Life Is Not A Malfunction

"Life is not a malfunction." Actually that's a quote from robot Number 5 in the movie Short Circuit. Number 5 discovers that he has somehow become alive, rather than just an assemblage of metal and wire controlled by computer coding. His programmers say, "impossible," and spend the rest of the movie trying to capture and destroy the wayward robot and the girl who has befriended him. (A great movie if you can shut out too much unnecessary foul language.)

Number 5 makes you stop and think about the definition of "life." Am I alive? Are you? We seem to think that we are, because we eat and breathe and create or read web pages. Genesis 2:7 assures us that God breathed into man's nostrils and the first human (who contained in his body both men and women) "became a living being."

"Living:" the plain old garden variety of life, simple vitality, which even plants were given. "Being:" often translated "soul," the emotions, awareness and intellect, which we also share with animals. Surprised? I was. Lots of the verses which relate to life, and which we like to spiritualize, are these same levels of life. John 3:16 for example. That eternal life we are promised when we believe is more than just a spiritual quality, but a real, vital, familiar being-ness. The word is "zoe," that "lowest" level of vitality.

In John 10, Jesus says, as the Good Shepherd, that he will give his life for the sheep. He repeats himself in verses 11 and 15, but not really. In verse 15, he says he will lay down his physical life, this vitality. In verse 11, however, where the English translation says he will give his life, it is his psyche, that he gives.

Our life is in Christ, because he is our life. This truth comes from Colossians 3:4. Again, it's the simple vitality. Examples like this go on and on.

What's my point? I'm definitely not trying to reduce the quality of God's gift of life to something physical and trivial. Rather, I am delighted to know that God is not only concerned about my simple be-ing, but that this part of me is inextricably wound up in Him. These thoughts were generated from reading John 5:26, "For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself." This is again simple vitality, zoe. Whatever life we have, even our physical, "animal" self, is only on loan from God.

Only God has intrinsic life, and since it seems likely that He will not choose to eliminate a facet of His own make-up, I have confidence in a corporeal resurrection and a future life more of substance than ghostly. I find this fact to be re-assuring. Maybe you will too.