By The Offence of One

The Bible teaches us that God is the Sustainer (or, Upholder) of all things (Hebrews 1:2-3). God literally holds all things together: from everything smaller than subatomic particles to everything greater than galactic superclusters—and all the invisible heavens too, and everything that is in them. By his own power and in accordance with his own will, God is preventing everything falling back into nothing.

God is still, even now, giving us every heartbeat, the air that we breathe, our food, our health, the ground on which we walk, the environment around us, and everything in it. In his providence, he makes use of the material world in order to sustain our material bodies. It is entirely due to God’s sustaining providence that “we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28; see also Psalm 104:10-30).

As with us today, so our first parents were utterly dependent upon God for everything—for “life, and breath, and all things” (Acts 17:25). Adam and Eve’s original God-given ability to glorify God and to enjoy him (an ability that would have lasted forever)¹ was likewise sustained by the spiritual life-giving God.

Adam and Eve’s sins so offended God, and grieved him, that he immediately withdrew from them both. God withdrew from them because they had rebelled against him.

God has “purer eyes than to behold evil” (Habakkuk 1:13). “For thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness: neither shall evil dwell with thee” (Psalm 5:4).

Furthermore, as the apostle Paul teaches us: “Through the offence of one [i.e. Adam] many be dead…by the offence of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation” (Romans 5:15,18).

Note the past tense of the apostle’s awful pronouncements. Because of the broken law of God in the covenant of life, the sentence of condemnation has already been passed upon the human race in Adam, when he represented us in the Garden of Eden (i.e. all mankind except for the Lord Jesus Christ)—even though the eternal death punishment is delayed so long as we remain (physically) alive in this world.

What is Death?

Human death is not merely caused by a person’s body or brain or DNA ceasing to function. Nor is it merely the breaking of the connection between a person’s body and soul—as though the human soul is the sustainer of the body, or as though the functioning body was the prison cell of the soul (as some ancient Greeks believed).

According to the Bible, human death occurs through the withdrawal of God’s providential blessings and their replacement with curses: God’s just punishment of sinners for their sins. Death pervades all parts of the human being—physical, spiritual, and eternal. So, these curses include:

• The severance of spiritual communion with God (Genesis 3:8,19,22-24; Habakkuk 1:13);
• The withdrawal of all the spiritual blessings which that entails;
• The eventual removal of material blessings, including all sustaining providences in this earthly life; and
• The outpouring of God’s wrath upon body and soul forever (John 5:28-29).

All this, unless we are saved.

Temporarily Spared

If it were not that God spared our first parents for a time, then they would have “surely died” in full, then and there, immediately after they sinned (Genesis 2:16-17). But God continued to sustain them in a state of spiritual death² while temporarily refraining from pouring out all the deserved punishment of the full spiritual, physical and eternal death upon them.

However, as things stand now, the human race (all mankind in Adam) is being temporarily spared from the full outworking of God’s solemn threat of death upon the breaking of the covenant of life. The question is, why?

It is not that God has changed his mind. It is not that God has become unjust. And it is not that God has lost the will or the power to bring this solemnly threatened death upon any sinner. So, why is fallen mankind being temporarily spared from God’s just condemnation?

The answer that the Bible gives to this question is this: it is God’s will to call a people to himself from among the entire human family and to save them from their sins, and all this death that has come by sin (see Genesis 3:15; 12:1-3; 15:1-6; Romans 5:12; 9:22-24; Galatians 3:16; Ephesians 1:3-6).

God is, at the present time, enduring “with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction,” sustaining in their spiritually dead state all those whom he will not save. But it remains true that God is “willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known” upon them (Romans 9:22). So, we must take it as a given, that “It is appointed unto men once to die , but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27).

Vessels of Mercy

God’s reason for enduring sinners for a little while (i.e. for their physical life on earth) is this: “that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory” (Romans 9:23).

It is God’s sovereign prerogative to bestow grace (that is, undeserved favour), mercy and compassion upon those on whom he wills to bestow it (Exodus 34:6-7; Romans 9:15). As God himself says: “I…will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will shew mercy on whom I will shew mercy” (Exodus 33:19).

We Christians know how our sins manifested our own state of enmity³ against God (Romans 8:7). And we will all, sooner or later, come to admit that before we were “born again” (John 3:3-8), we were indeed spiritually dead. That is how things were with us—this was our fallen nature. We will accept what the Bible says of us:

• “But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved)” (Ephesians 2:4-5).
• “And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others” (Ephesians 2:1-3).

We also remember how, even while we were being upheld by God in that spiritually dead state, we heaped up great mountains of our own sins! Our own un-Christian rejection of God, before we were converted, was an abuse of all the good things that had been God giving us even before we were converted.

All we ever did was, as the saying goes, bite the Hand that feeds us.⁴

Appendix

Thomas Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold State, Part 1 Chapter 1.

[In Genesis 2:17] The death threatened was…temporal, spiritual, and eternal death. The event is a commentary on this; for that very day he did eat thereof he [Adam] was a dead man, in law, but the execution was stopped because of his posterity, then in his loins, and another covenant was prepared. However, that day his body got its death-wound, and became mortal. Death also seized his soul; he lost his original righteousness, and the favour of God; witness the pangs of conscience which made him hide himself from God. And he became liable to eternal death, which would have actually followed of necessity, if the Mediator had not been provided, who found him bound with the cords of death, as a malefactor ready to be led to execution. Thus you have a short description of the covenant into which the Lord brought man in the state of innocence.

John Flavel, The Method of Grace in Gospel-Redemption, Sermon 31 (on Ephesians 5:14). In The Whole Works of John Flavel, Volume 2.

We must know there is a three-fold death, viz.

1. Natural.
2. Spiritual.
3. Eternal.

Natural death is nothing else but the privation of the principle of natural life, or the separation of the soul from the body (James 2:26), “The body without the spirit is dead.” Spiritual death is the privation of the principle of spiritual life, or the want and absence of the quickening Spirit of God in the soul; the soul is the life of the body, and Christ is the life of the soul; the absence of the soul is death to the body, and the absence or want of Christ is death to the soul. Eternal death is the separation both of body and soul from God, which is the misery of the damned. Now christless and unregenerate men are not dead in the first sense; they are naturally alive though they are dead while they live; nor are they yet dead in the last sense, eternally separated from God by an irrevocable sentence as the damned are; but they are dead in the second sense; they are spiritually dead, whilst they are naturally alive; and this spiritual death is the fore-runner of eternal death.