Getting Connected
1 John 5:9-15
A plant pulled from the soil soon dies. A fan disconnected from the wall socket stops. A hose unscrewed from the faucet runs dry. And a life disconnected from God is no life at all, but death. That’s what the Lord warned Adam in the Garden at creation. “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:17). Eat from the Tree of Life, or the Tree of Knowledge: that was the choice facing Adam. And he and Eve chose knowledge of evil over life. What is evil? Evil is to be cut off from God, and therefore disconnected from life.
It might seem like God wasn’t honest with Adam. After all, he lived to be 930 years old (Genesis 5:5)! But if we take God at his Word, we realize that Adam’s “life” wasn’t really life the way God intended it from the beginning. From our birth to our death, our life in this world is not life as God means life. It is a sort of “living death,” a sort of zombie existence, disconnected from the One who is the Lord and Giver of Life, the Spirit of God.
But in Christ, we now have real life once again. “Whoever has the Son has life.” Whoever is reborn in Christ by the Spirit has the life the Father intended. We belong to God again; we are connected to each other in real community again; our real life does not end with death in this world. Just as Jesus rose from the dead to live eternally in a glorified existence, so too will we. “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life” says John. Amen, Come Lord Jesus!