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Chosen no: R-362 b, from: 1882 Year. |
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Wages Of Sin Is Death
How clear and simple is this
statement. How strange it is that so many who profess to receive the Bible as
the Word of God persist in contradicting this positive statement, and affirm
that they believe, and that the Bible teaches, that the wages of sin is everlasting
life in torment.
They realize that this is an awful
thought, and affects the interests of every human being--because all have
sinned and come short. Yet it is what they have been taught from infancy. It is
what their church creed still teaches, and they are taught that it is one of
the first steps to infidelity and perdition to doubt the eternal torment of all
who are not true Christians. They suppose that, since their church creed
teaches it, it must be one of the fundamental teachings of Scripture.
A very large majority of Christians
(We say it with sorrow and shame) have never searched the Scriptures which are
able to make them wise. (2 Tim. 3:15.) They have merely
learned a few texts, which, construed in the light of their church creeds and
instructions, tend to convince them that those creeds are in harmony with the
Bible, and that eternal agony awaits a large majority of our race, foreseen and
foreknown and pre-arranged by our Creator and Father, who, despite this
terrible plan, they must call a God of love--who, despite his malevolence, must
be worshiped and adored as the benevolent, loving One, the Author of every good
and perfect gift. This One they must thus worship and try, or pretend, to love,
lest they be of that eternally tormented multitude. No wonder so many draw near
to God with their lips, while their hearts are far from him. No wonder that
some who come to lose the fear of such torment, become blasphemous infidels,
denying all things sacred, and regarding all religion as fraudulent, when they
lose their dread of this fundamental teaching of the religion of to-day. [R363 : page 5]
The difficulty is that the
traditions of men are given the authority which belongs only to the Word of
God. God says that he gave us our existence, and has the power to deprive us of
it if we do not use it properly; (Ezek. 18:4; Eccl. 9:5,10; Psa. 145:20; and 146:4,) that
the wages which he will pay to sinners will be DEATH--the extinction of life;
and the wages he will pay to those who use life in harmony with his will, will
be, everlasting life--life unceasingly. "The soul (being) that sinneth it
shall die," but none other. (Ezek. 18:20.) Again we
read, "I have set before you life and death"-- blessing and cursing;
"therefore choose life." (Deut. 30:19.) Choose it
by complying with the condition, on which God says we may have it. "I have
no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord God; wherefore turn
ye and live." (Ezek. 18:32.)
Nor can any one find a reasonable
objection to death--EXTINCTION of being--as the punishment for sin. Man (as a
perfect being when created) was capable of appreciating good and evil, and of
developing a character in harmony with the one he chose. God gave him this free
agency, telling him which is His will, and which is best, and what the
consequences of his choice will be to himself. He said to Adam regarding a
forbidden thing, "In the day thou eatest thereof, dying thou shalt
DIE." (Gen. 2:17, margin.) So he tells us that the
wages of sin is death; that we must shun sin if we would avoid its penalty. [R363 : page 6]
All of God's plans and laws are the
very best, and any other course than obedience is sure to bring some evil
consequence. The interests of humanity are so much in common, that evil and its
consequences in one member produces more or less evil and distress to others. It
is a wise and blessed provision God has made, that none will be allowed to live
whose misuse of life would be an injury and source of misery to themselves and
others. And who would not admit that God's dealings with the sinner as thus
explained by His Word, are not only Just, but Merciful?
One cause of much of the confusion
on this subject, arises from the fact that death happens alike to saint and
sinner, hence many conclude--It must be some other kind of death than the death
of the individual as we see it all about us, that the Scriptures refer to as
the wages of sin. And giving their imaginations full play, they conclude that
the DEATH which is the wages of sin, must be a life in torment, or, as some
describe it--a death that never dies. In attempting to explain this, modern
theologians fall into grievous errors, and begin to talk mysteriously about a
number and variety of deaths. They must find as many beings to die as they find
deaths. Hence, they not only tell us that there are many deaths, but that man
is a combination of a number of beings. They explain that what God said to
Adam, and what happened to him when he had sinned, was spiritual death; that
nine hundred and thirty years after was physical death, and that then he was
liable to eternal death--a condition of torture --a death that never dies.
