The thief comes only
to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it
to the full. John 10:10
What man, in his
natural condition, has not got, is Spiritual life—the higher and different sort
of life that exists in God. We use the same word life
for both: but if you thought that both must therefore be the same sort of
thing, that would be like thinking that the 'greatness' of space and the
'greatness' of God were the same sort of greatness. In reality, the difference
between Biological life and Spiritual life is so important that I am going to
give them two distinct names. The Biological sort which comes to us through
Nature, and which (like everything else in Nature) is always tending to run
down and decay so that it can only be kept up by incessant subsidies from
Nature in the form of air, water, food, etc., is Bios.
The Spiritual life which is in God from all eternity, and which made the whole
natural universe, is Zoe. Bios
has, to be sure, a certain shadowy or symbolic resemblance to Zoe: but only the sort of resemblance there is between a
photo and a place, or a statue and a man. A man who changed from having Bios to having Zoe would have
gone through as big a change as a statue which changed from being a carved
stone to being a real man.
And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is
a great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round
the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.
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