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The Meaning of Life
Chapter 1: Two Perspectives on Life
Translation Preference: |
Author’s Choice |
Article Perspective: |
Grow in Christ |
Life: The Great Mystery
When did life begin and for what purpose has life been created? Complete answers to many such questions won’t be revealed until the afterlife. Yet, the Bible does contain some information regarding the meaning of life, particularly the meaning of human existence.
Life Forms: Vast and Varied Entities?
There are a multiplicity of opinions regarding what constitutes a life form. Biologists generally agree that something possesses life when it exhibits all, or most, of the following attributes: - growth: Living organisms experience physical development in size over time of all its parts. This perhaps implies that living things need a measurable bounding container of some sort (i.e. skin or membrane);
- motion: Life forms generally participate in purposeful, self-directed movement. For example, animals eat. Additionally, plants grow/stretch in the direction of the sun;
- reproduction: Individual specimens of a living organism result from such an organism’s ability to reproduce or regenerate in some way. For instance, humans reproduce sexually while bacteria divide asexually;
- metabolism: Living things are sustained through the absorbtion of & interaction with external nutrients. For example, the development and maintenance of strong human bones requires the human body to extract calcium from calcium-containing foods and transport it through the bloodstream to the bones throughout the body. Similarly, plants use energy from sunlight to combine carbon dioxide and water to produce the sugars which the plant uses to sustain itself;
- response to stimuli: Life forms respond and adapt to environmental events and changes (i.e. injuries; weather conditions).
According to this understanding of life, plants, animals (including humans), fungi, and bacteria are all classified as life forms.
| The following standard dictionary definition of “life” reflects a basic, yet biologically accurate, understanding of the word: |
life
1 a : the quality that distinguishes a vital and functional being from a dead body b : a principle or force that is considered to underlie the distinctive quality of animate beings c : an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction
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| For those who are interested, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy takes a more scholarly approach to defining “life”: |
“Life is often defined in basic biology textbooks in terms of a list of distinctive properties that distinguish living systems from non-living. Although there is some overlap, these lists are often different, depending upon the interests of the authors…”
“Living entities metabolize, grow, die, reproduce, respond, move, have complex organized functional structures, heritable variability, and have lineages which can evolve over generational time, producing new and emergent functional structures that provide increased adaptive fitness in changing environments. Reproduction involves not only the replication of the nucleic acids that carry the genetic information but the epigenetic building of the organism through a sequence of developmental steps. Such reproduction through development occurs within a larger life-cycle of the organism, which includes its senescence and death. Something that is alive has organized, complex structures that carry out these functions as well as sensing and responding to interior states and to the external environment and engaging in movement within that environment…”
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The Bible expresses life in very different (and much more simplistic) terms. God refers to moving, breathing beings (or souls) as the parts of His creation that possess life. Blood is the substance that produces such life. While humans and animals meet this criteria, plants, fungi, and bacteria do not. Furthermore, humans are described as a separate creation, rather than simply a type of animal.
| God contrasts the things that produce seed with the moving, breathing creatures that possess life. |
Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you;
and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so. |
Genesis 1:29-30 (NASB) |
| Man became a living being (or soul) when God breathed the “breath of life” into his nostrils. |
| Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. |
Genesis 2:7 (NASB) |
| Before the world-wide flood in the days of Noah, plants provided food for both humans and animals. After the flood, for reasons that are not specified in the Bible, God also permitted people to eat meat. Yet, because blood is the source of life, the blood of animals is sacred and not to be consumed. |
And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.
“The fear of you and the terror of you will be on every beast of the earth and on every bird of the sky; with everything that creeps on the ground, and all the fish of the sea, into your hand they are given.
“Every moving thing that is alive shall be food for you; I give all to you, as I gave the green plant.
“Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. |
Genesis 9:1-4 (NASB) |
In Biblical illustrations that refer to human life, plants sometimes metaphorically exhibit features present in moving, breathing creatures: possessing bodies; experiencing death; etc. Furthermore, humans sometimes metaphorically exhibit features present in stationary, souless plants: existing as planted, cultivated, and harvested crops; developing strong roots (i.e. in Christ’s teachings); etc.
| In the following passage, the Apostle Paul uses the seeds of plants to illustrate what will happen on the day when those who have died will return to life in new, resurrected bodies. |
But someone will say, “How are the dead raised? And with what kind of body do they come?”
You fool! That which you sow does not come to life unless it dies;
and that which you sow, you do not sow the body which is to be, but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or of something else.
But God gives it a body just as He wished, and to each of the seeds a body of its own. |
1 Corinthians 15:35-38 (NASB) |
| Through the prophet Nathan, God spoke these hopeful words to King David: |
| Moreover I will appoint a place for My people Israel, and will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own and move no more; nor shall the sons of wickedness oppress them anymore, as previously, |
2 Samuel 7:10 (NKJV) |
The Meaning of Life
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