Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher who lived in the late ninetieth century. He is associated with a statement that he made a few times in his books: “God is Dead.” He made the statement three times in the book The Gay Science and once in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Because of the Enlightenment period and the teaching of evolution that made the “God-hypothesis” unnecessary, Nietzsche said that “belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable.” And, everything built on that faith, propped up by it and grown into it was bound to collapse, including the whole European morality.
When the Bible teaches that God is “immortal,” it means that He is Life. Everything that God created has life by His grace, but God is inherently life.
GOD IS IMMORTAL:
Paul writes a word of praise to God: “Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen” (1 Tim. 1:17). Later in the same letter, he writes: God “alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see. To Him be honor and eternal dominion! Amen” (6:16).
GOD IS THE GIVER OF IMMORTALITY:
In John 5:24, Jesus states: “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life.” “Eternal life” here is set in contrast to “death.” God gives eternal life. If someone does not have that eternal life which only God can give, then he or she will experience eternal death, eternal separation from the One who gives immortality.
WE MUST SEEK IMMORTALITY:
In Romans, Paul writes: “In the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, He will render to each person according to his deeds: to those who by perseverance in doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, eternal life; but to those who are selfishly ambitious and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, wrath and indignation” (Rom. 2:5–8.
So here we see that we need to seek for: glory, honor, and immortality and life as if it is important to us. And God will give us eternal life. Notice also that this “seeking” is set in contrast with “not obeying the truth.” So “seeking immorality” is another way of saying “obeying the truth.” When we do that, God will give us immortality.
WE SHOULD PRAISE GOD FOR HIS IMMORTALITY:
As in all His attributes, we ought to praise God that He is “undying.” He is “immortal.” He is “incorruptible.” As Paul told the people in Athens, Greece, “in Him we live and move and exist” (Acts 17:28) and as he wrote in Colossians 1:17: “in Him all things hold together.” And we praise God because He will give us an incorruptible body one day: Phil. 3:20-21:
“For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself.”
Let’s live God’s incorruptible message so that He will give us an incorruptible body as a part of our incorruptible inheritance.
Paul Holland
