The New Testament abounds in references to zoe, assuring us that it is the purpose of God that we should receive zoe life as the addition to our natural life and so truly live as we were always intended to.
The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life (zoe), and that they may have it more abundantly.
John 10:10
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life (zoe).
John 3:16
In each of these verses, the word zoe is used for “life” and “everlasting life.” We were created to partake of the life of God. Sin stole it, and Jesus came to return it to us.
Therefore, we must define death as including, but so much more than, what occurs to the body at the end of physical life. Death must be understood as separation from, of being unaware and unresponsive to, the dimension that one is dead to. The physically dead human is conscious in another dimension but separated from the physical world and therefore unaware and unresponsive to it.
Using this definition, we can say that the animal world is dead to the human world. Do not be upset with me but, according to this definition of death, your cat is dead to the fullness of human life. It lives in a human world but is unaware and unresponsive to everything that is essentially human. It responds to our providing food, water, and shelter and has an awareness of our being there. But it is unaware and unresponsive to a Beethoven symphony or the reading of a passage from a book, nor does a joke have any effect on it. It does not ponder the meaning of its existence or discuss life with other cats. It may see two humans kiss but has no reference point for the love that the kiss expresses or, in fact, what a kiss means. It only has cat life, which cannot relate to human life.
In that sense, through the great disobedience, the man and the woman plunged into the state of being dead to God and alive only to human awareness of their physical world, which was light years above animal life but light years below what they were created to enjoy.
There is an awful finality in both spiritual and physical death. Once dead, only God can bring a person back to life. In the realm of the physical, He does that in the resurrection; and spiritually, He accomplishes it in the miracle of the new birth.
The human lives on the edge of awareness of God, enjoys His providential care, but is hardly aware that it is He who cares for him. Humankind is oblivious to the love of God and is unresponsive to His approach. Men and women are alive in the physical world, the world of the creature, of flesh; but they are separated from God and unaware of Him, deaf to His words, and thus unresponsive.
The human spirit is like a radio that is no longer able to pick up or transmit a clear signal. But, importantly, men and women know they have a radio even though it doesn’t work. They are lost but not so lost as to not know that there is something missing. They exist out on the edge of an awareness of God, haunted by the uneasy feeling that He is there and some moral responsibility to Him is demanded. The race has a memory that cannot be recalled, a dream that cannot be remembered of the glory they were created to enjoy and once had.
There is a longing to be loved unconditionally that cannot be satisfied by another human. They are surprised by unexpected surges of longing within for something above and beyond the prison walls of sin, selfishness, and satanic domination.
Men and women are aware of a vast emptiness within, which sends them searching after something higher than their human existence. There is a hole inside each one of us that is bigger than the universe, but left to ourselves we have no tools for discovering who can fill the hole.
There can be no contact with God from the human side; God is not known by the logic of the human intellect but by revelation in the spirit from the God side. The groping after God within the categories known by the human intellect and imagination creates a God made in the image of man, which reduces Him to a superhuman and leaves the human in a greater darkness than ever. Such groping into the unknown inevitably leads to the spirit world of darkness, deception, and the demonic.
Jesus defines for us the biblical meaning of the word “dead” in the parable of the lost son. (Luke 15:11-32.) The father announces, "This my son was deal and is alive again" (verse 24); that is, he was separated from the father’s love, unaware of it and untouched by it and unresponsive to it, finding his existence far away from it. For him to come “alive” was to become aware of that love, be touched and embraced by it, responding by opening himself to it.
Our first parents, Adam and Eve, did not become “as God,” as Satan had promised them, but instead became the slaves of the one who had lied to them and promised ultimate freedom and independence. Life now was lived on the meaningless treadmill of trying to make the lie of Satan work in life. They were doomed to fail at meeting their goal of being as God, yet in a blind and insane belief have been spurred on to attempt to achieve it in every succeeding generation of humankind.
Dead while physically, mentally, and emotionally alive, the sad parade of humanity moves through existence toward physical death, the dissolution of the body, being separated even from the physical existence. Created to rule the universe, humankind has ended up being absorbed back into the dust from whence he came. And the first man and woman believed that they would become gods!
