NOTES for Jo1 2:25
About eternal life today know not only Christians, everyone certainly heard about it. But about what speaks the apostle? The answer seems obvious: about life after death, which is usually identified with the Kingdom of God. Besides, it is considered as something which is obvious, that eternal life begins "there", "beyond the grave ", after death, and this life, which we live here can be by definition only temporary. But is it what wanted to say John? According to the meaning of the Greek text, "eternal life" is not so much a life going on eternally, as the life belonging to eternity.
And it is of course not the same thing. In principle, one can imagine a life continuing eternally, at least, in theory, even according to the not transformed man in the not transformed world. Besides: the Bible does not give us any reason to doubt the fact that before the fall, man (still not transformed, but also and without sin) possessed what we could call the practical immortality: he could in principle die, but death, including the death of old age, was not for him inevitable. However in the eternity in the sense of the New Testament, even this sinless, but natural life had no relation. In fact John, as other apostles, speaking about eternity, has in mind before all the Kingdom of God.
And the eternity of the Kingdom is not linear, a bad infinite, nor a stream of moments, stretching from past to future, and the fullness of time, where everything exists, as a whole, not split up over moments replacing each other, just as it dwells in the not transformed world. And the eternal life, obviously, can be considered only the life connected to this fullness of time, rooted in it, and thus, rooted in the Kingdom.
The Kingdom for us, if we are Christian is not the future, but the present. Of course, in our world being transformed, but not yet transformed till the end, it is not the only reality. Up to full transformation in it the old order of things will keep and declare, along with the Kingdom entering the world. But eternal life, about which speaks the apostle, is perhaps already now really a part of the Kingdom, independently of the fact, where passes its existence. And at the end of time this rootedness will become visible to each, so that everyone who joint to the eternal life, acquires this fullness of the Kingdom, which he was looking for.