THOU SHALT SURELY DIE by G. W. A.

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 7, 1858

THOU SHALT SURELY DIE.

By G. W. A.

Gen. ii, 15. And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden, to dress it and to keep it. Verse 16. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat.

Verse 17. 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.

The point to which we wish to call attention here is the death threatened Adam. Our immortal-soul-friends stoutly insist that the thou addressed, refers to the intellectual man—or inside soul, and the sentence was it should be a moral death. But we fail to perceive any such idea existing in the text. The same thou which is threatened with death, in the preceding part of the verse is said to eat. "In the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die." Now who has either the hardihood to assert, or acumen to prove, that the "thou" here introduced have not one and the same meaning,—and do not refer to one and the same thing—viz., the whole man? And surely the intellectual thou cannot easily eat material food; still this must be so if the "thou" which "dies" is the immaterial soul, for this same "thou" did "eat" of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

But let us apply the same kind of interpretation usually used in this text to others of like phraseology. Deut. xxxi, 14, 16. Here God says to Moses, "Behold the days approach that thou must die . . . Behold thou shalt sleep with thy fathers." Now if thou in Gen. ii, 17, means the soul entity, it means the same here also; and, consequently, if Adam's soul in Eden died a moral death, Moses' soul up on mount Pisgah must have slept a moral sleep!

Concerning the death Adam died, we believe that the very day he partook of the forbidden fruit he was struck with death, was "as good as dead," or began to die. The sentence was, "In the day that thou eatest thereof, dying thou shalt die." Here a dying condition is expressed. In chap. iii, 17-19, an exposition of the penalty is given. Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. . . . In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return into the ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return. By his transgressing he entailed upon himself a toiling, sweating, sorrowing condition and "sin when it is finished bringeth forth death." G. W. A.