3695 — Dying and Not Dying
By Editor
The first text reads, "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." 3:17 reads, "And unto Adam He said, Because thou hast harkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life." Our correspondent has not given us the full record, in the carrying out of the sentence. The first is God's sentence in brief. Man possessed not only physical life, the life of the body, the life of the flesh that all animals possess, but he also possessed the life of the spirit, the life which came from God in harmony with God's law, the higher life, which animals did not possess. In the very day man ate of the tree, he should surely lose that; and losing that, he would surely die. Death began—even physical death—at that very moment that man transgressed. This instruction was given before man sinned. In Genesis 3 we have the instruction after he sinned, the pronouncing of that sentence. That sentence involved the curse of the earth, that sorrow which came upon man, the thorns and thistles which the earth should bear, the labor which would come upon the human family; but the ultimate of the sentence is mentioned in verse 19: "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." Man should die. That is all that is implied, it seems to us, in the fulness of God's word; there was no changing of it. Man lost spiritual life, which he held by faith and obedience, the very moment that he ate of that tree, and that made him a dying man physically, and the fulness of that act would be terminated when man should return to the dust.