2. Positive and formal exclusion from God's presence.
This included:
(a) The cessation of man's former familiar intercourse with God, and [pg 593] the setting up of outward barriers between man and his Maker (cherubim and sacrifice).
“In die Welt hinausgestossen, Steht der Mensch verlassen da.” Though God punished Adam and Eve, he did not curse them as he did the serpent. Their exclusion from the tree of life was a matter of benevolence as well as of justice, for it prevented the immortality of sin.
(b) Banishment from the garden, where God had specially manifested his presence.—Eden was perhaps a spot reserved, as Adam's body had been, to show what a sinless world would be. This positive exclusion from God's presence, with the sorrow and pain which it involved, may have been intended to illustrate to man the nature of that eternal death from which he now needed to seek deliverance.
At the gates of Eden, there seems to have been a manifestation of God's presence, in the cherubim, which constituted the place a sanctuary. Both Cain and Abel brought offerings “unto the Lord” (Gen. 4:3, 4), and when Cain fled, he is said to have gone out “from the presence of the Lord” (Gen. 4:16). On the consequences of the Fall to Adam, see Edwards, Works, 2:390-405; Hopkins, Works, 1:206-246; Dwight, Theology, 1:393-434; Watson, Institutes, 2:19-42; Martensen, Dogmatics, 155-173; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 402-412.
Section V.—Imputation Of Adam's Sin To His Posterity.
We have seen that all mankind are sinners; that all men are by nature depraved, guilty, and condemnable; and that the transgression of our first parents, so far as respects the human race, was the first sin. We have still to consider the connection between Adam's sin and the depravity, guilt, and condemnation of the race.
(a) The Scriptures teach that the transgression of our first parents constituted their posterity sinners (Rom. 5:19—“through the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners”), so that Adam's sin is imputed, reckoned, or charged to every member of the race of which he was the germ and head (Rom. 5:16—“the judgment came of one [offence] unto condemnation”). It is because of Adam's sin that we are born depraved and subject to God's penal inflictions (Rom. 5:12—“through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin”; Eph. 2:3—“by nature children of wrath”). Two questions demand answer,—first, how we can be responsible for a depraved nature which we did not personally and consciously originate; and, secondly, how God can justly charge to our account the sin of the first father of the race. These questions are substantially the same, and the Scriptures intimate the true answer to the problem when they declare that “in Adam all die” (1 Cor. 15:22) and “that death passed unto all men, for that all sinned” when “through one man sin entered into the world” (Rom. 5:12). In other words, Adam's sin is the cause and ground of the depravity, guilt, and condemnation of all his posterity, simply because Adam and his posterity are one, and, by virtue of their organic unity, the sin of Adam is the sin of the race.