How to Obtain Enternal Life
Matthew 19:16‑22
This morning, in our study, we're looking at Matthew chapter 19 again. And we come in our ongoing study of this great gospel to verses 16 through 22, Matthew 19, verses 16 through 22.
As a preface to looking at the text, I have been reminded of some time ago when I was riding on an airplane and there was a man sitting next to me. And as we were just flying along, he looked over at me and introduced himself and then said to me, he said, "Sir, you wouldn't know how I could have a relationship with Jesus Christ, would you?"
Now that doesn't happen very often to me, but it does. And I happened to have a Bible open and so that prompted him to ask the question. And I thought he was so ready and so eager and this is some time ago. And I said, "Well yes, you simply believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and accept Him as your Savior," and so forth. And he said, "I'd like to do that." And so we prayed and I was so very excited about what happened and tried to follow it up unsuccessfully to find out only that he has had no continuing interest in the things of Christ at all, as far as I can tell.
That's very hard sometimes for us to deal with but very frequently occurs. Anyone who's in any kind of ministry at all and even people who are lay people like yourselves, perhaps, out sharing Jesus Christ, have those occasions where someone prays a prayer with you or someone is led to Christ by you and you see no change in their life, nothing really happens differently and they never ever connect up with the church in any ongoing sense at all. And if you've been struggling with why that happens, then I think you're going to find the answer to that in the message this morning.
I don't think I really understood fully why that happened until I understood this particular story that's here in Matthew 19. The passage before us gives us an insight that I think is extremely valuable. We might even say that Matthew 19:16 to 22 is an illustration of another truth. And that truth is very clearly articulated in Luke 14:33. And maybe in the margin of Matthew 19:16 to 22, you ought to write Luke 14:33 because I believe this explains the meaning of that verse.
Luke 14:33 says this, "So likewise, whosoever he is of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, cannot be My disciple." Now that is a very straightforward truth. Unless you forsake all that you have, you cannot be the Lord's disciple. Salvation is not for people pray a prayer necessarily or people who think they need Jesus Christ, it is for people who forsake all. There is an abandonment of everything in genuine salvation. And that, I think, is the essence of what our Lord is teaching us with the encounter with the young man in Matthew 19.
Let's begin at verse 16, you follow and I'll read you the text.
And behold, one came and said unto Him, Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life? And He said unto him, Why are you asking Me what is good? There is none good but one, that is God, and if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. He saith unto Him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness, honor thy father and thy mother and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. The young man saith unto Him, All these things have I kept, what lack I yet? Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast and give to the poor and thou shalt have treasure in heaven and come and follow Me. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful for he had great possessions.
You see, there was a test. On the one hand, he had his possessions. On the other hand, there was Jesus Christ. He had to make a choice. Because he was unwilling to forsake all, he never could be a disciple of Christ. That's the essence of what the text is saying. Salvation is for those who forsake everything. Now I think it's very important to affirm that.
Now you'll notice in verse 16 that the young man poses a question related to eternal life. He asks about how to obtain eternal life. The term "eternal life" is used about 50 times in Scripture and is essentially the heart of all evangelism. In other words, in all that we endeavor to do, we try to get people to want eternal life, to seek eternal life, to receive eternal life. In fact, in the most familiar gospel verse of all, John 3:16, we remember that the text says, "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting, or eternal life." And we struggle and we work and we pray and we study and we strategize and we plan and we develop methods to try to get people to want and to receive eternal life.
But here comes a young man who walks right up and asks Jesus the very question. Most of our work in evangelism is to get somebody to this point. From here on out, it's easy. I mean, if you can just get the guy to say "what do I need to do to inherit eternal life" you've got him where you want him, all you have to do is say: believe, sign the card, raise your hand, walk the aisle, do whatever. I mean, you've got him right where you want him to be.
So, when the young man walked up and asked the question, he jumped over the whole process of normal preevangelism effort. Like the young man on the airplane, who jumped by all the things that you usually have to work on, like how do you know there's a God, how can you believe the Bible and on and on and on. He walked up and asked Jesus the question about eternal life.
Now, that's not an unfamiliar question to the Lord. It appears on several occasions in the New Testament. Not only asked by this young man, but also asked by a lawyer and also in John 6, asked by a group of people, essentially the same question. How do you get eternal life? And all of our evangelistic efforts are basically to bring someone to that point, aren't they? Where they seek eternal life. And it can be given to them in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
I guess I have to say this has got to be the hottest evangelistic prospect in the gospel so far. I mean, this guy is really ripe. He is ready. But the amazing thing is he goes away without ever receiving eternal life. And the reason he goes away is because he is not willing to forsake everything. Jesus actually set up an insurmountable barrier for the man. Instead of taking him where he was and just getting him to make the quote/unquote "decision," Jesus stops him dead in his tracks and makes it impossible for him to get saved on those terms which he had already had come to.
