The Seed of the Woman: Chapter 7
Genesis 2:17 tells us that the effect of eating the forbidden fruit was to begin immediately: "in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Since Adam did not return to the dust until centuries later, it has sometimes been held that the whole import of this passage is spiritual not physical: that it was a spiritual death that occurred that very day, and that the Tree of Life was a tree for the healing of a spiritual disease rather than a physical one. But the implications are clear. It was a physical disease with fatal consequences that man had incurred from the forbidden fruit which the Tree of Life could have served to antidote. It is necessary, then, to read the words "in the day that..." in some less literal sense. And here we have an interesting parallel in 1 Kings 2:36-46.
On this occasion Solomon had condemned Shimei to permanent confinement in Jerusalem for the rest of his life. Solomon's words in verse 37 are: "For it shall be, that on the day thou goest out (of the city)...thou shalt know for certain that thou shalt surely die." We are told that Shimei stayed in Jerusalem according to the King's command for some three years, until certain of his servants ran away. Without stopping to think about the consequences, Shimei saddled his ass and went right out after them. After Shimei had returned to the city, Solomon learned what he had done and sent his official executioner to put him to death. The meaning of Solomon's warning was probably quite clear to Shimei: he understood that the day he disobeyed, from that time he was a doomed man. But after three years, living freely within the confines of Jerusalem, he evidently forgot all about the injunction of Solomon - and paid the penalty.
Now Augustine in his treatise on Merits and Forgiveness (Bk. 1.21) illustrates how the threat of Genesis 2:17 can be viewed as certain rather than immediate:
By a certain disease which was conceived in men from a suddenly infected and pestillential corruption, it was brought about that they lost that stability of life in which they were created, and by reason of the changes which they experienced during the stages of life the disease issued at last in death. However, many were the years they lived in their subsequent life, yet they began to die in the day when they received the law of death, because they kept verging towards old age.
Keil and Delitzsch, in their commentary on Genesis, consider briefly not only the evil of death, the prospect of which was to plague man throughout his life, but also the merciful aspect of its delayed action. *
This was the fulfillment of the threat "in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die," which began to take effect immediately after the breach of the divine command; for not only did man then become mortal, but he also actually came under the power of death, received into his nature (i.e., body) the germ of death [the mortogenic factor, ACC], the maturity of which produced its eventual dissolution into dust. The reason why the life of the man did not come to an end immediately after the eating of the fruit...was that the long-suffering of God afforded space for repentance and so controlled and ordered the sin of men and the penalty of sin as to render them subservient to the accomplishment of his original purpose and the glorification of his name.
* Keil, C. F. and F. Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary On the Old Testament, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, reprint, n.d., Vol. 1, The Pentateuch, p. 105.
The poison must be slow acting or the whole of God's purposes would have been rendered futile, since humanity would have perished at once. Thus Adam and his immediate descendants must be allowed to survive for a sufficient length of time to allow the establishment of the human race. But once established, thereafter longevity could be reduced for safety's sake lest the race once again destroy itself by its very potential for wicked invention which this factor of long life made so probable.
God therefore appointed that man should neither die at once, nor enjoy undue longevity. Death was designed as a process, not an event. Moreover, if Adam and Eve had died at once before guaranteeing the continuance of the race, the whole creation would have been pointless. For the universe finds its meaning only in so far as the love of God has been effectively displayed in redemption.
Augustine had a tremendous influence by his writings on the subsequent development of Roman Catholic theology. The Roman Catholic view on this subject in the earlier centuries has been set forth by a Jesuit writer, Professor T. B. Chetwood, as follows: *
The immortality of Adam is explicitly defined by the Church. The Sixteenth Council of Carthage (418 A.D.), the decrees of which were approved by Pope Zozimus, teaches: "If anyone shall say that Adam was created mortal so that he would have died in the body whether he had sinned or not, let him be anathema." And the same doctrine is confirmed by the decrees of Orange and Trent.
The Scriptures, both the Old and the New Testament, have very many passages which speak of the "death" which came to us from Adam but there are none plainer than the Book of Genesis which gives the words of God to the pair in the garden: "But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat. For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death."
* Chetwood, T. B.. God and Creation, N.Y., Benzinger Bros., 1928, p. 145 ff.
