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It is obvious that the designs of God respecting the work of His hands entirely depend on His own will, and that, unless He please to favour us with an express declaration of those designs, we may, indeed, by debating about the probabilities of the case, bewilder ourselves in all the mazes of metaphysical conjecture; but, as for anything like certainty respecting what so deeply concerns us, that is a point which it is utterly beyond our abilities to attain. Such a declaration, however, God has been pleased to make. In the record of the Old and New Testaments we have an express revelation of His will.

I. THE UNMERITED GRANT OF OUR GOD.

1. The nature of the blessing here said to be granted to us.

(1) It is life, life worthy of the name, a life perfectly exempt from every kind and degree of evil, and accompanied by every conceivable and by every inconceivable good.

(2) This life is eternal, not like our present life, which is but as a vapour that appeareth for a short time and then vanisheth away.

(3) It is a life, too, which includes everything that appertains to it, the pardon of our sins, reconciliation with God, adoption into His family, and all those sanctifying influences of the Holy Spirit which constitute the foretaste of this eternal life in the heart of the Christian.

2. The person to whom this grant is here also said to be made. "To us," the sinful children of sinful parents; "to us," miserable sinners, who thus were lying in darkness and in the shadow of death, provided only we will accept the boon in His appointed way; "to us" hath God given eternal life.

3. The gratuitous nature of the grant. For in what way but in that of a free gift could eternal life be made over to those who have both forfeited the blessing and incurred the curse?

II. THE CHANNEL THROUGH WHICH THIS GRANT IS CONVEYED TO US.

1. The obstacles which stood in the way of this grant were of the most formidable description. These were no other than the severer perfections of the Divine nature, and the honour both of God's law and of His universal government.

2. But by the determination that this free gift of life should be in the Son of God, to be sought for through Him alone, all the obstacles to the grant, which presented themselves from the quarters just referred to, were at once removed.

III. THE CHARACTER OF THE INDIVIDUALS WHO WILL OBTAIN THE BENEFIT OF THIS GRANT AND OF THESE WHO WILL FAIL OF IT. "He that hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life."

1. It is clear, then, on the one hand, that we are interested in this grant of eternal life if we have the Son.

2. And it is the undisputed testimony of the record that he that thus hath the Son hath life, and that he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.

(John Natt, B. D.)

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KJV: And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.

WEB: The testimony is this, that God gave to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.