Now you say, "What kind of evangelism is this? Jesus would have flunked the evangelism seminar. He doesn't know how to get closure. He doesn't know how to draw the net. He doesn't know how to sign the guy up. I mean, you get a guy coming along saying I want eternal life, you've got a hot one. You don't want to lose it."
But, oh do we need the truth that's in this text. We have so many contemporary unbiblical modes of evangelism. Our mass evangelism with its decisions, statistics and its aisle walking and its hurry‑up‑and‑come‑to‑Jesus and just believe and there's nothing else kind of approach is leading all kinds of people into the delusion that they're saved when in fact they're not. And so, we must go to this passage for its very important instruction.
Now, let's ask a question similar to the young man's question and then we'll flow through the text. And I think it will unfold very easy in your eyes and you'll see what happened that went wrong with this young man. How does one obtain eternal life? That's the question. How do you obtain eternal life?
Well, let's look at the points. First of all, it's necessary to know what you want. The man came to Jesus and he said I want to obtain, I want to do something to get eternal life. Now he knew what he wanted. And that's where it has to start. You cannot come seeking something if you don't know you want it. You've got to know what it is you seek before you can seek it. And he wanted eternal life. He knew he didn't have it. He had a lot of things but he didn't have that.
Matthew tells us that he was young, verse 20. Matthew tells us in verse 22 that he was rich. He had great possessions. Luke tells us in Luke 18:18 that he was arche, he was a ruler. And most likely he was a ruler of the synagogue, comparing it with Matthew 9:18. He was probably a ruler of the synagogue. He was a Jewish religious leader, devout, honest, in terms of his relationship to Judaism, young, wealthy, prominent, influential. Very rare that a young man would be a ruler of a synagogue. Well we don't know for sure that he was a ruler of a synagogue but that seems to be the best indication. But he was highly respected, very devout, very religious. As far as the culture of his day, the religious environment of his day, he had everything. And I think that's why in verse 16, Matthew says, "And behold," and that's an exclamation "and lo," and we would say in our vernacular, "Can you believe this, that this guy came to Jesus wanting eternal life who is a devout Jew who was a religious man, who is a ruler of a synagogue, who is influential, prominent," and so forth, it was amazing that he would come and admit that he didn't have eternal life.
He had not found the reality to put his soul at rest. He had not found a confident permanent peace, joy and settled hope. And he was feeling in his heart the absence of this. He was basically coming on the grounds of a felt need. There was a restlessness in his heart. There was an anxiety in his heart. There was a sense of being unfulfilled. And he knew what was missing...eternal life.
Now how did he know that? Well, the Jews understood eternal life. They understood that term or that concept. Simply stated, if life means‑‑and it does mean‑‑the ability to respond to your environment, that's what life means, if you don't think it means that, look at a dead person and see how well they respond, life basically means the ability to respond to your environment. Eternal life means the ability to permanently respond to your environment. And eternal life carries with it the divine environment. In physical life, we can respond to a physical environment. In eternal life, we have the ability to respond to the divine environment. In other words, we respond to the life of God. That's why when we're saved, Paul says we enter into the heavenlies. Our citizenship takes on a divine character and we all of a sudden come alive to God and that's unending.
But it is a quality of existence, not a quantity of existence. It is the idea that I am sensitive to God, that I can respond to God. Before I was saved I was dead in sin, utterly unresponsive to the divine environment. When I became a Christian, I became capable of responding to the divine environment and I shall always be capable of responding to the divine environment.
The Jews thought of it as the life of the age to come, the life which is characteristic of people who live in the age to come. And this young man knew that he did not have the ability to fully respond to the divine environment. He knew that he did not have the ability to fully respond to God. He wasn't sensing God's love, God's rest, God's peace, God's hope, God's joy, the security of belonging to God. He knew that he did not possess the divine life. He knew that he didn't have in his soul the life of God.
By the way, John uses the word zoe 34 times and every time he uses it in his writing, it always means the life principle itself which makes us spiritually alive. And so, eternal life is not just long‑time living, eternal life is a quality of existence which allows us to be alive to the world that God dwells in. It allows us to possess the very life of God. It is that life which is the result of the new birth. Nicodemus was born into a new life, a new dimension of living in which he was alive to God and that life is unaffected by death which only transfers us fully into the heavenly world.
