Hey Mike,

I was rereading an exchange between you and another gentleman.  This comment has me wondering: am I reading this wrong, blind or confused.  I’ve copied and pasted what has confused me below:

When God said “Dying you shall die, He was telling us that Adam began dying spiritually when he ate of the tree. Before that happened, Adam simply had not yet done the inevitable, that which flesh and blood is created as, to sin.

Is this saying that Adam had not yet sinned?  Hadn’t Eve lusted after the tree before eating of it?

1Jn 2:16 KJVR For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.

Could you explain when you get time?

Love ya,

brother J____

Good morning J____,

I have come to see that when a word in scripture can be understood in two different ways, then it should be understood both ways.

Adam was already dying physically by virtue of being “marred in the Potter’s hand, shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin… made of the dust of the ground… naked and not ashamed.” Adam was all of these corruptible dying things before he ever so much as touched the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He was flesh from the beginning, and this is what flesh is:

1Co 15:50  Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.

My point is that we are dying physically by virtue of being born of the flesh, but we are not dying spiritually until we disobey God and at that point we are born “of our father the devil.” At that point we must be spiritually born again.

When we read Christ’s conversation with Nicodemus, and we, like Nicodemus, think that Christ is talking about physical birth as our first birth, then we, like Nicodemus and all of orthodox Christianity, are guilty of comparing spiritual things with physical things and thinking that we are really comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

When we do that, we miss the point that Christ was making with Nicodemus. Christ knew full well that neither Nicodemus nor His own disciples, at that point, understood what He was saying, but He said it anyway, knowing that the understanding of His words would be given to them all at a later date.

What Christ was telling Nicodemus and is telling all of us, is that we, like Nicodemus, are all at first in Babylon. We are all first convinced of the lies of the Adversary, and are thereby guilty of believing that God will either forever destroy by death or torment by fire, many if not most, of His own creation. This doctrine alone makes us all guilty of blaspheming the name of our loving Father “who will have all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.

We are not born into this corruptible flesh with such false doctrines in us. We are taught those doctrines and we come to accept them as true. We were dying physically before we came to accept such blasphemous doctrines, but we were not dying spiritually until we were capable of accepting such a lie against our own heavenly Father, as being true. That is when “sin entered and I died.”

When Paul says “I was alive without the law once…” he is not teaching that he was born spiritually alive. What Paul is teaching is that he had not yet died spiritually until he came under the curse of the law, just like our original parents. Adam and Eve were dying physically before they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but their spiritual death had not begun until they disobeyed their Father’s command.

Rom 7:8  But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin [was] dead.
Rom 7:9  For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.

In what manner was Paul “alive without the law” before the commandment came? He was “alive without the law” only in the same sense that the word liveth is used in this next verse:

1Ti 5:6  But she that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.

So Adam and Eve and Nicodemus, and all men of all time, are born in corruptible, dying flesh and blood, predestined to first become the seed of the serpent, spiritually born of their “father the devil” before they repent of believing all of his lies, and confessing that they were spiritually born blind of their mother’s womb, that first mother being carnal Eve, the fallen wife of Christ, as opposed to Christ’s cleansed and purged wife, “Jerusalem above, the mother of us all.”

It is this spiritual blindness that keeps us from seeing the first Adam as a type of Christ. We are so conditioned to deny that God deliberately creates evil for the purpose of giving us all an evil experience to humble us that the whole world is deceived by that old serpent the devil.

Rom 5:14  Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come.

Only if God opens our eyes to see the truth of this verse, will we ever come to understand that the revelation of Jesus Christ begins in Genesis 1:1. That revelation is “every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God”, and we are all predestined to live it all, in our appointed time.

I hope that helps you to see that though we are dying from the moment we take our first breath, we are not at that point dying spiritually. Spiritual death begins when we are old enough to be capable of giving an account for our disobedience. if there is anything that is still unclear, let me know.

Mike