Alive

Occasionally I like to post things I read that catch my interest. Here's an excerpt from Hearing God by Dallas Willard:

"What is life? In all its various levels and types, life is power to act and respond in specific kinds of relations. For example, a cabbage has certain powers of action and response and a corresponding level of life. There is a difference between a cabbage that is alive and one that is dead, thought the dead one still exists. This can also be said of a snail or a kitten.

"But a live cabbage can make no response to, say, a ball of string. That is precisely because of the kind of life that is in it. Though alive as a cabbage, it is dead to the realm of play. Similarly, a kitten playing with the string can make no response to numbers or poetry, and in that sense the kitten is dead to the realms of arithmetic and literature. A live cabbage, though dead to one realm (that of play) is yet alive to another -- that of the soil, the sun and the rain. The situation is similar with the kitten.

"Human beings were once alive to God. They were created to be responsive to and interactive with him. Adam and Eve lived in a conversational relationship with their Creator, daily renewed. When they mistrusted God and disobeyed him, that cut them off from the realm of the Spirit. Thus they became dead in relation to it -- much as a kitten is dead to arithmetic. God had said of the forbidden tree, "in the day you eat of it you shall die" (Gen 2:17). And they did.

"Biologically they continued to live, of course. But they ceased to be responsive and interactive in relation to God's cosmic rule in his kingdom. It would be necessary for God to confer an additional level of life on them and their children, through "being born from above," (Jn 3:3) in order for them once again to be alive in God, to be able to respond toward him and to act within the realm of the Spirit."