The terms which Jesus used in describing His Person and work in the classic passage of Jn.l4:6 deserve a second look before we proceed further. Jesus has provided for us the incomparable frame of reference as 'THE WAY' in mankind's search for meaning and relevance in the areas of existence, epistemology and most importantly, morality. He could qualify to be the signpost only because He revealed Himself as 'THE objective, absolute, exclusive TRUTH', Who was not just a concept or an idea but a Person. But then many religions and philosophies would offer us the (alleged) intellectual underpinnings in terms of addressing the subject of truth. All religions attempt to speak unquestionably on the subject of morality. But will these do? Will not these two approaches alone leave unanswered the all important existential question of death?
The cardinal fact that sets apart the way of Christ from any other is the state of the human race. If we are intellectually insensitive to the question of God, will any amount of cerebrations on the subject of truth suffice? If we are morally depraved, will not a vauntingly high standard for required behaviour prove nothing but a conscience-teaser? In calling Himself 'THE LIFE' as well, Jesus touches upon the sensitive subject - totally unacceptable to the majority of humanity - of the fallenness of humans and their multidimensional deadness and offers Himself as the only Alternative - the inward Life-Resource Who alone can bring ultimate truth and morality within reach.
Some of our friends from other faiths - especially Hinduism - consider the Christian understanding of man as a sinner an insult to the human race. Swami Vivekananda - the Indian Guru (religious teacher) who took by storm the Congress of World Religions in Chicago in 1893 - had gone on record that "it is sinful to call man a 'sinner"'! In all fairness to our detractors on this point, we must concede that the Bible does not begin with the sinfulness of man as some of our religious tracts do! Rather, we are taught that man was created with the greatest dignity available to creatures - that of being made in the image of God - sharing the rational, emotional and volitional capabilities of the Creator albeit to a finite extent. In fact, I think it is time that we Christians recognise the correct sequence - that human sin is the great tragedy that it is not because of the smallness of our race but rather on account of its greatness.
Even some of our finest hymns suffer from this omission - How Great Thou Art! for instance. After singing the praise of God in the light of non-human creation in the first two stanzas, a transition is made to the Atonement in stanza 3. Rather, if one is poetically inclined, there is a crying need to insert two more stanzas to accentuate the appropriateness and importance of the Atonement. In our new stanza 3, we will sing the greatness man, taking our cue from Ps.8, where we are told that mankind is made a little lower than Elohim. Our chorus for this stanza should be, "Then sings my soul, 0 creature man to thee! How great thou art!" and we would not be guilty of heresy! A fourth stanza on the fall of man - with subject matter drawn from Gen.3 - with the refrain, "Then cries my soul, 0 creature man to thee ! How vile thou art!" would make the picture complete. Then the new stanza 5 -And when I think that God His Son not sparing... - would be theological precise.

The Bible makes it clear that man was created as a whole being, reflecting the vitality of the Creator in every department of his personality. The gross damage to our rationality and morality caused by our wanton and deliberate rebellion from God is described most aptly by the greatest of all disasters ever felt and experienced by humankind, namely death. [That rationality and morality are two sides of the immutable character of God has been well argued in several of C.S. Lewis' writings]. It is because of our intellectual and moral deadness that we are unable to think and behave rightly in spite of our sincere attempts to do so. Two simple illustrations from everyday life should serve our purpose. At the intellectual level, postmodernism provides us with the best example. In denying ultimate meaning, this philosophy is guilty of violating the most basic tenet of right thinking. It cuts the ground from under its own feet, denying meaning to its own denial of meaning! Yet it is claimed in today's intellectual climate to be the high point of man's mental reach outwards! What more is required to establish the fact of our intellectual death? It is not surprising that our generation, which has enjoyed the practical benefits of the greatest leap in knowledge in human history, is guilty of superstitions far worse in degree than those of our most primitive ancestors. Rightly and prophetically did Francis Schaeffer title one of his earliest books as 'Escape from Reason'!
At the moral level, the well-publicised trial of O.J. Simpson shows us how the most powerful nation on earth has touched the nadir of moral justification. Simpson's defense attorney, Robert Shapiro in an interview has stated that it was his duty as a lawyer to be professional and not moral. The absurdity of this position was highlighted by Dr. Zacharias at the recent Conference at Mumbai when he told us that that choice on the part of the lawyer was in itself a moral one! - and he should make it by denying the very tenets of morality!
Is it not a fact of common life - often neglected by the very force of familiarity - that a child is in need of admonition as to what is 'right', and what is 'wrong' comes naturally to him/her? I have deliberately refrained from defining what is wrong or right only to emphasise the fact that the worst relativist among us has to refer to some standards of morality.

