There is a word for everlasting if that idea is demanded. That didios occurs rarely in the New Testament and in LXX does not prove that its place was taken by aidwos. It rather goes to show that less importance was attached to the bare idea of everlastingness than later theological thought has given it. Paul uses the word once, in Rom. i. 20, where he speaks of “the everlasting power and divinity of God.” In Rom. xyi. 26 he speaks of the eternal God (rod aiwviov Oeod) ; but that he does not mean the everlasting God is perfectly clear from the context. He has said that “the mystery” has been kept in silence in times eternal (xpovots aiwvios), by which he does not mean everlasting times, but the successive aeons which elapsed before Christ was proclaimed. God therefore is described as the God of the aeons, the God who pervaded and controlled those periods before the incarnation. To the same effect is the title 6 BaowWeds tdv aidvey the King of the aeons, applied to God in 1 Tim. i. 17; Apoc. xv. 3; comp. Tob. xiii. 6,10. The phrase zpd ypdvwv aiwviwv before eternal times (2 Tim.i.9; Tit. i. 2), cannot mean before everlasting times. Tosay that God bestowed grace on men, or promised them eternal life before endless times, would be absurd. The meaning is of old, as L.i. 70. The grace and the promise were given in time, but far back in the ages, before the times of reckoning the aeons.
Zon aidvios eternal life, which occurs 42 times in N. T., but not in LXX, is not endless life, but life pertaining to a certain age or aeon, or continuing during that aeon. I repeat, life may be endless. The life in union with Christ is endless, but the fact is not expressed by aiwyios. Ko- Aacis aiwyios, rendered everlasting punishment (Matt. xxv. 46), is the pun- ishment peculiar to an aeon other than that in which Christ is speaking. In some cases fw aidvios does not refer specifically to the life beyond time, but rather to the aeon or dispensation of Messiah which succeeds the legal dispensation. See Matt. xix. 16; J. v.39. John says that Cwy aidvos is
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the present possession of those who believe on the Son of God, J. iii. 36; y. 24; vi. 47, 54. The Father’s commandment is fw) aidvos, J. xii. 50; to know the only true God and Jesus Christ is Cwm aimvos, J. xvii. 3.
Bishop Westcott very justly says, commenting upon the terms used by John to describe life under different aspects: “In considering these phrases it is necessary to premise that in spiritual things we must guard against all conclusions which rest upon the notions of succession and duration. ‘Eternal life’ is that which St. Paul speaks of as 7 dvrws Cur) the life which is life indeed, and 4 wn Tod Geod the life of God. It is not an end- less duration of being in time, but being of which time is not a measure. We have indeed no powers to grasp the idea except through forms and images of sense. These must be used, but we must not transferthem as realities to another order.” *
Thus, while aiwvos carries the idea of time, though not of endlessness, there belongs to it also, more or less, a sense of quality. Its character is ethical rather than mathematical. The deepest significance of the life beyond time lies, not in endlessness, but in the moral quality of the aeon into which the life passes. It is comparatively unimportant whether or not the rich fool, when his soul was required of him (L. xii. 20), entered upon a state that was endless. The principal, the tremendous fact, as Christ unmistakably puts it, was that, in the new aeon, the motives, the aims, the conditions, the successes and awards of time counted for nothing. In time, his barns and their contents were everything; the soul was nothing. In the new life the soul was first and everything, and the barns and storehouses nothing. ‘The bliss of the sanctified does not consist pri- marily in its endlessness, but in the nobler moral conditions of the new aeon, —the years of the holy and eternal God. Duration is a secondary idea. When it enters it enters as an accompaniment and outgrowth of moral conditions.