You make known to me the path of Life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand. Psalm 16:11
“I am the way and the truth and the Life.” Jesus, in John 14:6
In his classic book Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis speaks of two distinct and very different kinds of life: biological life and spiritual life.
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 [pronounced zōw’-eh]. 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 significant a change as a statue which changed from being carved stone to being a real man.
That is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumor going around the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.
Lewis is saying there is a type of life worth searching for, worth hoping for: Zoe life - or Zoweh, my rendering of the pronunciation, reflected and pronounced in the name Yahweh.
Zoweh was the thing that motivated Jesus’s whole ministry:
I came that they might have Life [Zoweh] and have it to the full. John 10:10
It was the reason why the apostle John wrote his gospel:
These [stories and sayings of Jesus] are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life [Zoweh] in his name. John 20:31
To the Roman believers, the apostle Paul had this to say:
The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life [Zoweh] and peace. . . . You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. Romans 8:6, 9
And in his second letter to the young pastor Timothy, Paul wrote:
Our Savior, Christ Jesus . . . has destroyed death and has brought life [Zoweh] and immortality to light through the gospel. 2 Timothy 1:10
Love and Life, the offer of the Gospel. Sure, we get the wonderful grace and never ending forgiveness but both grace and forgiveness are so we can Live and live Loved.
That is the greatest Life of all.
How have you experienced God’s Love?
How, when and where has He demonstrated you are one of His favorite image bearers?
