The following excerpt is taken from What Every Christian Should Know About Satan. Order your copy in print, Kindle, or Audible versions here.

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God warned Adam that if he disobeyed, he would die “on the day” he ate from the forbidden tree (Gen. 2:17). Yet Adam lived at least another eight hundred years, breathing his last at the age of 930 (Gen. 5:5). So, in what sense did Adam die on the day he sinned? A little background may prove helpful.

When the Bible says we are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27), it means, at least in some respects, we are a trinity – not that we exist as three co-equal divine persons, but that we each possess a body, soul, and spirit. This means we also die in three stages as a consequence of sin.

The Fall affects each part of human beings’ threefold nature. As James Boice explains, “Specifically, his [man’s] spirit died, for the fellowship that he had with God was broken; his soul began to die, for he began to lie and cheat and kill; his body died eventually, for as God said, ‘Dust you are and to dust you will return’” (Gen. 3:19).

Let’s look briefly at these three deaths in reverse chronological order. 

Physical death

Although it is hundreds of years after his flagrant disobedience, Adam experiences physical death, and so has nearly everyone since then. At some point, we all stop breathing, our brains stop functioning, our skin grows cold, and our bodies become stiff. No doubt, this type of death is easy to understand. Only Enoch and Elijah are recorded in Scripture as having escaped this type of death. Not even Jesus gets a pass – although he comes into this world to die (John 12:27; 1 John 4:10), and his death secures our everlasting life. Physical death comes to all of us as a consequence of sin.

God did not create Adam and Eve to die. Had they remained faithful to their creator, they would have enjoyed the direct presence of God in the garden every day for all eternity. And their descendants would live forever as well, without the ravages of decline and ultimate death. It is fair to say that, being cast out of Eden, Adam and Eve live in a state of death. As Peter Bolt explains:

Without access to the tree of life and its promised immortality, they were left to a life characterized only by their mortality. Paul confirms this where he affirms that with the sin came “death through sin,” and from that moment on “death reigned” (Rom. 5:12, 14, 21).

Silencing Satan: A Handbook of Biblical Demonology

Physical death does come to Adam and Eve, but not before they witness the murder of their son, the difficulty of childbirth, the toils of growing food in a hostile environment, and the creeping decline of youthful vigor. This touches on the second type of death.

Death of the soul

Immediately after rebelling against God, Adam and Eve note a marked difference in their perceptions, words, and deeds. Their souls are dying. They see their nakedness and experience shame. They sense fear and hide from God. They make excuses for their rebellion and push the blame toward others – even toward God. 

The serpent is right about one thing concerning Adam and Eve: their eyes are opened, and they know evil as well as good. But it’s not what they expected. Adam shifts the blame to his wife. Worse, he essentially tells God the Fall never would have happened if God were not so mistaken in his judgment as to create a woman. In a similar manner, Eve is quick to blame the serpent.

Shame, fearfulness, and lying are symptoms of a mind and will alienated from God. The Lord is the source of all good things (Jas. 1:17). But when we break fellowship with God, we descend into rebellion, cowardice, malice, jealousy, pride, hatred, and every other kind of evil. It spreads like a contagion. Sin immediately stresses Adam and Eve’s harmonious relationship. Their sons find themselves at odds, with Cain striking down Abel in a premeditated act of jealousy (Gen. 4:8; cf. 1 John 3:12, 15). Lamech takes two wives – the first human act of bigamy – and brags to his wives about killing another man (Gen. 4:19, 23). 

By Genesis 6, human wickedness is so widespread, the Lord decides to destroy mankind with a flood. Even though Noah and his family find favor with God and are delivered from judgment on an ark, they pick up where their evil contemporaries left off as soon as the flood waters recede. 

We read about the Tower of Babylon (Gen. 11), Abram’s deceit with Pharaoh in Egypt (Gen. 12), Abram and Sarai’s impatience with God over a promised son (Gen. 16), the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19), incest between Lot and his daughters (Gen. 19), and the list goes on. The death of the soul is slow and steady – but it is certain. Conceived in sin and guilty at birth (Ps. 51:5), all people find themselves at the mercy of the sin nature.

Spiritual death

But there is an even worse death – more destructive than the slow rotting of the soul and the eventual cessation of physical life. This is spiritual death. This death is instantaneous and total. The spirit is what sets humans apart from and above animals. It enables us to have communion with God. And the spirit died instantly when Adam and Eve sinned. “In contemporary language this is described as alienation – alienation from God – and it is the first result of that death that came into human experience as the result of sin,” writes James Montgomery Boice.

John Stott calls spiritual death “the most dreadful of all sin’s consequences.” He further writes:

Man’s highest destiny is to know God and to be in a personal relationship with God. Man’s chief claim to nobility is that he was made in the image of God and is therefore capable of knowing Him. But this God whom we are meant to know and whom we ought to know is a moral Being … our sins blot out God’s face from us as effectively as the clouds of the sun…. We have no communication with God. We are “dead through trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1) which we have committed.

Basic Christianity

The so-called natural man (1 Cor. 2:14 KJV), or “person without the Spirit” (CSB, NIV), certainly is alive in body and soul, but is spiritually dead. That is, he can think, have emotions, and make decisions. But because he has rejected Christ, the Holy Spirit does not inhabit that sinner’s human spirit. Therefore, his life is directed by what he experiences through his five senses, what he thinks about, and what he reasons from a mind that Satan has blinded and the Spirit has not renewed (Rom. 12:2; 2 Cor. 4:4).

This death is absolute, complete, and permanent. It requires the Holy Spirit’s work of regeneration. In the New Testament, the Greek palingenesia – a compound of palin (“again”) and ginomai (“to become”) – is used only twice and means “regeneration,” “renewal,” or “recreation.” In Matthew 19:28, it refers to God’s ultimate renovation of the cosmos, and in Titus 3:5, it speaks of the work of the Holy Spirit, bringing back to life a dead human spirit – “a radical change of heart and mind resulting in renewed devotion to God and Christ,” according to Stephen Renn.

Put simply, regeneration is the work of the Holy Spirit that brings a sinner from spiritual death into spiritual life. Our spirits – our innermost beings created for intimacy with God – are dead in trespasses and sins (Eph. 2:1), and they remain so unless and until the Holy Spirit breathes new life into them. John Frame writes:

The new birth brings life out of that [spiritual] death. Without this new birth, we cannot even see the kingdom of God, because our spiritual eyes are dead. Paul teaches in Romans 1 that sinners suppress the truth and exchange it for a lie. So the new birth marks the beginning of spiritual understanding, as well as the beginning of obedient discipleship.

Systematic Theology

In summary, we see how God’s warning of death “on that day” came true in Adam’s life. He died spiritually in an instant. He began to die in his soul, and kept dying slowly for the next eight hundred years. And, finally, he died physically. This is the darkest of tragedies, except for one distant light: the promised seed of woman in Genesis 3:15. This coming redeemer crushes the head of Satan and completely reverses the effects of the Fall – not only in believing sinners, but in the fallen cosmos as well (2 Pet. 3:10-13; Rev. 21-22). 

God’s work of redemption, completed in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, turns spiritual death into spiritual life; makes the darkened mind the mind of Christ; and guarantees the future glorification of the corruptible earthly body. Even the curse of this sinful and fallen world is reversed one day in creation of the new heavens and new earth.

Next: Satan: Murderer by proxy