#5: Creation of Death

Jo Helen Cox

Where does the Bible say that sin revoked immortality?

Nowhere.

By removing the unbiblical constraints of perfectionism, death was part of God’s creation from the beginning, no redesign necessary.

God's Command

Most believers will reply, “What about God’s first command in Genesis 2:17? If the fruit made the man die after eating, then that means he was immortal before eating.”

It is not that simple. Scholars describe God’s command as a difficult Hebrew phrase to interpret. The literal translation is, “In the day you eat, dying you will die.” Translators assume this is a “Hebrew double” used as an emphasis. They already believed eating the fruit activated eventual physical death within the once immortal man, so it became, “… you will surely die.” Theology influenced the interpretation, which supported the theology.

Immortality is an essential detail in that interpretation. Believers use it to define the basic concepts of humanity. Yet, no biblical text mentions initial immortality or morns its loss. If the Bible totally ignores it, then is the interpretation more inspired then the Bible?

Understanding the Command

How did Adam comprehend God’s command if he had never seen death? God could have simply said, “Don’t eat that,” but he did not. God provided a reason. Without understanding, the reason was meaningless.

Perfection theology answers that God implanted understanding into Adam and Eve. To me, this addition makes no sense. It requires God to tarnish perfection before the reality of sin or death existed.

The Tree of Life

How could the Tree of Life give additional life to an immortal?

In Genesis 3:22, God told the cherubim that he did not want the people, with knowledge like theirs, to eat from the Tree and live forever. It is an assumption to say the fruit would return humanity to an immortal state. God’s statement may not even mean the tree’s blessing was physical immortality.

No Redesign Needed

All these problems come to the same conclusion: a perfect and immortal creation is an assumption based on non-biblical perfection theologies. The additions scorn God’s good creation by insisting our current existence is not what he intended. A perfection interpretation let one act of non-compliance spoil everything he planned, and it degraded God’s supremacy as it assigned sin as the creator of our present world. Perfectionism’s attempt to guard God’s holiness presents him as incompetent.

Biblically, God created everything. He called creation good, not perfect.

The serpent spoke the truth; eating the fruit did not instantly kill or inflict mortality. He only twisted the reason.

God did not lie to Adam. The edict of “death” did not refer to physical bodies. Physically, Adam and Eve remained the same. Mentally, they changed.

If no biblical passage mentions a redesign to end immortality, then that means God did not redesign his creation.

Reality Is Imperfect

By removing the perfectionistic additions, the story stops sounding like fiction. If Adam and Eve had not eaten from either tree, then they would have died in the garden as innocents beings.

Biblically and scientifically, a naturally imperfect universe included physical death from the beginning. Death is not evil, not something to be feared. It is a transition from one state of being into another, which takes place throughout the universe, not just in life. Stars die (explode) to seed the next generation of stars with heavier atoms. Rocky planets form around these, and life appeared on this one. Life lives and dies, which changes the atmospheric and mineral makeup of our world. Because of death, a multitude of life forms has existed and gone extinct. Our sun will die too, and the universe will be richer in that death.

Instead of an end of immortality, God’s command in Genesis 2:17 introduces the concept of a different kind of death, one much more important. The Old Testament regularly hints at this death, and the New Testament clearly defines it. God spoke of spiritual death. Choosing to eat the fruit was the choice to make bad choices. Such decisions slowly distort and wound the human soul. Enough bad choices can kill the spirit, God’s Breath within, long before the physical body dies. The spiritually dead do not go to heaven.

To create His image, God warned the man of the second death. “In the day you eat, dying you will die.” Our Creator wants you to live. He desires your presence in heaven.

Read More In This Series.

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