From Death to Life

1 John 3:10-15
“In this the children of God are manifest and the children of the devil are manifest. Whoever does unrighteousness and does not love his brother is not of God. This is the message that you heard from the beginning: we should love one another. Not like Cain, who was of the wicked one and slew his brother. Why did he slay him? Because his own works were evil and his brother’s were righteous. Marvel not, my brethren, if the world hates you. We know we have passed from death into life because we love the brethren. He that loves not his brother abides in death. Whoever hates his brother is a murderer. No murderer has eternal life abiding in him.”

“At the end of His life, our Lord said, ‘This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom You have sent’ (John 17:3). So if that is life, then death is he exact opposite – to not know God, to be outside the life of God, to have no fellowship with Him, to be living entirely apart from Him. Such people are entirely dead to spiritual things. ‘You has he quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins,’ said Paul in Ephesians 2:1.

To be a Christian is not just deciding to live a better life than you lived before, not just holding to moral principles and making a great effort to keep them. No, it is a change in nature, a translation. “We have been translated from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of His beloved Son.” Or as Peter puts it, “in time past you were not a people but now are the people of God, who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light’ (1 Peter 2:9-10). Christians not only know God, they have received something of God’s own nature. They have become ‘partakers of the divine nature.’”