We are now ready to better appreciate Jesus' claim to be 'The Life'. The bitter reality is that we are intellectually and morally dead - a sordid consequence of our refusal to live in the light of God's absolutes. We are in desperate need, not of direction, but of life itself so as to follow the moral motions that operate inside of us. The uniqueness, of Christ's offer as LIFE comes to us at three levels moral, intellectual and physical. It is reasonable to suppose that REAL death has supervened at these three areas from an earlier and exalted state of life. "The diagnosis of the Bible appears as extremely reasonable in contradistinction to the ultra-optimism of the humanist and the over-pessimism of the nihilist.
We are told that at creation, we were alive in more than one sense. We were spiritually (and therefore morally) alive, willing and able to carry out the purposes of the Creator which flowed inexorably from His own absolute character. We were intellectually alive, capable of right reasoning) having the wherewithal to explore, manipulate (in the right sense!) and develop the world that was at our feet. Lastly, but not in any way less importantly, we were in possession of a physical life for which there need not have been any termination. The key to these dimensions was the moral-spiritual axis where mankind could choose to obey God. The tragedy which theologians call 'The Fall' was our failure to abide by God's junction and choose to be autonomous of Him. The rest of course is the historically palpable tale of alienations at every level of human experience - from oneself, from others and from nature. This cataclysm has rendered us spiritually dead, incapable of perceiving, far less obeying the absolute moral standards of God. Our intellects have been adversely affected with the result that s have lost the capacity to think rightly, leave alone the need to think rightly about the Creator. Our physical bodies have begun, from the moment of birth their steady degenerative descent to the ultimate frustration called death.
We need to recognise, however, that the image of God in us has not been totally obliterated. We are still able to think rationally and, as illustrated above, can move towards God if we will. Our consciences, though relativised and seared into a callous, would still point to the reasonability of a moral absolute. Our bodies do long for a continuation of the physical existence, although we do not know how. All religions that have graced our planet during the millennia of human history have been but refinements to varying degrees of these three basic aspirations.

Into this milieu, Jesus comes with His categorical affirmation that He is the" Life - that at all these three levels. He would reverse the deathly regress and infuse a new vivacity that would take us beyond all the religious longings of sages and philosophers. His answer rings true only because His historic intervention on this planet addresses these issues squarely and without compromise. Firstly, His life (dealt with at length in TFT 4) answered the trilogy of basic questions of humanity.
• The brilliance of His INTELLECT shone forth in every one of His verbal exchanges with His detractors. Matthew 22 contains four such conversations where there is no doubt as to who is in control of the dialogues. Even the temple guards sent by the Pharisees to arrest Him came back to their leaders with an unlikely reason for not obeying their orders - 'No one ever spoke the way this Man does' (Jn.7:46) - "The most astonishing excuse ever given by a police force for failing to carry out an arrest", as Archbishop Marcus Loane put it!
• His CHARACTER was impeccable - He was free from sins of omission (Jn. 8:29) and commission (Jn. 8:46). His followers could solemnly affirm without apology or exaggeration that He was without sin (Writer to the Hebrews 4:15), that He knew no sin (Paul - II Cor.5:21), did no sin (Peter - I Pet.2:22) and that in Him was no sin (John - I Jn.3:5). His perfection could also be seen in the robustness of His humanity as He recoiled from the thought of suffering (Matt. 26:39 - otherwise He would have been a masochist!) and yet gladly submitted Himself to the will of His Heavenly Father (Matt.26:42) in obedience. He could not have been guilty of fantasies as suggested by Katzantakis and Scorsese ( in the book and the film, 'The Last Temptation of Christ') during His last moments on the cross as we have reasons to believe that Jesus consciously rejected even the possible thoughts of resentment against His tormentors by unilaterally forgiving them Lk.23:34).
• While little is known from Scriptures about His PHYSICAL body, we have ample evidence that throughout His ministry, He was engaged in physically restoring the sick including raising the dead back to life again (Matt.8:14-17; 9:18-26). He proclaimed Himself as the Lord of the natural and spiritual worlds by silencing storms (Mk.4:41) and driving out demons (Matt.9:32,33). His answers at the physical, mental and moral levels have yet to be heard again on earth.