Unlike lower creatures, men and women know that physical death is inevitably coming, which makes their existence meaningless. Whatever they may do, whatever they may achieve or aspire to, whatever their hopes and ambitions, men and women are acutely aware that all is being swept on toward inevitable death. Life itself becomes pointless and meaningless.
The Cosmic Act
Adam’s act of the great disobedience was also the cosmic disobedience, for Adam was lord of the creation and head of the human race. His act brought death to the whole creation and brought the race that was in him into a state of living death. The entire human race was in Adam when he sinned; therefore, his was not a private sin but a cosmic act that involved the entire cosmos and all of future history and people.
The human race outside of Christ is called “in Adam” or “the old man(kind).” We are not isolated individuals but are locked in to one another.
For example, some of my far off ancestors were Vikings. When my ancestor came in his longboat to the shores of eastern England, I was in him; I was potential in his life. If he had been killed in the raid, I would have died in him—like it or not, that is the way it is.
Likewise, if Adam had died before his first child was conceived, none of us would be here today. When he disobeyed he carried us, the entire race of humankind, into the darkness. That does not excuse us, for we have all willfully chosen the same path he did. Every generation believes the lie and votes by its actions that Adam was right. We are personally responsible for our sin.
The Futility of Life in the Flesh
Humankind has become something other than what we were created to be. Men and women were created to be spirit persons, living from their spirit centers, where they were to be submitted to God and share in His life. From that center, they were to live in and through their physical bodies and rule the universe.
But dead to God they became flesh persons, living from the created flesh as the source and center of their life. That was inevitable, for that was all that was left! The spirit was not functioning and the lie told every man and woman that within themselves, independent of God, they could find the meaning of life and happiness.
Let me make it very clear that the body and all its cells and organs are good. God created the human body and pronounced it good, and Jesus took to Himself a human body made like ours in every way.
What happened when the first couple died to God in Eden was that they now looked in the realm of their created physical existence for the meaning of life. In that physical arena, they would live out their rebellion to God. There is nothing wrong with flesh; the evil is in fallen men and women’s ma
king the flesh the source and meaning of existence.
It would appear that before sin and death entered, the couple lived in an acute awareness of the spirit dimension—so much so that they were hardly aware of their bodies except as the vehicles of their spirits. It would seem that the glory of the life of God shone through their bodies, clothing them in glorious light, much as it did Jesus in His transfiguration.
The entrance of sin and death turned everything upside down. After they sinned, they were suddenly acutely aware of their bodies stripped of the glory of God, while paralyzed and confused in terms of the heavenly dimension.
The shock of the new awareness that their flesh had become the center of their existence was vividly portrayed by their reaction. It is significant that the first act after their sin was a total focus on their bodies and a frantic effort to cover them. They had no horror of their sin, but were obsessed by the shame of bodies stripped of glory and now stark naked.
From then on, this was where they would find their life and the meaning of their existence—in the realm of creature flesh. Men and women would now spend their lives searching for meaning within their magnificent brains, intellects, emotions, feelings, and passions, which all exist in the organs of their bodies.
But for every human being, the questions regarding the meaning of existence will not go away. Men and women cannot forget the dream they cannot remember! The human is plagued by “Why am I here?” “What is the point of my existence?” “What is the meaning of my life?” Midlife crisis is due to looking at life and realizing that the elusive meaning has not been found and time is running out. Humans explore all possible reasons for existence within the physical, material universe in which they find their entire existence.
Men and women outside of Christ are flesh persons living with their flesh bodies at their center, with only a dim awareness of the spirit and its function. For the human created to know and walk in love with the Creator, there is no ultimate meaning to life in the flesh.
I once owned a very beautiful painting that hung on the wall of my office in a frame carved with leaves and overlaid in gold leaf. One day, I decided to sell the painting. The empty frame stood against the wall, and I remember thinking how I needed to put it in the attic until I could find another picture that would fit the frame. It never occurred to me to hang the frame on the wall, however beautifully it was carved. Frames are for pictures, and apart from the pictures they have little meaning.
