Though the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted our lives, the good news is that more people are thinking about God. They are contemplating the reality of heaven and hell and what happens when they die.
This is evident by how many people made a decision to follow Christ after watching online services on Easter. This is great news and it demonstrates how God redeems a terrible situation for His glory.
As more people contemplate the afterlife, there’s two misconceptions that I want to address.
First, when most hear the phrase eternal life, they immediately think of heaven. If this is the way you think, hopefully this article changes your perspective.
Second, many think that believing a set of facts about Jesus saves them. As you will see, we aren’t saved by mental ascent but by embracing Jesus as the New Covenant sacrifice and surrendering our lives to enter into the New Covenant.
Picking up from my previous post, let’s look at these two misconceptions as we continue looking at seven steps to living by Christ’s indwelling life from John 6.
Today we will look at Steps 3 and 4.
3. Eternal life is Someone in us who possesses us not somewhere we go.
In John 6, Jesus used the phrase eternal life ten times in five verses. That’s significant.
The word eternal means without a beginning or an end. In other words, it is uncreated, indestructible life. The word life is zōē, which is God’s life.
Notice that Jesus said, “He who believes has eternal life. . . . He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life” (John 6:40, 54, emphasis mine).
Believing in and partaking of Christ allows us to possess His life that is without beginning or end. In fact, we won’t go to heaven when we die if we don’t possess His life now.
Jesus is the Life and he who has the Son has the life (1 John 5:12). Or we could say it like this: Those who have the Son have His life dwelling within them.
4. Embracing the New Covenant is how we receive Christ’s indwelling life.
Jesus told the self-seeking crowd, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves” (John 6:53). Like the thrust of a sword, this statement cut to heart of the crowd, offending most.
They thought to themselves I loved when Jesus did the miracles, signs, and wonders. I loved when Jesus provided the bread and fish. But this guy sounds like he’s promoting cannibalism. This guy is too extreme for me. I’m out of here.
The problem was they didn’t understand what Jesus was truly saying. They misunderstood Him and allowed their hearts to be offended.
Jesus wasn’t promoting cannibalism at all. He was inviting the crowd, and by implication the world, to partake of Him as the New Covenant sacrifice.
It’s no coincidence that Jesus revealed Himself as the New Covenant sacrifice near Passover. Jesus Christ is the Passover Lamb who takes away the sins of the world.
In Scripture, there’s a progressive revelation of the Lamb atoning for sins. In Genesis 22, it’s a lamb for one man. In Exodus 12, it’s a lamb for a family. In Leviticus 16, it’s a lamb for the nation. Finally, in John 6, it’s a lamb for the whole world.
On Passover, the Father cut a covenant between God and humanity. Jesus Christ was both the New Covenant sacrifice and the New Covenant representative.
In essence, Jesus told the crowd, “Unless you partake of Me as the ultimate Lamb of God that Passover points to—the sacrifice whose blood secured the New Covenant—My life can’t dwell within you.”
In John 6:53, eat is in the aorist tense, which is usually synonymous with the English past tense. Here, Jesus described a one-time act. In essence, He said, “You must embrace Me once-and-for-all as the Lamb.”
As my dad pointed out in his book, Understanding Your Inheritance in Christ, there were eight common steps when an ancient covenant was enacted.
As a side note, if you would like a free PDF copy of this excellent, eye-opening book, we are giving it away to subscribers of our email list. Just go to http://email.radicalpursuit.net to join.
Back to my point, the fourth step of covenant making was The Walk unto Death. Basically, to express how seriously the two covenant representatives viewed their part of the agreement, the two parties would walk around the pieces of the sacrificed animal. Some scholars believe they walked in the form of a figure eight. After this brief walk, the two would look to heaven and say something like this: “Do so to me as has been done to this animal if I break this covenant. If I fail to keep this covenant, may I die even as this animal has died.”
Thankfully, Jesus is humanity’s New Covenant representative. He is the One who took the walk unto death on the cross. Nevertheless, when Jesus invited us to eat His flesh and drink His blood, He invited us to take our own walk unto death.
It’s impossible to enter the New Covenant with a causal approach that seeks to preserve our lives. We can only enter the New Covenant by an unconditional, all-inclusive, hold-nothing-back surrender of our entire lives. All that we are and all that we will ever do must be laid upon the altar to enter the New Covenant.
This is what it means to eat Jesus’ flesh and to drink His blood. It is taking our own walk unto death—totally surrendering our lives to Him. And when this happens, as part of the New Covenant transaction, Christ comes to dwell within us. We receive His indwelling life. Our spirit is regenerated, raised from the dead, and infused with Christ. We become one spirit with Him and our spirit is made righteous, holy, and complete (1 Cor. 6:17; Eph. 4:24).
Like Romans 6:5 describes, we become united to Him spirit-to-Spirit. The word united means born together with. That means, when we enter the New Covenant by fully embracing Jesus as the Passover Lamb—the New Covenant sacrifice that atones for our sins—we are born together with Christ spirit-to-Spirit.
At that moment, we are baptized into His body (Rom. 6:3-5; 1 Cor. 12:13). And then an amazing thing happens. In God’s eyes, the Lord’s crucifixion, burial, death, and resurrection becomes our very own crucifixion, burial, death, and resurrection.
Being baptized into Christ’s body, our experience and destiny is joined to Christ, our New Covenant representative. All that is true of Christ is now true of us.
We have now died to sin, to self, and to the Law. We are now partakers of Christ and His divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4). We now have His indwelling life in our spirits. We have been sealed by the Holy Spirit for the day of redemption.
Having His life—possessing His eternal life that is uncreated and indestructible—we now have the ability to live by His life. We can now make the transition that Jesus is looking for. We can exchange our self-life for His divine-life.
