11. The Scripture Intimations
The Scripture Intimations That it is life, moreover, and such a moral life as thus seeks to insure happiness to all who will accept it which is the ultimate moral truth in the Being of God, there seems to be abundant evidence in Scripture.
Some scriptures speak simply of the “living God,” without reference to the traits, qualities or attributes of His life, as when He is contrasted with dead idols. But other scriptures indicate, with unmistakable clearness, the qualities and characteristics of that life. At least nine times God swears by Himself. taking oath by His life, not by His holiness, His love, or any other attribute of His life, using the term, “as I live,” in every instance. This seems clearly to show that God Himself regards His life as the ultimate fact of His Being, and therefore as that by which it is most appropriate, as standing for the whole divine Being, to take solemn oath. And moreover that it is His moral life, not merely His infinite Being, by which He takes oath, since the issues involved in His oaths are moral issues, and are an appeal to His moral integrity.
We find also fully forty occasions when men took solemn oath, a moral action, by Jehovah that liveth, again emphasizing life as the ultimate moral reality behind everything else in God.
Then John, whose heart of love saw more deeply than the other disciples into the nature of Christ, when he was moved to tell the central fact in His Being, said: “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:4-5). No kind of life can be a light to men in moral darkness, except one which is the perfect embodiment of the moral all which ought to be. Any other kind would be moral darkness itself.
Then Christ Himself, when He gave reasons why men should honor the Son as they do the Father said: “For as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself” (John 5:26). Not love, nor holiness, but life.
He also said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life”(John 14:6). The last word is the climax of His revelation of the Father, and it is life, not love or holiness.
He announced also as His sole mission on earth: “I am come that they might have life” (John 10:10). That kind of life, therefore, of which love and holiness are the necessary attributes, since neither of these is possible except as there is first a spiritual life.