The definition of God, as "dwelling eternally" or "existing eternally", derives from His very name, the name Yahweh, revealed to Moses by God. The prophet reinterprets it, by opposing God possessing the fullness of life, to man, who not only does not possess it, but loses in a constant way (although, maybe, and slowly) even this relative plenitude that God gives him. Strange at first sight, the assertion nevertheless completely corresponding in the yahviste hymnography, reflected in the Book of Psalms, and the writings of the wise men (for example, the Book of Proverbs).
Even the story of the creation of man, implies something similar. Man is made man by this "breath" that God breathes into his "nostrils ", and breath by definition cannot be unique, it is a process, from which depends the spiritual life of man, quite as his physical life depends on the physical breath. It was like that till the fall, and after the fall everything changed: before, the beginning of life ("the soul") of man was connected with the breath of God, now it turned out to be connected with the nature, with the blood, as it is appropriate to animals.
Man after the fall became a being more animal than spiritual. The spiritual life in man smolders hardly now. He has not of course lost completely the image of God, but if before this image was completely clear and distinct, and man bore it in himself from birth, now it is hardly perceptible, and becomes the purpose of the spiritual life of man the clarification in oneself of the image of God, if it is not up to this complete clarity which was appropriate to him before the fall, then at least, up to the degree, which would make for man possible the observation of the commandments given to God and the way of righteousness.
The final liberation of man from the consequences of the fall and his complete transformation became possible only after the coming of the Messiah. So the prophet sees the life of man: either it increases in the man, when he walks on the way of the righteousness, strengthening and deepening his relationships with God, or it extinguishes in him, if he walks on the inverse direction. There is no middle here, and each has to choose. It is the choice between the way of life and the way of death, that proposes the Bible to man. Choice that depends only on man himself.
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