Jesus bringer of Life

Jn 1:4   In him was life, and that life was the light of men
   
Life is a mystery, not the whole existence of a person, but the very force or energy that keeps them going. Materialistic scientists have to say it is just the interaction of chemicals that make a body move, react, respond, and interact with everything around it. It is most clearly realized when it is absent, i.e. when death occurs. To see a dead body immediately after death is to realize that ‘something’ has gone from it and so all that is left is flesh which will decay leaving just a skeleton. Something within the flesh gave up and no longer energises the body into action. For most of us, the thought of simply chemical interaction is grossly inadequate. We sense, we feel, that we are something far more that just chemicals, for chemicals have no beauty, no meaning, no ‘purpose’ and things like love and creativity are also meaningless to a pile of heaving molecules!
   
From a materialistic point of view we know that a human body needs a pumping heart and an active brain and when either shuts down, the body shuts down and dies. We explain the brain activity as minute electrical charges flowing between cells causing stimulation that brings ‘life’, but as we’ve just said, most of us almost demand that it is more than this. Whenever men rationalise and reduce humanity to mere matter, very soon after we find abuses of man by man. History is littered with such abuses. It is only when we see man as something more than merely molecular activity does man rise up to greatness. Then we start talking about the ‘quality of life’ and in all this we are struggling to put meaning to this word, ‘life’.
  
John says “in him was life” as if that was something different from anyone else. The inference is that in everyone else life is imparted, given to them at conception, passed on by their parents, but in Jesus this ‘life’ existed independently of any other human being. The inference is that this life, this energy that we struggle to understand, exists in God alone and everything else has it because God imparts it.
    
The word ‘life’ occurs 50 times in John’s Gospel, often in the context of eternal life, a life force or energy that goes on without end. When the Bible speaks of our spirit, is that the part of us that is the mysterious holder of this life energy which, when a person becomes a Christian, is energised by the Holy Spirit? Who or what is the Holy Spirit except the life that is God – energy that is personal.
    
To catch something of the significance of this we need to see the effect of the Holy Spirit coming ‘upon’ men in the Old Testament and New. In Ex 31:3,4 He gave new creative abilities. In Num 11:25 He gave new ability to prophesy. In Judges 3:10 He gave ability to lead as in 6:34. In every case of the Holy Spirit coming upon men He gave them new abilities. It was like all their natural abilities were heightened. A parallel picture to try to explain it would be to say it was like a man with only black and white sight being given the ability to see in colours. With the arrival of God in power, there is a flow of ‘life’ that brings a transformation in man that is as dramatic as the change that takes place when the sun comes out on a cloudy day. Prior to Jesus coming, we were like human bodies that were living out a form or copy of life. Then we encountered him and real life, real God-energy, flowed into us and we were transformed. We became what we were designed to be. We started seeing differently, thinking differently, and acting differently. This ‘life’ in Jesus came into us and we were transformed!