p. 172 | The Death of Adam

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 12, 1872

The Death of Adam.

The inquirer into the nature of man, and his condition in death, must ever turn with the deepest interest to the record left us concerning the father of our race. In Adam we have an account of the origin of the human family, at once so simple and consistent that the jeers of skepticism fall harmless at its feet, and science, in comparison, only makes itself ridiculous, in trying to account for it in any other manner. And in the sentence pronounced upon him when he fell under the fearful guilt of transgression, we are shown to what condition death was designed to reduce the human family. In the creation and death of Adam we have the account of the building up and the unbuilding of a human being; and this case being the first and most illustrious, must furnish the precedent, and establish the rule for the whole race.

Of the creation of Adam, and the elements of which he was composed, we have already spoken. The record brings to view a formation made wholly of the dust of the ground. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground.” This body was endowed with a high and perfect organization, and was quickened into life by the breath which the Lord breathed into its nostrils. The body before it was made alive had no power to act; the breath which was breathed into it could not of itself act; but the body being quickened, the machinery set in motion, by this vital principle, all the phenomena of physical life and mental action at once resulted.

The Author of this noblest of creative works, who must of necessity, as the ruler over all, require the creatures of his hand to obey him, and toward whom an exercise of love, and a voluntary and willing submission, can alone constitute obedience, placed the man whom he had formed, as was meet, upon a state of probation, to test his loyalty to his Maker. The scene of his trial was the beautiful garden in which was everything that was pleasant to the sight and good for food; and over all that adorned or enriched his Eden home, with one exception, he had unlimited control. The condition upon which he was to be tested is thus definitely expressed:—

“And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. But 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.”

Adam and Eve could not mistake the requirement of this law, nor fail to understand the intent of the penalty. And before Satan could cause his temptation to make any impression on the mind of Eve, he had to contradict this threatening, assuring her that they should not surely die. A question of veracity was thus raised between God and Satan; and strange to say, the theological world, in interpreting the penalty, have virtually, with the exception of a small minority, sided with Satan. This is seen in the interpretation which is commonly put on this penalty, making it consist of three divisions: 1. Alienation of the soul from God, the love of sin and the hatred of holiness, called spiritual death. 2. The separation of soul and body, called temporal death. 3. Immediately after temporal death, the conscious torment of the soul in hell, which is to have no end, and is called eternal death. The Baptist Confession of Faith, Art. 5, says:—

“We believe that God made man upright; but he, sinning, involved himself and posterity in death, spiritual, temporal, and eternal; from all which there is no deliverance but by Christ.”

Let us look at the different installments of this penalty, and see if they will harmonize with the language in which the original threatening is expressed: “Thou shalt surely die.” Adam incurred the penalty by sinning. After he had sinned, he was a sinner. But a state of sin is that state of alienation from God which the orthodox school make to be a part of the penalty of his transgression. In this they take as the punishment of sin that which was simply its result; and they make the sentence read, virtually, in this profoundly sensible manner: “In the day that thou sinnest, thou shalt surely be a sinner!”

Because he wickedly became a sinner, and brought himself into a state of alienation from God, the doom was pronounced upon him, “Thou shalt surely die.” Could this mean eternal death? If so, Adam never could have been released therefrom. But he is to be released from it; for, “in Christ shall all be made alive.”

These two installments, then, spiritual and eternal death, utterly fail us, when brought to the test of the language in which the sentence is expressed: one is nonsense, and the other an impossibility.

Temporal death alone remains to be considered; but the interpretation which is given to this, completely nullifies the penalty, and makes Satan to have been correct when he said, “Thou shalt not surely die.” Temporal death is interpreted to mean the separation of the soul from the body, the body alone to die, but the soul, which is called the real responsible man, to enter upon an enlarged and higher life. In this case there is no death; and the sentence should have read, In the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt be freed from the clog of this mortal body, and enter upon a new and eternal life. So said Satan, “Ye shall be as gods;” and true to this assertion from the father of lies, the heathen have all along deified their dead men, and worshiped their departed heroes: and modern poets have sung, “There is no death; what seems so is transition.” If ever the skill of a deceiver and the gullibility of a victim were manifested in an unaccountable degree, it is in this fact, that right in the face and eyes of the pale throng that daily passes down through the gate of death, the devil can make men believe that after all his first lie was true, and there is no such thing as death.

From these considerations, it is evident that nothing will meet the demands of the sentence but the cessation of the life of the whole man. But that, says one, cannot be; for he was to die in the very day he ate of the forbidden fruit; but he did not literally die for nine hundred and thirty years. If this is an objection against the view we advocate, it is equally such against every other. Take the threefold penalty above noticed. If death spiritual, death temporal, and death eternal, was the penalty, how much was fulfilled on the day he sinned? Not death eternal, surely, and not death temporal, which did not take place for nine hundred and thirty years; but only death spiritual. But this was only the first installment of the penalty, and far less important than the other two. The most that the friends of this interpretation can say, therefore, is that the penalty began on that very day to be fulfilled. But we can say as much with our view. “Dying, thou shalt die,” reads the margin; that is, thou shalt inherit a mortal nature, and the process of decay shall commence. As soon as he sinned he came under the sentence of death, and the work commenced. He bore up against the encroachments of dissolution for nine hundred and thirty years, and then the work was fully accomplished.

An expression exactly parallel to this is found in Ex. 18:18, where it is recorded that Moses’ father-in-law said to him, “Thou wilt surely wear away, both thou and this people.” The margin reads, “Fading, thou shalt fade.” This idiom, which is common in the Hebrew, evidently denotes the commencement and continuation of a process which ends in the complete destruction of the individual. With Adam, this process commenced on the very day he transgressed and the penalty threatened, which covered all this work from beginning to end, was executed in full when this process was fully completed in Adam’s death nine hundred and thirty years thereafter.

