“For in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die.”  So said God to Adam.  “You sin, you croak” would be the way in which many Christians would understand it.  But is that it?  Just physical death?  Of course that would be bad enough, but unfortunately, that isn’t it.  The death that is spoken of in Genesis is the rupture or distortion of all kinds of things that were originally in harmony; separations of what was meant to be together.  Though Marxists have stolen the word, “alienation” is an accurate description of what sin brought about.  Man became alienated from everyone and everything around him.

First, man was separated from God.  Where once he enjoyed the purest relationship in the most uninhibited way, he came to be afraid of God and hide in shame.  That separation also had an eternal dimension that we know as hell.  This was the death of spiritual life.

Second, man was separated from nature.  No longer yielding its fruit virtually without effort, the earth began to produce thorns and thistles and man began to eat only by the sweat of his brow.  (And having worked on a farm, I can add blisters and a few other things.)  Even the original pristine environment was placed off limits.  His body became subject to disease and pain and the agony of dissolution that we know as death.  This was the physical death that we most commonly connect with sin.

Third, man as a race was separated from each other.  The harmony of the original marriage was broken.  All kinds of finger pointing ensued-it was the woman you gave me; it was the serpent that beguiled me; at least it isn’t my fault-and the marriage counseling industry was born.  The equality of relationship and the love and respect that were present turned into a power relationship along with imposed pain and suffering.  Sibling rivalry and murder were not far behind, along with polygamy and unjustified vengefulness.   This was social and cultural death.

Fourth, man was separated from himself.  He became psychologically divided and lost the wholeness that had characterized him from his creation.  He was subject now to shame, fear, tension, doubt, anger, jealousy, and all those things that torture us and tend to make our lives sometimes a living hell.  There is an emotional or psychological aspect of the death sin brought.

Sin brought brokenness to all of reality.  It is all fractured and out of joint.  The world as we experience it is not the world as it was intended to be in any fashion or in any of its aspects.

We will pursue the restoration of sin’s devastation in more detail in the future, but here it should be noted that the grace of God in the face of sin is as wide as sin’s effects.  Grace makes us children of God, it restores broken relationships (with the church being a paradigm), it will ultimately bring a new heaven and earth, and it brings us psychological renewal.  All of these are provisional for now, but it is important to see that all of creation was ruined by sin; yet in the mercy of God the circle of redemption is the circle of creation.