The Word of Life

God's word has the power to create life. He made the plants and plant life is able to respond in that realm to the soil, sunlight and rain. God created animal life and in that realm animals can do much more than plants. They can eat, hear, and mate with each other. Plants are oblivious to the animal realm and in that sense are dead to animal kind of life. Humans live in a yet higher realm in which we can understand abstract thought such as mathematics, poetry, art and all manner of communication. The animal is dead to this kind of life.

There is an even higher kind of life that we as humans were meant to have--Eternal life. This is the realm in which we hear and communicate with God. God is eternal and to communicate with Him in that realm we must have an eternal kind of life. But since Adam we have been dead to this kind of life. How can we regain it? To enter any life you must be born into it.

John 3:3 (NKJV)

Jesus answered and said to him, "Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."

The life creating power of God's word is what makes this new birth possible. Willard says "Without this birth we cannot recognize God's workings: we do not possess the appropriate faculties and equipment. We are like kittens trying to contemplate a sonnet."

1 Peter 1:23 (NKJV)

having been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word of God which lives and abides forever