Separation from God, and Reconciliation

How was Adam separated from God?

God is perfectly holy, and His presence is sacred. Think about what it means for something to be sacred. It means that a thing is dedicated to holy purposes and not to be used for an unholy purpose.
We’ve seen Muslim extremists in Iran riot and kill after somebody allegedly defaced a Quran or drew an image of Muhammad. While we can judge the reaction as unacceptable, we can recognize that they respect the concept of sacredness in a way that people in the West no longer recognize.

We can see respect for sacredness in Roman Catholic churches. During communion, the priest allegedly turns the communion wine and wafer into Jesus’s blood and flesh. That makes the wine and wafer sacred to Catholics. To prevent defiling Jesus’s body by letting it fall to the floor, an assistant holds a plate at mid-chest level in front of the person receiving the wafer to catch Jesus in case his alleged flesh falls. This prevents defiling the sacred.

Through Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God, they did, as God had warned, die. It was not a physical death, although it made physical death inevitable. It was a spiritual death. Whereas physical death is separation of a person’s spirit from their soul, spiritual death is separation of a person’s spirit from God.

We inherit that condition from our ancestors. Although we are all born physically alive with functioning spirit and body, we are all born spiritually dead with spirit separated from God.
Separation from God means that fellowship with God is broken and needs to be restored. Sacred, holy God cannot just ignore sin. The Bible describes the situation several ways.

• Sin incurs a debt that we cannot pay. We owe obedience and all good deeds to God, so we cannot pay for sins with what we already owe. That would be like paying the bill from last month with what we saved up to pay for this month’s bill. That is why our good deeds could never cancel or outweigh our sins.
  
• The penalty for sin holds us for a ransom that we cannot pay. (Contrary to myth, Satan does not hold us hostage; God’s justice does.) The penalty is proportional to the importance of the one you offend. If I lie to my wife, I might have to sleep in the doghouse. If I lie to the government, I might go to prison. If I lie to infinite God, the consequences are infinite or everlasting.
  
• Sin defiles me, so if I stood before God without having been redeemed, then I would defile God’s presence, which God will not tolerate.
  
• Sin’s defilement changes my nature such that if I were thrust into God’s presence without having been redeemed and reconciled, I would try to flee from His presence.

This is why Jesus’s time on the cross is so crucial to us. When God created the universe, that included creating time and space. Having created time and space, God chose to experience time and space as three centers of consciousness or “Persons.” Each Person voluntarily took on a distinct role: Father, Son, or Holy Spirit.

The titles Son of Man and The Word: God the Son is called the Word because His role was to be the expression of God to human beings. When the time was right, the Son donned a human body and lived as the man, Jesus of Nazareth. As the Son of Man, Jesus experienced all the temptations and torments of life and death as our representative.

The title Son of God: Being God, Jesus lived a perfect life, never sinning. Thus, He had no sins to pay for. This kept Him free to become our substitute. Like a big brother taking the whoopin’ for his little brother and sister, Jesus took our place and bore sin’s penalty.

The title Savior: Whereas the penalty for sinning against infinite God would have destroyed us, Jesus could not be held by death. He rose from the dead, proving that He was divine, that God was satisfied with the payment, that God would restore us to spiritual life, and that God can one day raise everybody from the dead. Thus, God offers this gift of redemption to all who will receive it as a gift. Those who receive the gift as a gift receive forgiveness and spiritual life, but those who refuse the gift will be sent into separation from God’s presence, forever stuck in their guilt and anger.

You might have been bothered by an apparent redundancy, receive the gift as a gift. The point is important because all the world’s religions depend on achieving or earning something to receive redemption. Within “Christianity,” many denominations swerve off into the world’s religions by teaching that one must do something to earn the gift — which is self-contradictory.

If someone suggests that you have to take part in a ceremony or do good deeds or persevere in the faith to earn or retain grace, their teaching lies outside of explicit biblical teachings. It even lies outside the definition of “grace?”

To receive the gift, you need to do exactly two things:

• Understand in your heart your need for the gift,
• Trust God to endow you with the gift.
• Any more than that turns the gift into something you could never earn in a million lifetimes. And God will not stand for having His generosity insulted.

