A Word in Season: The Hope of Eternal Life (Titus 1:2)

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The Apostle Paul is no slow starter. It sometimes seems as if he just presses the button and off he goes.

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It's evident, for example, when he writes to the church in Ephesus, where his letter simply explodes into life with this great catalogue of blessings, and we're soaring up into the sky and trying to keep hold of the

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Apostle's coattails. On a more personal level, it's there at the Titus, where he writes, that introduction goes in a number of different directions.

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It's not a scattergun approach, but there's a thrill, there's an awareness of the majesty of God, there's a sense of the responsibility and duty that has been committed to the

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Apostle as a messenger of the Lord to speak of salvation, there's a consciousness of the beauty and the stability of the truth, the excellence of that truth as it points us to, moves us toward real godliness, so that all who believe are transformed by degrees in this life into the image of God's Son, and it is all in hope of eternal life which

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God who cannot lie promised before time began. The Gospel gives us faith, it gives us something, someone to lay hold of, it holds out to us

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Christ and tells us of his saving work so that we may rest upon him in order to be delivered from our sins.

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But with faith also comes hope, hope of eternal life. This hope, as we've said before and we may yet say again, is not a vague expectation, it's not a mere possibility, it is the confidence of something that is certain but just hasn't happened yet, and a

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Christian has the hope of eternal life. We know that in us now there is this life everlasting, the same life that was in Christ Jesus, the same power by which he was raised from the dead is now at work in us, we are now seated with him in the heavenly places, and having that in us now, having received the down payment of the inheritance in the gift of the

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Holy Ghost, we know that we will one day come to enjoy the fullness of the experience of that eternal life at the return of Jesus Christ.

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Now how can we be so sure? Where does this certainty come from? What is it that makes our hope more than a mere possibility?

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It is that God who cannot lie promised this life before time began.

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Now it may be that that language carries us back to the very beginning of the history of the world when in the muck of the fall

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God was pleased to bring forth a diamond of promise and to assure us of a champion who would come on behalf of lost mankind to trample upon the head of the serpent.

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But it may point back even further to the covenant of God, the eternal purposes of the

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Godhead to save his people from their sins and to bring them to himself.

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Is that not a wonderful and comforting thought for God's people? When we talk about the hope of eternal life, it rests upon the promises of God himself, a

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God who is true, a God who is truth, a God who does not and cannot lie, for to say anything false would be to empty himself, to deny himself, essentially to destroy himself.

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God, the God of truth, has spoken and from before the beginning in his own triune councils he has determined that his people will obtain everlasting life, and every promise that he makes after that is in the light of that assurance, so that the gospel we have, the

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Christ we believe, the truth that we proclaim is one that is resting upon the promise of God and that points always to a hope of eternal life, an unlying, unchanging