Jesus and the Elixir of Life

Part 1

Most human beings would give anything to be able to prolong life indefinitely. Jesus’ mission to humanity implied the astonishing claim to be in possession of the secret of living permanently. He came to bring “life and immortality to light through the Gospel” (2 Tim. 1:10). That priceless information is accessed only by intelligent belief in his teaching/word/Gospel of the Kingdom as well as belief in his death and resurrection. Churchgoers talk somewhat vaguely about “eternal life.” This phrase does not fully represent the original idea. It means more precisely “the life of the Age to Come.” The expression is a Jewish one that Jesus loved and used frequently. He found it in Daniel 12:2 where there is a grand promise of resurrection for the sleeping dead. When multitudes awake from their sleep of death in the dust of the ground (Dan. 12:2), they will attain to the “Life of the Age [to Come].” It is the Age to Come because it is the age of world history which follows the future resurrection of the dead. That resurrection of all the faithful happens when Jesus returns (1 Cor. 15:23). That precious verse in Daniel 12:2 tells us also with marvelous simplicity what the dead are now doing, and where they are doing it. It is one of the Bible’s most lucid testimonies to the present condition of the dead prior to the resurrection. They are sleeping — unconscious. Such truth ought once and for all to demonstrate the futility of “prayers” offered to Mary or any other “departed Saint.”

That Life of the Age to Come, of which Daniel first and the New Testament after him spoke, is indeed life in perpetuity, but it is life to be gained finally and fully in the Age to Come. That means that there is going to be an “Age to Come.” Time will continue in that coming age, and the earth will be renewed under the administration of the Messiah Jesus who will return in power at the beginning of the New Age — not seven years before that time to perform a secret rapture, as some popular schemes have proposed and propagated.

Translators of the Bible sometimes make it difficult for us to gather the sense of the original. The King James Version (beautiful in its way but badly corrupted in certain verses) makes you think that there will be “no more time” when Jesus comes back! That verse in Revelation 10:6 actually states nothing of the sort. It means only that there is to be “no more delay.” The Second Coming will follow immediately. But time will continue: it will be the Age to Come of the Kingdom of God on earth.

Churches have tended to make the Bible in many respects hard to understand. While they go on talking about “heaven” as the goal of the Christian, the Bible says the opposite. Jesus promised the earth as the future inheritance of his followers. Quoting Psalm 37:11 Jesus defined the destiny of his followers as the inheritance of the land or earth (Matt. 5:5). He announced this at the very heart of his teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount, and all the teachings of Jesus, are given to us as necessary instructions for the present life, as we prepare to enter the Kingdom of God on earth when it comes at the Second Coming. At the Second Coming the faithful dead of all the ages will awake from their present sleep of death in “dust-land” (Dan. 12:2) and they will then “inherit the earth” as Jesus promised (Matt. 5:5) and, in fact, “rule as kings with Jesus on the earth” (Rev. 5:10; cp. Rev. 20:9 which describes the residence of the saints as on the earth). Jesus, according to the verse preceding (Rev. 5:9), has died to ratify the Kingdom covenant with his blood and to secure our forgiveness by his reconciling death. At the last supper Jesus spoke of this “blood of the covenant,” and the covenant is God’s arrangement/contract/promise to give Christians (Jesus spoke to the Apostles as representing the faith) the Kingdom of God with Jesus. “Just as my Father has covenanted with me to give me the Kingdom, so I covenant with you to give you the Kingdom…and you will sit on twelve thrones to administer the [regathered] twelve tribes” (Luke 22:29, 30). Some translations now correctly, we think, remind us that the word “grant” is really the verb “covenant.” The word is indeed related to “covenant.” Jesus had just been talking about shedding his “covenant blood” (Luke 22:20).

Jesus, as the “new Moses” and the “new Joshua,” promises the Land or the Kingdom of God on earth to the faithful. It is the confirmation of the ancient “Land Promise” made to Abraham. When Jesus spoke of “this Gospel of the Kingdom” (Matt. 24:14) he provided a comprehensive title for his plan for human immortality in the coming Kingdom. Just as “this book of the Law” (Torah) was communicated through Moses (Deut. 30:10), the one greater than Moses delivered the New Torah summarized as the Gospel of the Kingdom.