We will first state our objection to
this theological division of death into three, and proceed to explain the
question under discussion from our standpoint. We object first to the division
of a man into three parts-- spiritual man, physical man, and something after
which survives both of the former. The supposition that man could lose
spiritual being arises from a confusion of thought concerning human and
spiritual beings. Scripture teaches us that human beings and spiritual beings
are different orders of beings, there being far more difference between a man
and spiritual beings (angels, etc.), than between a fish and a horse. Adam, as
a human being, was "of the earth, earthy." (1 Cor.
15:47.) And this was God's design in his creation-- viz.: to make a different
order of beings from angels--spiritual beings, which he had already created--an
order of beings adapted to the earth by nature. That God had succeeded in
making man different from angels --spiritual beings--is evident from the fact
that he called him "very good," and gave him dominion over earth and
all earthly things. (Gen. 1:26; Psa. 8:6.)
If, then, Adam was human and not spiritual
by nature, he could not lose spiritual nature or spiritual life; and those who
hold that he did lose it, are unable to point to a single Scripture which so
declares. We suggest to make it forcible to your minds, that it would be as
reasonable and as sensible to talk of a fish dying to a horse's life or nature,
as to say that man died to a nature totally different from his own.
Adam died only as a man. From the
time he sinned and was driven from the Garden of Eden, he gradually began to die
as a man; he began to lose those grand perfections of mind and body which
constituted him the superior and ruler of the lower animals. This dying process
continued by reason of his strength and perfection for a long time--930
years--then the dying process was complete--Adam was dead--lifeless. So far as
he knows or feels he is "as though he had not been" created.
Thus, in him was illustrated God's
word--the wages of sin is death.
But the query comes--would not Adam
have died anyhow, whether he had sinned or not?--if not, how could he ever go
to heaven? We reply, no; if Adam had not sinned, he had not died, but would
have lived on, on earth. God never promised anywhere in his Word to take Adam
to heaven. Adam had no such hope or desire. His desire was in harmony with his
earthly or human nature--to live on the earth and to enjoy it. And this, as we
have shown, was God's will also--to make an earth to be inhabited, and to make
a creature to inhabit and use and rule it in harmony with God's will.
It should be clearly held in mind,
that while God does purpose and is to accomplish the lifting of a "little
flock" of humanity from the human nature to a spiritual--the Divine nature,--as
new creatures--yet this is not a change of God's original plan, when he said let
us make MAN. God's plan relative to having the earth peopled with a race of
perfect MEN, still continues, and will, ere long, be accomplished. It is only
during this Gospel Age since Jesus was (at resurrection) highly exalted to the
DIVINE PLANE of being, that God is calling out from among men, some to become
partakers of the Divine nature, and sharers of glory as spiritual beings--joint
heirs with Jesus Christ their Lord. The condition upon which we may claim those
promises as ours, is, that becoming dead to earthly aims, hopes, motives, and
pleasures, we render the human nature (not its sins) a living sacrifice.
But another inquires--if Adam would
not have died had he not sinned, does it not prove that he possessed
immortality? Not at all, (You will see the distinction between immortality and
everlasting or continuous life by reading "Food," pp. 11 and 134,)
his life would have been continued by allowing him to continue to feed on the
trees of life in the Garden of Eden. There was nourishment in their fruit which
sustained human life. God executed the penalty, death, by separating man from
those nourishing trees; Adam's life forces were exhausted in labor, and the
products of the cursed earth were insufficient to supply the waste. The earth
was cursed for man's sake-- that it might not sustain his life.
