I was reading my scriptures this morning and was struck by the comparison of spiritual death to temporal death.
We understand alot about the physical death of the body. When the body and it’s physical functions cease–so does the life of that person’s body cease.
It dies, and it decays, it returns to the dust so to speak.
Those of faith believe that the spirit of man slips out of that physical body and ascends to his maker–to God, to heaven, to the spirit world. At the very moment the body dies, man experiences the temporal or physical death, a separation from this life, but the spirit along with the intelligence or mind of that man, continues to live. At death we are kicked out of this world as we know it.
Adam and Eve experienced a spiritual death, a death that occurred because they partook of the forbidden fruit, the fruit of the tree of good and evil–a necessary step for the progression of all men, but nevertheless, a step that caused another separation. They became separated from God’s presence. The life in the garden ceased to exist for them, they were kicked out of the garden, they died.
The spiritual death is much like the physical one we are acquainted with here on earth. The pain and loss we feel here when a loved one dies, must be similar to the pain and loss that God and Adam and Eve felt. They lost their presence with God in the Garden, to be able to walk in the cool mist of the garden with their maker. This was no longer possible. Just as it is no longer possible to walk in the cool mist of the morning with a loved one that has passed from this world.
When the scriptures say that Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden, it may have been like death here, they really could not go back, it was impossible. They were not so much as kicked out, as they died–this time the spiritual death, a great loss, a great sadness.
In the books of Adam and Eve we read that they were so sad, beyond anything they had ever experienced–not knowing if the sun would rise, not wanting to eat anything for fear of greater death–the sadness was overwhelming, and they begged to go back to the garden.
We did not experience the spiritual death first hand as did Adam and Eve. They remembered the other life. All born after them have no recollection of what it was like to be in the presence of God, we do not feel the sting of that death as our first parents. The best we can relate to it is by feeling the pain of the loss of physical life.
All this can be reversed–the spiritual death and the physcial or temporal death. All reversed with the atonement, the supreme act that will bring us at one, bring us back to the presence of god, based on our desire, our agency and what we do here on planet earth.
