Everlasting Life

• Everlasting life


  Meaning of life
• aeternum


  aionios
• Eternity


  Applies properly to God, since He has no beginning or end
• Everlasting


  Applies properly to creatures, since they have a beginning though may have no end
• The notion of everlasting life is difficult to grasp, even for us Christians, since all our present experience is transitory and fleeting
• It is because of death that human beings long for a lasting home
• Eternity (Plato)


  A timeless and transcendent state totally outside the dimension of time
• Eternity (Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas)

  • Lacking beginning or end
  • Lacking successiveness, existing entirely at once
• Benedict XVI: 'Everlasting life is "something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality"'
• In the Bible, Everlasting life is always connected to God who is eternal
• God's love, blessings, and other attributes and benefits endure without end; as long as God exists, so do they
• Only God can define what eternal life is
• Man is created in God's image
• The seed of eternity has been intimately imbedded in the nature of human person
• A close connection is made between eternal life and obedience to God's commandments
• Jesus is our good Shepherd who showed us the way and provided the food that sustains us to eternity: His flesh and blood
• St. Ignatius of Antioch: 'The Eucharist is "The medicine of immortality, and the antidote against death"'
• Jesus will confer eternal life to those who have shared their good things to the poor, while eternal punishment to those who withheld good things to them