But now the previous question. If
physical death is the penalty or wages of sin, why is it that all--saints and
sinners alike--die? We answer in the words of the apostle, death is passed upon
all men in that all have sinned. The reason you die is because you are a
sinner--you were born a sinner. It was not your fault that you were thus born,
but it resulted from a law which God established in the creation of the race to
which we belong. It was a part of his law or plan that this race should
propagate its species. Thus Adam was to multiply and fill the earth with beings
perfect and sinless like himself --in God's sight "very good" men. But
when Adam began to decay and to lose his grand perfections as a part of the
penalty of disobedience --dying--he began to lose the ability to produce
sinless and perfect offspring. A pure, perfect and sinless race could not come
from a sinful and decaying head, and thus when Adam sinned, all his unborn
posterity partook of the evils or wages of sin--death.
At first glance it seems unjust and
harsh that we should be condemned and punished for an act in which individually
we had no share. But when we take God's explanation of it, all is clear and
satisfactory: He condemned all through, or on account of one man's sin, in
order that he might have mercy upon all and redeem all by one sacrifice, which
he had purposed in himself, before the foundation of the world. (Rom. 5:18,19; and 11:32.)
As we have before shown, had each
man been given a trial, such as Adam had, the probabilities are, that more than
half of the billions of his children would have done just as he did. And each
one who did so, would have been condemned to death, and to redeem them all,
would have made necessary the death of just as many substitutes or ransoms;
causing pain and death to as many sinless (willing) redeemers. All of these
redeemers must have first come down to earthly conditions, and become men, that
they might taste death for the sinner and pay his penalty.
But how much wiser and better was
the plan which God took. He condemned all through one representative, that he
might justify through another--a representative redeemer. "Oh, the depths
of the riches, both of the knowledge and wisdom of God."
The reason, then, that all die, is,
that by nature all are sinners. And, though the ransom of believers has been
paid by the death of Jesus, yet those believers are not yet saved from [R364 : page 6] the penalty of sin (death), but are
merely assured by God's promises that their ransom has been paid, and in His
due time, they will be saved out of death by a resurrection.
The advantages which now accrue to
believers are not actual for they share the miseries of the curse with the
world, but they are by faith, "For we are saved by hope" only, and
not in fact. (Rom. 8:23,24.) We have a basis of hope for
future life, in God's promise of a resurrection, which none but believers in those
promises can have. Thus we have hope as an anchor which keeps us from the
drifting doubts of the world. We have more also as believers in the efficacy of
Jesus' ransom. We realize that while before as sinners, God could not recognize
us at all, now as those whose sins have been paid and canceled by Jesus' death,
we can come to God as sinless--"justified from all things." (Acts 13:39.) We can again, as Adam did before sin, call God
Father, and be recognized by him as human sons. (Luke 3:38.)
But, as we have seen, the penalty of
sin--death--is allowed to continue until the full close of this Gospel or
Sacrificing Age. During this age so many of the believers as desire may join
themselves to Christ in sacrificing their humanity, and become thereby sharers
with him of Divinity. When this work shall be accomplished --which pays in full
the ransom price of the world--then comes the time for SALVATION in the actual
sense. The church--the new creatures-- will be the first to be saved from death.
Theirs is called the first (chief) resurrection, because they are raised to the
divine--spiritual plane. Blessed and holy are all they that have part in the
first (chief) resurrection. This first (chief resurrection) began with our
head, Jesus, and will be completed in raising to the same condition the church,
which is his body. As Paul aimed, so we also aim to have a part in that chief
resurrection, for only the "little flock" --his body--are of it. (Phil. 3:8-11.)
Then will follow the actual
SALVATION of the world from death, by a resurrection. (See article "Resurrection.")
So we see that death is not complex but a simple thing. The man died, and God's
plan is to save him from death by paying his ransom, and then giving him back
his life, in hope, that being better able to appreciate its value, he will
"choose life and live" in harmony with God's laws.
At some future time we will answer and explain the
various passages supposed to conflict with the above explanation of sin's
wages.
W.T. R-362 b : page 5 –
1882 r.