God’s Word teaches us what to believe. We learn specific truths from the Bible,
sometimes called “doctrines”, or more simply “beliefs”. The Bible also teaches us to think like God
thinks. The more we read and listen to
His Word, the more our thought patterns become like His. In this blog post I will write about a
specific belief called “conditional immortality” and will also try to help you
see how the Bible trains us to think in patterns consistent with this belief.
Conditional immortality is a doctrine based on the Bible
which says that people will live forever only under certain conditions. This doctrine can be seen quite clearly in
many verses which discuss eternal life. In these verses a condition is either
explicitly stated or else strongly implied.
After this paragraph are some examples.
Don’t rush through them. This is
God’s Word and you will benefit by reading them slowly and thinking about them
even if they are familiar to you:
We can see from these examples that God, through His
Word, conditions us to think of eternal life (immortality) not as something
that all humans automatically have no matter what, but rather as a special gift
from God which depends on us meeting a condition: namely faith in Jesus Christ.
Sometimes, the condition given is that we live the kind
of life and make the kind of decisions which demonstrate that we really do
believe in Jesus. In these cases, there
is still a “condition” and there is still “immortality”, but the condition is
stated as an evidence of faith in Christ rather than simply faith itself. Here are two examples:
If you would like to see a few more verses where this
pattern of conditional
immortality can be
seen, hold your cursor over any of the verses below. After the verse pops up, see if you can
identify the condition
and the immortality:
John 3:15, John 4:14, John 6:47, Romans 2:7, Romans 5:21,
Titus 3:7, 1 John 5:11
There are other verses, but you have seen enough to see
how clear and consistent this pattern is.
We will live forever only by God’s grace which we receive only if we
have faith in Jesus. Our faith is in a Savior who changes how we live. Sometimes the condition focuses explicitly on
our faith in Jesus and other times the condition focuses on the changes in our
lives that come from faith in Jesus.
Now, we might wonder about the “negative side” of conditional
immortality. God holds out hope through
gracious promises for those who believe in Christ. He also gives warnings of
the tragic consequences for those who do not believe:
Consistency and
Inconsistency
One of the many signs that the Bible is inspired by God
is that it is consistent in what it teaches.
This is true even though, from a human point of view, the Bible was
written by many authors over a period of more than 1,400 years. The doctrine of
conditional immortality is an example of Biblical consistency. On the one hand,
from Genesis to Revelation the Bible never says that all people are
immortal. It never says that the
unrighteous will live forever. On the
other hand, the Bible consistently offers eternal life to those who put their
faith in Christ. “Conditional Immortality” is seen consistently throughout
Scripture.
While the Bible is 100% consistent, we are not. The Bible is perfect, but our understanding of
it is flawed. Even as Christians who
really believe the Bible is God’s inerrant Word, and who really have put our
faith in Jesus, and who really seek God’s truth, we still have errors mixed
into our understanding. One sign of an
imperfect understanding of the Bible is when part of what we believe is not
consistent with the rest of what we believe.
Another sign of misunderstanding is when something we believe requires
us to talk in ways that are different from the way the Bible talks. Here is an example:
Can you see how the slogan on the t-shirt is inconsistent
with the consistent Bible teaching about conditional immortality?
It’s not just t-shirts and bumper stickers that contain
this inconsistent way of thinking. Good,
godly, Christian pastors, authors, teachers, and others often think in terms of
UN-conditional immortality. In other
words, they believe and talk as if all people will live forever whether they
are saved or not.
Seeing the relationship between the doctrine of
conditional immortality and the doctrine of the final fate of the unrighteous clarifies
the problem:
Questions and
Resources
This blog post may raise a lot of questions in your
mind. In fact, I hope it does!
Here are some resources which may help you:
1. My previous
blog post on annihilationism, which is “the tragic side of conditional
immortality”, might help. This blog post
contains links to a two part sermon I preached on annihilationism.
2. The Rethinking Hell website has a lot
of information on the topic of conditional immortality (also called “conditionalism”),
including an excellent Statement
on Evangelical Conditionalism
Hebrews 13:16 And do not forget to do good and to share with others . . .