With Adam fallen- even from the first moment of his fall- we enter upon a new period. Sin and death, now come into the world, necessitate new dealings of God with man, if, indeed, judgment do not bring all to a sudden close. And this was not in His mind, who from the first had foreseen and provided for the rebellion of the creature. Judgment does indeed follow, such as God had previously announced; but that was no final one, but (as we shall easily see) one anticipative of the mercy to be shown, and which could be made to take itself the character of mercy. It is in confounding the provisional "death," threatened to and inflicted on Adam and his posterity, as the result of the primal sin, with the "second" and final "death" of the lake of fire, that much error and heresy of the present day finds apparent countenance, scripture being strained to establish what is a mere foregone conclusion in the minds of its interpreters, and what none can in fact deduce from its straightforward simplicity of statement.
"In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" is defined so clearly, in the Lord's words to fallen Adam, as to put its meaning, one would think, beyond serious question. "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." Gen. 3:1919In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. (Genesis 3:19).
To read into this eternal judgment is to misread it thoroughly. The death announced, and which we know to be everywhere in the world, through the first man's sin, is in reality a thing which, in its very nature, necessitates the suspension of eternal judgment until it is taken out of the way. Not till the dead are raised will the white throne be set, and the dead- the wicked dead—be "judged, every man according to his works." And thus the resurrection of the unsaved dead is as much a "resurrection of judgment"- that is what it implies and necessitates- as the resurrection of the saved is similarly a "resurrection of life." The final judgment is thus in nowise the result of Adam's sin; it is that in which emphatically each suffers for his own. The second death and the first are in nowise to be confounded- they are incompatible and contrary things.
Nor can spiritual death, or "death in trespasses and sins," be possibly what God speaks of in His threatening to Adam. This is indeed the spiritual state which is the result of the fall; but the moral state of a criminal is a very different thing from the judgment upon the criminal. Man's depravity is what he is condemned for, not what he is sentenced to; and these things cannot be synonymous. "Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return," is thus the only possible, as it is the divinely-given, interpretation of the announcement, “in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."
Yet it is quite true, and to be pressed, that this death, coming not only upon the first sinners, but upon all their posterity- and surely by no mere arbitrary decree on God's part- marks the changed relation to Him of the now fallen creature. Everywhere does scripture recognize this, and in God's ordinances for His chosen people of old it comes fully out. Death is associated ever with
uncleanness and defilement. If a man die in a tent, all that come into the tent, and all that is in the tent, are unclean seven days. Every one touching a dead body, a bone, or a grave, is similarly deified. Nor must we look at this as merely symbolic teaching. The psalm of the wilderness is plain enough in its doctrine here: "For all our days are passed away in thy wrath; we spend our years as a tale that is told. The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear so is thy wrath." (Psa. 90:9-119For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told. 10The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. 11Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath. (Psalm 90:9‑11).)
Yes, if God had thus to turn to destruction the being over whom, as first created, He had rejoiced with unfeigned delight, surely the state of the creature it was, that was thus marked out, not a causeless change in God. Death was the stamp upon the creature fallen away from God; and every sign of its approach a standing admonition to him as a being thus under sentence- not final indeed, or there would be no use in the admonition, but still a sentence of condemnation, which cut him off from all pretension to righteousness, or natural claim to favor, and left him but the subject of mercy, and of mercy alone.
True, he may (alas! he does) resist and strive against the sentence graved upon his brow. He may condemn God, that he may himself be righteous. This changes nothing- no, not a hair of his head- from white to black, He may complain of himself as the victim of circumstances, impossible to be ‘clean’ as "born of a woman." He may plead that he did not give himself the evil nature that he carries with him, but conscience will not be satisfied with this. It will not excuse actual transgressions by any plea as to a fallen nature. We feel and know, every one of us, that we ought nevertheless to be masters of ourselves and of our nature, and that our responsibility has been in nowise destroyed or lessened by the fall. So in the day of judgment also God will render to every man, not according to his nature, but his deeds, and upon this ground is the whole world brought in "guilty before God."
Death thus, while introduced by one man's sin, "passes upon all men, for that all have sinned." Were there one man, in the full sense, righteous before God, he might successfully plead exemption from the common doom; but "there is none righteous, no, not one;" and death remains universally a sentence gone forth against man as man, the constant witness against self-righteousness on his part, the constant witness of his need of mercy- absolute, sovereign mercy.
The sorrow of all this is thus God's appeal to man; the trouble to which he is born, as sparks fly upward, becomes the discipline of holy but merciful government. It is of this that God speaks to the man and the woman when He first appears to them in the garden; to the woman, of the sorrow of conception, and subjection to the rule of her husband; to the man, of the cursed ground, and of its thorns and thistles, with the toil of labor, till he return to the dust. With them, let us notice, He makes no new terms- no other covenant is proposed to them. As helpless and hopeless otherwise, they are made simply to listen to what God announces He will do- to the message of a deliverance He will raise up to them in the woman's Seed. It is to faith in One to come they are invited, in the midst of the ruin they have brought upon themselves. No new trial is proposed. They are left under the salutary government of God, to realize what and where they are before Him, and to embrace the mercy wrapped up for them in the bud of that first promise.
