ETERNAL LIFE NO. 3 - NEW BIRTH AND ETERNAL LIFE
ETERNAL LIFE NO. 3 - NEW BIRTH AND ETERNAL LIFE
John 3 is a plain refutation of the doctrine that new birth and relationship are one and the same thing. If it were so, the saints in the kingdom would be the same as the Christian. There is special pleading in the statement that the new birth took its character from the testimony. This is true; but though it be true, the eternal life is not connected with the new birth, but with faith in the Son of man lifted up, which is the testimony now. There can be new birth, which is “the earthly thing”, without the “heavenly thing”, though there cannot be the heavenly apart from new birth. The testimony necessarily enhances God’s grace at the time. If new birth carried everything there would be no difference between the earthly and the heavenly family. Cornelius was born again before he had faith in Christ, or had received the Holy Ghost.
I contended that Christ as man had a life to give up, and that as to the manifestation of eternal life when He was here, that it was limited to those whose eyes God had opened — to His own, though I fully admitted that God was manifested in every act of His life. Everything He did, He did from God. Though truly a Man, He was not from man but from God. All His springs were in God.
Evidently if you are born of the Spirit that is an eternal work. It is a wholly new and divine sense which will last for ever. The danger is in making it more than God [p. 109] intends, and thus sinking into the leaven in Christendom that new birth is enough, and the nature of the judgment on man is ignored. There is death in one man, and life in another Man; you must be severed by death from the first man, in order to enjoy life in the second Man.