How is physical death related to spiritual death?

We see the rich man in his luxury and the beggar in his misery on earth, and then we see both in another sphere. The grave had not ended the history of either of them. Death is not cessation of being. There are three kinds of death connected with man as a sinner — spiritual death, physical death, and the second death. The first represents man's moral condition of alienation from God, as we read in Ephesians 2:1, "dead in trespasses and sins"; the second is the dissolution of the body; and the third is the lake of fire. But none of these means ceasing to exist. The man spiritually dead is full enough of energy in evil, "fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind." The man physically dead still lives to God, as was shown at the burning bush when Jehovah spoke of the long departed Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the present tense (Luke 20:37-38). Even the lake of fire does not mean ceasing to exist, for when the Devil is cast in there a thousand years after the Beast and the False Prophet he finds these transgressors in that place still (Rev. 19:20; Rev. 20:10). Death is separation. The man spiritually dead is morally separated from God, not a motion of his being going out towards him; the man physically dead is separated from his body, and from all the associations connected therewith; and he who experiences the second death finds himself separated from God and all that is blessed for evermore.

The last verse of our chapter, so well known, gives us a concise summary of the matter. We cannot serve sin without receiving its wages, which is death. Death is a word of large meaning. In one sense death came in upon man when by sin he was utterly separated from God. The death of the body occurs when it is separated from the spiritual part of man. The second death is when lost men are finally separated from God. The full wages of sin includes death in all three senses.

The word death is used in three ways. It expresses: First, Separation morally from God through sin. Second, Separation of the body from the soul and spirit. Third, Eternal separation from God. In no case does it mean annihilation.

The word ‘death’ is used in three ways. It expresses: First, separation morally from God through sin. Second, separation of the body from the soul and spirit. Third, eternal separation from God. In no case does it mean annihilation.

The penalty of eating of the tree of knowledge was, for Adam, death — physical death; but this necessarily the sign of the judgment of God, of separation between himself and God, of which the other is the image. For if death is the separation between soul and body, the separation of God from the soul is death also.

First by understanding what death is. It is not extinction of being. No reconciliation would be possible if that were the case. Death is separation: primarily from God Himself the source of all life and happiness; secondarily the dissolution of man's composite estate, the separation of spirit and soul from the body.

In the day that he sinned Adam died in the primary sense, that is, an infinite gulf yawned between him and God as the account shows. He became, in New Testament language, "dead in trespasses and sins" (Eph. 2:1).

Man was formed in the strength of his manhood, nor were there any influences of decay or any signs of death upon, around, or before him. All was life. But God had proclaimed that in the day of disobedience he should surely die (Gen. 2:17)." We know the true and awful story of the fall: indeed its sad evidences are around and in us all today. But Adam did not expire at once. True it is that death set in, and that in this sense from the moment of his fall he was a dying man; but what did actually happen was that he became an outcast from the presence of God. This was "death" in a most terrible aspect. The bodily act of dying was but a small thing, compared to the spiritual death, the separation from God, which was beyond measure appalling, as it surely ends in judgment everlasting.

At the beginning we get the strongest expression of the holiness and righteousness of God — "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Here the Lord attaches to the first commission of evil nothing less than complete separation from Himself; for He is the living God. As such He had just shown Himself; He had just become the source of all that in that moment was surrounding Him in earth, air, and seas; He was the living and life-giving God, and, therefore, a state of death was a state of separation from Him. And this state is announced to be the sure and immediate doom of the creature on the moment of his commission of evil. What a strong assertion, thus, at the very outset, of the purity of God, of the great truth that "God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all;" the creature that becomes a child of evil, a child of darkness, must at once be an exile from Him — "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."

Nor can spiritual death, or "death in trespasses and sins," be possibly what God speaks of in His threatening to Adam. This is indeed the spiritual state which is the result of the fall but the moral state of a criminal is a very different thing from the judgment upon the criminal. Man's depravity is what he is condemned for, not what he is sentenced to; and these things cannot be synonymous. "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" is thus the only possible, as it is the divinely given, interpretation of the announcement, "In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."

It is written concerning man, "The wages of sin is death." We know from Scripture that on man* death has two parts: there is, 1st, the death of the body, when the mortal life ceases to animate it; and there is, 2ndly, hereafter, the second death. Moral death (as men speak) is sin indwelling. To touch a certain tree in Eden was the expression of man's independence toward God. I can think with awe and dread of the touching it, without sin or moral death; but when the will to touch it was once formed, there was sin; and when Eve had touched it, there was moral death. The judgment of this sin was death of the body, and after that the judgment and second death, of the whole race who might descend from Adam and Eve.