For promise indeed it is, while it comes in the shape of threatening to the serpent; a promise, whose broken echoes the traditions of the nations have prolonged, even to our own day. Scripture, which cannot be broken, has alone given us the very words, in their original simplicity and grandeur- the " Let there be light" of a new creative period, exceeding the former as antitype, its typic "shadow." The words are for us to-day, to vindicate their imperishable nature, fresh for our souls as the day when they were uttered: "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel."
It is the character of the new period we are occupied with, and for this have only to do with certain features of this promise. It is plain enough that Another is here given as the Conqueror of the serpent, the enemy of man, but whose "seed" nevertheless (as the near future would painfully reveal) would be found among men. This Conqueror is also the woman's seed, and not the man's. It is no restoration of Adam's forfeited headship, but a new and mysterious beginning, wherein divine power takes up the frailty and mutability of the creature, which has its fullest expression in the woman, to demonstrate divine grace, while not without cost is the victory over the enemy achieved: in bruising the serpent's head the Conqueror has His own heel bruised.
Thus does the divine purpose begin to be disclosed, asking no aid from, and making no condition with, the fallen creature. From the first it is seen that all help is laid upon Another, One in whom, though born of a woman, power from God is found; who suffers, and in suffering overcomes; and manifestly in behalf of those of whom He is the kinsman.
Although, then, the Lord's address to the woman afterward speaks of nothing but pain and humiliation, and to the man himself of toil, and suffering, and death, yet we read immediately upon this that "Adam called his wife's name Eve [or ‘Life’] because she was the mother of all living." Life he apprehends, according to the divine announcement, to be in the woman connected by grace with her victorious Seed; weakness and evil in her thus met and triumphed over, while the headship of the first man is set aside. Adam bows, then, to this sentence, while in faith he receives the mercy, and it is upon this that we find God significantly replacing the inadequate apron of fig-leaves, the first human manufacture, with the coats of skins, the fruit of death itself, now made to minister to their need, and by divine gift, not human acquisition. We may thus very clearly see how God accepts the faith of Adam, and in thus clothing, how the shame of our moral nakedness is put away forever, clothed, in divine mercy, with Christ Himself, as the fruit of His death for us.
How much of this Adam and his wife might apprehend is another question, and it is one impossible, perhaps, for us to answer, Instead of unsafe speculation, therefore, it will be better to pass on to that in which, according to scripture itself, the faith of one of their children is expressed: for "by faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain; and by it he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts," The use of sacrifice thus demands our attention, no solitary example merely of which we have in the case of a few early patriarchs, but a thing which we find, in whatever perverted forms, pervading all religious creeds from the beginning. That- unnatural as it is- it could have rooted itself thus deeply in the minds of men, shows its manifest divine institution, as well as the depth and universality of a common conviction to which it appealed.
Nature could never have dictated it. Cain's way was nature's dictation, but not Abel's. How could it be supposed that, admitting man's sinfulness, and its desert, the death of an innocent victim could atone for the guilty, or that the blood of bulls and goats could put away sin? Looked at as the product of reason merely, such reasoning were utter folly. Connected with the bruised heel of the Seed of the woman, and perhaps with the skins which clothed the first transgressors, a voluntary Sufferer might be seen, whose suffering and death should indeed have efficacy on man's behalf. And thus we gain the assurance of a real view which faith had, and which was offered to faith, of vicarious atonement, as linking itself with the suffering Conqueror of the first prophecy, even as we are assured of Abel that his "gifts" had in some way a value in them which God could accept on his behalf, pronouncing him righteous on their account. With Cain also it would seem as if we must read God's expostulation, "and if thou doest not well, a sin-offering coucheth at the door;" thus prescribing a way in which faith, on the part of a poor sinner, might approach Him with confidence. The way of sacrifice was thus openly proclaimed as the way of acceptance; repentance and faith as what, on man's part, this implied, if really apprehended; no legal conditions, no covenant of works, were in anywise imposed, God starts with that which He has now, and once for all, returned to: His first thought is His last- His own thought, in fact, all through, though man's necessity might require, as we shall see, apparent departure from it. Man's necessity is indeed his perversity, and nothing else, which, refusing in self-confidence God's simple way of grace, compelled Him to allow them the experiment of their own way. But for sixteen centuries, at least, God abides by what He has said at the beginning. Having made known to man His way of acceptance and approach to Him, He waits to see how man's conscience will respond to the sentence upon him- his heart to the grace, which has provided for his need. Alas His next word has to be a threat of near and approaching judgment. "My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh; but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years." F. W. G.
(To be continued, the Lord willing.)