The Only True God

"These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him. And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was."  - John 17:1-5

     The glory of the Father and the glorification of the Son is the salvation of the elect, the chosen, the selected, and the picked out, however you want to put it. The glory of the Father and the glorification of the Son is simply that, the giving of eternal life to as many as God has given him.

     Eternal life is a thing most treasured by everybody. I know that is what they want. And the emphasis of every religion is eternal life, to live forever, to return from the dead, to reincarnate, to reside as some disembodied specter in the invisible ether. These are different ways of describing what men call eternal life.

     For all religions except for one eternal life is the product of a life well lived or a life well started by the will of man and finished by the works of the flesh. The Hindus keep coming back until he gets it right. The Muslim will rise by obedience to the Koran. The radical Muslim achieves it by blowing himself up and killing some infidels along with him. The fundamentalist gains it by working up and then exercising faith manifested by trodding down a church aisle to some man made Kleenex covered altar. The legalist arrives by keeping the law. The intellectual attains eternal life by proper study of doctrine. The moralist gets it by good deeds.

     In truth none of these things inherit eternal life. They are just one of the many thousand ways to die. “There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”

     Eternal life is attained only and solely and precisely because God the Father glorified the Son so that the Son would glorify him according as the Father authorized the Son to give eternal life to as many as God has given him. That is how it happens. Eternal life never goes out this two fisted, tight fisted community of God and his Son.

     No man is able to pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand.” That’s a two fisted community. And that is where eternal life is, in the Father and in the Son.