"For my Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son and
5. RENEWAL
"For my Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day" (John 6:40).
This verse in the sixth chapter of John is one of the most important passages in the New Testament. It summarizes some of the most central aspects of the Gospel – including the role of God the Father, the role of God the Son, and the role of our faith in Christ. In addition, this verse contains one of the most encouraging of all Christ's "I will" promises – his guarantee of eternal life to those who believe! It is a verse that can well repay our study and thought.
We saw in the preceding chapter of this book that Jesus utilized repetition to emphasize the importance of some of his statements, and John 6:40 is another example as Christ's words in this verse are extremely similar to what he said in verse 39: "And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day" (John 6:39).
But the differences between the two statements are also important. While both verses show the role of God's will regarding our salvation and eternal life, verse 40 announces Jesus' great "I will" promise regarding eternal life. It is repeated again in verse 44: "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day." In this promise Jesus reminds us that belief in him is the only path to eternal life, and that he gives us that eternal life through the resurrection. We will look closely at the two main aspects of this great promise. The Importance of Belief The whole sixth chapter of John is an important one that begins with Christ's miraculous feeding of the 5,000 and includes one of
the seven "I am" statements in which he declared, "I am the bread of life" (John 6:35). In earlier verses in the chapter, Jesus explained this: "it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world" (John 6:32–33). By using this analogy of the bread, Jesus taught both the Father's giving of his Son to the world and the Son's giving of life to those who turn to him. As Jesus himself prayed: "For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him" (John 17:2). Jesus' insistence that he is the One who gives eternal life to us underlies the importance of our belief in him and is central to much of what we read in John 6. For example, when the people asked him "What must we do to do the works God requires?" Jesus replied "The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent" (John 6:28–29). Yet most people were reluctant to believe that the man Jesus was the Son of God – as we see in Jesus' comments "you have seen me and still you do not believe" (John 6:36) and "The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe" (John 6:63–64).
That is why Jesus said "Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life" (John 3:36), but his promise emphasizes that "everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life" (John 6:40). Our role could not be simpler – we have it on Christ's authority that we are not given eternal life through works that we must strive to produce, rather we are given this inestimable gift simply as a result of our faith in him and his faithfulness. If we believe, he promises to bestow the life that is his to give as the One sent by God. Thankfully, there are no exceptions – as we saw in the first chapter of this book – Jesus promises that he will accept all those God the Father gives him (John 6:37) and who look to him in faith (John 6:40).
The Hope of the Resurrection The Bible appears to be purposely vague when it comes to details of the next life – so it is perhaps not surprising that there are almost as many ideas on exactly what life in eternity will be like as there are denominations in this life! Some Christians believe that at death people are judged and immediately sent to their eternal destinations. Others believe that at death everyone "sleeps" until the resurrection and final judgment. Still others think that the souls or spirits of those who die are held in a "temporary" heaven or hell awaiting the final resurrection and judgment. But the Scriptures do make two things clear regarding eternal life – that it comes only through Jesus Christ, as we saw above, and that it is given to us through a resurrection from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:13).
The resurrection is a concept that we already find in the Old Testament – for example, when an angel told Daniel "As for you, go your way till the end. You will rest, and then at the end of the days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance" (Daniel 12:13). But the resurrection is made clearer in the New Testament. It is what Jesus had in mind regarding believers when he said "I will raise them up at the last day" (John 6:39), and when he repeated this truth in his promise of John 6:40, and yet again in John 6:44 and John 6:54. The "I" in these verses is emphatic in the Greek of the New Testament – it is Jesus alone who will raise up the faithful at the last day.
Jesus emphasized the resurrection to his disciples repeatedly – as we see in John's Gospel leading up to Christ's promise of John 6:40. Notice, for example:
Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. Very truly I tell you, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live ... Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their
graves will hear his voice and come out—those who have done what is good will rise to live, and those who have done what is evil will rise to be condemned. (John 5:24–29) In addition to the words of Jesus himself, Paul clarifies this, stating that we will be raised at the return of Christ: "But there is an order to this resurrection: Christ was raised as the first of the harvest; then all who belong to Christ will be raised when he comes back" (1 Corinthians 15:23 NLT). In 1 Thessalonians Paul also tells us that the resurrection will occur when Christ returns:
For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. (1 Thessalonians 4:16–17) The renewal that God will work in us at that time – what theologians refer to as our "glorification"– is not explained in detail, yet it is clear that we will be granted eternal bodies like Christ, just as John explains in his first epistle: "now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2). It is not surprising that Paul follows his explanation of the resurrection to the Thessalonians by urging his readers "Therefore encourage one another with these words" (1 Thessalonians 4:18). Living Belief and Eternal Life No matter how blessed we may be in this physical life, we all suffer in some ways, we all become sick, and eventually grow old. Jesus' promise of renewal and eternal life is all the more wonderful for
that. But this is very different from the common belief that whenever any person dies they simply go to heaven whether they have faith in the Son of God or not.
Jesus' promise of John 6:40 shows that our belief in him in this life is tied to our life in him in eternity – the two aspects of salvation are inseparable. This is because, in a very real way, eternal life is not just an event – it is a person: the person of Christ. As Jesus told Martha "I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die" (John 11:25–26). In his first epistle, John summarizes the teaching of Jesus in this regard: "God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son" (1 John 5:11).
Jesus clothed himself in humanity in order to unite himself to us. At the resurrection, we will be fully united with him. His wonderful promise of John 6:40 affirms that he is the only path to true and everlasting life, and that if we believe in him we will be renewed in the resurrection to eternal life. As the Son of God, Jesus promises to renew and to open a door for all who believe in him. The renewal is eternal, and the door is the doorway to forever !