Chetwood elaborated the argument first of all by pointing out that by his disobedience Adam did not die immediately but only after the passage of centuries. By which he concluded that God meant: "You will at once come under sentence of death, i.e., from that very day." And then, secondly, he observed that unless Adam really possessed immortality before he disobeyed, it would have been no punishment whatever to forfeit it afterwards. As Chetwood said, "He could not, clearly, be deprived for a punishment of something which he did not possess." Chetwood then remarks that the Fathers were unanimous in so understanding this passage and in their teaching of the original immortality of Adam and Eve.
Although Luther was diametrically opposed to Roman Catholic teaching on almost every point of importance, on this issue he found himself in agreement. In his Lectures on Genesis, he wrote: *
If God had permitted Adam to eat of the tree of life, Adam would have overcome death by means of this food, since he had become subject to death after he had eaten of the tree of death...
I believe that if Adam had been permitted to go to the tree of life, he would have been restored to the life he had lost, so that thereafter he would not have died....
* See Luther's Works: Lectures on Genesis Chapters 1-5, ed. J. Pelikan, St. Louis, Concordia, 1958, Vol. 1, p. 116. See also reference #114 for further excerpts from Luther.
In his commentary on Psalm 90 Luther deals at some length with the tragedy of death which for man he calls "a genuine disaster." It seems that in most evangelical circles today the fact has been almost entirely overlooked. The Theory of Evolution has made its case so forcefully that many have abandoned their former position and come to accept the animal origin of man's body, demanding only that his soul be a special creation.
But this is to surrender an essential aspect of man's uniqueness, namely, that he was created immortal. If this is true, and the Word of God most assuredly proclaims it in no uncertain terms, then man cannot have received his body by evolutionary descent because the primate stock from which it is proposed to derive him consists of a line of animals for whom old age and death seem clearly to be natural and programmed. For man death is neither natural nor is it programmed - save as a penalty.
Luther wrote in his commentary: *
This Psalm reveals in striking fashion that the death of man is in countless ways a far greater calamity than the death of other living beings. Although horses, cows, and all animals die, they do not die because God is angry at them. On the contrary, for them death is, as it were, a sort of temporal casualty, ordained indeed by God but not regarded by Him as punishment. Animals die because for some other reason it seemed good to God that they should die.
But the death of human beings is a genuine disaster. Man's death is in itself truly an infinite and eternal wrath. The reason is that man is a being created for this purpose: to live forever in obedience to the Word of God and to be like God. He was not created for death. In his case death was ordained as a punishment of sin; for God said to Adam: "In the day that you eat of this tree, you shall die" (Gen. 2:17).
The death of human beings is, therefore, not like the death of animals. These die because of a law of nature. Nor is man's death an event which occurs accidentally or has merely an aspect of temporality. On the contrary, man's death, if I may so speak, was threatened by God and is caused by an incensed and estranged God. If Adam had not eaten of the forbidden tree, he would have remained immortal. But because he sinned through disobedience, he succumbs to death like the animals which are subject to him. Originally death was not part of his nature. He dies because he provokes God's wrath. Death is, in his case, the inevitable and deserved consequence of his sin and disobedience.
Man's death is truly an event sadder and more serious than the slaughter of a cow. This becomes most evident when one takes into account the propagation of evil. Moses says: "Thou causest men to die." "Men" refers to the entire human race. Moses includes in this one word "men" all the offspring of our first parents. Therefore that which was created for life is now destined for death. This is the result of God's wrath. So the entire human race plunged from immortality into eternal death.
* Luther's Works: Selected Psalms II, ed. J. Pelican, St. Louis, Concordia, 1965, Vol. 13, p. 94, 95, 96.
Such is certainly the Scriptural view of human mortality: it is a penalty, and a tragedy. In his Biblical Theology Geerhardus Vos nicely states the position of Adam before and after the Fall, as well as the position of man redeemed yet still destined to die, as follows: *
Immortality is used in theological terminology for that state of man in which he has nothing in him which would cause death. It is quite possible that at the same time an abstract contingency of death may overhang man, i.e., the bare possibility may exist of death in some way, for some cause, invading him, but he has nothing of it within him. It is as if we should say of somebody that he is liable to the invasion of some disease, but we should not on that account declare him to have the disease.
