This is the most obvious import of the threatening in Gen. 2:17—“thou shalt surely die”; cf. 3:19—“unto dust shalt thou return.” Allusions to this threat in the O. T. confirm this interpretation: Num. 16:29—“visited [pg 657] after the visitation of all men,” where פקד = judicial visitation, or punishment; 27:3 (lxx.—δι᾽ ἁμαρτίαν αὐτοῦ). The prayer of Moses in Ps. 90: 7-9, 11, and the prayer of Hezekiah in Is. 38:17, 18, recognize plainly the penal nature of death. The same doctrine is taught in the N. T., as for example, John 8:44; Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17, where the judicial phraseology is to be noted (cf. 1:32); see 6:23 also. In 1 Pet. 4:6, physical death is spoken of as God's judgment against sin. In 1 Cor. 15:21, 22, the bodily resurrection of all believers, in Christ, is contrasted with the bodily death of all men, in Adam. Rom. 4:24, 25; 6:9, 10; 8:3, 10, 11; Gal. 3:13, show that Christ submitted to physical death as the penalty of sin, and by his resurrection from the grave gave proof that the penalty of sin was exhausted and that humanity in him was justified. “As the resurrection of the body is a part of the redemption, so the death of the body is a part of the penalty.”
Ps. 90:7, 9—“we are consumed in thine anger ... all our days are passed away in thy wrath”; Is. 38:17, 18—“thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit ... thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back. For Sheol cannot praise thee”; John 8:44—“He [Satan] was a murderer from the beginning”; 11:33—Jesus “groaned in the spirit” = was moved with indignation at what sin had wrought; Rom. 5:12, 14, 16, 17—“death through sin ... death passed unto all men, for that all sinned ... death reigned ... even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression ... the judgment came of one [trespass] unto condemnation ... by the trespass of the one, death reigned through the one”; cf. the legal phraseology in 1:32—“who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death.” Rom. 6:23—“the wages of sin is death” = death is sin's just due. 1 Pet. 4:6—“that they might be judged indeed according to men in the flesh” = that they might suffer physical death, which to men in general is the penalty of sin. 1 Cor. 15:21, 22—“as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive”; Rom. 4:24, 25—“raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered up for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification”; 6:9, 10—“Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death no more hath dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died unto sin once: but the life that he liveth, he liveth unto God”; 8:3, 10, 11—“God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh ... the body is dead because of sin” (= a corpse, on account of sin—Meyer; so Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:291) ... “he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall give life also to your mortal bodies”; Gal. 3:13—“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.”
On the relation between death and sin, see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 169-185—“They are not antagonistic, but complementary to each other—the one spiritual and the other biological. The natural fact is fitted to a moral use.” Savage, Life after Death, 33—“Men did not at first believe in natural death. If a man died, it was because some one had killed him. No ethical reason was desired or needed. At last however they sought some moral explanation, and came to look upon death as a punishment for human sin.” If this has been the course of human evolution, we should conclude that the later belief represents the truth rather than the earlier. Scripture certainly affirms the doctrine that death itself, and not the mere accompaniments of death, is the consequence and penalty of sin. For this reason we cannot accept the very attractive and plausible theory which we have now to mention:
Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, holds that as the bow in the cloud was appointed for a moral use, so death, which before had been simply the natural law of the creation, was on occasion of man's sin appointed for a moral use. It is this acquiredmoral character of death with which Biblical Genesis has to do. Death becomes a curse, by being a fear and a torment. Animals have not this fear. But in man death stirs up conscience. Redemption takes away the fear, and death drops back into its natural aspect, or even becomes a gateway to life. Death is a curse to no animal but man. The retributive element to death is the effect of sin. When man has become perfected, death will cease to be of use, and will, as the last enemy, be destroyed. Death here is Nature's method of securing always fresh, young, thrifty life, and the greatest possible exuberance and joy of it. It is God's way of securing the greatest possible number and variety of immortal beings. There are many schoolrooms for eternity in God's universe, and a ceaseless succession of scholars through them. There are many folds, but one flock. The reaper Death keeps making room. Four or five generations are as many as we can individually love, and get moral stimulus from.
Methuselahs too many would hold back the new generations. Bagehot says that civilization needs first to form a cake of custom, and secondly to break it up. Death, says Martineau, Study, 1:372-374, is the provision for taking us abroad, before we have stayed too long at home to lose our receptivity. Death is the liberator of souls. The death of successive generations gives variety to heaven. Death perfects love, reveals it to itself, unites as life could not. As for Christ, so for us, it is expedient that we should go away.
While we welcome this reasoning as showing how God has overruled evil for good, we regard the explanation as unscriptural and unsatisfactory, for the reason that it takes no account of the ethics of natural law. The law of death is an expression of the nature of God, and specially of his holy wrath against sin. Other methods of propagating the race and reinforcing its life could have been adopted than that which involves pain and suffering and death. These do not exist in the future life,—they would not exist here, if it were not for the fact of sin. Dr. Smyth shows how the evil of death has been overruled,—he has not shown the reason for the original existence of the evil. The Scriptures explain this as the penalty and stigma which God has attached to sin: Psalm 90:7, 8 makes this plain: “For we are consumed in thine anger, And in thy wrath are we troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, Our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.” The whole psalm has for its theme: Death as the wages of sin. And this is the teaching of Paul, in Rom. 5:12—“through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin.”
(b) From reason.
The universal prevalence of suffering and death among rational creatures cannot be reconciled with the divine justice, except upon the supposition that it is a judicial infliction on account of a common sinfulness of nature belonging even to those who have not reached moral consciousness.
The objection that death existed in the animal creation before the Fall may be answered by saying that, but for the fact of man's sin, it would not have existed. We may believe that God arranged even the geologic history to correspond with the foreseen fact of human apostasy (cf. Rom. 8:20-23—where the creation is said to have been made subject to vanity by reason of man's sin).
On Rom. 8:20-23—“the creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will”—see Meyer's Com., and Bap. Quar., 1:143; also Gen. 3:17-19—“cursed is the ground for thy sake.” See also note on the Relation of Creation to the Holiness and Benevolence of God, and references, pages 402, 403. As the vertebral structure of the first fish was an “anticipative consequence”of man, so the suffering and death of fish pursued and devoured by other fish were an “anticipative consequence” of man's foreseen war with God and with himself.