The Author of Life

Today's Scripture

Genesis 2:7 — "then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature."

Acts 17:24-25 — "The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything."

Psalm 100:3 — "Know that the LORD, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture."

The Big Idea

Over the next ten days we will walk into some of the hardest arguments people have — abortion, the end of life, what we owe the weakest among us. But none of those arguments can be settled until a quieter question is answered first: where does life come from? The Bible's answer is simple and staggering. Every life is breathed out by God, belongs to God, and is held in existence by God right now. Life is not our property. It is a gift, and the Giver has not let go.

Reflection

Borrowed breath

Genesis 2:7 is one of the most intimate pictures in the whole Bible. God does not create human beings from a safe distance, with a snap of his fingers. He kneels in the dirt like a potter — "the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground" — and then does something no potter has ever done. He "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life." Mouth to clay. The very first thing a human being ever experienced was the closeness of God.

And that breath never became our private property. Job 12:10 — "In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind." Notice the tense. Not was in his hand. Is. Right now, while you read this sentence, your breath sits in God's open hand. You did not start your own heart this morning. You cannot keep it beating tonight by trying hard. Every breath is a gift that arrives, gets used, and is replaced by another gift.

A.W. Tozer believed that everything in our lives flows downstream from how we picture God:

"What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us." — A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

That cuts both ways. If we picture God as distant and bored, human life shrinks into biology — cells, chemistry, accident. But if we picture the God of Genesis 2, kneeling in the dust and giving his own breath away, then every human life is personal to him. Irenaeus, one of the church's earliest teachers — he learned the faith from a student of the apostle John — put it in one unforgettable line:

"The glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God." — Irenaeus, Against Heresies

Read that slowly. Your aliveness is not in competition with God's glory. Your aliveness displays his glory, the way a lit lamp displays the power running through it.

No ordinary people

Genesis 1:27 — "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." "Image of God" is church language, so let's make it plain: every human being is a small, living portrait of God. In the ancient world, kings would set up statues — images — of themselves in distant cities, as a way of saying, "This territory is mine." Genesis says God did that with people. Every person you pass in a hallway is a statue of the King, planted in his territory.

C.S. Lewis took that idea to its logical end:

"There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal." — C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

The kid who annoys you in class. The driver who cut your family off this morning. The patient who no longer remembers her own name. No ordinary people. Not one.

Lewis wrote those words in a sermon about the eternal destiny of ordinary neighbors, and his point was sober arithmetic. Nations, companies, and headlines are temporary; the person sitting next to you will outlast every one of them. You cannot hold that thought for long and stay casual about people.

Now flip the idea over and see what happens when a culture lets it go. Francis Schaeffer spent the 1970s warning the West about exactly this:

"If man is not made in the image of God, nothing then stands in the way of inhumanity." — Francis Schaeffer, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?

If people are accidents, then their value becomes a sliding scale — measured by usefulness, wantedness, intelligence, or cost. Sliding scales can be slid. The weak slide off first. But if people are images of God, their value is fixed from outside us, by Someone we cannot outvote. That single difference sits underneath every debate this plan will touch.

We are not our own

In Acts 17, Paul stands up in Athens, the university town of the ancient world, and takes on its best thinkers. Some of them, the Epicureans, taught that life was random atoms bumping in the dark. Others, the Stoics, taught that life was run by blind fate. Paul tells them both that they have missed a Person: God "himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything" (Acts 17:25). Then he quotes their own poets back to them: "In him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). God is not far away. He is the air our existence breathes.

If God gives everything, then God owns everything. Psalm 24:1 — "The earth is the LORD's and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein." Not just the planet. The people.

Here is an everyday version of the idea. If you borrow a friend's bike, you ride it differently than your own. You do not leave it in the rain. You do not jump it off curbs. Why? Because how you treat it is no longer only your business — it answers to an owner who trusted you with it. John Calvin pressed that logic all the way into the human heart:

"We are not our own; therefore, neither is our own reason or will to rule our acts and counsels... We are God's; let us, therefore, live and die to him." — John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

At first that sounds like a loss of freedom. Honestly, it is meant to be a rescue from a crushing weight — the weight of having to invent your own worth and defend it daily. Psalm 100:3 says it gently: "It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture." Sheep do not own the pasture. They are kept, fed, and defended by Someone stronger than they are.

And notice what this does to our hardest debates. The modern argument about abortion or euthanasia usually starts with the question, "Whose choice is it?" Scripture starts a step earlier: "Whose life is it?" If every life is God's before it is anyone else's, then no human being — not a mother, not a doctor, not a government, not even the person themselves — holds absolute ownership over a life. We are handling borrowed things.

The Author who let his breath be taken

So far this could sound like a lecture about rules: God owns life, so hands off. But the Bible is not finally a lecture. It is a story with a shocking turn, and the turn is this: the Owner became one of the owned.

The New Testament says Jesus was not just a messenger sent by the Author of life. He is the Author. John 1:3-4 — "All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men." Colossians 1:16-17 goes further: "all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together." The hands that hold every atom together took on fingers and a heartbeat.

Augustine explains why we were built this way — made by him and made for him:

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." — Augustine, Confessions

A gift always points back to its Giver. The ache in us — the sense that life must mean something — is homesickness for him. J.I. Packer says the same thing as a job description:

"What were we made for? To know God. What aim should we set ourselves in life? To know God." — J.I. Packer, Knowing God

Now the turn. When the Author of life finally stood on his own stage, what did we do with him? Peter answers, preaching in Jerusalem just weeks after the event: "you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead" (Acts 3:15). Sit with the strangeness of that sentence. The Author of life let his characters kill him. With his last borrowed breath he prayed, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!" (Luke 23:46) — handing back to God the very breath God first breathed into the dust.

Why? So that the people who treat life carelessly — and that is all of us, in one way or another — could be forgiven and made new. And then the grave discovered what the Epicureans and Stoics never knew: death cannot keep the Author of life. He rose. And on the evening of that first Easter, John tells us, the risen Jesus breathed on his disciples and gave them his Spirit — Genesis 2 happening all over again, the Maker once more putting his own breath into people made of dust.

This is why Christians treasure life. Not because we are rule-keepers with a list, but because we are debtors with a story. The One who owns every life gave up his own for ours. After that, contempt for any human life — small or sick, useful or inconvenient — is unthinkable. Reverence for life is not our achievement. It is our thank-you.

Going Deeper

Tonight, before you fall asleep, lie still for two minutes and just notice your breathing. Do not control it; watch it. In, out. Gift, gift. Thank God for it in plain words — "this one is from you; so is this one." Then bring to mind one person you find easy to dismiss, and say to God: "That person is your image, on loan from you." That is the whole exercise. You are not solving any debates tonight. You are learning, breath by breath, whose world you live in.