Attempts to Deal with the “Death Before Sin” Dilemma

By Christians attempting to superimpose a “millions of years” time frame in place of the literal six days of creation described in Genesis and ascribing the massive amount of sedimentary rock layers we find worldwide as evidence for those long ages, we discovered that the fossils within those layers (a record of death, suffering and disease) would have occurred before Adam fell.

This would mean that death and suffering would all have been part of God’s original “very good” creation, creating a conundrum by asking why Jesus would have wanted to reverse those bad things if they were really good things that he used to create the world with. It also begs the question as to what Adam’s fall brought about if the effects of sin were already present in creation before sin entered into the world as Romans 5:12 describes: “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.”

This is the “death before sin” dilemma that I believe is the Achilles’ heel in professing Christian’s attempts to reconcile long ages and/or evolution with the Bible. Why is death before sin so damaging to Christian theology? Well, even my fellow Canadian, theistic evolutionist, and professing believer Denis Lamoureux admits that his beliefs contradict Jesus’ teachings, meaning he believes Jesus was wrong, which means he is in fact a heretic.

The greatest problem with evolutionary creation is that it rejects the traditional literal interpretation of the opening chapters of Scripture. . . . Even more troubling for evolutionary creation is the fact that the New Testament writers, including Jesus Himself, refer to Genesis 1–11 as literal history.1

Trying to Find a Way Out

Now I’ve been around these arguments long enough to know the typical ways professing Christians who believe in long ages will try to wiggle out of this death before sin dilemma. One of which has zero intellectual credibility whatsoever, another which will get your animal-activist friends frothing at the mouth, and all of which provoke the average person to question God’s character.

Only Mankind Fell

So let’s start with a very common way I’ve seen believers try to reconcile this “death before sin” argument. First, they state that it was only the death of man that occurred at the fall, not animals. These folks will point out that (admittedly) Romans 5:12 states that death came to all men, not animals, because of Adam’s sin. So the record of animal death in the fossil record is nothing to worry about in their eyes.

However, Genesis 1:29–30 clearly states that in the beginning (before the fall), all animals were only eating plants. But the fossil record that long-age-believing Christians say took place during the six days of creation is replete with examples of carnivorous activity. While several fossils have been found with evidence of them eating plants, examples of creatures being attacked and consumed by others are quite common. That makes no sense if the animals were supposed to all be herbivorous prior to the fall.

Another huge problem with the “only men and not animals fell” idea is that remains of fully modern humans (not supposed ape-men or hominids or the like) have now been found and dated to almost 200,000 years old2 by the very same dating methods those Christians have accepted as proving long ages. So it would be inconsistent for them to accept some dates and not accept others from the same authority.

An article from the University of Utah reported on this discovery and quoted one of the investigating scientists as saying, “These are the oldest well-dated fossils of modern humans (Homo sapiens) currently known anywhere in the world.”3

However, even more recently, evolution-believing scientists say that they have discovered humans dating back to 300,000 years old, as the title from the National Geographic article covering the find states: “These Early Humans Lived 300,000 Years Ago—But Had Modern Faces.”4

Regardless of this newer find that might get updated, for long-age-believing Christians to be consistent, this means they must now logically accept that there was death of fully human people occurring prior to Adam’s sin (because there is no way to reconcile even 200,000 years being placed into the Old Testament timeline after the fall).

Only a Spiritual Death

Another way I’ve heard Christians try to argue around the “death before sin” problem is that it was only a spiritual death that Adam’s sin brought, not a physical death. They try to justify this by pointing to the fact that Adam didn’t die physically when he sinned, even though God had told him that in the day that he should eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he would “surely die.”

However, although many English translations of Genesis 2:17 read that way, the original Hebrew doesn’t. It connotes a “double death” that would occur should Adam disobey, by the doubling of the word die. The Hebrew literally reads “die die,” which many Hebraists concede could be better translated into English as “dying you will die” (as the English language and many other languages don’t typically use the doubling of words the way the Hebrew sometimes does).

Of course, this is exactly what happened when Adam rebelled. He immediately died a spiritual death (separation from God) and also began the process of physically dying—his body began wearing out, and he eventually perished. “Dying you will die” is the perfect description of the fulfillment of God’s warning.

Christians arguing this way (that Adam only died spiritually) also need to contend with the fact that Jesus died a physical death to pay the penalty for sin, not just a spiritual death. As the Apostle Paul explains, “For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:21–22).

If Adam’s fall were only spiritual, why would Jesus have had to die a physical death and then prove his credentials as the sinless Son of God by rising from physical death three days later?

Let’s remember that God’s warning was very clear about the promised physical results that would happen to Adam should he disobey: “For out of it [the ground] you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19).

This verse is obviously not talking about some kind of spiritual matter, but rather, the fact that Adam’s body would eventually degenerate, stop functioning, and decompose into the earth.

On top of that, anyone arguing that Adam’s fall was only spiritual, logically means they believe that people were meant to die physically from the beginning.