The patriarch Abraham is known in Scripture as the father of the faithful. His faith is the model of Christian faith. Believers are described as following in the footsteps of the faith of Abraham (Rom. 4:16). They are heirs, Jews and Gentiles alike, of exactly the same promises made by God to Abraham. To Abraham the Christian Gospel had been preached in advance (Gal. 3:8). The divine promises made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are the rock-foundation of the New Testament Gospel. Abraham was promised the land of Canaan (property) and offspring (posterity). God’s unilateral proposal to him was a guarantee of both “seed and soil.” The seed or descendants were to be many and in a special sense one individual, that is Christ (Gal. 3:16). The “soil” was the Promised Land, or more exactly the Land of the Promise (Heb. 11:9). In that promised land the patriarchs resided as “resident aliens” (Heb. 11:9), believing, based on the divine word, that their country of residence would one day be transformed into the “heavenly” Kingdom of God on earth. This means that the Land was really theirs by divine promise, but during their lifetime they owned none of it. (Abraham had to purchase from the actual owners of the land a small plot in which to bury his wife Sarah.)

The vitally important Gospel truth is that Abraham actually lived in the Land of the Promise (Heb. 11:9). This proves beyond any argument that the Promised Land is not “heaven,” as a place removed from this planet. The Promised Land was a territory in the Middle East. That territory remains the Promised Land. It will be the scene of the coming Kingdom. Its rightful King, the Messiah, will return to take over that country and extend his rulership across the globe. The Promised Land is thus nothing other than the promised Kingdom of God — the heart of Jesus’ saving Gospel. Jesus could say equally, “Blessed are the gentle. They will have the Land as their inheritance” (Matt. 5:5) or “Blessed are the humble in spirit for the Kingdom of Heaven[5] belongs to them” (Matt. 5:3) by divine promise. In order for the promise to be fulfilled for Abraham, the patriarch must return to life by resurrection. Only then will he receive the promised reward and inheritance on which the divine covenant was based (see Heb. 11:13, 39, 40).

When the Kingdom comes (as we pray in the Lord’s prayer, “Thy Kingdom come”) Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the Old Testament and New Testament faithful will arise in resurrection (from their present sleep in the dust of the ground, Dan. 12:2) and sit down at a grand celebration to inaugurate the New Age of the Kingdom of God on earth (Matt. 8:11). Many others will assemble from the four corners of the compass and join them at that spectacular banquet (Luke 13:28, 29). In order to qualify for a place at that banquet, we are urged by Jesus to prepare now with all urgency and diligence. That is in fact what the Gospel is all about. Jesus exhorts us to make the Kingdom of God and gaining a place in it our first priority (Matt. 6:33). All other ambitions and activities must take second place. Jesus called his Message “the Gospel about the Kingdom” (Mark 1:14, 15), and Matthew, when he used the noun Gospel, always qualified it as “the Gospel about the Kingdom” (Matt. 4:23; 9:35; 24:14; cp. 26:13). Jesus declared his mission statement in Luke 4:43: “I am duty bound to preach the Gospel about the Kingdom of God to the other towns: that is the reason why God commissioned me” — that is what I was sent to do. Since he dispatched his followers to continue the same commission (Luke 9:2, 60; Matt. 28:19, 20; Luke 24:47), we would expect churches everywhere to be concerned with the Gospel of the Kingdom. This phrase, however, has apparently disappeared from contemporary presentations of “the Gospel.”

Jesus according to Luke 24:47 declared that “repentance and forgiveness” are offered only on the basis of Jesus’ name, that is, his own Gospel revelation. As in Mark 4:11, 12 reception of the Kingdom Gospel (Matt. 13:19) is the essential element in the acceptance of Jesus himself. Jesus made the same point often. He warned that “those who are ashamed of me and my words” will fare disastrously in the judgment (Mark 8:38). The separation of Jesus from his words is the major theological disaster to be avoided at all costs. Satan really has only one trick, in various guises: to detach Jesus from his teachings/Gospel (see also 2 John 7-9; 1 Tim. 6:3).

