God’s not being the God of the dead signifies two things:  that they who are without him are dead, as well as that they who are dead are also without him.  So far as our knowledge goes respecting inferior animals, they appear to be examples of this truth.  They appear to us to have no knowledge of God; and we are not told that they have any other life than the short one of which our senses inform us.  I am well aware that our ignorance of their condition is so great that, we may not dare to say anything of them positively; there may be a hundred things true respecting them which we neither know nor imagine.  I would only say that, according to that most imperfect light in which we see them, the two points of which I have been speaking appear to meet in them:  we believe that they have no consciousness of God, and we believe that they will die.  And so far, therefore, they afford an example of the agreement, if I may so speak, between these two points; and were intended, perhaps, to be to our view a continual image of it.  But we had far better speak of ourselves.  And here, too, it is the case that “God is not the God of the dead.”  If we are without him we are dead; and if we are dead we are without him:  in other words, the two ideas of death and absence from God are in fact synonymous.

Thus, in the account given of the fall of man, the sentence of death and of being cast out of Eden go together; and if any one compares the description of the second Eden in the Revelation, and recollects how especially it is there said, that God dwells in the midst of it, and is its light by day and night, he will see that the banishment from the first Eden means a banishment from the presence of God.  And thus, in the day that Adam sinned, he died; for he was cast out of Eden immediately, however long he may have moved about afterwards upon the earth where God was not.  And how very strong to the same point are the words of Hezekiah’s prayer, “The grave cannot praise thee, Death cannot celebrate thee; they that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth;” words which express completely the feeling that God is not the God of the dead.  This, too, appears to be the sense generally of the expression used in various parts of the Old Testament, “Thou shalt surely die.”  It is, no doubt, left purposely obscure; nor are we ever told, in so many words, all that is meant by death; but, surely, it always implies a separation from God, and the being—­whatever the notion may extend to—­the being dead to him.  Thus, when David had committed his great sin, and had expressed his repentance for it, Nathan tells him, “The Lord also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die:”  which means, most expressively, thou shalt not die to God.  In one sense, David died, as all men die; nor was he, by any means, freed from the punishment of his sin:  he was not, in that sense, forgiven; but he was allowed still to regard God as his God; and, therefore, his punishments were but fatherly chastisements from God’s