On top of that, anyone arguing that Adam’s fall was only spiritual, logically means they believe that people were meant to die physically from the beginning. This makes you wonder what they think the restoration will be like because Revelation 21:4 says, “Death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

According to Scripture, mourning, crying and pain are all physical results that will be no more in the fully restored new heavens and new earth and are listed right alongside death. Death causes us to feel emotional distress. Even Jesus wept when his friend Lazarus died, and he then resurrected him physically, which counteracted the mourning, pain, and tears Lazarus’ family and friends were experiencing.

If human beings were meant to die in God’s original very good world, then death would have to be classified as very good. So why then would Jesus have countered that “good” by raising Lazarus? Why did he resurrect Jairus’ daughter (Mark 5; Matthew 9; Luke 8) or the widow’s son (Luke 7)? Once again, our conceptions of good and bad are thrown out the window with this “Adam only died a spiritual death” idea.

Death and Suffering Are Good?

To blunt the conclusion that adding long ages to Scripture means that God’s original “very good” world would have included death, disease, and suffering, professing believers use the incredibly weak argument that death and suffering should actually be considered good things.

They typically recount a situation where the death of someone led to an unsaved person attending their funeral, hearing the gospel, and getting saved. Another situation they recount would be someone suffering from cancer displaying such a Christlike attitude in the hospital that a staff member was converted. So their argument is that if someone’s death or suffering produced such a good result, then how can it be called bad?

If all this death and suffering was happening before Adam fell, what use would such things be before redemption for sins was required? If death, suffering, and disease were part of God’s very good initial creation, then why did Jesus counteract them when he was here on earth?

Jesus is often referred to as the great physician because of all the good things he did during his earthly ministry. But why would he go around healing and resurrecting people when their deaths and afflictions were good things that could have brought about situations resulting in the salvation of people (according to this argument)?

You see, while most Christians would agree with what Romans 8:28 says, there shouldn’t be a sane person alive that would say that death, disease, and suffering themselves are good in any sense.

Suffering is the opposite of pleasure and contentment, disease is the opposite of a healthy, functioning body and death is the opposite of one of the greatest miracles God ever created—life itself.

So one has to ask folks that argue this way, why does 1 Corinthians say, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

If death was a “good thing” present in the initial very good creation, why does Scripture refer to it as an enemy? Why would God create a good creation with a built-in enemy? Well, the answer to that is simple—he didn’t!

We Just Can’t Explain It!

Unfortunately, I have even had Christians, when confronted with the “death before sin” dilemma, who simply shrug their shoulders and say something like “we can’t really be sure how all these things fit together, but God is bigger and far beyond our understanding, and we just have to accept the seeming contradiction.”

The problem is, contradictions are called lies, and God and his Word do not lie. What they are truly saying is that accepting “millions of years” and trying to force them into the biblical timeline clearly contradict God’s goodness but we simply have to be OK with that because the whole dilemma is somehow currently unsolvable.

However, it’s very solvable indeed. All you have to do to is ditch the baggage of long ages because, without outside influence from secular science, a straightforward understanding of what Scripture teaches is as follows.

Sin and death entered the creation as the result of Adam’s sin when God cursed the world as a punishment for Adam’s disobedience

God created a very good world. Sin and death entered the creation as the result of Adam’s sin when God cursed the world as a punishment for Adam’s disobedience —there was no death before sin. The majority of the fossil record (a record of death) was created at the time of Noah’s flood some 1,650 years after the fall, not during the six days of creation prior to the fall. God took on flesh and became a man, Jesus, who lived a perfect, sinless life and paid the penalty for sin by willingly dying on the cross of Calvary and rising from the dead three days later. And God will one day fully restore his people and the creation itself to a very good and incorruptible state—even better than it was in the beginning—with no death, suffering, disease, or sin even being possible.

Misrepresenting Jesus

Telling people that you believe Jesus (the Creator as revealed in Colossians) used billions of years of death and suffering to create, showed up as a man years later, and fixed those bad things as proof of his messianic identity would be like someone secretly sabotaging your car engine, arriving when you couldn’t get it started, fixing the problem they had created, and receiving your thanks and accolades for doing so.

However, once what they had done had been revealed, that person wouldn’t be seen as a Savior by you but as your problem in the first place. Similarly, many people assume that death and suffering have always been part of existence. And they may hold the same view as the actor and comedian Stephen Fry: “Atheism is not just about not believing there is a God, but on the assumption that there is one, what kind of God is He? It is perfectly apparent. He is monstrous, utterly monstrous and deserves no respect whatsoever.”5

To all my brethren out there who have accepted the idea of “millions of years” as proven science and simply want to talk about Jesus to people—amen to that.

However, if they want to talk about other related topics to those of sin and salvation—such as the origin of death and suffering—they had better be able to fulfill 1 Peter 3:15 and provide good, solid, and most importantly, biblically based answers.

Telling people that our great physician, Jesus Christ, supposedly used billions of years of death and suffering to create and called it very good while simultaneously describing how gracious he was by going around repairing those things during his time on earth, simply doesn’t make any sense.

“But in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.” (1 Peter 3:15)