Life

Life, in Scripture's usage, is both the God-given existence of living creatures and, far more often in the New Testament, a share in the durable life that comes from God, most commonly named as eternal life.

The text says that eternal life is set in deliberate contrast to perishing, and is received through believing in the Son: "whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life" (John 3:15–16). It is spoken of as a present possession with a future horizon — "everyone who sees the Son and believes in him should have eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day" (John 6:40) — and as a gift Jesus gives and guards: "I give eternal life to them. They will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand" (John 10:28). The text also presents life under the images of water and food that endures: a well "springing up to eternal life" (John 4:14) and "the food which remains to eternal life" (John 6:27).

Most strikingly, the text says that life is not only a gift but a person. Jesus says, "I am the resurrection and the life" (John 11:25) and "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6), and 1 John 5:20 closes by identifying "the true God and eternal life" with the Son who has come. The underlying Greek phrase, zōē aiōnios, literally means the life "of the age" — the life of the coming age — and standard lexicography treats it as naming a quality of life as well as a duration; that is an established linguistic point, not a doctrinal one.

Christian traditions read this material differently without disagreeing that life comes from Christ. Sacramental traditions commonly connect the water and the food of John 4:14 and 6:27 with baptism and the Eucharist, while others read them as metaphors of faith and take believing itself as the whole means of reception. Eastern Orthodox teaching characteristically describes salvation as participation in the divine life, drawing on 1 John 5:20; many Western Protestant accounts stress the forensic gift of life credited through faith, and differ among themselves over whether John 10:28 guarantees that the gift cannot be lost. One way to read the whole is that Scripture holds together life as present possession, future resurrection, and personal union with the Son, leaving the weighting of those elements to confessional debate.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.