Deuteronomy 30:15 (NKJV) 15 “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil,
We have been looking at the role choices play in walking in favor that comes from God. We must choose to obey God’s voice, walk in his ways and keep his commandments so that we will be in a position where God can bring favor and blessing into our lives. In Deuteronomy, we have seen that the Lord has set a choice before us. We can choose life and blessing or death and cursing. The choice is ours and God will not violate that choice.
I believe it is important for us to understand what this choice really means. Many people think the bible is difficult to understand. It is not difficult if you learn what the bible means by these two words; life and death. We understand these words from a physical perspective. Most of the time when the bible uses them it is not speaking from the perspective of natural life but of spiritual life and spiritual death.
What is life? It is not just a state of being. Life is a force that flows from God. God is life. There are three things that bible says that God is. They are light, love and life. These three forces are aspects of the same thing. They are forces that flow from the nature of God. God does not “have” these things. God “is” these three forces.
The word “force” could be a little confusing unless we understand it properly. Last week I mentioned the law of sin and death and the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus. I likened them to the law of gravity that describes the force of gravity. A force in natural physical law is a flow of power. Life, light and love are three aspects of the power that flows from the being of God.
One of the most interesting natural forces is electricity. Electricity is a flow of power that can do many different things. It can light your home. It can cool your home and heat it. It can transmit sound, pictures and data. It can drive your car or run a factory. It is the same power, or force, but it has many applications. The force of life that flows from the nature of God is similar only far, far greater.
This should not be confused with the idea portrayed in the Star Wars movies about a “force” that flows between everything and controls everything. This idea was drawn from eastern philosophies. Although it is an attempt to explain what I am talking about, it makes this “force” something impersonal. The force of life that flows from God is not impersonal. It is the nature of the person of God himself. It is the thing in God that makes God what he is.
We first see this force manifested in creation. In Genesis 1:1, the bible says that God created the heavens and the earth. In the verse 3, the Lord says, “Let there be light.” In that moment, something came from inside of God. It was a creative force that he called light. Science tells us that the building block of all matter is light.
The next thing he does is speak various aspects of our world into existence. In the first statement, God released that aspect of his nature called light. As he continues to organize creation, he comes to all the living things. He speaks and they appear. Out of his nature there is another force flowing. That force is life.
We all know that there is a great debate in the scientific world as to the existence of God. Many scientists see the creator in the creation. However, they are in the minority and they are not the ones we tend to hear about. For the most part the scientific community rejects the idea of a creator. They cite the “big bang” and the theory of evolution. There is one question for which they have no answer. Their persistence in ignoring this question actually goes against their own scientific method. From where did the first life come?
I remember when I was in school that my science teacher spoke of the ignorance of people in the middle ages who thought that maggots just appeared in meat. They did not understand that flies had to land on the meat and lay eggs for the little worms to appear. He said, “There is no such thing as spontaneous generation. Life must be present for life to be produced.” Therefore, I ask again, “Where did the first life come from?”
If you want to accept evolution, fine. However, today we cannot put dead proteins into a petri dish and have them produce life. They simply decay. Life must come from life. Even if that life evolved from one level to the next eventually producing man, where did the first life come from?
A popular theme today is that life on earth came from space. Some alien creature came to earth, deposited life here and, viola, evolution begins. That still does not answer our question. Where did the first life “out there” come from? I humbly submit that the bible gives us the only possible answer. Life came from God. God is life and he transmitted that life from the dimension of the spirit to the natural world in which we live.
In Genesis 1:26 we hear God speaking about his desire for a family.
Genesis 1:26 (NKJV) 26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
In this statement, we see the third of the forces that flows from God manifested. That is the force of love. Love is the motivating force that flows from the heart of God. He wanted a family to love. When he said, “Let us make man in our image” we see reflected the desire of every parent who chooses to have a family. Let us bring into the world another human being who carries our life.”
The aspect of God’s nature called love motivates him. The aspect of God’s nature called light is the substance that flows from the spirit realm and touches the natural world. However, the force that creates is the force called life. There is a Greek word that describes this kind of life. It is the word “Zoë.”
Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words calls this kind of life, “Life in the absolute sense.” It is life in which there is no death at all. I like to illustrate this by looking at something called absolute zero.
I live in the Northeastern United States. It gets cold here in the winter. We will often have two or more weeks in a row where the temperature is 0 degrees Fahrenheit or lower. Absolute zero is 273.15 degrees colder than 0 degrees. Absolute zero is the point at which there is no heat at all. Molecular motion stops.
When it is 0 degrees at my house, I feel very cold. However, there are still 273.15 degrees of heat in the air. That is hard to fathom. A heat pump both cools and heats a home. It cools the home by extracting heat from the air in the summer and pumping it out of the house. In the winter, it extracts the heat out of the cold air and pumps it into the house. How is this possible? It is possible because even in winter there is still heat in the cold outside air. At 0 degrees we still have 273 degrees of heat to draw from.
The life of God is absolute. There is no death in it at all. At absolute zero a heat pump would be of no use because there is no heat to pump. God’s life cannot produce dead things. Look at this scripture.
James 1:17 (NKJV) 17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.
Everything good comes from God. There is not even a “shadow of turning” in him. He is not even thinking about changing. Where then do evil things come from? Join me tomorrow for more.
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