Why Do We Die? What the Bible Says About Death

When God formed Adam, He breathed into his nostrils, and Adam became a living soul. But God warned him that the day he ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would be the day of his death.

I imagine the first question Adam ever asked may have been, “What is death?” Followed promptly by another: “Why must I die if I sin?”

We think we know what death means because we have seen it. Adam had never experienced it. When God warned him about death, it was a concept foreign to the world God had made. Today, death is one of the few things we can be certain every one of us will eventually experience. But I wonder if we really understand what God was telling Adam, or if we are trying to piece it together only from what we have seen of death.

A conversation I once had with a Jehovah’s Witness made me realize I didn’t really understand death myself. They were trying to defend a doctrine I believe is false and asked me a simple question: “What is death?” I answered that it meant ceasing to be. They immediately took my definition and used it to support their argument.

That was when I first realized that this simple question may not be as simple as I had thought. So what is your definition? Did you arrive at it through Scripture, or simply through your experience of watching people die? Have you ever stopped to ask God, as Adam may have asked, “What is death?”

If we want to understand death, our answer cannot come from our own human experience. It must come from the One who gives life and can take it away—the One who stands at the crossroads between life and death, knowing what is on both sides.

What the Bible Says About Death

Let’s learn about it in the same order that Adam would have learned about it.

The first thing Adam could have learned about death is that it is what happens when we disobey God. There was a command not to eat from the tree, and God said that if that command was broken, Adam would die.

That leaves a lot left unsaid. What is death? Why would we die from disobedience? How would it happen? All we know at this point, like Adam, is that disobedience ends with something called death.

Remember that I said it ends with something called death. That’s foreshadowing because we’re going to discover soon that this is also the answer to one of our biggest questions about death: Why?

If God didn’t explain death to Adam at that moment, and Adam was simply left to find out on his own, then the next bit of information about death came after he disobeyed.

He didn’t immediately drop dead. The ground didn’t open up and swallow him. He didn’t cease to be. But something was different. Things had changed somehow.

No doubt the words of God, saying, “Thou shalt die,” came to his mind. If I were Adam, feeling this new sensation of guilt and fear that drove me to hide in the garden, I would naturally assume this must be what God meant when He said I would die. But this is only the first part of the process by which Adam came to understand death.

And this is where I need to clear something up that has caused many people to stumble.

Adam didn’t drop dead. The moment he ate the fruit, his heart didn’t stop, and his body didn’t collapse. Yet God had said, “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” So what are we missing?

Look at the words more closely. God said Adam would die, not be dead. That’s an important thing to notice because the word die is actually a verb. That means it is an action. And actions don’t typically finish their tasks instantaneously.

There is a difference between the action of dying and being dead:

• To die = the process or action of transitioning from life toward death.
• To be dead = the completed state of being after life has been completely lost.

God told Adam that he would die, meaning he would begin an action the same day that he ate from the tree. God didn’t tell him that action would be completed on the same day. That’s something our own minds add into the text because when we hear the word die, we typically think of the end result, not the process of dying.

The phrase used in Hebrew is mot tamut — “dying, you shall die.” God told Adam he would begin dying, a process. He never said that the process of him dying would be completed on the same day.

Look at what actually happened.

Adam:

1. Eats the fruit.
2. Becomes ashamed.
3. Hides from God.
4. Is separated from the garden.
5. Loses access to the tree of life.
6. Eventually returns to dust.

What Adam was learning is that death is not just a state of being. It’s also a process of loss. He lost his innocence. He lost the presence of God. He lost his home. He lost hope. And eventually, he lost even his body.

Put simply, dying is a process of destruction and decay leading to death, which is the final state in which nothing remains that isn’t completely broken.

Let me also note that God didn’t say Adam would cease to exist. God said he would return to dust, the most basic element of what he was made of. The state of death is not annihilation. It is a state of being completely broken. Another word for it would be destroyed.

When something is destroyed, it is not annihilated. It doesn’t simply vanish from existence. Adam wasn’t going to vanish. His body was going to be reduced to dust. Destruction and annihilation are two completely different things. So do not make the mistake of thinking the Bible teaches annihilation.

This was the consequence of disobeying God. It is the penalty that God has declared we would suffer: a process of destruction that would eventually return our bodies to dust. But why? What could be so bad as to warrant us being broken down to such a point?

Sin Doesn’t Stop

I’ve mentioned this several times through this unit. Sin isn’t as finite as we think. It spreads from one point to another, taking over everything.

Like yeast in bread dough, a little bit of sin multiplies. First Adam ate from the tree of knowledge, then he tried to hide from God, and when he realized that wasn’t going to work, he tried to subtly shift the blame. Eventually, sin even spread to his children, who began to kill each other.

The point is that sin left unstopped gets worse over time, not better and not stagnant either. Eventually, it gets to a point where nothing good is left untouched by evil. That’s what we see in the story of Noah.

People had reached a point of no return. Sin had spread through mankind to the point that every thought was evil.

If children learn from their parents, then future generations would only be taught to do evil. If God allowed everything to continue as it was, the result would have been a world with only evil and only suffering, with no purpose.

It had to be brought to a stop.

Looking at how society as a whole eventually turned out, we can see how the individual would also turn out if they were left to live forever. Without an end, they too would eventually be overtaken by sin.

This is what I was foreshadowing earlier. Death is how God stops evil from spreading and puts an end to it.

The body we now live in is prone to sin by instinct. Even people who are Christians still fight with their own flesh. Because our flesh continues as it always has been, it must be brought under submission.

The problem is that the sinful flesh will never stop fighting to sin.

Like the rest of the world, our flesh must also die. We daily “crucify” it by bringing it under submission, but we never fully get rid of it. Our bodies, like the rest of the world, must be stopped once and for all. Therefore, our bodies eventually die just like everyone else.

This is the reason God has placed a limit on the number of our days. Death comes upon the Christian and the non-Christian alike and for the same reason. It prevents us from inevitably becoming completely corrupt. That’s the purpose for the death of the body.

But a person isn’t just their body. God breathed life into Adam, and Adam became a living soul. So what happens to the soul? We will see how the process of dying and death affects the soul in the next study.

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