Jesus IS The Way, The Truth, and The Life (Part III - The Life)
Jesus IS the Life.
1) He is not a branch, He is the vine (John 15). Again, He has life in Himself (John 5:26, John 1:4), whereas all other life saps from His. In our mother’s womb, we were entirely dependent on her life for our life. In that sense, she was our life. Later our bodies developed, and we became independent, so that even if our mother died, we would continue to live. But as a branch connected to the vine of Jesus, we will never be independent of him. Any branch not connected to the vine will shrivel up, die, and be burned (John 15).
2) But Jesus not only supplies life and not only is in Himself the source of life, but moreover, true life consists in knowing Him and being connected to Him (John 17:3). This fact should be obvious, the only reason it even needs to be explicitly stated is because our sinful nature has made us confused about reality. The abundant life that Jesus offers is an abundance of Himself. A creature walking around and breathing, and doing so in defiant rebellion against his Creator, is in a much worse position than merely “living an empty life”. The Bible accurately describes this state as death:
And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world. (Eph 2:1-2)
Note that the Bible doesn’t speak in terms of “spiritual death” like evangelical Christians often do. The phrase isn’t necessarily totally bad, but we can learn something from the Bible’s language. God didn’t say to Adam, “The day you eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil you will die spiritually,” He said, “You will die.” Expressions like, “let the dead bury their own dead” (Matt 8:22), “she… is dead even while she lives” (1 Tim 5:6), “excluded from the life of God” (Eph 4:18), “abides in death” (i.e. lives in death!, 1 John 3:14), “you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead” (Rev 3:1), show that from God’s perspective, the qualities that a biologist would label as “life” are, apart from Him, not worthy of the title.
Apart from Christ we are spiritually dead indeed. But when we get our new bodies (1 Cor 15) and experience a reinvigorated sense of what it is to love God in Christ with all our strength, and when the heart-hardening effects of sin are taken away and we begin to reciprocate from the heart more of Jesus’ passionate devotion toward us, and when the fulness of revelation and the imminence of the Lord’s presence opens us to love Him with all of our minds, then we will certainly look back on the days spent in our sinful nature and realize that we were not just spiritually dead. Anything not centered in, abiding in, and vitally attached to Jesus is truly dead.