Adam and Eve were not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge under the threat that if they were to do so, they would die. When they eat, this is the curse of Eden that falls upon them and upon the creation, that though they were dust, they would also return to dust in death. The way back into Eden is cut off from them by sword and flame, meaning anyone who tries to enter will be killed, but before they leave, God makes garments of skin for Adam and Eve, meaning an animal was killed.
The imagery of death abounds, in ways that both reflect the curse of death, but which also begin to show us the role death plays in God's redemptive plan. Death expels Adam and Eve from the Garden. But death is also their only way into the presence of God, and the only way that Adam and Eve can ever make it back into the garden. Peter Leithart writes: "From Adam on, if anyone wanted to enter the presence of God, he would have to pass through the sword and fire of the cherubim. No man could return to feast in the presence of God unless he first died. Yahweh performed the first sacrifice by providing animal skins for Adam and Eve, and from that point on no one could approach God's presence unless he were clothed in an animal. He could return to life, feasting and the presence of God only by passing through death." (Delivered, 77)
The death of Adam and Eve must be put to death. The drama is this: how can this be done without actually killing us? How can we be put to death without actually being put to death?
What is death anyway? From the perspective of Christ's completed work, Paul reflects in his Letter to the Romans on the nature of death as a "power." He writes: "...death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come." Again, Paul later writes, "...death reigned through that one man" just as grace and righteousness reign through Jesus. And finally, Paul writes, "...just as sin reigned in death," grace also reigns. (Rom. 5:14-21) Paul is telling us that death under the first Adam and grace under the second Adam, Jesus, are two opposing reigns, two opposing kingdoms, two different realms or aeons. His point ultimately is that Christ has put the old reign to death.
But we must stop to appreciate that death is a power. It is its own kingdom that governs by its own rules. It turns a harmonious, orderly cosmos into chaos, under its own twisted order. Leithart writes: "Flesh is not only a motivating power for individuals but also a principle of religious life and social organization. It is a "power" in the Pauline sense, a transpersonal reality that dominates and may enslave human beings." (82) Fleming Rutledge writes: "Paul's preferred way of identifying the occupying Enemy is in its various manifestations as Sin, Death, and the Law - or alternatively, as principalities and powers, as kurio (lords), thrones, authorities, and other designations." (Rutledge, 378) Rutledge elsewhere invokes the fiction of Cormac McCarthy for powerfully conveying this. "In (McCarthy's novel) The Crossing, we meet one of (McCarthy's) enigmatic sages: "The old man (said that) the wolf...knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there." (Rutledge, 202) Notice that death has agency in this line. It put something there. This gets at the ways that Satan orders these things to impose his rule over this age. Think of the authority Satan claims in the temptation passages with Jesus in the Bible.
Finally, it is important for us to see that if death is a power, if it has agency, then all humanity are active in bondage to it. Philip Ziegler writes: "To be lorded over by Sin is to have been engaged to be its representative, "member, part, and tool."...In our very existence "we are exponents of a power which transforms the cosmos into chaos," our lives actually "making a case" for the power that possesses us and in whose service we are enrolled. This is why Paul characterized the guilt of Sin not in terms of ignorance, but rather in terms of "revolt against the known Lord." (quoted in Rutledge, 179)
Two things are important to note here. First, we're part of the mess. Ignorant or not, we remain in revolt, in league with Death, sworn enemy of the Lord. Hiding this fact, that we are in bondage to death, we try to push death to the margins of our lives as much as we can. We hide from it. We protect ourselves from it. We deny it. We fear it. We puff ourselves up, because we don't want to be afraid. Leithart writes: "Vulnerability to loss, lack, death and damage leads to fear, and fear produces protectiveness, protectiveness produces violence and aggression." (80) It is a type of boasting. A deeply ironic one to be sure, because so much of our displays of strength are just our attempts to hide this core vulnerability. All human boasting, prowess in battle, sexual prowess, public debate, etc., all greed, cruelty, rivalry between genders, rivalry between races, even religions - its all fleshly boasting. Leithart again: "Flesh is good. Even mortal flesh is not evil in itself. Flesh becomes a motivator of sin and evil when human beings seek to compensate for finitude, mortality, weakness, when they refuse to accept their vulnerability and trust their Creator for all good gifts." (81-82)
Second, we can see that we are helpless to do anything about this. If sin, death, and the devil were just behavioral dispositions in each of us, maybe we could develop some better habits and improve things. But when Death is a power, a rival kingdom, its another story. But this frees us to see what it means that Christ's reign doesn't come from within this reign of death, but from outside. It is a revelation. It is a disclosure. It is "an electrifying bulletin from somewhere else, over against and independent of anything, religious or otherwise, that we human beings could ever have dreamed up or projected out of our own wishes." (Rutledge, 140) In other words, Christ's reign doesn't come as good advice, but as good news.
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