“…but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:17)
There is a matchless wonder and beauty in the first two chapters of Genesis. The glorious powerful creation of God is manifestly displayed with the creation of man as the height and pinnacle of that creation. The focus on God as Creator cannot and must not be missed. But in Genesis 2:17 God introduces a negative, a prohibition. It is a warning with dire consequences. Those consequences are “you shall surely die.”
I do not know if Adam truly grasped what that meant. The deception of Eve and the willingness by Adam to eat and thus disobey God suggest that they had not really probed or fully understood the ramifications of disobedience. This is true, of course, of all of us. It is simply a manifestation of unbelief. We just do not believe God. Sin always is painted as so attractive and beautiful in temptation that we are blinded to the ugliness and darkness and death inherent in it.
You would think that since we are on this side of the Fall we might know ourselves, but the reverse is true. We do not know ourselves. The only way we can know ourselves is through divine intervention.
The nature of sin is always to distrust God. We do not appreciate his goodness and we do not acknowledge his truthfulness. Eve thought there was something better. She began to have distrustful thoughts of God: God was keeping something good from her, which, if true, would mean that God was a liar.
In the first two chapters of Genesis, God blesses his creation (1:22, 28; 2:3), but in chapter three he curses it (3:14, 17). God does not withdraw his blessings, but his face turns away from them. In Genesis 1:28, God urges Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it, to rule over everything. Here you can see the blessings of childbearing and labor. But under the curse in chapter three, childbearing and labor are affected. Childbearing will be with pain (3:16), and work will be with difficulty (vv. 17 – 19). So part of the curse is painful delivery and painful labor (no pun intended). In Genesis 2:18 – 25, marriage is a gift from God (it is probably the greatest gift given to us apart from life itself; in particular life in fellowship with God). But in Genesis 3:16, this marriage relationship is characterized by conflict.
So we can say that in Genesis 1 – 2 God gives life but in Genesis 3, he pronounces death. All of these consequences are from God. He imposes them. Pain, hard labor, conflict and death come into being because God brings them about. It is God who pronounces the curse. This is punishment by a Judge who is righteous and can never tolerate any sin or let any sin go unpunished.
What God pronounced to Adam in Genesis 2:17 has now come about in Genesis 3. Dark and tragic was the day when Adam sinned and fell. Every believer in Christ knows the darkness of that day because we know ourselves to be sinful. But what is this death that God pronounces? It cannot be limited to physical death because Adam remained physically alive after he ate. Yet God had said that “in the day you eat you shall surely die.” It must therefore be much more than mere physical death. Death on the physical level is a great enemy. You cannot turn back death. Scientists can seek to turn back death, but it cannot be. It will not be thwarted.
So the death that God speaks of here must be much more than just death on the physical level. Death did not come to Adam on the physical level immediately, yet he died. Solomon promised Shimei that if he ever left Jerusalem that on that day he would die (1 Kings 2:37, 42). And sure enough, he left one day to go and get back his wandering donkeys, and Solomon sent and executed him on that very day.
But for Adam he does not physically die (on that day), so we must look elsewhere to grasp what happened to Adam. Did another kind of death come upon him, and if so, what was it? Another death then! To be sure, physical death is the consequence of sin, but there is something more.
Augustine, in the fourth century (The City of God, Book 13, chp.12) spoke of two deaths. The first death, however, also had two deaths (parts), but the second death includes all deaths. The first death consists of the death of the soul and the death of the body. It is a death of the whole person, since the soul without God and without the body undergoes punishment for a time (until the Judgment). But the second death is when the soul without God, but with the body, undergoes eternal punishment (given at the Judgment).
Thus, when God declared to Adam that “in the day you eat… you shall surely die,” God meant all death. The remedy, therefore, to deliver us from this all-consuming death must truly be powerful. Jesus spoke of fearing God who could destroy body and soul in hell (Matt. 10:28). Those who can kill the body, but not the soul might be feared on a surface level in comparison to fearing what God can do. The writer to the Hebrews teaches us that our Lord Jesus became flesh and blood so he might deliver us from the one who had the power of death (the devil), and because we are kept in bondage to the fear of death by the devil (Heb. 2:14, 15). How shall Jesus do this? By dying himself!
The visible punishment in Eden was exclusion from the Garden, which meant exclusion from God. Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden. This banishment is connected to death, because in leaving Eden, Adam and Eve were heading back to the ground from which they were taken. Adam must now labor by the sweat of his brow (Gen. 3:23).
What is the end result of this? He shall die and return to the dust. We should see then that in the blessing of labor that now has a curse attached to it, the enjoyment of it and fruitfulness of it is left behind when we die. We work to leave legacies, but they only remain for a time. Death is a constant reminder that nothing remains the same here on earth. It is because of sin that man lives to die. Sin is therefore the monumental tragedy with death as an expression of it.
If death could be reversed then sin would be overcome. Every death is a reminder of the horror of sin. Death is a horror. We have become machines of war. We kill and destroy. Every war is but an expression of what we have done against God. We should be in no rush to commit war. Rather the war to really engage in is to defeat sin. The Christian has this power (not of himself but of Christ) to overcome sin. Sin is to have no dominion over us because we are now under grace (Rom. 6:14). The power of grace is something we perhaps have never thought of. Grace delivers us from bondage to sin, and this grace has come to us in our Lord Jesus Christ. He has died our death. Freedom from sin and death is in Jesus Christ alone. He holds the keys of death and Hades (Rev. 1:18). He died but now is alive forever more. Death is conquered and one day it shall be completely destroyed (1 Cor. 15:26). Oh, how much Christ has done for us! We live because He lives. Let us praise him for this great deliverance at the cost of his own life. What a wonder and blessing is ours. We have been set free from death. Let us rejoice in eternal life.