What is the gospel message? When God made man, He made him perfect. He made the first two people, Adam and Eve, and placed them in the Garden of Eden where they had a special, very beautiful relationship with God. When He made them, He gave them a choice. He wanted their love not as a programmed response, but as a reasoned act. They chose to rebel against God. This rebellion is called sin. All sin comes under the banner of rebellion against God and His will.

As a result of that rebellion in Eden, a number of things happened. First, man was estranged from God. That separation is called spiritual death. On its own, the final effect of this would have been living forever in our sinful bodies, eternally separated from God. Imagine living with Hitler and Stalin forever! Imagine living in an incorrigible, sinful state for eternity. But something else happened. Romans 5:12 tells us that as a result of mans actions came sin, and as a result of sin came death; but not just spiritual death, as some theologians claim. To confirm this, one needs only read 1 Corinthians 15:20 where Paul talks about the physical death of the first Adam and the physical death of Christ, the last Adam. Or read Genesis 3, where God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden so that they would not eat of the Tree of Life and live forever. Physical death as well as spiritual death resulted from their sin.

Why did God send death? Three aspects of death should be considered carefully:

1. God, as a righteous judge, cannot look upon sin. Because of His very nature and the warning He gave to Adam, God had to judge sin. He had warned Adam that if he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." The curse of death placed upon the world was, and is, a just and righteous judgment from God who is the judge.

2. One of the aspects of mans rebellion was separation from God. The loss of a loved one through death shows the sadness of the separation between those left behind and the one who has departed this world. When we consider how sad it is when a loved one dies, it should remind us of the terrible consequences of sin that separated Adam from the perfect relationship he had with God. This separation involved all mankind because Adam sinned as the representative of all.