Death Passed upon All Men

When God completed the creation of the heavens and the earth, and all that is in them, he said of his own work that “it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). This included the first parents of the human race, Adam and Eve. In this original state, God created mankind as bearers of his own image (Genesis 1:26-27).

In the beginning, our first parents were on the most intimate terms with God himself (Genesis 2). They loved God with all their heart, soul, mind and strength. They worshipped and obeyed him. They believed the words that God spoke to them. Their knowledge of him and of spiritual things was altogether true. In short, they had the God-given ability to fulfill their main, all-encompassing purpose of their lives: to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.¹

That this is how things were in the original state of Adam and Eve is evident from the fact that all these things are renewed in sinners whom God saves—and from the fact that, notwithstanding fallen man’s total inability to keep it, God still requires of human beings perfect obedience to his moral law (Romans 3:19; 8:29,30; Ephesians 4:24; Colossians 3:10).

Our first parents originally possessed free will with which they could choose to worship and obey God. But the Bible tells us they abused their freedom by sinning against him. In doing this they ruined the image of God with which they were endowed and so they became unrighteous, unholy rejecters of God. Their original freedom ended when they became slaves to their sin (Romans 6:16).

Adam and Eve still bore the remnants of the image of God, so to speak: they were still morally responsible, spiritual and rational beings. But each of their original endowments had become ruined by sin.

The Broken Covenant of Life

Our first parents sinned by eating the forbidden fruit of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17; 3:6). Perfect obedience, including not eating of the fruit of this one tree, was the condition of the covenant of life² that God had established with Adam in the Garden of Eden. In this covenant, Adam was appointed by God to stand as the responsible representative head of mankind by ordinary generation.³

Adam remains at the head of the whole human family, except for the Lord Jesus Christ. Christ stands as the “Last Adam,” the head of the New Covenant.⁴

We call the covenant that God established in Eden the covenant of life because:

• It is a covenant, since by this arrangement God committed himself to keeping Adam and the whole human race alive so long as Adam did not eat the forbidden fruit; and Adam, for his part, was committed to remain obedient to God’s command not to eat of this tree;
• It is a covenant of life because this covenant conveyed life to mankind so long as Adam performed his part.

This Edenic covenant is also sometimes known as the covenant of works,⁵ because it stood unbroken only if Adam was continued to be obedient to it (Genesis 2:16-17).

The question is sometimes asked, “What would have happened if Adam and Eve had resisted the temptation of the serpent in the Garden of Eden?” In the covenant of life, God had solemnly promised that death would come upon man if he (in Adam) ever disobeyed God. It is evident that if Adam had successfully resisted all temptation, then God would have faithfully kept him and his descendants in the state of life. The human race would have remained in covenant with God.

But that is not what happened.

When Eve sinned, she sinned for herself. We can speculate that if Adam had not been involved in any way at all in Eve’s sin, then God would have judged Eve alone for her sin. But Adam was there. He was present nearby “with her,” and he did nothing to stop his wife eating the forbidden fruit. Then Adam himself, in full knowledge of what he was about to do—not deceived as Eve had been (Genesis 3:13; compare 1 Timothy 2:14)—“he did eat” (Genesis 3:6).

For That One Sin We All Died

The sinful act that catastrophically ruined the human race was this: the first man, the appointed covenant head, perfect in all his faculties and up to that point without sin, disobeyed God. This was the sin that broke the covenant of life that God made with man.

Adam knew God had solemnly promised that if he ate the forbidden fruit, then God would forsake him, withdraw his favorable providences, and punish him with death for his sin. Or, to put it simply: if Adam sinned against God in breaking the covenant of life, then he would “surely die”⁶ (Genesis 2:16-17). And so would his children and all his descendants (if God did not intervene).

Adam, in his unfallen state, deliberately disobeyed God, for all of us. God had used the singular term, “thou” in addressing Adam himself directly: “thou shalt surely die.” But we were all included in that “thou.” We were all “in Adam” because when God established the covenant of life with him, with its attendant promised blessing and threatened curse, he appointed him to stand for all mankind⁷—the family that would grow from him as its head. God appointed the whole human race to stand as one body, one corporate entity, in Adam, who in his capacity as our head, acted both for himself and for his (ordinary) descendants (see Romans 5:17-19).

This is what the Apostle Paul teaches us: “by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned…” (Romans 5:12). That is, all are counted to have sinned Adam’s original sin; and, “in Adam all die” (1 Corinthians 15:22). In that one yet compound sin of eating the forbidden fruit, Adam broke the covenant of life—and we all died.

Our ability to glorify and enjoy God was destroyed when the covenant of life was broken. So now, fallen human beings do not have it within themselves to raise themselves from this state of spiritual death. And the fall of man has put man on the road that leads to hell, that place of everlasting punishment deserved for turning against God himself (Matthew 7:13; 25:41,46; John 5:28-29; Daniel 12:2; 2 Thessalonians 1:9).

Appendix

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 2 Chapter 2 Secion 12.

Man, when he withdrew his allegiance to God, was deprived of the spiritual gifts by which he had been raised to the hope of eternal salvation. Hence it follows, that he is now an exile from the kingdom of God, so that all things which pertain to the blessed life of the soul are extinguished in him until he recover them by the grace of regeneration. Among these are faith, love to God, charity towards our neighbour, the study of righteousness and holiness. All these, when restored to us by Christ, are to be regarded as adventitious and above nature. If so, we infer that they were previously abolished. On the other hand, soundness of mind and integrity of heart were, at the same time, withdrawn, and it is this which constitutes the corruption of natural gifts. For although there is still some residue of intelligence and judgment as well as will, we cannot call a mind sound and entire which is both weak and immersed in darkness. As to the will, its depravity is but too well known. Therefore, since reason, by which man discerns between good and evil, and by which he understands and judges, is a natural gift, it could not be entirely destroyed; but being partly weakened and partly corrupted, a shapeless ruin is all that remains. In this sense it is said (John 1:5), that “the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not;” these words clearly expressing both points—viz. that in the perverted and degenerate nature of man there are still some sparks which show that he is a rational animal, and differs from the brutes, inasmuch as he is endued with intelligence, and yet, that this light is so smothered by clouds of darkness that it cannot shine forth to any good effect. In like manner, the will, because inseparable from the nature of man, did not perish, but was so enslaved by depraved lusts as to be incapable of one righteous desire.