During a conversation a few years ago, a friend of mine made a passing comment that has stuck with me ever since:
“I measure a culture according to its ability to create and sustain life.”
In other words, a culture in which plants, animals, and children flourish is superior to one where they don’t.
This comment immediately struck me as being profound and insightful, but I also instinctively felt it to be Biblical. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced of that. Since it has been such a blessing to me to reflect on it and has led to a deepening of my wonder for Christ, I decided to write it down in the hope that it would do something similar for others.
Why is it Biblical?
The Bible has a very high and positive view of life, and ties it inextricably to God. God is the author of life, and in Genesis He creates both the environment that could sustain life (days 1-4), and He creates life itself (days 3, 5 and 6). Not only does He create life, but He creates life that creates more life. In a sense you could say that God’s intent with creation was a multiplication of life.
Since we were created in God’s image, it makes sense that we should also be life-giving1 beings. This is reflected in the original command given to Adam, in which he is told to multiply and fill the earth and to keep and guard the garden. If he succeeds, life will flourish. If he fails, death will occur. (Interestingly, Adam fails by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, yet the tree of life was available to him.)
If our Creator brings forth life, and our original command was to produce and guard life, it makes sense that wherever we see life flourish under the hands of people we see in some way God’s image being honored. It is in this sense that I hold my friend’s comment to be Biblical.
Where does life flourish?
Since life is inextricably tied to God, it is inevitable that those who are more aligned to His nature will bring forth more life. This alignment happens either through regeneration and sanctification (the true conformity), external obedience to His Scriptures, or through common grace by which people discover life-giving principles outside of the Scriptures, such as disciplining their children or caring for the elderly.
This principle of conformity to God bringing forth life is clearly stated in Deuteronomy 30:
“19 I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, 20 loving the LORD your God, obeying his voice and holding fast to him, for he is your life and length of days, that you may dwell in the land that the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.”
Deut 30:19-20 ESV (emphasis mine)
Where does death flourish?
Since conformity to God brings forth life, death flourishes wherever God is rejected. Those who reject God conform themselves to someone else, who seeks to “steal, kill, and destroy.” An example of this are the murderous regimes of the 20th century, where certain nations rejected God to elevate the state as the supreme authority and consequently killed millions of people.
Modern examples of the rejection of God leading to death are seen in abortion and homosexuality: the first destroys life whilst the latter can’t produce it. They represent direct rejections of our first command to “keep and guard (preserve) life” and “to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth”.
Full of life but still dead
It’s important to note that we can have a thriving garden and a happy family and still be dead in God’s sight. When God told Adam that He will die if he eats of the forbidden fruit, He wasn’t talking just about biological death. Death in the Bible is a broader concept than the biological cessation of life. By eating the fruit Adam died in that moment, but the death was primarily spiritual and therefore of much greater consequence.
It is therefore possible to see communities that have thriving plants, animals, and children, but whose people still reject God as He has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. They are spiritually dead, but because to some degree they adhere to God’s law and his character they experience certain life-giving benefits.
Life redefined and personalized
Just as death is a broader concept than the biological cessation of life, so life in the Bible is broader than being biologically alive. When Jesus proclaimed 2000 years ago that He Himself is the life, this radically challenges the ‘natural’ understanding of what it means to be alive. He taught that whoever is not joined to Him is dead, even though that person is alive biologically. At the same time He taught that those who are joined to Him are alive even though they die biologically:
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.
John 11:25-26 (emphasis mine)
In this way, Jesus radically challenges our common understanding of life, placing Himself in the center of its definition.
True life issues from a source
We can look at a culture and evaluate its ability to create and sustain life by looking at various aspects of that culture: do their laws protect life? Do they uphold Biblical standards for marriage? Do they see children as a blessing or a burden? Do they farm in ways that are sustainable? These are all good indicators of their conformity to God, and where life flourishes the odds are good that there is (or was) some direct or indirect connection to God and His law.
In God’s sight however, a living connection to Christ is the determining factor as to whether what is produced by a culture is truly life. All the biological life a culture creates still amounts to nothing if it is not borne from such connection (John 15). For groups and individuals, the creation and support of biological life is an important indicator of conformity to God, but if it’s done outside of being rooted in Christ it is ultimately worthless.
(Updated 24 December 2023)
- The term “life-giving” I attribute to Jim Wilder. ↩︎