With his urgent call to repent and believe the Gospel about the Kingdom (Mark 1:14, 15 — a summary of Christianity according to Jesus), Jesus was in fact inviting people everywhere to a place in that coming, covenanted Kingdom as co-executives with himself. Jesus, as Messiah, planned to “fix” the world, but he knew that he must first die, be resurrected and leave the world for a time. He is currently with the Father at His right hand, and he will depart from the presence of the Father and return to the earth when the time comes for the Kingdom to be inaugurated on the earth.

In this connection Psalm 110:1 is a most useful verse. It is the Apostles’ and Jesus’ favorite “proof-text.” It is referred to in the New Testament 23 times — and is thus quoted much more often than any other verse from the Old Testament. Its importance is massive. It is also a revolutionary Psalm since it tells us about the relationship of God and Jesus. Psalm 110:1 is a divine utterance (poorly translated if your version leaves out the original word “oracle”). It is “the oracle of Yahweh” (the One God of the Hebrew Bible, of Judaism and New Testament Christianity) to David’s lord who is the Messiah, spoken of here 1000 years before he came into existence in the womb of the virgin Mary.

I call attention to the simple fact that David’s lord is not David’s Lord. There should be no capital on the word “lord.” The Revised Version of the Bible (1881) corrected the misleading error of other translations which put (and still wrongly put) a capital L on lord in that verse. What is at stake here? An enormously important truth about who Jesus is. He is not the Lord God, because the word in the inspired text is not the word for Deity, but the word for a human superior — a human lord, not a Lord who is himself God, but a lord who is the supremely exalted, unique agent of the One God. You may have to check this fact with a rabbi or friend who can read the Hebrew of the Old Testament. The Hebrew word for the status of the Son of God in Psalm 110:1 is adoni. This word occurs 195 times in the Hebrew Bible and never refers to God. When God is described as “the Lord” (capital L) a different word, Adonai, appears. Thus the Bible makes a careful distinction between God and man. God is the Lord God (Adonai), or when His personal name is used, Yahweh, and Jesus is His unique, sinless, virginally conceived human son (adoni, my lord, Luke 1:43; 2:11). Adonai is found 449 times in the Old Testament and distinguishes the One God from all others. Adonai is not the word describing the Son of God, Jesus, in Psalm 110:1.[6] Adoni appears 195 times and refers only to a human (or occasionally an angelic) lord, that is, someone who is not God. This should cut through a lot of complicated post-biblical argumentation and creed-making which in subtle ways obscured the simplest and most basic biblical truth, that God is a single Person and that the Messiah is the second Adam, “the man Messiah” (1 Tim. 2:5). That “man Messiah Jesus” so perfectly and consistently reflected the character and will of his Father that he could say, “He who has seen me has seen my Father” (John 14:9). Nevertheless by himself he could do nothing (John 8:28). He was always dependent on and subordinate to his Father, God.

Part 2

Back to the Gospel of the Kingdom

This is the saving Message which Jesus and Paul always offered to the public.[4] Jesus, having preached the Gospel of the Kingdom, commanded the Apostles and disciples till the end of the age, to take the same Message/Gospel of the Kingdom of God to the whole world (Matt. 28:19, 20). This task has apparently been poorly executed, since professing Christians have used every descriptive term for the Gospel, except the one always found on the lips of Jesus, “the Gospel of the Kingdom.” If we compare Luke 9:11 with Acts 28:30, 31 we find that Jesus and Paul typically “welcomed the people” and immediately began to address the most crucial of all Gospel topics, the Kingdom of God. Astonishingly, some today do not even believe that the Gospel Jesus preached should be preached at all. They suppose, quite mistakenly, that Paul was given a different Gospel for the Gentiles. If this were so, Paul would have put himself under his own curse (Gal. 1:8, 9) for abandoning the one and only true saving Gospel. There is only one saving Gospel Message offered to every human being. The Gospel of grace is identical to the Gospel of the Kingdom (Acts 20:24, 25).

