BIBLE GUIDE: life
The Bible's central concern and main issue is the paramount importance of life, and how to maintain and sanctify it.


The underlying concept for the biblical view of life is the creation of man in God's image (Gen 1:26). God breathed into the nostrils of the man the breath of life and man thereby became a living being (Gen 2:7). By this divine act man was set apart from all other creatures, to stand only a step lower than the angels (Ps 8:5). The divine likeness serves man, not to achieve immortality, but to attain sanctity; nevertheless, having been created in the divine image, one of man's prime tasks is the preservation of life. Since life is a divine gift, no one has the right to take either his own life or that of others (Ex 20:13; Deut 5:17).

Life in the biblical sense means to live according to God's way (imitatio Dei) which can be summarized in the command "You shall be holy: for I the Lord your God am holy" (Lev 19:2). In the Psalms and Proverbs, life is clearly connected with the observing of the commandments of God's laws: "keep my commands and live" (Prov 4:4; 7:2). To prolong one's life, it is required to fear the Lord (Prov 10:27). Prolongation of days is granted to all those who keep God's statutes and commandments (Deut 6:2). The Torah itself is seen as "a tree of life to those who take hold of her: and happy are all who retain her" (Prov 3:18).

Trust in God who sustains the world is likewise a basic theme in the NT: "Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing ?" (Matt 6:25; cf Luke 12:22-23). In the NT, as in contemporary rabbinic literature, life is seen in the double dimension: in this world and in the world to come (Matt 16:25; Mark 8:35; John 6:26-58; 8:12).

For the Gospel According to John, more abundant life for the believer is the whole goal of the coming of Jesus (John 10:10). It is the greatest existential theme of the entire gospel (John 20:31). Resurrection, eternal life and faith in Christ are closely related (John 11:25-26). According to Paul, Gentiles can fill their lives with the hope of salvation, which consists of being raised together with Christ (I Cor 15:23-28; I Thes 5:15-17, 23). While Christians await God's son (I Thes 1:10), they have the Holy Spirit manifest in spiritual gifts (Gal 5:22-26). Paul urges the Christians to remain pure and blameless until the Day of the Lord (I Cor 6:11). The messianic aspect of waiting actively by living according to God's will is common to both Jewish and Christian traditions.

LIFE:
life, although there is no universal agreement as to a definition of life, its biological manifestations are generally considered to be organization, metabolism, growth, irritability, adaptation, and reproduction. Protozoa perform, in a single cell, the same life functions as those carried on by the complex tissues and organs of humans and other highly developed organisms. The attributes of life are inherent in such minute structures as viruses, bacteria, and genes, just as they are in the whale and the giant sequoia. In seeking an understanding of life, scientists have broken down many barriers that once separated the physical sciences from the biological sciences; a result of the growth of biochemistry, biophysics, and other interrelated fields of study has been a better understanding of the composition and functioning of living tissues of all kinds.


CHARACTERISTICS OF LIFE:
Organization is found in the basic living unit, the cell, and in the organized groupings of cells into organs and organisms. Metabolism includes the conversion of nonliving material into cellular components (synthesis) and the decomposition of organic matter (catalysis), producing energy. Growth in living matter is an increase in size of all parts, as distinguished from simple addition of material; it results from a higher rate of synthesis than catalysis. Irritability, or response to stimuli, takes many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism when touched to complex reactions involving all the senses of higher animals; in plants response is usually much different than in animals but is nonetheless present. Adaptation, the accommodation of a living organism to its present or to a new environment, is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the individual's heredity. The division of one cell to form two new cells is reproduction; usually the term is applied to the production of a new individual (either asexually, from a single parent organism, or sexually, from two differing parent organisms), although strictly speaking it also describes the production of new cells in the process of growth.

THE BASIS OF LIFE:
Much of the history of biology and of philosophy as related to biology has been marked by a division of thought between vitalistic (or animistic) and mechanistic (or materialistic) concepts. In the most antithetic interpretations of these concepts, the vitalistic school maintains that there is a vital force that distinguishes the living from the nonliving and the mechanistic school holds that there is no essential difference between the animate and inanimate and that all life can be explained by physical and chemical laws. Such diametrically opposed views have actually seldom been held by investigators of either school; elements of both are usually involved. The animistic school, largely predicated on the inexplicability of the basic phenomena of life, has been greatly overshadowed by the accumulating weight of scientific data. As more and more is learned of the minute details of the structure and composition of the substances that make up the cell (to the extent that some have been synthesized chemically), it has become increasingly apparent that living matter is made up of the same (and only those) elements found in inorganic material, except that they are differently organized.
THE ORIGIN OF LIFE:
Fundamental religious concepts center around special creation and belief in the infusion of life into inanimate substance by God or another superhuman entity. On the other hand, many scientists have hypothesized that during an early geological period there gradually formed in the atmosphere increasingly complex organic substances composed of available inorganic compounds and water, utilizing ultraviolet rays and electrical discharges as energy sources. At a certain stage they formed a diffuse solution of "nutrient broth." Then in some way they were drawn together and developed the capacity for self-renewal and self-reproduction. In 1953, S. L. Miller synthesized several of the most basic amino acids in a glass flask by introducing an electrical discharge into an atmosphere of water vapor and some simple compounds thought to have been present naturally at the time when life first developed on earth. A more recent theory now widely held is that life originated in a volcanic setting more than 3.5 billion years ago, perhaps in hot deep-sea vents, utilizing a biochemistry based largely on sulfur and iron. The theory that life on earth came in a simple form from another planet has had small currency, although the discovery by Melvin Calvin of molecules resembling genetic material in meteors has given it some force.