In this sense it can appropriately be said that man as created was "immortal," but not that after the fall he was so, for through the act of sinning the principle of death entered into him; whereas before he was only liable to die under certain circumstances, he now inevitably had to die. His immortality in (the sense of his soul) had been lost. Again immortality can designate, in eschatalogical language, that state of man in which he has been made immune to death, because immune to sin. Man was not in virtue of creation, immortal in this highest sense: this is a result of redemption accompanied by eschatalogical treatment...
(Man) was (initially) immortal and mortal both, according to the definition employed: mortal as not yet lifted above the contingency of death, but non-mortal as not carrying death as a disease within himself. Here, therefore, immortality and mortality coexisted. In the next stage (fallen) he is in no sense anything else but mortal: he must die, death works in him.
In the next stage the word mortal has only a qualified application to the regenerate man, namely, in so far as during his earthly state death still exists and works in his body, whilst from the centre of his renewed spirit it has been in principle excluded, and supplanted by an immortal life, which is bound in the end to overcome and extrude death.
* Vos, Geerhardus, Biblical Theology, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1975, p. 38, 39.
The Tree of Knowledge might well have been called the "tree of death," for such it turned out to be. But the Tree of Life seems clearly to have been potentially a tree of health, this character being either in its leaves (Rev. 22:2) or perhaps in its fruit. The circumstances surrounding the forceful exclusion of Adam and Eve from access to it (Gen. 3:24) once death had been introduced into their bodies, reinforces the view that this Tree of Life was not for spiritual but for physical well-being. For it seems highly unlikely that if this tree had the power of spiritual healing, Adam and Eve would have been so rigidly excluded from further access to it, just when they most needed it.
The probability is rather that the Tree of Life supplied in their diet, while they were yet unfallen and immortal, that which would preserve them in perfect health indefinitely. But once they had disobeyed and destroyed by a single act of disobedience both their spiritual vitality as well as their physical immortality, the healing of the body could only have consigned them to an unending existence with a fallen nature. To continue for ever without the amendment of an evil spirit was a fate too awful to contemplate. Keil and Delitzsch put the matter thus: *
Immortality in a state of sin is not the zoe aionois (eternal life) which God designed for man, but endless misery which the Scriptures call "the second death" (Rev. 2:11; 20:6, 14; 21:8). The expulsion from paradise, therefore, was a punishment inflicted for man's good, intended, while exposing him to temporal death, to preserve him from eternal death.
* Keil, C. F. and F. Delitzisch, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, n.d., Vol. 1, The Pentateuch, p. 107. Erich Sauer rightly remarked: "The sinner's bodily deathlessness would be eternal death to his soul, and Paradise would have become a Hell." [The Dawn of World Redemption. Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1953, p. 61]
Thus God thrust them out of the Garden and stationed at the entrance an angel with a sword that turned every way (i.e., was inescapable) specifically to keep the way to the Tree of Life. What had once been a guarantee of blessing had now become a potential hazard of immeasurable consequence.
The day that Adam and Eve disobeyed and ate of the fruit of the forbidden tree, they destroyed their unique constitution. They surrendered a potential physical immortality, and by a process of inheritance (to be considered later in this volume) they involved all their descendants (save One) in the same unnatural and unhappy state. As Paul says: "By one man sin entered into the world and death by sin; and thus death passed upon all men." *
* For an extended note on Romans 5:12, see reference #115.
As A. H. Strong notes:
"The death spoken of (in Rom. 5:12) is, as the whole context shows, mainly though not exclusively physical. It has passed upon all even upon those who have as yet committed no conscious and personal transgression whereby to explain its infliction (i.e., infants)." *
* Strong, Augustus H., Systematic Theology, Valley Forge, Pa., Judson Press, 1974 reprint, p.622.
The fatal poisoning which had become the penalty of disobedience in the first pair was passed on and became the root cause of disobedience in all their descendants save One. This has been stated succinctly: "In Adam a person made human nature sinful: in his posterity, nature made persons sinful." *
* Jones, I. C., Primeval Revelation: Studies in Genesis I VIII London, Hodder & Stoughton, 2nd ed., 1897, p. 256.
Luther spoke at some length on this matter. He said: *
If Eve had not sinned, (man) would nevertheless have eaten, drunk, slept, etc., but all this without any sin and disorder. Such a life would have continued as long as it pleased God, let us say for two or three thousand years. Then we would have been changed in a moment without passing through death; and, completely sanctified, we would have entered into an eternal life free from trouble; such a life as, indeed, we are even now expecting. But because sin has stolen into the world through the work of the devil and the consent of man, the judgment has been passed from the beginning and remains in force throughout this life: "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." This is the reason why we must die.
