If you've studied that verse, you know that Jesus there put two negatives together.
He says, as we would translate it literally, and they shall not never perish, which is
very bad English, and two negatives make a positive, but not if you're using Greek grammar
rules so that in the language of the New Testament you put two negatives together.
It merely underlines, it reinforces that thought.
So he's really saying, and they shall not by any means perish.
You and I who know Christ have meaning in this life that will go on forever and forever
and forever.
We have purpose because we belong to him.
I'd like to sing about that as we close tonight.
Number 538, the words of Norman Clayton, words that are familiar to you.
Now I belong to Jesus, and wonder of wonders, Jesus belongs to me.
Let's stand as we sing tonight about this wonderful truth.
Come on, stand.
Jesus, my Lord, will love me forever.
From him no power of evil can sever.
He gave his life to ransom my soul.
Now I belong to him.
Now I belong to Jesus, Jesus belongs to me.
Not for the years of time alone, but for eternity.
Once I was lost in sins degradation.
Jesus came down to bring me salvation.
Lifted me up from sorrow and shame.
Now I belong to him.