One of the characteristics of separation from God is a lack of His immediate presence and influence in one’s life. When one is redeemed and restored to relationship with God, God sends the Holy Spirit. Before Jesus’s resurrection, the Holy Spirit came “upon” people to achieve a specific purpose such as prophesying, giving strength and skill in battle, or leading a nation. Since the resurrection, the Holy Spirit has indwelt believers to begin transforming them into holier people, give them insight when reading the scriptures, empower them to serve God and each other, and intercede for them when they don’t know how to pray.

To summarize what “separation from God” means, it means that a person who has not received the gift of redemption as a free gift has none of the blessings of forgiveness or intimate relationship with God. Unless he receives the gift as a gift, he remains forever outside of relationship with God.


I first posted this as an answer to a question on Quora. If quoting, please give credit where credit is due.

Calvinism Exaggerates Meaning of Spiritual Death

Defining spiritual death

Just as the Arminian idea of Free Will is an exaggeration, the Calvinist definition of spiritual death is, too. Here’s what I derive about it from Scripture: 

• The lost are dead to God, as when the prodigal’s father declared his wandering son dead [to himself]. (Luke 15:24) Technically, “dead” is a metaphor. It uses a physical condition to describe a relationship.  
• The lost are incapable of receiving spiritual truth (1 Corinthians 2:14) because Satan has blinded them. (2 Corinthians 4:4). This speaks to loss of ability, not cessation of function.
• We might say that dead men do not see, but we do not say that they are blind. Only the living can be blind. (ibid.) Again, “blindness” describes disability without cessation of animation.
• If a person’s spirit is enslaved by sin, it cannot be non-functional. (ibid.) A spirit must be functional in order to lust and then obey that lust. 
• The spirits of the dead are conscious in hell, so “the spiritually dead” must not mean “non-functioning spirits.” Non-functioning spirits could not attempt to justify themselves, weep, gnash teeth in rage, or be tormented. (Luke 16:23, and any passage that describes the judgment where the “[spiritually] dead” stand before God) 
• The Second Death does not mean a cessation of function. (Revelation 14:11)

This leads one to conclude that “spiritual death” describes the condition of an animated spirit that is addicted to sin, disabled with respect to spiritual truth and righteousness, estranged from God, and under sentence to the Second Death. This places me between Arminian unqualified free will and the Calvinist idea that regeneration precedes faith, because it implies that the Spirit can temporarily or partially reverse bondage and blindness without having regenerated the person. 

Defeating spiritual death

The Spirit uses three ingredients to bring about the action of placing faith:

• convicting of sin
• enlightening the understanding
• bestowing faith

These are initial gifts that free a person from spiritual blindness sufficiently to consent to what the Spirit is doing. This is not regeneration, but it leads to it. Regeneration is the bestowal of permanent gifts including a new heart, freedom from sin’s enslavement, reconciliation with God, and many polysyllabic blessings. 

This is not God “forcing” conversion. The Spirit convicts the conscience of sin through enlightening the mind so that the preaching of the Law brings guilt and fear of condemnation. This frees one to turn away from various forms of false belief — false religion, self-righteousness, rationalization of sins — which we call repentance. (Note: “Fruits worthy of repentance” are distinct from repentance itself.) The Spirit also bestows understanding of and belief in the gospel. This frees one to trust Christ. 

Rather than God “forcing” us to convert, the Spirit, in three areas, frees us to respond to the irresistible beauty of God’s offer. Being freed (*), we respond in repentance and faith, like a moth drawn to a flame or a baby drawn to the mother’s breast. And when we consent, God regenerates us, completing the process. 

Consenting (which might take the form of asking through prayer) is not a work. Rather, it is a cessation from work. Many people fold the putting away of sin into repentance, that that turns repentance into working for the gift of salvation -- which is a contradiction in terms! Repentance is a change of mind that, together with regeneration, results in putting away sin. 

Part of the idea here is that a dead man cannot put away sin. He is, after all, enslaved by it. Earning salvation through either good works or through giving up sinful actions might be the very things he needs to repent from! The actions that give proof of the change of mind can only come after regeneration. 

(* Perhaps the Arminian would be more comfortable if I said, “having had our free will further freed.”) 

Copyright 2019, Richard Wheeler: Permission granted for personal use, but please give credit where credit is due.