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The Fundamentals
to have committed i t ; nor only the heinousness of it, as an act done against light and love bestowed upon the doer of it, and in flagrant opposition to the holiness and majesty o f the Lawgiver so that He, the Lawgiver, cannot but regard it with abhorrence as an act abominable in His sight, and repel from His presence as well as extrude from His favor the individual who has become chargeable with i t ; but over and above these representations of sin which are all Scriptural, by the culpa bility of sin is intended its exposure to the penalty affixed by Divine justice to transgression. That a penalty was affixed by God in the first instance when man was created, the Eden narrative in Genesis declares: “The Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge o f good and evil thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:16) ; and that this penalty still overhangs the impenitent is not only distinctly implied in our Saviour’s language, that apart from His redeeming work the world, i. e., every individual therein, was in danger of perishing and was indeed already condemned (John 3:16-18) ; but it is expressly declared by John who says, that “the wrath of God abideth” on the unbe liever (3:16) , and by Paul who asserts that “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23) . Without entering on the vexed question as to how far Adam’s posterity are legally responsible for Adam’s sin, in the sense that apart from their own transgressions they would be adjudged to spiritual and eternal death, it is manifest that Scripture includes in the just punishment of sin more than the death of the body. That this does form part of sin’s penalty can hardly be disputed by a careful reader of the Bible; but equally that that penalty includes what theologians call spiritual and eternal death, Scripture unmistakably im plies. When it affirms that men are naturally “dead in trespasses and in sins,” it obviously purposes to convey the
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