Why is the Wage of Sin Death?

We all know that the wage of sin is death, but have we ever asked the following questions:

Why is the wage of sin death? Isn’t that too harsh of a punishment? Couldn’t a loving God have made the punishment something else?

These are a series of questions that I received a while ago and that many may ask who are both inside and outside the church. Hopefully, this post will answer all these questions. In order to fully answer it though, there are some basic things that need to be understood.

The first thing to understand is that God made man perfect and “very good” (Gen. 1:31, “very good” is only used after the creation of man). When God created man, He created man with the intention of immortality. In Gen. 2:7, we see God giving man the breath of life. This Breath of life is the human spirit & the gift of the Holy Spirit for immortality (I got this from a Coptic Orthodox Theologian). Also, in Wisdom of Solomon, “For God created man for immortality and made him an image of His own eternity” (Wis. 2:23 SAAS). If we understand this concept, than we can move on to answering the question.

Man, as long as he was sinless, portrayed all of the characteristics of God that He gave to us. These characteristics are ingrained in us since we are created in the Image of God (Gen. 1:26). These characteristics are: Immortality/incorruption, rational, free will, authority to rule, and goodness/holiness. We were created with these characteristics before the fall. These are also the same characteristics that the Incarnate Logos would posesss as well. (Note: We were created IN THE IMAGE of God, but Christ is THE IMAGE of God). About this concept, St. Irenaeus says:

“In previous times man, it is true, was said to have been made according to the image of God, but he was not revealed as such. For the Word according to whose image man was made was still invisible. Therefore also man easily lost the likeness. But when the Word of God was made flesh, he confirmed both image and likeness. For on the one hand he truly showed the image by becoming what His image was. On the other hand He firmly established the likeness by the co-assimilation of man to the invisible Father through the visible Word.”
(Against Heresies 5.16.2)

Because of our free will, we corrupted these characteristics when we sinned. This isn’t how God wanted us to live, but to have true free will, we needed a possibility of not living according to God’s way. God gave us that opportunity so that we may choose to love Him instead of having no choice but to love Him.

So here is the punishment for sin: death. Now I can finally answer the question. Why death? There was no choice but death! It had to be death.

Man was living in the presence of God. As a result they lived like gods: perfect, incorrupt, holy, and eternal. When man sinned, we became corrupt and this corruption cannot live symbiotically with immortality. God is life, and is incorrupt. St. Athanasius says it better:

“But men, having turned from the contemplation of God to evil of their own devising, had come inevitably under the law of death. Instead of remaining in the state in which God had created them, they were in process of becoming corrupted entirely, and death had them completely under its dominion. For the transgression of the commandment was making them turn back again according to their nature; and as they and at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again. The presence and love of the word had called them into being; inevitably, therefore when they lost the knowledge of God, they lost existence with it; for it is God alone Who exists, evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good.” (On the Incarnation, 1, 4)

So basically, what St. Athanasius is saying is that the corruption of sin was slowly destroying the goodness of man. The knowledge of good and evil would now give them the ability to sin more and since they were already corrupt, they would not be able to resist sin.

The wage of sin is death, but there are three deaths. The physical, spiritual, and moral death. The death that happened due to sin was all of these but in different ways. The first one that happened was moral death. That’s what I described in the previous paragraph. The ability to sin came to man and man lost his goodness. He lost his morality. Moral death is death to goodness. The second death is a spiritual death. Sin is separation from God because God cannot abide in sin. He is sinless and so if we sin, we cannot abide with/in Him. Therefore, man and God had separated. This isn’t “death” in the way we think. This “death” rather, is separation from the SOURCE OF LIFE, God. Since we’re separated from that source, we are dead.

Now the question is, why the physical death? The physical death is out of God’s mercy. The physical death is necessary due to God’s love. God allowed us to die a physical death in order to protect us from the spiritual death, which came about from the moral death. Can you imagine if we lived eternally in our corrupt state? God used death as a way for us to get rid of corruption. He also used death in order to redeem us.

But God’s love was the reason he ALLOWED us to die. Look at Genesis 3:22-24: “Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”— therefore the LORD God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.”

This verse is key to understanding death. Because man was now corrupt (knows good and evil), he was taken away from the tree. God made sure that man wouldn’t get to the tree of life after corruption. He sent man out of the Garden and protected the tree with the Cherubim. So why? He did this so that man would not live eternally as a corrupt being.

God created us with those characteristics I mentioned above, but we lost those characteristics when we sinned. Why should we live forever like that? God loves us, and wants to “restore us to our first estate” (as we say in Church). He did this through His death on the cross and through giving us the Holy Spirit.

When we grow in His Likeness, we become more and more like how we originally were through His Grace and the help of the Holy Spirit. Once we are deemed worthy, we become restored through His Resurrection. Then, God will give us eternal life again through the same way he prevented it from us: The tree of Life. Revelation 22:1-3 says, “And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the middle of its street, and on either side of the river, was the tree of life, which bore twelve fruits, each tree yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him.”

So we see that God, at the end, gives us the tree of life when we overcome sin. Death was necessary because we separated ourselves from God, but through His Death he abolished death, raised us with Him, and gave us eternal life. When we say this stuff in church, this is what we mean. If God never allowed us to die, we would never have the opportunity to be raised with Him and live eternally.