* What Luther Says, an anthology complied by E. M. Plass, St. Louis, Concordia, 1959, Vol. VI, entry no. 4153.
In another place Luther wrote: *
Had man not fallen into sin, he would, of course, also have eaten and drunk. The change of his food by the process of digestion would have taken place in his body, but it would not have been so foul as it is now. This tree of life would have kept him in perpetual youth; nor would any man have ever felt the inconvenience of old age. His brow would not have been furrowed; nor would his foot or his hand or any other part of his body have become increasingly weak and languid. Through the beneficent effect of the fruit of this tree man's powers for procreation and all sorts of labour would have remained perfect until he would finally have been translated from this corporeal or natural life to the spiritual life.
* Luther: ibid., entry no. 4135.
Paul Althaus in discussing Luther's views on the entrance of physical death, observed that his theology of death is expressed particularly clearly in his powerful interpretation of Psalm 90. *
Luther held that people usually understand death as a natural event, as a particular example of the transitoriness of all creatures; they therefore recommend that we should not take it too seriously...Holy Scripture, however, opens our eyes to what really happens when we die. Dying is more than a biological phenomenon. It is a human reality; and this distinguishes it from the ending of plant and animal life. Plants and animals do not come to an end because of God's wrath, but according to a "natural order" established by God. As Luther says, "The death of a man is an infinite and eternal misery and wrath." For man is a creature created in the image of God, to live eternally and immortally in relationship to God and not to die. His death is not the result of a natural process created by God. Rather death is "laid upon him and executed on him through God's wrath." This is why men draw back in terror in the face of death and experience horror such as no other living being experiences. We must understand our mortal fate theologically (i.e., not merely biologically) within the relationship between God and man; for this relationship is the decisive and all embracing destiny of man.
* Althaus, Paul, The Theology of Martin Luther, tr. R. C. Schultz, Phil., Fortress Press, 1975, p. 405 f.
W. G. T. Shedd points out that physical death, as a mortal principle, befell Adam immediately, though he did not actually die on the day he sinned. *
When a man is smitten with a mortal disease he is a dead man, though he may live for months. Adam's body became a mortal body....
The difference between the immortal body of holy Adam and the mortal body of fallen Adam is, that prior to the fall the human body was not liable to death from internal causes, but only from external. It had no latent diseases, and no seeds of death in it...It could however be put to death. If it were deprived of food or air, it would die.
* Shedd, W. G. T., Dogmatic Theology, Grand Rapids, Zondervan reprint, 1969, Vol. U, p. 159.
In speaking of the meaning of the phrase "in the day that thou eatest thereof...," Stephen Charnock (1628-1680), a Puritan scholar and Presbyterian minister in London wrote: "It is to be understood, not of an actual death of the body (that day) but the deserving, and the necessity, of death." *
* Charnock: quoted by W. G. T. Shedd, ibid., Vol. 111, p. 336.
That death for man was something far more serious than death for any animal below him is certainly implied by much that is revealed in Scripture about the constitution of man as a spirit/body entity who was made in the image of God and for God's pleasure. As James Denny put it: "Body and soul exist only in and for each other; the body is not a body, but the body of the soul; the soul is not a soul, but the soul of the body; in our consciousness of self the two are one...Man is a unity, not a tying together of separate parts or even separate faculties, and the Bible deals with him as such." *
* Denny, James, Studies in Theology. Grand Rapids, Baker reprint, 1967, p. 76.
In a similar vein, James Orr wrote: *
Man is not a pure spirit like the angels, but an incorporated spirit. Death therefore is not the same thing to him as it is to the lower animals unless, indeed, we deny to him, as we do to them, immortality.
Neither, as I said, is the body to be regarded in his case, as the old philosophers thought of it, as a material prison house, from which he should be glad to escape in death. It is part of himself: an integral part of his total personality, and body and soul in separation are neither of them complete man.
It follows, if we deal firmly with this conception of man, that death is to him not a natural process but something altogether Un-natural - the violent separation of two parts of his being which God never meant to be separated; a rupture, a rending asunder, a mutilation of his personality.
