The Results of the Fall
All humans tend to possess an innate philosophy of life. Many humans adhere to a materialistic philosophy in that they believe only in physical reality and reject any form of spiritual reality. Jesus shed His blood and water on the cross to provide an eternal, spiritual life for all humans who will believe in Him while still alive in the flesh. All of the Old Testament blood sacrifices of animals symbolized this salvation by grace that Christ accomplished through His death, burial, and resurrection. For this reason in Genesis 9:4, God prohibited the eating of the blood of slain animals because that would amount to a misuse of the symbolism of the blood sacrifice. Eating is for the purpose of keeping the physical body alive. The blood sacrifice symbolized keeping the soul and spirit alive, not the physical body.
The physical bodies of humans cannot last forever. All physical bodies must die and return to the elements which formed them. This fact happens to be God's general rule for all humans without exception. Genesis 3:9. Enoch and Elijah were bodily translated to heaven, and they may have lived there for a very long time, but eventually they had to physically die. In the Rapture of the Church, all of the saints still alive in the flesh must leave their mortal bodies behind and receive new, spiritual bodies that Christ will bring with Him from heaven. I Corinthians 15:51-53; II Corinthians 5:1-4. The physical bodies and fleshly nature of all humans are filled with sin and corruption, and God always completely eliminates all unrepentant sins and evil before He recreates any human. I Corinthians 15:50. At the Rapture of the Church, all of the alive saints will put off their mortal bodies and put on their spiritual bodies similar to a person taking off old clothes and putting on new ones. I Corinthians 15:53. Christ did change His own physical body to a spiritual body when He resurrected, but His body was sinless.
Before Adam and Eve sinned, they were neither mortal nor immortal. They existed in a neutral position. Whether they became mortal or immortal depended on whether they ate first of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or of the tree of life. They sinned and spiritually died that same day. Genesis 2:17. The fact that they became ashamed and made clothes of fig leaves to try to hide from God symbolized their spiritual deaths. They had become alienated from daily fellowship with God. But God came to them with His plan to restore that fellowship through a future Savior who would eliminate their sins and spiritual deaths. Genesis 3:15.
God punished Adam and Eve, and all future humans, with a temporary suffering for sins in lives of hard labor and pain. But God Himself would save them from eternal suffering which the Devil desired to impose upon them. God would also punish all future humans who rejected salvation by His grace by consigning their living souls and spirits to one of the regions of death following their physical deaths. Hebrews 9:27. But after their temporary suffering, Christ will cleanse all these living souls and spirits of their sins and evil with His consuming fire and resurrect them to new, recreated lives on His recreated earth. I Corinthians 3:11-14; Revelation 5:11-14; Revelation 20:5.
God did not punish humans with physical death. God simply informed humans that after lives of suffering for their sins, they would physically die and return to the elements from which they had been formed. Genesis 3:19. The dead bodies of humans are completely nonconscious. Therefore, physical death cannot be a punishment for sins.
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