MEASURE UPON MEASURE – DEATH – THE RESTORATION OF GOD - Part 9 (Section 1)
CHAPTER 5 - THE FIFTH CONSEQUENCE
In this fifth consequence, because it is the longest, and probably the most important, it is difficult to break it into sections. I have done that but it ended up with some sections being a bit smaller than normal. There are 5 breaks (sections) in this fifth consequence, and by rights the whole 5 sections should be read/considered as one.
So far we have looked at four results of the Fall into sin in Eden. They were guilt and shame; and separation; and the curse that came upon men and the world; and sorrow. The next one has a ring of finality about it and wraps all the others up in its power. That is death. In every consequence of sin, Jesus Christ identified with the measure of it, making it His own upon the cross, but returning to us greater blessings than Adam ever knew. This is what I mean by Measure Upon Measure. He restores more and more and greater and greater.
We now take up the fifth consequence of sin. In every aspect it is the inevitable culmination of all previous consequences and at the same time it is the most severe, the most imposing of them all. This consequence is death.
Because we were not existing at that time, we can not comprehend the perfection of the conditions the earth originally enjoyed. Adam was placed in surroundings which were God’s ideal, for we were told several times, “and God saw that it was good”. Already we have hinted at some of those utopian conditions. Sometimes we have posed suppositions and perhaps have forwarded suggestions in the area of speculation.
There are some who think the world as such existed “outside” of the Eden that God created where He made man and woman for that Garden. After all, all created life was told to be fruitful and multiply. Whatever might have been outside of the Garden of Eden we do not know but the animals, plants, insects, birds, and fish would have been there. God created them – mammals – birds – fish and all other life forms and they populated the earth. It would be absolutely wrong to think all that was contained inside Eden.
What we can be certain about it that Adam was the FIRST man. God did not have people running around outside the Garden. {{1 Corinthians 15:45-47 Also it is written so, “THE FIRST MAN, ADAM, became a living soul.” The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural, then the spiritual. The first man is from the earth, earthy. The second man is from heaven.}}
It is in that range where we might spend a brief time now. It is my proposition that in the unspoilt and pristine creation, there was present no death whatsoever, but that statement needs refining. Death and decay meant separation and must irrefutably be considered foreign to God. HOWEVER that death and the entry of it is confined to humans who were created in the image of God. The animal kingdom was not, even though a gorilla resembles a human in a broad way; and vegetation, was not. We know that all the grasses and weeds and crops such as wheat flower in their season, and have seeds and the plant dies. The butterfly and moth hatch, lay eggs, then die.
Again we come back to the Garden and the outside world. The outside world functioned according to Nature but the Garden was select and special, the residence for Adam and Eve. Perfection was all around them.
How big was the Garden? Answers in Genesis has a photo of Adam in the Garden feeding a Tyrannosaurus Rex with other dinosaurs there, a huge impossibility as far as I am concerned. I won’t put down AIG but I think the understanding of Eden is really imperfect.
Let me ask a question. How extensive was the Garden? I think the answer is clear. These eastern gardens (paridisimo) are not very large. Let us say that Adam and eve had not sinned. There would have been hundreds of people. Where would they be? Adam’s job was to tend and keep the Garden, so it was big enough for him to do that.
I know this is speculation and I said earlier it was. The reason for challenging your minds in this is to consider death and its outcome. Death entered through the First Man and I think it pertained to human beings alone, not the plant and animal creations. Do not challenge me. There is so much uncertainty that God has kept from us, that we can use world like “maybe”, “perhaps”, “it may have been that way”.
Death carries the perception of judgment and imperfection, AS IT RELATED TO HUMANS MADE IN THE IMAGE OF GOD. God is Light and God is Life. It is inconceivable that death could co-exist with God, or be initiated by God in any way in His perfect creation. For death to have come into operation, there would have to have been the intervention of something not of God Himself. We would identify that intervention as man’s deliberate disobedience which was sin.
