What is 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.

Our state is set forth in Ephesians 2:1, as "dead in trespasses and sins." The next verse remarkably enough goes on to speak of walking in those trespasses and sins; but that is because the death there spoken of is death towards God. Those who are dead Godward are very much alive to "the course of this world," and "the prince of the power of the air," who operates in the "children of disobedience." To be dead towards God is entirely consistent with being alive towards the world and the devil: indeed the one springs out of the other.

We find, then, that a study of the human spirit presents a consistent picture throughout the Scriptures. Perhaps it should be added that when we speak of man being spiritually dead because of the Fall, we do not mean that the human spirit has ceased to exist or to operate, but that the communion between it and God the Divine Spirit has been severed. Death here means separation from the source of life, as always throughout the Scriptures.

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.

As dead in sins, we are totally away from God. Do not we know it, beloved friends? Take the most respectable, decent man in the world — the things of Christ have no interest for him — he is dead towards God; he may be intelligent, honest, etc., but you never get Christ in his heart. It was just the same with ourselves. It is not a question of reprobate criminals, but we were dead.

But if the first death is not extinction, the second death, which takes its name from it, cannot be either. The first death is separation of soul from body, leaving the latter to corruption in the grave. Spiritual death is the separation of the soul from God, which involves the moral corruption of the soul. And the lake of fire is eternal distance from God, and wrath, in which the whole man suffers and "reaps corruption." Not one of these deaths is extinction and in the lake of fire the first death comes to an end forever. It is the time when all enemies are under Christ's feet, the last enemy destroyed being death (1 Cor. 15:25-26) but the lake of fire itself endures forever and ever, or "to the ages of ages," — a term five times given as the duration of the life of God Himself (Rev. 4:9-10; Rev. 5:14; Rev. 10:6; Rev. 15:7). Thus, then, with the first death at an end, the wicked must needs last on for eternal punishment.

341 What light may be thrown on the final result by the New Testament is another question. But in Ezekiel what is spoken of is a man belonging to this world dying in his sins. Death never means ceasing to exist. It is used for other things than physical death. The woman that lives in pleasure is dead while she lives. The believer has passed from death unto life. He who loves the brethren has passed from death unto life. That is, when applied to the soul, it has nothing to do with ceasing to exist, but separation of the soul from God, as a state of a soul which was alive as to existence, not possessing divine life, but as much alive as a being as when he had. So Romans 7 (10, and verse 24) teaches us the same truth. Paul found the commandment to be to death; but he was just as much alive, as to existence, as ever. The sin unto death is physical death. In a word, death means either simple physical death as we see it, or separation from God — not having divine life — when a man is alive.

Alive to sin, alive to the satisfying of his carnal appetite, alive to the pleasures of this world, alive in his rebellion against God; but dead toward God, estranged in heart and mind from his Creator, his ear deaf to the call of God in the Gospel, his eye blind to the glory that invites him, his conscience often past feeling, and the energy of his whole moral being put forth to keep God out of his existence. Such is man’s dreadful condition—dead in trespasses and sins. This is the sphere of death.

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."

As the acorn contains in itself the germ of what will in due time develop into the oak tree, so the few but pregnant words of Genesis 3:15 contain the announcement of God's future purposes of grace overcoming the power of evil. God had said unto Adam, "Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." No doubt the instant Adam disobeyed he became mortal, i.e. liable to death, through physical necessity, and at the same moment he fell into a state of spiritual death, i.e. the severance of the soul from God, alienation from Him, and enmity to Him in consequence of a nature now insubject to Him. In no sense does death to a human being mean annihilation; — even though the body returns to the dust, out of which Adam was originally and immediately created, it will be raised again. The breath which God breathed into Adam's nostrils endowed him with a rational and imperishable soul. Nevertheless life and incorruption, as well as the second death and eternal judgment, were brought to light by the gospel, and the expressions in the Old Testament, "Thou shalt surely die," and "the soul that sinneth it shall die," seem to speak solely of the death of the body, and with reference to God's government in this world.