July 28

“I am the way the truth and the life” (John 14:6).

It is inevitable, I suppose, that fallen man will read the words of God and try and relate to them from the position of self; that is, we try and understand what they mean to us, rather than consider what they may mean to God. Thus, for example, when we read in the scriptures of death, we think of death as the ending of life in this world, the inevitable outcome of our mortality.

But, Biblically speaking, death is not an event, but a dwelling place; this world is “the midst of the shadow of death” (Psalm 23:4); whilst we are in this world, we are surrounded by death and it is only as we are IN Christ that we are not in death. There are only two dwelling places on earth; IN Christ, which is life, or not IN Christ, which is death. Importantly, being a Christian does not necessarily mean that you are IN Christ, although you may be; But most Christians are IN Christianity, not IN Christ.

John 1:4 is generally translated as “In Him was life….”, but the Greek gives a different meaning. Firstly, “life” is in the nominative case, meaning it is the subject of the verb “was”; thus, a more accurate translation, even if less poetic, would be “life was in Him”. But there is more to it than that. The verb “was” is in the imperfect tense, meaning that the action described is in the past but is not completed. Thus, if the verse is rendered; “Life was in Him, is only in Him and will only be in Him”, it gives a better sense of what the apostle is saying.

Now, the fact is that while we live in this world, we are either in life or in death; there is no other dwelling place for mortal man; and we only have life to the extent that we are abiding IN Christ; biblically speaking, “life” is yielded to Him, while “death” is yielded to self; death is separation from life, that is, the life of Christ is separated from the life of the believer. Life is not ethics or morality, that is all self; life is total abandonment of self to Christ; anything else is death.