The importance of the Kingdom Gospel cannot be exaggerated. In it Jesus offers us the elixir of life. He presents a message for our intelligent reception which promises us life indefinitely. Here is how the Message of immortality works. First you have to hear it declared clearly. Secondly you have to grasp it with understanding, the understanding of a “child” whose eyes and ears are open to divine revelation (see Eph. 1:13). Thirdly you have to maintain it in your life, despite the perennial distractions of persecution, worry, and desire for other things (Luke 8:15). All this Jesus made entirely clear in his most fundamental illustration about the seed and soils (the parable of the sower, Matt. 13; Mark 4; Luke 8). In that wonderful theological “comparison” Jesus said that salvation is a process which must begin, continue and persist to the end. It all depends on an initial intelligent acceptance of the “seed” Gospel of the Kingdom as Jesus preached it. Only those who maintain faith and obedience to the end will be saved (Matt. 24:13). Salvation for New Testament Christians is like a race. The goal, salvation, “is now closer to us than when we first believed” (Rom. 13:11). We are “being saved” now (1 Cor. 1:18; 15:2), and we were saved “in hope” (Rom. 8:24), and we will be saved at the return of Jesus.

You don’t win a gold medal when the starting gun goes off and you don’t graduate from the university at orientation. Salvation is a race to the end and the stimulus which gets us started is the Gospel of the Kingdom, which imparts to us the energy of God Himself (1 Thess. 2:13; John 6:63; Gal. 3:2).

How Life Forever Is Obtained

Here is how life forever and ever is to be acquired. You hear the Gospel/Word of the Kingdom. You understand it and you respond to it by making it the first priority in your life. You value it so highly that you (figuratively speaking) sell all your properties in order to buy the one field which contains the treasure, the pearl of great price, the secret of immortality. When you are in pursuit of life forever, what else could possibly make an equal demand on your attention?

How does that spark of life arise within you? It is a new creation by the word of God. The word of the Gospel is God’s creative tool, a “spark” of His own immortality imparted via the words of Jesus to believing man. “Word of God” does not just mean the Bible as a whole. (The Bible generally calls itself “the Scriptures.”) It means the Gospel of the Kingdom, the Message of immortality and how to gain it (Matt. 13:19, word of the Kingdom = Mark 4:14, the word = Luke 8:11, the word of God). The word is God’s creative tool. It is a part of Himself and expresses His desire for us as humans. With His creative word He intends to share and impart His own immortality. He wants human beings to live forever. He wants to give us (by His grace) endless life and He imparts His “seed” to us, to spark that new life and vitality which is the beginning or downpayment — first installment — of immortality (Eph. 1:14). When that “seed” is taken into our hearts and minds, we have made the transition from death to life.

John 5:24 summarizes the salvation process brilliantly: “Truly I tell you: he who hears my word [Gospel Message] and believes Him who commissioned me has eternal life [the Life of the Age to Come, Dan. 12:2]. He does not come into judgment, but has made the transition from death to life.”

Everything depends on hearing, grasping and holding on — in the face of difficulty, distraction, affliction and persecution — to that precious word/Gospel of the Kingdom. No wonder Jesus described the Kingdom in terms calculated to impress on us its inestimable value as the pearl of great price, the treasure above all treasures.

