Moreover, God is the ultimate living Reality and therefore our whole future will be determined by our attitude to him and our relationship with him, and that is something which is crystallising here and now.  For the past, the present and the future together form a continuous whole, a progressive sequence.  Moral and spiritual union with God - Our Lord calls this light and life; moral and spiritual separation from him he calls by the opposites – darkness and death.  And he uses those terms to apply to this world and the next.  However, because the next world, unlike this one, is a spiritual world pure and simple, the only life, as distinct from existence, which it holds – or ever could hold – is spiritual life with God.  The alternative is spiritual death.

It is pointless to enquire what that living death means.  For, towering above all speculation, is the central fact of human history, that God thought it worthwhile to come himself into this world as a human being and to be crucified in order to save the human race from that living death.