LET US FOCUS ON CREATION WIDER THAN ADAM AND EVE
Some maintain there was no death whatsoever in the Creation. Is the logical conclusion of that argument then meaning that all living things in God’s creation and in the Garden, were not subject to physical death, God being the Author of life, not of death? Can we accept that God’s perfect order reigned in the confinement of the garden, while outside Eden, the law of the jungle operated? Did God create that Garden for man to be the paradise on earth? These questions do not have answers for we would answer from silence, or answer very tenuously.
With regards to the animal world, the question might be raised about the proliferation of grubs, grasshoppers, ants, butterflies, etc. If there was no controlling factor, then numbers would surely have exploded and smothered the earth. “Would not death have been the control?” it might be argued. Did God have one platform for man alone and another for all other created life? Death is decay and without the decay caused by fungi then all fallen timber would accumulate and smother the earth.
I believe that was probably the case but it would be fruitless to add any more to speculation. We conclude with this though, that God never intended death in any shape or form for Adam and his wife or for the human race. Adam was made in the likeness of God and that must include for him, not only an immortal soul and spirit but an immortal body. All that though has dramatically changed through the entry of sin. God breathed His Spirit which meant life. Man has a spirit which separates him from the rest of creation.
SERENITY RUINED – MAN’S ENTRY INTO THE SIN LIFE
God had warned Adam in {{Genesis 2:17, “. . . for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die.”}} In the very day the willful act was committed, the fulfillment came into effect. Adam ate and Adam died. “YOU SHALL NOT DIE,” the Devil had previously asserted. THAT WAS the FIRST LIE. To his own great horror Adam found the truth of God’s promise came crashing down all around him but it was too late.
THE DELUSION that death is the absolute finality IS ANOTHER lie being perpetrated by those too eager to be the devil’s modern scribes. At that point it was Serenity Ruined. The repercussion of Adam’s death emerged as a twofold consequence. One aspect was immediate, and the other was just as real, but the evidence of it was not immediately apparent. I don’t think Adam knew what dying meant (you shall surely die). The concept was foreign to him, both the physical and spiritual aspects of dying.
PHYSICAL DEATH, THE OUTCOME OF DYING AS GOD SAID
We shall deal with the latter aspect first. In Adam’s body that sad day, the seeds of physical death were sown, but in his personal case it took some centuries for them to mature into the ultimate finality of God’s warning prediction. In the meantime Adam saw the lower forms of created life in the animal kingdom coming under the curse and dying, outside of Eden, which reminded him of the introduction of death to his own family. It must have been a heavy burden for him to know all through his life, that it was his disobedience that was responsible for that condition. He lived through the trauma of his own son’s death, for Abel’s life was snuffed out through the manifestation of his brother’s sinful nature.
Physical death is so much part of our existence that we are constantly reminded of its reality at very short intervals. Death causes so much sorrow as it results in separation from a loved one, for death is perceived as being forever. The last sentence mentioned three consequences of sin but death is the most feared and abrupt of them all. Therefore it is the hardest hitting one, the harshest actuality of sin. Does it not provide the opportunity for us to consider the place of death in the program of life, and thereby direct our thoughts towards God? Funerals do provide that opportunity.
Elaborate preparations for physical death became one of the prime rituals of the heathen religions, and is still preserved in several of those cultures. None was more elaborate than the Egyptians with their pyramids as burial tombs and their intricate detail in mummification along with the attention given to the Pharaoh’s personal belongings.
Many distortions about death have cunningly tried to mask its serious reality. There is everything from the occult fear of pointing the bone in Australian Aboriginal spiritism to friendly ghosts like Casper and the ghost in “The Ghost and Mrs Muir”. There is reincarnation, and cannibalism to “eat” the strength or qualities from the dead one to the living ones. All the while, man is blind to his own spiritual death and the dire prospect of a Christless eternity.