Our flesh existence is the frame around the picture that is our spirits joined with and participating in the life of God. Our meaning is living in the love of God in the frame of our creature existence. Without the picture, there is no point to the frame except to wait for its fulfillment in having a picture placed in its heart.
The Scripture uses the word “futile” to describe the life lived in the flesh. It is a word that means going nowhere, dead end, aimless, and bringing nothing to fruition or harvest.
Knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold, from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers.
1 Peter 1:18
This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of[a] the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind.
Ephesians 4:17
Our pursuit of false meaning is sin because we were created to find our meaning in living in the love of God. Our looking for that meaning elsewhere is a slap in the face to God.
I once saw a group of young boys playing street baseball. I was shocked to see that they were using a violin for their bat. Its strings were broken, and it was dirty. Some of the veneer had stripped away, and a boy held its neck and swung it like a bat. I am sure the boys had found it trashed by someone and were using it creatively, but there was something very wrong with what I was seeing. I do not know much about violins, but this one had obviously not been purchased in a dime store; even in its dilapidated condition, it was beautiful. It had been lovingly made, fashioned, and lacquered by a craftsman with the one purpose in mind of filling a music room or concert hall with music to delight the ears of the listeners. Now broken, dirty, its strings flying in the wind, it was used as a baseball bat. I felt that what I was seeing was an insult to its maker and an affront to music and beauty.
We were created to delight in being the object of God’s love and to fill the creation with the music of His love by our lives lived in union with Him. The great disobedience is trashing the purpose of our creation and seeking, on an endless, futile quest, another meaning to life. In so doing, we insult our Maker and shame our very existence.
All Have Sinned
The major Greek word that sums up the condition of humankind is harmartia,3 which the New Testament translates as sin. Its basic meaning is “to miss the mark” and describes the action of human beings in missing totally the reason they were created. This must not be thought of as missing the mark like the little boy at summer camp who can’t hit the bull’s eye with his arrow but keeps trying in hope of success. Humankind misses the mark deliberately, having set up an alternative target, which in fact is the lie and an illusion.
But in the New Testament the word, while retaining its original meaning, takes on the much broader meaning of separation from God that is rooted in the principle of independence from Him, which is contained in the lie, which has become the source of all action and behavior.
Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned.
Romans 5:12
Harmartia is described as a ruling power. In Romans 6:6, it is spoken of as the body of sin, enslaving the members of the body.
Knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin.
Again in Romans 6, Paul speaks to believers who have been delivered from sin, describing it as a master that had ruled them as a tyrant through the members of the physical body. Although sin is an action taken by the will, it is the body that is the instrument by which sin is expressed in concrete behavior.
Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts.
For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace.
Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one’s slaves whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death, or of obedience leading to righteousness? But God be thanked that though you were slaves of sin, yet you obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine to which you were delivered.
Romans 6:12,14,16,17
Paul often speaks of sin personified as a tyrant master. In Romans 7:8,11 he writes,
But sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire. For apart from the law sin was dead.
For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it killed me.
Romans 7:8,11
Reconciliation and Resurrection
Although humankind is dead, men and women can still hear when God speaks, even as Lazarus heard the voice of Jesus and came forth from the tomb. The true person lies buried within each of us, awaiting the Gospel call of the Son of God that summons him or her to resurrection to true personhood.
And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.
But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ...
Ephesians 2:1-5
Humans are hostile to God and neither in a covenant nor are in a position to initia
te one. They are not only hostile to God but are the covenant breakers, for the first sin was the breaking of the covenant that was their destiny to enjoy; and as covenant breakers, they are under the penalty of death. The Bible is the fascinating story of how God has achieved the reconciliation of men and women to Himself, bringing them into covenant with Him.
But sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire. For apart from the law sin was dead.
God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them...
2 Corinthians 5:19
Chapter 4: The Loving-kindness of God
Power of the Blood Covenant: Uncover the Secret Strength of God's Eternal Oath Page 4