Now the rich young ruler knew that he didn't have the life of God in his soul. He knew that he really didn't sense God fully. He knew that he didn't walk with God, commune with God. So he was very perceptive. He'd gone beyond the Pharisees in his own system who were content with their own musings and praying to themselves. He was not. He knew it was a quality of life which he missed. And I hope we can get it through our heads that eternal life is not just a long time of living, eternal life is a quality of being alive to God, a quality of possessing the life of God, of being aware of the environment of the divine.
It's reminiscent of the old Greek mythology story of Aurora who was the goddess of the dawn. And Aurora fell in love with Tithonis(?) and Tithonis was a mortal youth. And when an eternal goddess falls in love with a mortal youth, it's got its limitations. And so she didn't want to ever lose him and she knew he would die so she went to the head of the gods in the mythology who was Zeus. And she said I want one wish for you. And he said I would grant you one wish in behalf of your lover Tithonis. And she said I wish that he would live...I wish that he would never die, that he would live forever. And he said the wish was granted. And he did. But she left out one important element...she forgot to ask that he would stay young. And so in the Greek mythology, he lived for ever but he just kept getting older and older and older until life was a horrible punishment.
That's not eternal life in the biblical sense. Eternal life in the biblical sense is the process of ever getting younger and younger and communing with the living God in an unending communion. And that this young man wanted.
So, he knew what he wanted. And I think that when we preach or evangelize, we're trying to get people to understand...to understand what they should want. We're trying to get them to see that they don't have eternal life and they should have eternal life. That's part of it. And so he was on track.
The second element that comes through here is that not only did he know what he wanted but he felt deeply the need. Now there are people who know they don't have eternal life but they also don't feel any need for it. Have you ever met them? I've met some like that. They know they don't have eternal life but they don't feel any need for it. They know they're not alive to God but they really don't care to be alive to God. They know they don't sense the divine dimension, they don't have the full confidence of security in the life to come, the great settled hope that comes to believers, they know they don't have it. But they really aren't that interested in it. And sometimes we say they're not desperate enough to really want what they don't have. This guy was. He not only knew what he wanted but he felt deeply the want of it.
And I think there's an urgency in his question, "Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I might have eternal life?" He doesn't have any prefaces, he doesn't warm up, he just blurts it out. I mean, it's right on the front of his tongue. And if you look over into verse 20, at the end of the verse, he's gone through all the things he's done religiously and he says, "What lack I yet?" And I sense there a certain amount of frustration, a certain amount of unfulfillment, a certain amount of anxiety saying, "Man, I've been at this religious thing with all my might and something is missing in my life." And it's the cry of a heart that feels a need. I want this thing.
So, boy, he's a really great prospect. He knows what he doesn't have, eternal life, and he wants it very badly because he has an empty place in his life, he has some lack in his life and he wants to fulfill that. Oh, he's lived an exemplary life outwardly. He has avoided outward sins. He tells all those laws that he supposedly thinks he's kept. He's moral. He's religious. He's strong in heart to conform to the standards of his..of his religion. He is a leader in terms of the eyes of the people. And yet he's unsatisfied and he knows that it's eternal life that he lacks and he wants to know how to get it. And there is a real felt need deep in his heart. There is a vacuum there. Now you're beginning to see what a tremendous prospect he is, aren't you?
That takes us to the third element. In obtaining eternal life it is also necessary to seek diligently...to seek diligently. And so you have a person who knows what they don't have, wants it and is willing to seek Jesus, you know, waited for the man to come to Him. And we see that very often in our Lord's life. Of course, the prophet of the Old Testament, Isaiah, said if you seek Me with all your heart, you'll find Me. And so here's a diligent seeker.
You say, "How do you know that?" Well, in verse 16 it says "one came." And that's all that Matthew tells us but in the parallel passage in Mark 10:17, Mark says he came running...he came running. Now there's urgency in that. I mean, he's dealing with a real frustration in his heart. This is a religious guy with some integrity. He really does want to know God. I believe he really did want the peace and the joy and all of that. If you would have approached him on: how would you like to have peace, joy, happiness, love? Boy, you would have had...you would have had a guy on a hood right now because he felt deep psychological need. There were missing elements inside of him.
But would you note somewhere in your mind that this is a very self‑centered...young man at this point? He is coming for something that will satisfy his heart and the need of his heart. That's not wrong, it's just incomplete. But that was his approach. There was an urgency. There was an eagerness. I mean, he rushed down the aisle before there was an aisle, you know. He ran to Jesus before "Just as I am" had ever been written. He beat the invitationalists. I mean, he is in a hurry. He's enthusiastically in pursuit of eternal life, salvation.