What does it really mean to have a eternal life?
I, likely, grew up with a somewhat fanciful vision of eternal life. That’s not to say that vision isn’t true (at least, any of it). But, like many things perceived as a child, there is surely more to the notion of what eternal life is. There appears to be something embedded in the human psyche that has a desire for something eternal. And, we tend to like the idea of that being related to life.
Perhaps, if the truth really were told, that is more of a function of our notions about death, than it is about life. Large swaths of American culture have a misunderstanding (if not aversion) of the role of death in life. This may, in fact, be where the real fantasy exists. The one that is infatuated with the notion that we could somehow live forever. Of course, when we imagine that idea, we are largely doing so in the frame of living in one, persistent, universal form — pretty much how we see ourselves at our best moments in our lives...forever.
Of course, there are virtually no domains of existence that conform to this particular fantasy. Everything is born, grows, and dies (including Jesus, by the way, if that's where you're coming from on the question of eternal things). In fact, the ability for that very process to be perpetual is the feature of both life and death...and there is something eternal about it. Life does, in fact, go on. What goes on about it simply changes. DNA structures, for example, demonstrate this truth. Parts of us, at the core of who we are, live on (almost always), just not in exactly the same form. We can even observe this, without too much sophistication, in both our offspring and in people groups at large. We can see this in animal kingdoms. We can see this in plant kingdoms. In living things of nearly every kind, in fact. Something about the universe itself lives on, endlessly perpetuating, in spite of death. Life and death are not mutually exclusive after all.
Against that back-drop, life is rather...eternal.
Time (or, should I say, time-keeping), then, is mostly something like an accessory we came up with. We're rather fixated on it, again perhaps from our cultural affinity for desiring to live forever. But, eternity doesn't really work in that dimension. Time, in fact, from the viewpoint of nature is rather ambivalent about our point of view. We would likely do better to notice nature's perspectives on such things. It seems to prefer the measurements of things like day and night, celestial cycles, and seasons.
And then, from the Christian Bible,
...the one who believes has eternal life.
-- John 6:47
The most obvious question here would seem to be, 'believes' in what? Because that answer would likely infer what the meaning of eternal life really is. What one believes in is a function of what one understands. In the context here then, I would take it that what one believes is the key to eternal life. According to the plain language of the verse, it appears to be something (perhaps, somewhat surprisingly) that one already has. In other words, it is the current believing that is key to the thing that one already has — in this case, eternal life.
And, here might be the greater clue. We often think of eternal things in the frame of something ahead of us. But, note that the present tense is the focus of the concept of eternal life. The idea doesn’t seem to have as much to do with the future, as it does the present. If you believe, you have whatever is eternal about life. It is not primarily as much something about what you will have, as it is what you already have.
So, if what is eternal is something we have now, then what does that look like?
Most of what we think about the eternal is related to our understanding of life and, in that sense, it is likely assumed that that life has something good (after all, why would you want something eternal, if it was bad?). So, if life is a representation of something that is good and that goodness has a quality of the eternal about it, then it would seem to follow that whatever is eternal now is about whatever is good…now. In other words, whatever is good about life now is something eternal — something that we would like…to last forever.
Have you ever had moments where something felt so good — so rich, so satisfying, so peaceful, so inclusive and at harmony with all things — that you just wish it could...last forever? That is what we want both now and in the future.
Eternal life in original understandings seemed to have more to do with a state of being, than with how long we would live (exist in the future). When that state of being is the experience of what is truly good, it is...eternal.
When you have this understanding and you experience it, you have...eternal life.
