The translation of Enoch and Elijah, and of the saints that remain at Christ's second coming, seems intended to teach us that death is not a necessary law of organized being, and to show what would have happened to Adam if he had been obedient. He was created a “natural,” “earthly” body, but might have attained a higher being, the “spiritual,” “heavenly” body, without the intervention of death. Sin, however, has turned the normal condition of things into the rare exception (cf. 1 Cor. 15:42-50). Since Christ endured death as the penalty of sin, death to the Christian becomes the gateway through which he enters into full communion with his Lord (see references below).
Through physical death all Christians will pass, except those few who like Enoch and Elijah were translated, and those many who shall be alive at Christ's second coming. Enoch and Elijah were possible types of those surviving saints. On 1 Cor. 15:51—“We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,” see Edward Irving, Works, 5:135. The apocryphal Assumption of Moses, verse 9, tells us that Joshua, being carried in vision to the spot at the moment of Moses' decease, beheld a double Moses, one dropped into the grave as belonging to the earth, the other mingling with the angels. The belief in Moses' [pg 659]immortality was not conditioned upon any resuscitation of the earthly corpse; see Martineau, Seat of Authority, 364. When Paul was caught up to the third heaven, it may have been a temporary translation of the disembodied spirit. Set free for a brief space from the prison house which confined it, it may have passed within the veil and have seen and heard what mortal tongue could not describe; see Luckock, Intermediate State, 4. So Lazarus probably could not tell what he saw: “He told it not; or something sealed The lips of that Evangelist”; see Tennyson, In Memoriam, xxxi.
Nicoll, Life of Christ: “We have every one of us to face the last enemy, death. Ever since the world began, all who have entered it sooner or later have had this struggle, and the battle has always ended in one way. Two indeed escaped, but they did not escape by meeting and mastering their foe; they escaped by being taken away from the battle.” But this physical death, for the Christian, has been turned by Christ into a blessing. A pardoned prisoner may be still kept in prison, as the best possible benefit to an exhausted body; so the external fact of physical death may remain, although it has ceased to be penalty. Macaulay: “The aged prisoner's chains are needed to support him; the darkness that has weakened his sight is necessary to preserve it.” So spiritual death is not wholly removed from the Christian; a part of it, namely, depravity, still remains; yet it has ceased to be punishment,—it is only chastisement. When the finger unties the ligature that bound it, the body which previously had only chastised begins to cure the trouble. There is still pain, but the pain is no longer punitive,—it is now remedial. In the midst of the whipping, when the boy repents, his punishment is changed to chastisement.
John 14:3—“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also”; 1 Cor. 15:54-57—“Death is swallowed up in victory ... O death, where is thy sting? The sting of death is sin; and the power of sin is the law”—i. e., the law's condemnation, its penal infliction; 2 Cor. 5:1-9—“For we know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle be dissolved we have a building from God ... we are of good courage, I say, and are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord”; Phil. 1:21, 23—“to die is gain ... having the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is very far better.” In Christ and his bearing the penalty of sin, the Christian has broken through the circle of natural race-connection, and is saved from corporate evil so far as it is punishment. The Christian may be chastised, but he is never punished: Rom. 8:1—“There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.” At the house of Jairus Jesus said: “Why make ye a tumult, and weep?” and having reproved the doleful clamorists, “he put them all forth” (Mark 5:39, 40). The wakes and requiems and masses and vigils of the churches of Rome and of Russia are all heathen relics, entirely foreign to Christianity.
Palmer, Theological Definition, 57—“Death feared and fought against is terrible; but a welcome to death is the death of death and the way to life.” The idea that punishment yet remains for the Christian is “the bridge to the papal doctrine of purgatorial fires.” Browning's words, in The Ring and the Book, 2:60—“In His face is light, but in his shadow healing too,” are applicable to God's fatherly chastenings, but not to his penal retributions. On Acts 7:60—“he fell asleep”—Arnot remarks: “When death becomes the property of the believer, it receives a new name, and is called sleep.”Another has said: “Christ did not send, but came himself to save; The ransom-price he did not lend, but gave; Christ died, the shepherd for the sheep; We only fall asleep.” Per contra, see Kreibig, Versöhnungslehre, 375, and Hengstenberg, Ev. K.-Z., 1864:1065—“All suffering is punishment.”
B. Spiritual death,—or the separation of the soul from God, including all that pain of conscience, loss of peace, and sorrow of spirit, which result from disturbance of the normal relation between the soul and God.
(a) Although physical death is a part of the penalty of sin, it is by no means the chief part. The term “death” is frequently used in Scripture in a moral and spiritual sense, as denoting the absence of that which constitutes the true life of the soul, namely, the presence and favor of God.
Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the [spiritually] dead to bury their own [physically] dead”; Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again”; John 5:24—“He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life”; 8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death”; Rom. 8:13—“if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live”; Eph. 2:1—“when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins”; 5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead”; 1 Tim. 5:6—“she that giveth herself to pleasure is dead while [pg 660]she liveth”; James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death”; 1 John 3:14—“He that loveth not abideth in death”; Rev. 3:1—“thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”
(b) It cannot be doubted that the penalty denounced in the garden and fallen upon the race is primarily and mainly that death of the soul which consists in its separation from God. In this sense only, death was fully visited upon Adam in the day on which he ate the forbidden fruit (Gen. 2:17). In this sense only, death is escaped by the Christian (John 11:26). For this reason, in the parallel between Adam and Christ (Rom. 5:12-21), the apostle passes from the thought of mere physical death in the early part of the passage to that of both physical and spiritual death at its close (verse 21—“as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”—where “eternal life” is more than endless physical existence, and “death” is more than death of the body).
Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”; John 11:26—“whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die”; Rom. 5:14, 18, 21—“justification of life ... eternal life”; contrast these with “death reigned ... sin reigned in death.”