What is eternal life?

What the Bible says

Most people hear "eternal life" and think of living forever. The Bible does promise a day when death is no more, but when Scripture defines eternal life, it points less to length than to relationship. On the night before the cross Jesus prayed:

Now this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent.

John 17:3

To "know" here is not to hold information. In Scripture, knowing is the way a person knows a person. Eternal life is first a living relationship with God, and it is "eternal" because that relationship does not end.

This life is given as a gift. John 3:16 says that God gave his Son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. Paul writes that "the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom 6:23).

The New Testament also refuses to push eternal life entirely into the future. Jesus said:

Truly, truly, I tell you, whoever hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life and will not come under judgment. Indeed, he has crossed over from death to life.

John 5:24

The verb is "has." The believer has already crossed over from death to life. First John says the same:

And this is that testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. I have written these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life.

1 John 5:11-13

So eternal life is not only what waits after death. When Jesus says he came that people may "have life, and have it in all its fullness" (John 10:10), he speaks of a life that fills this life.

Yet it is not yet complete. Believers still get sick, grow old and die. John admits that "what we will be has not yet been revealed" (1 John 3:2), though he adds that when Christ appears we will be like him. The completion is resurrection. Paul says Christ is "the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep" (1 Cor 15:20) and that at the last trumpet the dead will be raised imperishable (1 Cor 15:51-52). The Bible's last scene is heaven and earth made new, with God dwelling among his people:

Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man, and He will dwell with them. They will be His people, and God Himself will be with them as their God.

Rev 21:3

There will be "no more death or mourning or crying or pain" (Rev 21:4), and God's servants "will see His face" (Rev 22:4).

The church's witness

The early church placed this hope in the last line of its confession. The Apostles' Creed ends with "the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting" The Apostles' Creed, and the Nicene Creed looks for "the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come" The Nicene Creed. The church joined eternal life to the resurrection of the body because salvation reaches the whole person.

Commenting on John 17:3, Augustine says: "if the knowledge of God is life eternal, the more advance we make in this knowledge, the more we make in life eternal" Augustine. In the same passage he says that what God told Moses, "I am that I am," is something "we shall contemplate in the life eternal" Augustine. Eternal life is knowledge of God that deepens without end. On John 5:24 he says of our present life, "this life does not deserve the name of life; only that life is true which is eternal" Augustine. He does not call earthly life worthless; a life that death can swallow is simply a shadow of the real thing.

Matthew Henry, on Romans 6:23, says where eternal life comes from: "The gift of God is eternal life. And this gift is through Jesus Christ our Lord" Matthew Henry. The Westminster Shorter Catechism likewise teaches that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q1. At the center stands God himself.

On the place and shape of eternal life, Christians stress different things. Some speak mainly of "heaven" as the home of the redeemed; others, following Revelation 21, stress that heaven and earth are renewed and God lives with his people on a new earth. Both hold that eternal life is life with Christ, in a body, where death is no more. The state between death and resurrection is taken up in What happens after death?.

In the original languages

The New Testament's usual word for "life" is zoe (ζωή). It can mean ordinary biological life, but in John it often carries the richer sense of the life God gives.

"Eternal" translates aionios (αἰώνιος), which comes from aion (αἰών), "age." Jewish thought divided history into "this age" and "the age to come," and many scholars hear in "eternal life" first of all the life of the age to come. Scholars differ over whether the word is mainly about quality or about duration. Scripture as a whole suggests both: it is the life of the final age, and because death is no more, it has no end.

ginosko (γινώσκω) is "to know." Like the Hebrew yada, the Greek verb can reach beyond intellectual knowledge to personal acquaintance. To define eternal life as knowing God is to say its heart is communion rather than place or conditions.

Common objections

"Living forever would be boring, or even frightening." This is a serious objection. Some philosophers have argued that an endless life would eventually sink into tedium. If eternal life meant this present life stretched out forever, the fear would be reasonable, but that is not what the Bible describes. It describes knowing One who is infinitely good, and in such knowledge there is always more to know. Scripture pictures a feast, worship and a creation made new (Rev 21:5), not motionless stillness. Still, we do not know all that life will be.

"Eternal life is only consolation, pie in the sky that makes people accept injustice here." Religion has sometimes been used that way, and the church should hear the charge humbly. Yet the life the Bible promises is not escape from this world but the hope that this world will be renewed. And if eternal life has already begun, believers are called to know God and love their neighbor here and now. Jesus healed the sick and fed the hungry because he did not treat present life lightly. That a hope consoles does not show it false; Christians trust it because of the resurrection of Christ. See Did Jesus really rise from the dead?.

"If eternal life has already begun, why do believers still die and suffer?" Scripture does not hide the tension. Paul says that we who have "the firstfruits of the Spirit" still "groan inwardly" as we wait for the redemption of our bodies (Rom 8:23). Eternal life has been given but not yet completed, like a seed planted and growing before the harvest. How God uses suffering in the meantime is taken up in Does suffering have meaning?. The Bible neither denies the pain nor treats it as the last word.

Going further

The question of eternal life finally returns to another: whom do I know? According to John 17:3, eternal life is not agreeing with a doctrine but knowing a person, one who still wishes to be known.

You might ask yourself: when I hear "eternal life," do I think first of length of time or of a relationship with God? If it has already begun, what could change in my day today? What do I mean when I say I "know" God?

To read further, see What happens after death?, Are heaven and hell real? and What does it mean to be saved?.