ByGrace,
I'm entering this discussion very late. I have not read all the responses. Some of my thought may have been covered already. I apologise if that is so.
What did God say would happen if Adam & Eve ate from the trees of the knowledge of good and evil?
'16 And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die' (Gen 2:16-17 NIV).
Did the man and woman die physically when they ate from those trees? Not according to the Gen 2-3 record! They eventually died physically. Adam lived to 930 years (Gen 5:5), but no age is given in the Bible for Eve's physical death.
So what kind of 'death' was it that Adam & Eve experienced on the day they ate?
Hebrew expositor, H C Leupold, wrote of Gen 2:17:
For the thought actually to be expressed is the instantaneous occurrence of the penalty threatened, which is also again expressed in part by the imperfect with absolute infinitive, "dying thou shalt die" = "certainly die." This at once raises the question, "Why was this penalty not carried out as threatened?" We answer: "It was; if the Biblical concept of dying is kept in mind, as it unfolds itself ever more clearly from age to age." Dying is separation from God. That separation occurred the very moment, when man by his disobedience broke the bond of love. If physical death ultimately closes the experience, that is not the most serious aspect of the whole affair. The more serious is the inner spiritual separation. Oehler (T A T p. 254) rightly maintains: "For a fact, after the commission of sin man at once stepped upon the road of death." The contention that the Old Testament does not know spiritual death, because it does not happen to use that very expression, is a rationalizing and shallow one, which misconstrues the whole tenor of the Old Testament. The common claim raised in this connection, e. g. by Skinner: "God, having regard to the circumstances of the temptation, changed His purpose and modified the penalty," makes of God a mutable being, who, like a rash parent, first speaks severe threats, then sees Himself compelled by developments to modify His purpose. The 1.129 explanation, "He shall be mortal," is based on the erroneous translation of the Septuagint.
Before leaving this verse it is a good thing to observe how definitely the account teaches that the first man was gifted with freedom of will. The moral sense must not first develop later; it is a part of the original heritage of man. It has been pointed out that in records such as these the Old Testament "veritably reechoes with imperatives," (Koenig, T A T p. 233). A moral being standing on a very high plane of perfection at the time of his creation ― such is the man of the creation account of Genesis (
Leupold, Exposition of Genesis, 2:17).
So what did spiritual death or separation from God mean in the Genesis account and the OT? Did God need to write about 'eternal torment' in Gen 2-3 (your concern) if the theology of eternal torment was covered in 'separation from God'?
This is how Isaiah described the situation for rebel unbelievers:
But rebels and sinners will both be broken,
and those who forsake the Lord will perish....
30 You will be like an oak with fading leaves,
like a garden without water.
31 The mighty man will become tinder
and his work a spark;
both will burn together,
with no one to quench the fire (Isa 1:28, 30-31 NIV).
I find it to be dangerous to build one's theology of life after death in the Old Testament, on the first few chapters of the Bible.
I have just concluded weeks of study with a seniors' group on life-after-death in the OT. An examination of the Scriptures did not conclude that eternal torment or torment in Sheol was not included in OT revelation.
However, we need to remember that God revealed his purposes and plan through progressive revelation and not in one dollop in the OT.
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Oz