When God created man and gave him a paradise in which to live, God also gave him a free will and a constant choice to make. God allowed man to eat of every tree in the garden, including the tree of life, but forbade man from eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God told man that he would die in the very day that he ate of the forbidden fruit. Genesis 2:17. By God's use of the word "die," He had to have meant separation from fellowship with God which Adam and Eve had enjoyed every day. Genesis 3:8. God could not have meant physical death because Adam and Eve did not die that day, but God did banish them from paradise and daily fellowship with Him on that very day. Genesis 3:23-24. This meant Adam and Eve died a spiritual death since in their souls and spirits they no longer had any consciousness of their need for God. They no longer fully depended on God to sustain their lives, but were forced to labor in the field and in childbirth to sustain human life.
Adam did not suffer a physical death until over 900 years later. Many suppose that God created mankind to live in paradise on earth forever, but the Bible does not state this. If God had created man to live forever in paradise, then for what purpose did He create the tree of life? If man already had immortal life, then the tree of life would have served no purpose. The purpose of the tree of life had to have been the opposite of the purpose of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Since the purpose of the forbidden fruit was to cause spiritual death, then the purpose of the tree of life must have been to impart an eternal spiritual life to man. If man had rejected the forbidden fruit, and had eaten of the tree of life instead, then God would have created an eternal soul and spirit for them similar to the way God creates an eternal soul an spirit for every "born again" believer the moment he believes. If Adam and Eve had eaten of the tree of life first, then they would have lived in the garden for over 900 years. Their physical deaths would have been quite a natural and painless event; their eternal souls and spirits would have returned to God in heaven where God would have clothed them in a new spiritual body that He had already created for them. This event would have been similar to the Rapture of the Church. Such an event did happen to the patriarch Enoch because he "walked with God" which meant he had become a "born again" believer.
In Genesis 1:28, God commanded mankind to "multiply, and replenish the earth." The word "replenish" means to fill again something which has been depleted. God had commanded man to replace the physical lives of those who would die a natural physical death. Physical death never means an eternal separation from God. Physical death simply means that a person's body will return to the dirt from which God created him, as God told Adam in Genesis 3:19. Physical death actually symbolizes God's recreative powers. Man returns to dirt which feeds plant life, which in turn, renews the physical lives of new people. God enjoys breaking down existing systems into their constituent elements in order to recreate new, individual systems. This fact accounts for all the diversity of life on the earth. Every human, every animal, and every plant are not like any other on earth. Even snowflakes melt and are replaced by snowflakes that are not like any other that have ever been created.
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