*Orr, James, God's Image in Adam, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans reprint, 1948, p. 251, 252.
This is reflected in Paul's hope, a hope shared equally by every child of God, expressed so clearly in 2 Corinthians 5:1-5, in which he assures us of a new house, a new tabernacle, awaiting us for embodiment after resurrection. We long for this, not because we long for death which must first intervene and might leave us "unclothed" (a kind of naked soul), but because we long to be "re-clothed" with an immortal body, one in which death is swallowed up by life. And Paul says: "He that wrought us for this very thing is God." It was never God's intention to turn us into anything else than a body/spirit reality.
This body is essential to our being. And it is a body deliberately designed with enormous potentialities - especially to make the Incarnation of God in Christ possible. This house, this body that is the house of man's spirit, is not just a complex electrochemical machine. It was designed from the very first for a special purpose. It was so built that it would properly meet the requirements that God had in mind both for man and for Himself in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. In due course, it was to make it possible for God to objectify Himself, perfectly expressed in terms of human personality as a Man. And then, as a Man, to sacrifice his life vicariously for any man who would believe and appropriate that sacrifice as a full, perfect, and sufficient one. In the face of the divinely appointed moral law, man must have this "satisfaction" against his own sinfulness, failure, and self-will. God made man's body such that He Himself could assume it for a season as his own proper House without doing any violence to his own Person. And then in the Person of his Son, Jesus Christ, He could die in it that we, who are dying in it even as we live, might be redeemed to live again and for ever in a new and even more glorious resurrected "house" throughout eternity. Thus shall we exhibit the grace and love of our Saviour God as a matter of personal experience. No mere animal body could have sufficed for such a tremendous purpose.
Now this immortality, surrendered by the first man named Adam because of disobedience to the will of God, was in due time to be sacrificed by another man named Adam, Jesus Christ, (1 Cor. 15:45) in obedience to God's will. The conditions surrounding its forfeiture have already been examined in some detail: it remains now to examine some of the important circumstances under which the second Adam was able to sacrifice his immortality as an entirely free act of his own will without any other internal or external compulsion. Both these two Adams are declared to have been immortals, the first implicitly by the wording of Genesis 2:17 and 3:22, and the last explicitly by the wording of Hebrews 7:16 which reads "made after the power of an endless life." Of both, Augustine's words are true: it was not impossible for either of them to die, but it was possible for neither of them to have done so.
In the New Testament, there is presented to us a portrait of perfect manhood, such a perfection as any one of Adam's descendants might have achieved had the Fall not occurred. Jesus Christ grew from birth to manhood, flawlessly. Whereas the first Adam turned innocence into unrighteousness, the "last Adam," * the last truly human being to possess immortality, turned the innocence of childhood into moral perfection.
* Anselm of Laon observed that Christ is the "Last Adam" because He is never to be succeeded by another as federal head of the human race. (A Scholastic Miscellany, ed., E. L. Fanweather, Phil., Westminster Press, 1956, Vol. x, p. 273)
And when He had thus been "made perfect," that is to say, when He had reached full and perfect maturity by the things which He experienced in the process of reaching manhood (Heb. 5:8,9), He had arrived at the point which the first Adam and all his descendants might have come to had there been no Fall. Being thus ready, He might have been translated directly into a higher state of human existence without passing through death. *
* Two other men, Enoch and Elijah, seem to have experienced such a translation: but see on this some further discussion at reference #116.
I believe that in the case of the Lord Jesus, Peter and James and John actually witnessed on the Mount of Transfiguration the moment when just such an event might have transpired (Luke 9:27-36). At that time, the Last Adam was transformed and ready to be translated out of this world of time and space into that other world of which this world is merely a vestibule.
This, it would seem, was the prospect God had made possible for unfallen man: to turn innocence into virtue as a response to the daily challenges of having dominion over this world as God's appointee. *
* If man had not fallen, he need not have continued for centuries before translation. He might have matured much more quickly and therefore been translated within only a few centuries or even less. Indeed, the experience of Enoch may be intended to provide us with an illustration of this principle, for he achieved maturity in 365 years only: and this, be it remembered, in a world that had become increasingly wicked, so wicked in fact that within another three generations it was no longer salvageable and had to be destroyed by the Flood.
