Week 42 John 1
John has been laying down several pieces of data about the (mysterious) Word…and is leaving it up to the reader to jigsaw them together.
He’d already said that The Word was God. And yesterday he said The Word was Life.
It’d be simpler if he said The Word was alive. That would be normal life. Living. Eating breathing sleeping working recreating exercising talking and like that. A fusion of the different things we do that guarantee we’re not dead.
But with John life isn’t just eating-sleeping-breathing. He makes that pretty clear by using the phrase “eternal life” quite a few times.
And John also quoted the Lord saying things like:
You refuse to come to me to have life and
I am come that they may have life.
The Lord was talking to living people so verses like those are ludicrous if he was referring to normal breathing-and-eating life. But they’re not as ridiculous if the same word is used about two different things. Which is what it seems John’s doing. So reading his gospel I’ve been on the look-out for which ‘life’ he’s referring to: a) eternal life or b) non-eternal life.
My sense is that in John non-eternal life – eating breathing sleeping working recreating exercising talking and like that – is roughly equivalent to a state of living deadness. Dead except for being biologically alive. Which is a different domain altogether from Eternal Life.
Note: quotes from John 5:40 10:10 (NIV)