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Sin and Immortality

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Mar 24, 1904

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 81, No. 12.

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Sin and Immortality

By L. A. S.

THESE words represent opposing ideas. Inseparable from the idea of sin, is the idea of death. “The wages of sin is death.” Death and immortality are opposites to each other.
Sin not being immortal, no sinner can be immortal. The very idea of immortal sin — of an immortal sinner — is contrary to the sovereignty of God. God has no use for sin; therefore it can not be supposed that he will tolerate sin indefinitely in any part of his universe. It can not be supposed that he will suffer a plague-spot to exist forever in any part of his creation.
The mind of God has been plainly revealed to us on this point. No sooner had the fall in Eden taken place, than God took measures to guard the tree of life, lest Adam, who had become a sinner, should put forth his hand to the tree of life, “and eat, and live forever.” Gen. 3:22-24. God designed that Adam should live forever, when he was created. He was then perfect and without sin. But as soon as Adam became a sinner, God took measures to separate him from immortality, as a sinner, providing at the same time a way whereby he might regain immortality, by being separated from sin.
God took Adam away from the tree of life in Eden, but gave him access to a new tree of life,— Jesus Christ,— by partaking of which, he and his posterity might regain what had been lost, because that tree of life imparted to them the righteousness of God.
As death is inseparable from sin, so immortality is inseparable from righteousness.
Sin is a monarch. It reigns over the individual who yields to it, making him its bond-servant. But God’s universe, like Alexander’s world, does not admit of two sovereigns. God is the sovereign over all, and there can be none other. If sin were immortal, God would cease to be a universal, omnipotent sovereign.
The presence of God is death to sin, and his presence will be in every place. Sin survives now only because God is still working out his plan for the salvation of the sinner. The sinner can come to God through Christ; he can be crucified with Christ, that the body of sin may be destroyed, and he, freed from that body, still live. This is God’s plan for the destruction of sin now. But when Christ ceases to be the sinner’s refuge, then sin will be destroyed by the presence of God, and the sinner with it. When sin is destroyed now, the sinner is made righteous and fitted for immortality. When sin shall be destroyed in the day of judgment, it will be through the destruction of the sinner. There is no provision for, no possibility of, an unending existence of the sinner.
Popular theology may define death as being an endless separation from God and heaven, without cessation of conscious being; but when Adam had separated himself from God by sin, God at once took measures to bring such a state of being to an end. God will have a clean universe, without sinners or trace of sin, and in which the former state of things “shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.” L. A. S.