Secondly, His death was unique by any standards. He was conscious that His primary purpose was to lay down His life, not for a good cause as a martyr, but as a sacrifice for a morally disordered mankind. But why sacrifice? Does not the Christian faith encourage belief in a gory and bloody system, fit for primitive cannibalistic societies but so far removed from our present-day sophistication? Consider the following, if you will:
• HISTORICALLY, sacrifices have been a common practice of all the ancient religions and societies. It would be intellectually dishonest to overlook this startling fact. In India, horses were sacrificed by kings in order to ensure victory in battles. In some animistic societies, these were associated with appeasing obstinate deities or warding off evil spirits. In some extreme and unfortunate instances, human sacrifices had been practiced. Short of offering a life, various religions had encouraged self- flagellation - lying on a bed of nails, walking on burning coals etc.
• The THEOLOGICAL significance of practices which inflict suffering or death has to be carefully considered. They basically arise from an assumed (and somewhat vague) sense of accountability to something or Someone who has had reasons to be displeased by the behaviour of mortals. The Old Testament which prepared the world for the coming of Christ, however, does not leave any room for guesses in this regard. According to various passages of these Scriptures, the violence done to the sacrificial animal is said to atone for the violation of the moral law of God perpetrated by the wilful disobedience of mankind. The explanation is really not far to seek - if Ultimate Reality is an Infinite-Personal God Who is moral, then any infringement, major or minor, of His absolute standards would necessitate the ultimate punishment, namely death. This was not only physical in its ramifications but an eternal banishment from the very presence of God described in Christian vocabulary by the term 'hell'. A loving Father-God would not consign His supreme creation to this horrible end but was, by a series of sacrifices instituted in the Old Testament, pre-figuring a 'full, final and sufficient Sacrifice' that was to follow. Appropriately, the words of John the Baptist, as he heralded the ministry of Jesus, were - 'Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!' (Jn.l:29).
The prohibition that God placed on our ancestral parents related to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil - in the event they chose to be autonomous of Him by eating of it, they would experience death that would encompass the totality of their human personality. The effect of their disobedience was wide-ranging in its implications. When Jesus laid down His life on that wooden crossbeam - now respectably called 'the Cross' - on a hillock outside Jerusalem 2000 years ago, He was engaged in a cosmic encounter with evil and death to reverse, rather, to turn the human disaster into a grand victory. The dark intensity of the battle and its real consequences had Him uttering a cry of despair heard only in hell - 'My God! My God! Why have You forsaken Me?' While in terms of space-time, the engagement took place in what is present-day Israel and lasted about 6 hours, its results transcend it. John describes Jesus as 'the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world' (Rev. 13:8) - in the same context, he gives us a glimpse of heaven where Jesus is still seen as bearing the marks of the cross (Rev.5:6). Salvation in Christ is therefore dependent entirely on the vicarious nature of His death, when the Infinite God-made-Man suffered for finite-sinful humanity and the Eternal so limited Himself in order to die for the temporal.

Thirdly and climactically, His resurrection crowned the entire effort of God in securing the salvation of humankind. Indeed, Jesus' claim to be the life would have lacked credibility if His mortal remains had remained in the grave. His offer of forgiveness would have been hollow because true forgiveness would need to be eternal when God is involved and a mere creature of time would be in no position to dispense it. Paul makes this point in his own characteristic way - 'And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. '(I Cor.l5:17). One point needs emphasis over and above other references to the resurrection in these articles - the resurrection of Jesus was not just resuscitation - a reversal of the processes of degeneration -but a march into a new level of existence. It was qualitatively different from all other resurrection incidents of the Bible.
At Lazarus' grave, Jesus commands the bystanders to remove the stone from the mouth of the grave and, after Lazarus comes out, to untie the linen strips that render him immobile. When Jesus rises from the dead, He has a new body which, while being still material, can go through matter - Paul would call this 'a spiritual body' (I Cor. 15:44). The stone at Jesus' grave is removed by the angels for the disciples to go in (not for Jesus to come out!) and see the clothes which lie undisturbed - only the body appears to have evaporated! Jesus offers His body to be touched by the disciples, thus proving that He was not a ghost but He describes Himself as having 'flesh and bones' (Lk.24:39) - the good doctor takes pains to omit 'blood' thereby signifying that the physiology and metabolism of Jesus' body was of quite a different order! By the quality of His resurrection, Jesus eliminates the possibility of misunderstanding the resurrection as 'reincarnation' - a series of purported births and deaths which belong to the same level of life.
Death could not hold the Son of God in its iron grip. In defeating it - rightly called 'the last enemy' (I Cor. 15:26) - Jesus earns for Himself the right to the title of 'Life'. Under His transforming power, countless individuals have felt the life-giving touch of His Holy Spirit energising their personality and enabling them to live His life on this planet. History which has just begun to feel the effects of this single Individual would await her climax when He returns to set up a kingdom where death in all its dimensions will have been forever destroyed.