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.
No comments:
Post a Comment