What is Death?
People often make the logical fallacy of equivocating death in the Bible with the physical death of our bodies. I have heard the argument that if Adam and Eve had not sinned, they would still be alive today and our world would be an overpopulated place full of all the people who have come before us. An often-cited verse to support this is Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. This is a misunderstanding which will be addressed, but for now, I am acknowledging it and in whole agreement with its truth and authenticity. The errant belief that sin and physical death are connected has led to many problems with people’s faith in God and Christians loss of the logical high ground, which God owns by nature of Him being the source of all truth. There must then be something we are missing.
Adam and Eve would have physically died in the absence of sin because the world that God created is a physical world which has a beginning and all things physical in this world wear down over time. Or another way of putting it; God created the world to follow certain natural laws. Nowhere in Christian theology is the fall portrayed as a change in these natural laws. Adam and Eve have life because they are connected to God in a direct personal relationship. The closest way to communicate the nature of this relationship is to use the words “Life” and “Death”. The process their physical bodies undergo when they die is like the process that happens to their soul when they chose to sin. It is an analogy the writer is trying to communicate to the reader, just like when some one uses the phrase “When the fat lady sings” signals an end to a performance. The spiritual significance of the act has no meaning if the physical act has no context. For this reason, from the very beginning of the Scripture God is establishing a precedent. He is telling us an idea we cannot understand by talking about physical death and how we should view spiritual death.
As in Sunday school, the answer is always Jesus. Here too, we see the strongest argument for what God is really talking about when He speaks of death. To further understand this let us begin with a faulty logic argument.
Adam and Eve physically died because they sinned
Jesus never sinned
Therefore, Jesus could never physically die
This is particularly problematic on two levels. First, the most significant level is theological. He must die in order to be the atonement for the sin of humanity. The second problematic issue is historical. He did actually physically die. Since the conclusion is incorrect, then one of our premises must be untrue. If the first premise is untrue then Christianity still stands, but if the second premise is untrue then we have veered into a completely different topic and Christ is not the Son of God.
Now, one could argue the sins of the world physically killed him and that mysterious act on the cross was a physical manifestation of sin. If this is the case though, then Christ is not a pure sacrifice for humanity. He becomes tarnished at the moment of death with all the sin of the world and in effect becomes the worst sacrifice ever!
If this God-Man must die as a sacrifice, and yet we believe that God actually created Adam and Eve to physically live forever and it was their sin which led to their physical death, then humanity is in a real pickle.
This must indicate that life means something very different to God. And, Paul is talking about something more than physical life when he writes to the believers in Rome. By stating the “wages of sin is death”, Paul is giving us the ownership over and for our action. These actions have separated us from true spiritual life. This death is something different from physical death, because he is writing to people currently alive and makes no indications that he is offering some kind of panacea for the disease of a physical death. Instead he makes it very clear that he is speaking of something more in closing his statement “but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” The life he is referring to is eternal. His word choice gives us a clear distinction of the “life” concept he is communicating. A life eternal has no beginning and it has no end. No human has ever had eternal physical life. That is retained to God alone who is outside of time. As human and part of creation, we all have a beginning and end, therefore we are outside of this this eternal life. It is this concept Jesus refers to when He talks about himself as the river of life in John 7:38–39.
In analogy it is like a river flowing out of a mountain. It has always been flowing and it always will be flowing it is eternal. We are like man in boat who presently sits on the shore wondering about our purpose. Some men turn their boat upside down and to keep the rain off. Other boats are broken up and used for fire wood. One day, a man shows up and launches his boat into this river and start moving downstream. We see that and try it out too. But our boat is made with certain logs that cannot stay afloat forever and begins to rot. Finally, our boat, old and worn out sinks to the bottom. But that is not the end of us. As our boat hits the bottom of the river bed we are washed ashore without a boat. We look up and find another boat. It looks a lot like our previous boat, but at the same time nothing like it. This boat has a new material which will not rot and floats forever. We climb aboard and continue down our river exploring and living because the river is eternal but our boat has a beginning. The death of a us and our boat is not its rotting and becoming old, the real death is never doing what we were meant to do and float in the river.
Christ would have died by his nature of being Man and mortal. It is his 100% humanness that would have caused this to occur. All humans physically die, but we are not spirits trapped in a body. Our spirit is a part of us just as much as our body is part of us. The 100% God part of Christ is the part which atones for our sins and in it is the part of Christ which cannot spiritually die as we are spiritually dead. This is how Christ is the purest sin offering and can be a sacrifice for humanities separation from God.
Christ’s willingness to dying on the Cross points to what physical death means to the Christian and ultimately how we should see life differently from everyone else.
Dad Devotional 