We live in a world where everything is affected by sin. We ourselves are sinners. But that was not the way God created the earth and everything in it. When God finished His work of creation, He “saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Gen 1:31); nothing was in any way tainted by sin; Adam and Eve themselves were perfect in every way.
But it did not last. After Satan and other angels had fallen and been expelled from heaven, he entered the Garden of Eden. He was intent on bringing the entire human race into his kingdom. He first asked Eve a question, a loaded question designed to bring her to distance herself from the authority of what God had said to Adam. It is clear from her response that she was well aware of what God had commanded: “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen 2:17).
Satan went on to contradict directly the Creator’s instruction; he told Eve: “Ye shall not surely die”. Matthew Poole, in his Commentary, considers that what Satan said amounted to this: “It is not so certain as you imagine that you shall die. God did say so indeed for your terror, and to keep you in awe; but do not entertain such hard and unworthy thoughts of that God who is infinitely kind and gracious: that He will, for such a trifle as the eating of a little fruit, undo you and all your posterity.” Whether or not Poole was correct in every detail here, there is no doubt that Satan has ever since made use of such ideas in his strategies for deceiving sinners. Eve was the first to be deceived; she fell into Satan’s snare, for she looked no further than the attractiveness of the fruit when she took it and ate. She ignored the authority of God’s command and the goodness of His warning. So did Adam. Both were now sinners. And all Adam’s descendants fell in him, for he was representing them in the covenant of works. Had he continued in obedience, they would have been born spiritually alive; but he fell into sin and they fell in him and are born spiritually dead.
Whatever Satan might say in his temptations, God’s warnings remained true; He will always be faithful to what He has said. God had said that, if
man would eat of the forbidden fruit, he would “surely die”. So now that Adam and Eve have eaten it, they must “surely die”. It is soon absolutely obvious that they were now spiritually dead, that they were unable to do anything spiritually good. They were separated from God and His grace. They could not love God; they could not trust in Him; they had no will to serve Him. When “they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day . . . Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden” (Gen 3:8).
This vain attempt to hide from God shows that they now had no desire for communion with Him. Spiritually dead as they were, they had lost the true knowledge of God; otherwise they would never have thought that they could really hide from God; they would instantly have realised that God can see everything everywhere. It is the same spiritual death that leads a sinner, as he departs further and further from God and His worship to “bless himself in his heart”, in spite of God’s threatenings, “saying, I shall have peace, though I walk in the imagination of mine heart, to add drunkenness to thirst” (Deut 29:19). Satan will do all in his power to give sinners a feeling of peace when God is their enemy, just as he will do all in his power to disturb those with whom God is at peace through Jesus Christ.
Most obviously, death points to the separation between body and soul, when human beings pass from this world into eternity. Yet neither Adam or Eve died immediately after they sinned; indeed Adam lived until he was 930. But from the moment when each of them sinned, they were mortal; death, though it may not take place at once, is inevitable. Adam was told: “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen 3:19). And death will meet us much sooner than it met Adam.
Finally, Adam and Eve were condemned to eternal death, for as sinners they were now under condemnation. The solemn but just sentence of God was that they should be eternally separated from Him – separated from all His benefits, separated from all hope of any improvement in their condition – which meant that they would suffer in body and soul for ever and ever. Had they continued separate from God in this life, Adam and Eve would hear the sentence of final separation to be pronounced by Christ on the Day of Judgement: “Depart from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels” (Mat 25:41).
It is the same sentence of condemnation that hangs over every sinner who will not return to God. We see in Eden the beginning of Satan’s lying, murderous work in this world; thus the Lord Jesus described him: “He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him . . . he is a liar, and the father of it” (Jn 8:44). He continues
that murderous work by doing all in his power to keep sinners in a state of spiritual death and bringing sinners down at last to eternal death. He tempts sinners to go on in the broad way that leads to eternal destruction, blinding their minds so that they do not take their danger seriously and do not see the attractiveness of the narrow way that leads to eternal blessedness.
But return to God is possible. Even in the Garden of Eden, a revelation of God’s purpose of mercy was made to Adam and Eve in the promise of the coming of “the Seed of the woman”, whose heel Satan was to bruise, while He was to bruise Satan’s head (Gen 3:15). This was, of course, a promise of Christ coming into the world to save sinners from sin and its consequences, so that the separation between sinners and God might be removed – so that they might be reconciled to their Creator. Thus John wrote, “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil” (1 Jn 3:8). After the Fall, Satan regarded himself as the prince of this world and presumably thought his kingdom was impregnable. But Christ, the Son of God and the Seed of the woman, must have the pre-eminence, and what He did, in working out redemption for His people, was intended to weaken Satan’s kingdom. As that redemption is applied through the centuries, the kingdom of darkness is indeed weakened, and the application of redemption will continue until Satan’s kingdom is finally destroyed and he and his followers are cast into hell for ever.
Through Christ’s reconciling work on the cross, sinners are made spiritually alive and they believe in Jesus Christ as the Saviour of the guilty. Further, all their sins are forgiven, so that they will never experience eternal death; they will never be finally separated from God. Rather they will be brought into His presence at death and will spend eternity with Him in perfect blessedness. Even the separation between body and soul will be reversed, at the resurrection, when Christ will come again to this world to raise all from their graves who have ever lived. With body and soul reunited, God’s children will be able to serve Him wholeheartedly for ever.
In this sinful world, our only hope must be the saving work of Christ. Only through Him can the power of every form of death be destroyed. He died so that sinners might live. He experienced separation from God because of the sin He was bearing – its guilt, its liability to punishment. And He bore that sin away. Thus sinners separated from God by wicked works may be brought near to Him, and all who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ are actually brought near. Every form of the separation – every form of death – which sin brought into the world is to be reversed for those who believe. And the call comes to every sinner who hears the gospel or reads the Scriptures: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved” (Acts 16:31).