2. Death {Q6.va.To%, to which in its various senses correspond the vb. dirodvriaKu, 'die,' and the adj. veKpos, 'dead'). — Death is frequently used in the apostolic literature in its ordinary, everyday mean- ing of the end of man's earthly course {^los) or the extinction of his animal life i^irxv) through the separation of the soul from the body (Ac 2-"*, 1 Co 3", Ph 2^). Much more important than this purely physical employment of the word are its various theological uses, the chief of which may be distinguished as the punitive, the redemptive, the mystical, the spiritual and moral.
(1) For the NT writers, and above all for St. Paul, death has a punitive significance as the judicial sentence pronounced by God upon sin. When St. Paul writes, 'The wages of sin is death' (Ro 6^), or ' Through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin ; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned ' (o^-) ; or when the author of Hebrews links together the facts ol death and the judgment and relates them to the Death and redeeming Sacrifice of Christ (He 9^-28) : or when St. James says, ' He which converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death and shall cover a multitude of sins (Ja S-"), death is used to denote the punitive con- sequences of sin and the state in which man lies as condemned on account of it. For, just as ^uri in the NT means not the earthly existence but the
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LIFE AND DEATH
LIGHT AND DARKNESS
larger life of tlie Christian salvation, so ddvaros means not the end of the earthly existence merely but the loss of life in the full Christian conception of the word — the whole of the miserable results that flow from sin and constitute its penalty. Among these penal consequences certainly physical death is included, as passages like Ko 5^^- ^* and 1 Co 15-''" make perfectly clear. More than this, the death of the body is treated as ' the point of the punitive sentence, about which all the other elements in that sentence are grouped ' (H. Cremer, Bib.-Theol. Lex.^, 1880, p. 284). Death is the wages of sin (Ro 6^), it is the recompense received by theservants of sin (v.^^). Sin reigns in death (5'-'); it is the sting of death (1 Co 15®''). The saving sig- nificance of the Death of Christ is due to this same punitiverelation between death and sin. He died for our sins (1 Co 15*) ; He bare our sins in His body upon the tree (1 P 2'-^). And it is through the Death of His Son that we are reconciled to God (Ro 5^"). In including physical death among the penalties of sin, hoAvever, the apostolic writers are not to be held as meaning either that man was naturally immortal or that until he fell there was no natural law of death in the physical world. In neither the OT nor the NT is the assertion ever made that death entered into the natural world in consequence of the sin of man (the 'world' in Ro 5^^ is the moral world, as the context shows). And when man became liable to death because of sin (Ro 5'^*^'' ; cf. Gn 2''''), this does not imply that he was not created mortal (cf. Gn 3^"). But it does imply that, mortal as he was, he differed from the rest of the animal world in a potentiality of exemption from the law of decay and death, owing to the fact that he was a spiritual being made in God's image ; and that by his transgression he lost God's proffered gift of physical immortality (Ro 5", 1 Co 15-"- ).
But, while physical death is the point of the punitive sentence, the sentence of death stretches far beyond it. Just as fw^ has a future and other- worldly as well as a present reference, so is it with Odvaro^. Sometimes it plainly refers to a death that is not an earthly experience but a future state of misery which awaits the wicked in the world to come (Ro P-, 1 Jn Z^* 5^% In Rev 2" 20«- ^* 2\^ this future condition of woe is called ' the second death,' in contrast, viz., with the first death by which the life on earth is ended (see PUNISHMENT).
(2) At the other extreme from this punitive sense of death is the use of the word with a re- demptive meaning. When St. Paul declares in Romans that we died to sin (G'^), that we were buried through baptism into death (v.^), that he that iiath died is justified from sin (v.^^) ; or when in Galatians he says of himself, ' For I through the law died unto the law ' (2^"), the death he speaks of, as the last passage shows, is a legal or judicial death which carries with it a deliverance from the state of condemnation into which the sinner has been brought by his sin (Ro 6^). And when he speaks of this death as a dying with Christ (v.*), and explains more fully that all died because one died for all (2 Co 5^^), he reminds us that this re- demptive death is possible for Christians only be- cause a punitive Death Avas endured by Christ on their behalf. If they can reckon themselves to be dead unto sin (Ro 6"), it is because ' Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures ' (1 Co 15*).