“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” (Isaiah 9:6). In Greek mythology, Tithonus was a mortal man who fell in love with Eos, goddess of the dawn. Eos did not wish for death to separate them so she asked Zeus to make Tithonus immortal. Only, she forgot to also ask that he remain eternally youthful, so, even though Tithonus couldn't die, he just got older and feebler and slowly lost the use of his mind or his body. As we can see, Immortality without eternal youth is pretty much pointless. In the same vein, eternal life without eternal families is equally useless. If Christ's Atonement managed to secure immortality (with eternal youth) for all of God's children, but that immortality had to be enjoyed or more likely endured in isolation, completely cut off from all other family or friends, Christ wouldn't have done it. It wouldn't even be an Atonement because to atone means to bring back together as one those who have been separated, or, in other words, to rejoin family members together. In John 17:3, when Christ says that eternal life is to “know” God and Jesus Christ, He is using the Greek word ginosko. There are two Greek words used in the New Testament that get translated into “know” in English. Oida is related to seeing and is the kind of fact-based knowledge obtained through indirect observation. Ginosko, is a much more intimate knowledge based on direct experience. If the first kind of oida knowledge is more or less confined to high level abstracted knowledge that resides only in our heads and is very segmented and compartmentalized into discrete, unrelated elements, then ginosko knowledge involves experiencing something with our mind, body, and Spirit working together and building up a relational network of meaning based on thousands of different details spread across time. This kind of knowledge can only be obtained through intimate and personal familial relationships. The longer we observe and experience each other through all kinds of different situations, the more facets and layers and connections will be revealed and mapped out and linked together to build up a kind of knowledge that would be impossible to obtain from a distance. All of this is to say that there is almost no difference between having eternal life and having an eternal family. Christ’s title of Everlasting Father reflects this dual nature. To fully experience and appreciate and know a person so well that we are literally one with them takes much more than a single lifetime but all of eternity. And to exist for all of eternity without a family is not eternal life but eternal damnation. We can't have the Father without the everlasting and we can't have the everlasting without the Father. Christmas is ultimately about families. At the heart of every nativity scene is a little family, all of whom are dedicated to knowing and experiencing and loving each other for all eternity.