The saving Message of Jesus is called a seed (Luke 8:11). That seed must lodge in our minds. It is sown by the one preaching. It must be received “in an honest heart” (Luke 8:15). Those who welcome that seed “in a good and honest heart” must “bear fruit with patience” (Luke 8:15). All the Bible writers tell the same Gospel story. All offer the same “formula” for immortality. The “mechanics” or process of embarking on the immortality program are common to all the New Testament writers. James said that this rebirth, the germination of new life from the seed of the Gospel, is through the word, the word of the Truth (James 1:18; cp. “Your word is truth,” John 17:17). The word must take root within us: “Receive with meekness the word planted [i.e., sown] within you, which is able to save you” (James 1:21). That word is the Gospel of the Kingdom of God as Jesus preached it. Matthew called it the “word of the Kingdom” (Matt. 13:19). James, of course, knew all about the parable of the sower. Peter, as chief spokesman for the Messiah, made quite sure that we remember the process of salvation, the science of gaining immortality by being born again. He spoke, as had Jesus and his half-brother James, of the word of the Gospel as “incorruptible seed” (1 Pet. 1:23) — a seed, in other words, which carries in itself the germ of immortality. The seed transmits the very nature of God Himself. By participating in that nature, via the seed of the Kingdom Message sown in our hearts, we are participating in the indestructible life of God Himself. The seed, received and retained, creates in us a new root of personality, makes us new creatures, reborn human beings destined to live forever (1 Pet. 1:23-25). The indispensable key to this miraculous second birth is the “word which was preached to you as the Gospel” (1 Pet. 1:25). That Message discloses the secret of the divine plan in Christ for human destiny.

John the Apostle knew about the seed and how it is the key to be being “born again” with a view to immortality. In John 3:3 he reports Jesus as saying to a Jewish scholar: “Unless you are born again you cannot enter the Kingdom.” No rebirth, no living forever. And no rebirth without a living “seed.” John later reminded his readers that rebirth comes from seed. He too knew the immense value of Jesus’ precious teaching about the seed and the soils. John said that the person who “has been born again cannot continue in sin, because God’s seed remains in him” (1 John 3:9). In making rebirth the absolutely essential prerequisite for immortality, Jesus made it clear that the reception of the Kingdom Gospel was the key to life forever: “Unless you receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, you will not enter it” (Luke 18:17). “If you do not listen to and grasp the Gospel of the Kingdom (the word), you cannot repent and be forgiven” (see Mark 4:11, 12). Mark here, reporting Jesus, makes an intelligent, open-eyed grasp of the Kingdom Gospel as Jesus preached it the condition of repentance and forgiveness. The Devil, knowing how fatal the Kingdom Gospel is to his own opposing activity, attempts to “snatch away the word which has been sown in their hearts, so that they cannot believe it and be saved” (Luke 8:12).

Here in the parable of the sower is the very heart of Jesus’ immortality Message. Listen to the extraordinary words of the Master Rabbi, from a boat anchored just off the shore of the Lake of Galilee:

“To you has been graciously given the secret of the Kingdom of God, but to those who are outside everything comes as a puzzle, so that seeing they may not see and it will not be clear to them, and hearing it they will not get the sense. If they did, they would turn to God in repentance and be forgiven.” And he said to them, “If you are not clear about this parable, how will you be clear about any of the others?” (Mark 4:11-13).

Paul and Rebirth

Paul of course was no stranger to the secrets of immortality. He taught that rebirth, regeneration, happens by the renewing power of the spirit of God (Gal. 4:29) via the Gospel (Gal. 3:2). Christians are those who are born of the spirit, born of the promises made to Abraham (Gal. 4:23), recipients of “the holy spirit of the promise” (Eph. 1:13). It makes no difference whether we speak of the spirit of God or the word of God as the tool of rebirth. Both the spirit and the word mean the creative presence and power of God, as He undertakes His mightiest and most miraculous work: the production in human beings of the spark of immortality, the gift of Life in the Coming Age/Kingdom. In Genesis “God’s spirit hovered over the chaos” and “God said…” (Gen. 1:2, 3). God’s word was active with His spirit. (Spirit is to the divine word as human breath is to spoken utterance.) The creative activity of God through the Gospel stimulates the new life of the believer. “The Spirit comes through hearing the Gospel Message” (see Gal. 3:2).

Paul reminded Titus of the immortality “program.” “When the goodness and gracious kindness of God our Savior appeared, He saved us [through Jesus’ preaching and his death and resurrection], not because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but through His mercy, by the washing of rebirth and renewal in the holy spirit (Titus 3:4, 5).

