We have the authority of Paul for stating that through Christ we are released from all the penalty which the race has incurred through Adam’s transgression. “As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.” If the death in which we are involved through Adam is death spiritual, temporal, and eternal, then all the race is redeemed from these through Christ, and Universalism is the result.
Again, Christ tasted death for every man. He hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us. That is, Christ died the same death for us which was introduced into the world by Adam’s sin. Was this death eternal? If so, the Saviour is gone, and the plan of salvation can never be carried into effect.
In Rom. 5:12-14, occurs this remarkable passage:--
“Wherefore as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned: (For until the law sin was in the world; but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is the figure of Him that was to come.)”
In the first part of the verse Paul speaks of the death that came in by Adam’s sin, and then says that it reigned from Adam to Moses over them that had not sinned. From this language, accepting the popular interpretation of the Adamic penalty, we must come to the intolerable conclusion that personally sinless beings from Adam to Moses were consigned to eternal misery! From such a sentiment, every fiber of our humanity recoils with horror. We cannot stifle the feeling that it is an outrage upon the character of God, and therefore cannot be true. The death threatened Adam was literal death, not eternal life in misery.
To the view that the Adamic penalty was simply literal death, many eminent men have given their unqualified adhesion.
John Locke (Reasonableness of Christianity, s. 1,) says:--
“By reason of Adam’s transgression all men are mortal and come to die.... It seems a strange way of understanding a law which requires the plainest and directest words, that by death should be meant eternal life in misery.... I confess that by death, here, I can understand nothing but a ceasing to be, the losing of all actions of life and sense. Such a death came upon Adam and all his posterity, by his first disobedience in paradise, under which death they should have lain forever had it not been for the redemption by Jesus Christ.”
Isaac Watts (Ruin and Recovery of Mankind, s. 3), though he was a believer in the immortality of the soul, has the candor to say:--
“There is not one place of Scripture that occurs to me, where the word death as it was threatened in the law of innocency, necessarily signifies a certain miserable immortality of the soul, either to Adam, the actual sinner, or to his posterity.”