SPIRITUAL DEATH, THE OUTCOME OF DYING AS GOD SAID
We shall close now the examination of physical death, and consider the features of spiritual death. In both these deaths, they occurred when sin was entered into, but Adam had no immediate comprehension of either of them. He knew sorrow and separation. To emphasise again, at the instant the couple ate of the tree, they died to God. It was not the eating that caused the death; it was the disobedience that led to the eating.
Let us put this spiritual death into perspective. The unbroken, innocent, and sinless relationship hitherto fore was immediately and totally severed. Man became spiritually dead; dead to his God, and now a sin-being, for from that point in history, the sinful nature inherited now in Adam, bloomed and became the controlling feature in his life. He could not seek his God as we saw happening in Genesis Chapter 1. That fallen nature drove him from God and all he could do was hide. The consequences of sin smote him, one after the other and Adam died.
HE BECAME SPIRITUALLY DEAD. It could never be said of us that we have become spiritually dead, because for us it is different. {{Psalm 51:5 “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother CONCEIVED me.”}} We have always been spiritually dead for we were born in sins and shaped in iniquity and were by nature the children of wrath, as all human beings are or were, but Adam was not born, having been created in the likeness of God, in a state of sinless perfection.
The greatest devastation of our fore parents’ sin, is that all down the human ancestral line, everyone born of woman has been born dead, a spiritually stillborn death. That death is a total alienation from God because the sin nature rules in full control and the blackness of that nature is opposed entirely to the revelation light of God. The sin nature in a young life manifests its true self from the earliest months, and before long the resultant sin becomes fully evident. That sin confirms the spiritually bankrupt state of each human being and the consequence of that state is death. Paul confirms this to the Christians at Rome.
Romans 3:23 tells of the UNIVERSALITY of sin with its bankruptcy. {{“For ALL HAVE SINNED and fall short of the glory of God.”}}
Romans 5:12 summarises the ORIGIN of sin, the consequence of sin, and the universal degree of the consequence. {{“Therefore, just as through one man SIN ENTERED into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned.”}}
Romans 5:14 spells the AUTHORITY of death. {{“Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the offence of Adam.”}}
To the Ephesians Paul gives the news that once they were hopelessly lost in death. {{“And you were DEAD IN YOUR TRESPASSES AND SINS, in which you formally walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest,”}} Ephesians 2:1-3
You may recall back in Chapter 1 we saw how God provided skins to cover the shameful nakedness of man and woman, not that nakedness itself was shame, but the nakedness of sin had become the reality. “And THE LORD GOD MADE GARMENTS of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them.” (Genesis 3:21). Let us consider that action a little further. From where did the skins come? I believe God took an animal, and there had to be a death for their provision to be met.
God made garments and God clothed them. The sinful couple were the guilty bystanders. All was planned and done by God and there was a strong possibility that Adam watched, and if he did, maybe he was horrified to see for the first time, death; knowing that he was responsible. More than that, the death of the innocent creature was for their benefit and their provision. I would strongly support the proposition that the animal slain was a lamb, spotless and ready.
Sons were eventually born and we learn straight away of SACRIFICE. From where did this concept originate? It must have been an instruction from the Lord passed to Adam, but it was introduced by God Himself, because the lamb was sacrificed to cover their immediate clothing needs. The lamb met their provision. More on this topic will be developed shortly. We read much of the provision of a lamb or goat or bull for the sacrifice to atone for man’s sin. Still the problem of death remained, and death and its associated fear, reigned supreme.
In summing up so far, all human beings must keep the appointment with physical death because our bodies are steadily and imperceptibly dying, but our souls and spirits were dead to God when we were born. The mortal body houses the immortal spirit. The innocent died to provide for the guilty. What a miserable state our sins have created for us. Serenity Ruined by disobedience led to death as the consequence, and so death, which is Sin’s Result has passed upon all men, for all have sinned.
That ends section 1 and the next posting will continue with this consequence.
