Gift. “But the gift of God is eternal life.” No fault more perilous can be made than the assumption that persons who have no interest in God while on earth go automatically to heaven when they die. This seems to be the default religion of irreligious people. Go to practically any funeral, and you will hear a eulogy that will prove this point. The deceased usually has no history of loving God, no marked up Bible, no evidence of a point in life of turning from sin—nothing that should convince a pastor that his departed soul has been welcomed by angels and is now at rest in ‘a better place.’ There is no ‘Better Place’ for these exaggeratedly eulogized folks; there is no ‘Nirvana’ for Buddhists and Hindus; there is no ‘Happy Hunting Ground’ for American Indians; there is no ‘Paradise’ for Muslims; there is no ‘Valhalla’ for warriors and soldiers; there are no ‘Elysian Fields’ for heroes. There is only ‘the Kingdom of Heaven’ for sinners who become Christians. The kingdom of heaven is holy. It does not cavort with sin. We have no reason to believe that a person who went on in sin all his life has gone to a place that is the very antithesis of sin. It is true that even the Christian sins, for sanctification is a gradual process that stems from the regenerate soul. But any Christian in more than a name has his confession and testimony substantiated by an upstanding life, notwithstanding his occasional faults. To assume, and even declare, that a deceased person, regardless of lifestyle and belief, has been ushered into the care of heaven, is what pastors unjustifiably do and what families and loved ones routinely expect. The gift of God is eternal life. This gift comes by an act of grace. Grace is holy, and therefore consecration must exude from any sinner who has received the gift. To be holy is to be set apart. If a person is not known for standing apart from sinners and what sinners do and must be judged for, that person has not received the holy gift of eternal life, and there is no heaven for him. Grace makes a person hate sin more than like it. If a person has not been tiresome in his denunciation of sin, it is wrong to assume that he has had grace worked into him. A soul saved by grace and in possession of eternal life is daily outraged at sin. “Horror has taken hold upon me because of the wicked that forsake thy law” (Psalm 119.53.) Can this honestly be said of the last person we knew who was eulogized? Was that person habitually horrified upon hearing of wickedness like extramarital liaisons, abortion, idolatry, euthanasia, oppression, pornography, homosexuality, and perversities by any other name?
Death happens because of sin; life happens by the gift of God. Both are eternal futures. The exchange of one for the other is characterized by the power of sin being broken, which is what an operation of grace will do. It is true that every man has lied, and this reality is stated in the Bible more than once. It is a hard thing to lie no more; probably no one can live up to that. But we must reckon with the fact that even lying must be overcome, for liars, not just murderers, “shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death” (Revelation 21.8.) It seems out of sync for lying to be put next to murder, idolatry, and whoredom (debauchery) as a sin that a person will be consigned to the lake of fire for committing. The question is not: Have we lied? We all have. The question is not: Can we stop lying from now on until we die? The questions that help us to know if we are the kind of liar condemned in the verse are these: Is our profession of faith a lie? Do we feel guiltier before God than before man when we lie? “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned” (Psalm 51.4.) Have we ever struggled with the ethical issue of Rahab lying to save the Hebrew spies? Have we ever struggled with the ethical issue of lying to save Jews during the Holocaust? Christians are wont to grapple with questions like these.
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