When character had thus been perfected, then each individual would have arrived at the position that the Lord Jesus had arrived at when He was ready to be translated into heaven. That is to say, if there had been no Fall and no need for redemption, such an experience would have been the common lot of man - not as something to be dreaded and postponed at all costs, but as something to be striven for and longed for throughout the whole of life.
As John Taylor put it: *
In the transfiguration of Jesus we see what could have happened, we see the ultimate perfection that God intends for man. No physical deterioration, no rending of the earthly body from the soul, but metamorphosis as smooth as sunrise into the full grown man.
* Taylor, John, Man in the Midst, London, Highway Press, 1955, p. 51;
I believe we have tended to miss the real significance of what happened on the Mount of Transfiguration. This is partly because of an unfortunate translation of one word in Hebrews 12:2. The Authorized Version, which I find still the most satisfying version of them all, has these words, "Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame..." I imagine that most readers of this verse have assumed that in some way the agony, both spiritual and physical, of the events surrounding the crucifixion were anticipated by the Lord with a strange kind of "joy" because of what He knew that agony would in the end achieve for those He came to save. Perhaps this is true, though I honestly doubt whether it is the truth intended in this passage of Scripture.
Actually, the little word for in the phrase "for the joy that was set before Him" is not strictly correct as we now understand it. It really should have been rendered into modern English as "in place of" or "instead of the joy that was set before Him." Even today we use for in this sense as when we say "I will give you this for that," where our meaning is clearly instead of. Any good Greek lexicon will show at once that this is the meaning of the original, * even though only a few translations have actually observed it. The Williams New Testament has "who, instead of the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross." Smith and Goodspeed have "who, in place of the happiness that belonged to Him, submitted to a cross." There is really little doubt in my mind that these two versions have translated the original correctly.
* For a more extended treatment of this passage in Hebrews 12:2, see reference 117.
So here we have "Adam" once again restored to view, perfectly fulfilling the role which man was intended to fulfil and passing into glory without seeing death. But then a deliberate choice was made by the last Adam in obedience to his Father's will, not to follow through with this immediate and wonderful prospect of joy to which He was now perfectly entitled, but to return to earth and sacrifice immortality, embracing death by a deliberate act of will: and not merely embracing death but embracing a shameful death - death on a cross. There were reasons why this particular form of death was ordained in this case which are profoundly important, but they must be left for consideration until later. Suffice it to say at the moment that no other form of capital punishment known then, or since invented, could have provided the necessary setting for the offering of this unique sacrifice.
I believe we are being told here, in Hebrews 12:2, that when the Lord came back down the Mount with the disciples, He had made a deliberate choice whereby, instead of the joy that might have been his from that moment on, He set his face to go up to Jerusalem, there to suffer a shameful death.
Until the time of this Mount of Transfiguration experience, we are chiefly presented with a demonstration of the potential of human personality as revealed in the Lord Jesus Christ: but from this moment on we see the cost to the last Adam of the first Adam's failure to realize the potential he was originally endowed with.
If Adam and his descendants had realized that potential, I imagine that we would not speak of the dead at all. There would only be those who had "graduated" and those who were still "undergraduates." And there is no need to suppose that there would be any separation between them, any more than there was between the Lord and his disciples after the Resurrection. John Taylor shows how idyllic such a fellowship could be: *
For six weeks of springtime nineteen centuries ago, perfected Man was seen and loved on this same earth upon which the unfallen Adam, the germinal Man, had walked...At will He showed Himself, at will He was unseen. He consorted with his friends, and went for walks, and shared a supper and picnicked by the lake. Nothing could have been homelier, nothing more natural. For it was natural: that is the point.
* Taylor, John, Man in the Midst, London, Highway Press, 1955, p. 54.
In such a world, then, man would have lived without dying. The two worlds, the earthly and the heavenly, would not have been separated by a great gulf fixed. God would have dwelt with men and walked and talked with them daily as He did in the Garden of Eden and as He will yet do, according to Revelation 21:3. In such a world there would have been no parting, and there would have been no last enemy - death - to break the continuity of fellowship with those we love.
In short, death is programmed for animals but is an execution where man is concerned. Death for animals is for the benefit of the animal world. Death for man is a catastrophe for both the world of men and of animals. Indeed, "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now...waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body" (Rom. 8:22,23).
Corrections, May 14, 1997.
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