It was Jesus, the original Gospel preacher (Heb. 2:3; cp. 1 Tim. 6:3), who was equipped with the saving word/words of God Himself (John 5:24). The Father, using Jesus as His perfect agent and emissary, gave Jesus the creative words with which we can be infused with the new life of rebirth. “The words I speak to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63). They contain the very energy and vitality of God Himself. They operate as an energizing power in our life (1 Thess. 2:13; Rom. 1:16). They bring the influence of the spirit, which is the operational presence of God, into our experience and our thinking (Ps. 51:10-12; 139:7). They produce in the end a condition of endless life, for those who have taken the words of life to heart and, after being baptized (Acts 8:12, etc.), continue to bear fruit to the end.

Paul’s comment marks him out as a genuine disciple of Jesus, showing that he was following the Master as a preacher of the Kingdom of God Gospel. He spoke to the Colossians of “the hope reserved in heaven with Christ.” That hope, Paul said, was the source of Christian faith and love (Col. 1:4, 5). What terrible damage would be done, then, to faith and love if the hope which produces these virtues was not clearly understood! The hope in question had been transmitted to them “in the word of the Truth, the Gospel” (Col. 1:5), reminding us again of the parable of the sower. Paul described that saving Gospel and its hope as “bearing fruit and growing” (Col. 1:6). Once more the reference to Jesus’ parable of the sower is clear.

Jesus came offering the public the Elixir of Life, the fountain of eternal youth. He offered it on his conditions, or rather the condition of the God of Israel who commissioned him to present the saving Gospel. He urged the public to embrace his Gospel of the coming Kingdom and the promise of ruling with Christ in the New Age of that Kingdom to be inaugurated on earth, “the inhabited earth of the future, about which we are speaking” (Heb. 2:5).

The ultimate goal of God’s great purpose revealed in the Gospel is that His people would be in power as princes in the place promised to Abraham and Messiah, the Land of the Promise, the earth transformed by the presence of Jesus who will then have returned to this planet. As Messiah he will “inherit the throne of his ancestor David” in Jerusalem (Luke 1:32). He will do this because he is God’s Son, so constituted by the miracle of creation effected by God in the womb of Mary (Luke 1:35; Matt. 1:20, “that which is begotten in her”).

One would think that more people would be interested in immortality, endless, indestructible life and fellowship with Jesus and his Father now and forever. Our human task is to search out the secret of life in perpetuity, the pearl of great price, the treasure of the Kingdom Gospel as Jesus preached it.

Did you hear any sermons recently about being born again with a view to immortality and how this happens by contact with the power of the word/seed/spirit contained in Jesus’ creative Kingdom of God Message?

Many have been short-changed by being told that the death and resurrection of Jesus alone are the whole of the Gospel. Paul said otherwise. He taught that the death and resurrection of Jesus are “among things of first importance” in the Gospel (1 Cor. 15:3). He himself was a career preacher of the Gospel of the Kingdom (Acts 20:24, 25). Jesus had labored for years, described in some 25 chapters of Matthew, Mark and Luke, preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, while saying, at that stage, not a word about his death and resurrection (see Matt. 16:21 for his first announcement of that part of the Gospel).

Creeds, however, appear to have missed the point of Jesus’ saving Message about immortality. They urge belief in his birth (“born of the Virgin Mary”) and then skip right over his Kingdom Gospel preaching career to his death (“suffered under Pontius Pilate…”).

Belief in Jesus apart from belief in his words does not measure up to the biblical definition of belief. “He who hears my word and believes Him who sent me has eternal life” (John 5:24). At the climax of his career Jesus issued a stern warning against rejection of his saving teaching. He could hardly have made it plainer (John 12:44-50; Matt. 7:21-27).

Throughout his ministry the Messiah requires belief in his Gospel Message. To drive a wedge between Jesus and his teaching undermines the entire constitution of apostolic Christianity. “Faith comes by hearing and hearing through Messiah’s word” (Rom. 10:17).[5]²