1.2 Defining Death
What is death? Set against the Tree of Life is the tree of death, which God calls the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And God told Adam that if he ate of that tree, “in dying you shall die.” In other words, death is a process.
Now, when we look at the word “death” throughout the New Testament, we see that it is a word that carries several very different meanings, and the only way to know which meaning is being used is to consider the context. Most of the time, we think of death as the death of the physical body, but death is also the human spirit hardened against God.
Dead Even While Living. Consider this passage from Paul. It is evident that Paul is using the word “dead” to speak of living humans.
And you, being once dead inside of your own sin and disconnection from God, in which you formerly walked according to the world-cosmos of this age, according to the influences of the authority of the air, the spirit now energeoing inside the sons of refusal, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the desires of the flesh… and were by nature children of angry opposition, just as the others (Ephesians 2:1-3).
We want to consider two phrases in these verses, “inside of your own sin and disconnection from God” and “the spirit now energeoing inside the sons of refusal.”
Missing Our Purpose. The Greek word translated “sin” is hamartia, a word that originally meant missing the target in an arrow shooting contest. Hamartia is matched by the Greek word tygxánō, meaning – hitting the target in an arrow shooting contest. Hebrews 7:25 says specifically that Jesus “hits the target” for us, for our sakes.
Let me get right to the point. God created humans for a specific purpose and He fashioned every part of our design to fulfill that purpose. Nonetheless, Adam and Eve were not complete in themselves, for that is an essential part of our design. We are created with what has been called a “vacuum” inside; we must be filled with the knowledge of God, that is, with Life.
A Son of Refusal. If any human refuses the knowledge of God, which for Adam was the opportunity to eat of the Tree of Life, that is, John 14:20, he becomes a “son of refusal.” The problem, as we have seen, is that Life is another Person, the Lord Jesus Christ. - He who possesses the Son possesses the Life. Thus “sin” is failing to come to the Father through Jesus, that is, refusing to know God.
Except – there is no such thing as a “vacuum” with humans. To refuse the knowledge of God is to embrace the knowing of everything not true. Paul says specifically, “the spirit now energeoing inside of” – humans.
Connecting with Nonsense. We are made to contain another Person inside ourselves, inside our hearts – Christ lives inside of your heart through faith, that is, through your permission.
Yet those who refuse Christ, that is, who refuse to be a normal human as God designed us, are then filled with and energeoed by other spirits, that is, demons. To refuse a connection with God through Jesus is to embrace a connection with nonsense through demons. It’s all of one or all of the other. Yet the nonsense humans embrace is a specific and structured LIE, defined by two things, first by the words of the serpent to Eve and Adam, and second by God’s meaning of the tree of “the knowledge of good and evil.”
Sustaining All. Consider the following diagram in light of the ABSOLUTE reality that all things are sustained every moment by the good-speaking of Jesus.
Untrue Words and Feelings. The person who has his back turned against Jesus, that is, against the knowledge of God and against Life, continues to be sustained by Jesus’ words of goodness and power, regardless.
Yet Paul says that such a one is being “energeoed” by demons. What does that mean? God did not design us to be filled with angels, but to be filled with Himself through the Person of Jesus. Therefore, a fallen angel who is “energeoing” inside of a human can be doing nothing more than offering a continual stream of words and feelings that are all NOT true. Let’s create a modern picture to get a sense of what Paul is describing.
Willfully Deaf and Blind. Consider a man sitting in his easy chair. His house is burned down around him, his children are starving, his wife is weeping. Nonetheless, the man has a meta-reality headset covering his eyes and ears. He is sitting there in the “experience” of made-up stuff, even while refusing the reality all around him.
Now let’s switch that picture and consider the middle guy in our diagram, the one who is weeping. Here is a believer in Jesus sitting in the midst of all the goodness of God, being filled with the joy of Jesus, yet he refuses to know God through Jesus, but rather, with his unnecessary meta-headset on, he imagines that he lives in a reality that consists of a great struggle with “sin,” a great fight between good and evil.
The Saddest of All. This believer hears words of cursing, of self-exaltation and self-abasement, and he feels great feelings of “God far away.” He weeps over his ‘sins,’ even while refusing to know Jesus as his all-Salvation. He imagines that his false story and his human ‘feelings’ are more true than anything God says in the gospel. It’s all complete nonsense, yet he is actually living inside of God! Of truth, this person should be weeping, for such a one is the saddest of all – unless he would just turn to Jesus inside of him.
And so we understand that when Paul says “dead” in Ephesians 2, he means “living in a false story separate from Christ,” or, to reference Galatians 2:20, living by “I – not Christ” rather than by “Christ – not I, yet I live, for Christ is my only Life.”
From Refusal to Nonsense. Let’s take our definition of death – not knowing God – through the various aspects of death throughout the Bible.
After God said, “In dying you shall die,” Adam experienced three levels or arenas of death. First, Adam’s spirit went dark and he could no longer know God nor perceive the realms of the heavens all around. Because his fallen and now unregenerate spirit, which Paul called “the old man,” now blocked all knowledge of God, Adam and his descendants were free to spin every nonsensical story of self they wished. This false story, then, is the second experience of death for Adam, lasting through all his days.
Physical Death. Finally Adam’s physical body died after more than nine hundred years. This is the most common meaning of “death.” But what really happened?
The human body has two aspects to it, the physical and the spiritual. The physical is made from the dirt of the earth and the spiritual is part of the fabric of heaven, breathed into us by God. Humans are created to be part of and to live in all the heavens and all the earth at the same time. This is normal, and every human has some knowledge of heaven, otherwise they would not exist. No living thing on earth can be living except it be imbued with the fabric of heaven. As James said, “The body without the spirit is dead.”
Death Is Evil. Adam’s spirit, though unregenerate, still gave life to Adam’s physical body, though it was a limited and slowly dying level of life. Death came to Adam, then, when his spirit was ripped apart from his body, and his body no longer held the essence of life, thus it disintegrated. Death is the divorce of earth from heaven, the splitting apart of spirit and physic. Death is evil. This death is the ultimate consequence of not knowing God.
It is not our purpose here to go any further with physical death, for to do so would be partly speculation and would not serve our determination to eat of life.
Through Hope. The first experience of death and the third experience of death both happen in a moment, but the middle part of death, which Paul references in Ephesians 2, continues from the first moment to the last. Why? Paul is very clear on why.
Elsewhere he calls this same “being dead while living” as “the bondage of corruption” or “the slavery of decay.” – Indeed, the creation was made subject to vanity and purposelessness, not willingly, but through hope, that creation itself will be made free from the slavery of decay into the freedom and liberty of the glory of the children birthed out from God (Romans 8:20).
A Gospel of Life. God’s hope is that Jesus might enter into the darkness of souls ignorant of God and there begin to speak a story of Life and Liberty.
Now, Jesus is always speaking them in goodness, regardless. The difference between life and death, then, is Jesus speaking inside of me my true story, personal as me. Life for me is that I would know God my Father personally, through knowing Jesus Sent into me. This is the only salvation from death, that is, from not knowing God.
The astonishing thing is that this is the only gospel presented in the Bible, a gospel of LIFE, taking us immediately into all that is God.