When God said they would die if they sinned, what did He mean? Adam didn’t die for centuries, did he?
After Adam and Eve more or less confessed to their wrong-doing, God had some earth-shaking things to say. He had already told them, “The day that you eat of it [the forbidden fruit] you shall surely die.” Obviously they didn’t die physically right then, although their bodies began deteriorating, and it’s been downhill ever since. But what happened was far more serious. Death in the Bible does not mean annihilation but separation. They were severed from the life of God. This death was not an arbitrary punishment; it was simply the consequence of the human race cutting itself off from their Creator. Back in ancient history, we all had land-line phones. If there was no dial-tone, we said the phone was dead. That didn’t mean we had a funeral in the back garden for Ma Bell; it meant there was a break in the line, and we needed a repairman to reconnect us. So it is with us. On April 8, 1966, Time magazine printed a cover with the words, “Is God Dead?” emblazoned in red. But that’s like the story of Mark Twain. When his obituary was mistakenly published in a London newspaper, he replied in the New York Journal: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” It isn’t GOD who is dead; the problem is at the other end of the line. In Ephesians 2:1, Paul states that, without Christ, we all are “dead in trespasses and sins.” But the Lord Jesus became the heavenly Repairman, sent to provide a way that we could be reconciled, or reconnected, to God. What was the sentence? In a most shocking statement, God first addressed the serpent/Devil. And what did He say? Amazingly, it was a wonderful promise—Someone called “the Seed of the woman” one day would be able to crush that enemy once and for all!