The state of the dead and the destiny of the wicked

by Uriah Smith

Adam and Eve could not mistake the requirement of this law, nor fail to understand the intent of the penalty. And before Satan could cause his temptation to make any impression on the mind of Eve, he had to contradict this threatening, assuring her that they should not surely die. A question of veracity was thus raised between God and Satan; and strange to say, the theological world, in interpreting the penalty, have virtually, with the exception of a small minority, sided with Satan. This is seen in the interpretation which is commonly put on this penalty, making it consist of three divisions: 1. Alienation of the soul from God, the love of sin, and the hatred of holiness, called spiritual death. 2. The separation of soul and body, called temporal death. 3. Immediately after temporal death, the conscious torment of the soul in hell, which is to have no end, and is called eternal death. The Baptist Confession of Faith, Art. 5, says:--

“We believe that God made man upright; but he, sinning, involved himself and posterity in death spiritual, temporal, and eternal; from all which there is no deliverance but by Christ.”

Let us look at the different installments of this penalty, and see if they will harmonize with the language in which the original threatening is expressed: “Thou shalt surely die.” Adam incurred the penalty by sinning. After he had sinned, he was a sinner. But a state of sin is that state of alienation from God which the orthodox school make to be a part of the penalty of his transgression. In this they take as the punishment of sin that which was simply its result; and they make the sentence read, virtually, in this profoundly sensible manner: “In the day that thou sinnest, thou shalt surely be a sinner!”

Because he wickedly became a sinner, and brought himself into a state of alienation from God, the doom was pronounced upon him, “Thou shalt surely die.” Could this mean eternal death? If so, Adam never could have been released therefrom. But he is to be released from it; for “in Christ shall all be made alive.”

These two installments, then, spiritual and eternal death, utterly fail us, when brought to the test of the language in which the sentence is expressed: one is nonsense, and the other an impossibility.

Temporal death alone remains to be considered; but the interpretation which is given to this, completely nullifies the penalty, and makes Satan to have been correct when he said, “Thou shalt not surely die.” Temporal death is interpreted to mean the separation of the soul from the body, the body alone to die, but the soul, which is called the real, responsible man, to enter upon an enlarged and higher life. In this case, there is no death; and the sentence should have read, In the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt be freed from the clog of this mortal body, and enter upon a new and eternal life. So said Satan, “Ye shall be as gods;” and true to this assertion from the father of lies, the heathen have all along deified their dead men, and worshiped their departed heroes; and modern poets have sung, “There is no death; what seems so is transition.” If ever the skill of a deceiver and the gullibility of a victim were manifested in an unaccountable degree, it is in this fact, that right in the face and eyes of the pale throng that daily passes down through the gate of death, the devil can make men believe that after all his first lie was true, and there is no such thing as death.

From these considerations, it is evident that nothing will meet the demands of the sentence but the cessation of the life of the whole man. But that, says one, cannot be, for he was to die in the very day he ate of the forbidden fruit; but he did not literally die for nine hundred and thirty years. If this is an objection against the view we advocate, it is equally such against every other. Take the threefold penalty above noticed. If death spiritual, death temporal, and death eternal, was the penalty, how much was fulfilled on the day he sinned? Not death eternal, surely, and not death temporal, which did not take place for nine hundred and thirty years, but only death spiritual. But this was only the first installment of the penalty, and far less important than the other two. The most that the friends of this interpretation can say, therefore, is that the penalty begun on that very day to be fulfilled. But we can say as much with our view. “Dying, thou shalt die,” reads the margin; which some understand to mean, thou shalt inherit a mortal nature, and the process of decay shall commence. As soon as he sinned, he came under the sentence of death, and the work commenced. He bore up against the encroachments of dissolution for nine hundred and thirty years, and then the work was fully accomplished.

When God proceeded to pronounce sentence upon Adam, he gave us an authoritative interpretation of the penalty from which there is no appeal. Gen. 3:19: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

The return to dust is here made a subsequent event, to be preceded by a period of wearing toil. And being finally overcome by the labors and ills of life, the person addressed was to return again to the dust from which he was taken. With Adam, this process commenced on the very day he transgressed, and the penalty threatened, which covered all this work from beginning to end, was executed in full when this process was fully completed in Adam’s death, nine hundred and thirty years thereafter.

Two things are connected together in the penalty affixed to Adam’s disobedience. These are the words, day and die: In the day thou eatest, thou shalt die. The dying, whatever view we take of it, must include temporal or literal death. But this was not accomplished on that very day. Therefore, to find a death which was inflicted on that literal day, a figurative sense is given to the word die, and it is claimed that a spiritual death was that day wrought upon Adam. But we inquire, If either of these terms, day or die, are to be taken figuratively, why not let the dying be literal, and the day be figurative, especially since the sentence which God pronounced upon Adam, when he came up for trial, shows that literal death, and that only, was intended in the penalty?