When God proceeded to pronounce sentence upon Adam, he gave us an authoritative interpretation of the penalty from which there is no appeal. Gen. 3:19: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

The return to dust is here made a subsequent event to be preceded by a period of wearing toil. And being finally overcome by the labor and ills of life, the person addressed was to return again to the dust from which he was taken. We are very well aware of the method adopted to evade the conclusion which naturally follows from this language. This, it is claimed, was spoken only of the body, not of the soul. The poetry of Longfellow, “Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul,” takes much better with most people than the plain language of inspiration itself.

To whom, then, or to what, was this sentence addressed, “Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return”? Admitting that there is such a creature of the imagination as the popular, independent, immortal soul, was the language addressed to that or to the body? If there is such a soul as this, what does it constitute, on the authority of the friends of that theory, themselves? It is the real, responsible, intelligent man. Watson says, “It is the soul only which perceives pain or pleasure, which suffers or enjoys;” and D. D. Whedon says, “It is the soul that hears, feels, tastes, and smells, through its sensorial organs.” The sentence then would be addressed to that which could hear; the penalty would be pronounced upon that which could feel. The body, in the common view, is only an irresponsible instrument, the means by which the soul acts. It can, of itself, neither see, hear, feel, will, or act. Who then will have the hardihood to assert that God addressed his sentence to the irresponsible instrument, the body merely? This would be the same as for the judge in a criminal court to proceed deliberately to address the knife with which the murderer had taken the life of his victim, and pronounce sentence upon that, instead of the murderer himself. Away with a view which offers to the Majesty of Heaven the insult of representing that he acts in this way!

In the sentence the personal pronoun, thy, is once, and the personal pronoun, thou, is five times, applied to the Adam whom God addressed. “In the sweat of thy face, shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” When we address our fellowmen by the different personal pronouns of our language, what do we address? The conscious, intelligent, responsible man, that which sees, feels, hears, thinks, acts, and is morally accountable. But this, in popular parlance, is the soul; these pronouns must every time stand for the soul. The pronouns thy and thou, in Gen. 3:19, must then mean Adam’s soul. If they do not mean it here, how does the same pronoun, thou, in Luke 23:43, mean the thief’s soul, when Christ said to him, “This day shalt thou be with me in paradise”? or the I and my in 2 Pet. 1:14, refer to Peter’s soul, as we are told they do, when he says, “Knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle.” Our friends must be consistent and uniform in their interpretations. If in these instances the pronouns do not refer to the soul, then these strong proof-texts to which the immaterialist always appeals, are abandoned; if they do here refer to the soul, they must likewise in Gen. 3:19 refer to the soul. In that language, then, God addresses Adam’s soul; and we have the authority of Jehovah himself, the Creator of man, against whose sentence, and the sunlight of whose word, it does not become puny mortals to oppose their shallow dictums, and the rushlight of human reason, that man’s soul is wholly mortal, and that in the dissolution of death it goes back to dust again! There is no avoiding this conclusion; and it forever settles the question of man’s condition in death. It shows that the intermediate state must be one in which the conscious man has lost his consciousness, the intelligent man his intelligence, the responsible man his responsibility, and in which all the powers of his being, mental, emotional, and physical, have ceased to act.

No further argument need be introduced to show that the Adamic penalty was literal death, and that it reduced the whole man to a condition of unconsciousness and decay. But a few additional considerations will show that the popular view is cumbered with absurdities on every hand so plain that they should have proved their own antidote, and saved the doctors of theology from the preposterous definitions they have attached to death.

We have the authority of Paul for stating that through Christ we are released from all the penalty which the race has incurred through Adam’s transgression. “As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.” If the death in which we are involved through Adam is death spiritual, temporal, and eternal, then all the race is redeemed from these through Christ, and universalism is the result.

Again, Christ tasted death for every man. He hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us. That is, Christ died the same death for us which was introduced into the world by Adam’s sin. Was this death eternal? If so, the Saviour is gone, and the plan of salvation can never be carried into effect.

In Rom. 5:12–14, occurs this remarkable passage: “Wherefore as by one man sin entered into the world and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned: (For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is the figure of Him that was to come).”

In the first part of the verse Paul speaks of the death that came in by Adam’s sin, and then says that it reigned from Adam to Moses over them that had not sinned. From this language, accepting the popular interpretation of the Adamic penalty, we must come to the intolerable conclusion that personally sinless beings from Adam to Moses were consigned to eternal misery! From such a sentiment, every fiber of our humanity recoils with horror. We cannot stifle the feeling that it is an outrage upon the character of God and therefore cannot be true. The death threatened Adam was literal death, not eternal life in misery.

To the view that the Adamic penalty was simply literal death, many eminent men have given their unqualified adhesion.

John Locke (Reasonableness of Christianity s. 1.) says:—

“By reason of Adam’s transgression all men are mortal and come to die. . . . It seems a strange way of understanding a law which requires the plainest and directest words, that by death should be meant eternal life in misery. . . . I confess that by death, here, I can understand nothing but a ceasing to be, the losing of all actions of life and sense. Such a death came upon Adam and all his posterity, by his first disobedience in paradise, under which death they should have lain forever had it not been for the redemption by Jesus Christ.”

Isaac Watts (Ruin and Recovery of Mankind s. 3.), though he was a believer in the immortality of the soul, has the candor to say:—

“There is not one place of Scripture that occurs to me, where the word death as it was first threatened in the law of innocency, necessarily signifies a certain miserable immortality of the soul either to Adam, the actual sinner, or to his posterity.”

Dr. Taylor says:—

“Death was to be the consequence of his [Adam’s] disobedience, and the death here threatened can be opposed only to that life God gave Adam when he created him.”