Q19. What is the misery of that estate whereinto man fell?

A. All mankind, by their fall, lost communion with God, are under his wrath and curse, and so made liable to all miseries in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell for ever.

We previously had mentioned that there are some who downplay the death that Adam died when he had first sinned, or who are ignorant of it, or who deny it altogether. Our reply was that this was first a spiritual death. We compared the spiritual and the physical to the root and the fruit of death, except that the physical manifestation of death is less like the fruitful extension of a plant and more like the last withering away of that form of life that had been severed or uprooted at its source.  

The Loss of Communion with God

That this death that dies physically is first spiritual is seen in four ways: 1. God spoke of the death as being “in the day you …” (Gen. 2:17); 2. We are born spiritually dead (Eph. 2:1-3), which requires an explanation that only a death in Adam’s original sin can offer (Rom. 5:12). 3. Scripture flatly places our death in Adam’s sin (1 Cor. 15:22); 4. Satan is called a “murderer from the beginning” (Jn. 8:44). Yet how is this the case. It is simply that sin brings death (Rom. 6:23), and thus to personally lead one to it is to take that part of a life that is its root. It is worst kind of murder. 

If anyone wants to know what this death is that could be a death before the death we know, then start here. How is spiritual death the root of physical death? It is that spiritual life is the source of life, as God is that Life, as Paul said, “in [whom] we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:26). But this is not merely an impersonal bond between God and man, but was one of divine favor. It is this favor, and all of the blessings that come with it, that was lost.

The extreme opposite of communion with someone is warfare. Yet Paul says we were “enemies of God” (Rom. 5:10), and elsewhere, “haters of God” (Rom. 1:30). James tells us “that friendship with the world is enmity with God” (Jas. 4:4). Watson said, “When we lost God’s image, we lost his acquaintance.”1 This insight will lead directly to everything else one might mean by misery. As the Puritan Ralph Venning said, in his work on The Sinfulness of Sin,

“Inevitably, that must be evil to man, which is evil against God, who is the chiefest good of man. Communion with, and conformity to God is man’s felicity, his heaven upon earth and in heaven too, without which it would not be worth his while to have a being.”2

So the Proverb links the two in saying, “he who fails to find me injures himself; all who hate me love death” (Prov. 8:36).

The Wrath and Curse of God

This coupling of WRATH and CURSE calls to mind the displeasure of God. This is both legal and personal: “The LORD was very angry with your fathers” (Zech. 1:2); “the LORD of hosts says, ‘They may build, but I will tear down, and they will be called ‘the wicked country,’ and ‘the people with whom the LORD is angry forever’” (Mal. 1:4). 

Paul says, we “were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Eph. 2:3).

This cannot be sugarcoated. This means that there is a divine hatred. The Scriptures teach that this is not merely directed at sins but at persons. So the account in Genesis 25 that is given doctrinal explanation by Paul in Romans 9,

“though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad—in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of thim who calls—she was told, ‘The older will serve the younger.’ As it is written, ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated’” (vv. 11-13).

This means that even our best endeavors as human beings, apart from Christ, are under the curse. Our religious efforts are curses. Paul says, “For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them” (Gal. 3:10).

The Many Miseries of this Life: More Sin, Sickness, Fears, and Death

The main reason why we are operating with that tree analogy is to show how physical death—and all that is “contained within” this “body of death” as Paul calls it in Romans 7:24—is the wicked fruit of that initial death. Having been severed from the life of God, all that remains for the plant to be is to die and to, in a sense, “bear the corrupt fruit” that belongs to death.

In the first place, the sin that brings legal consequence is also heaped on as another consequence. James writes,

“But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (Jas. 1:14-15).

Sin is the murder that keeps on killing. Once it lodges itself in our habits, it spawns more assassins from within, becoming more monstrous versions of our own desires. It is like the “green mist” in Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It engulfs us from within. It tempts us to exercise our own deepest darkness as if it will satisfy.

Sin is described as a bondage, as the worshipers of Baal are described. They “sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the LORD, provoking him to anger” (1 Kings 17:17). This is in the verse that begins, “And they burned their sons and their daughters as offerings and used divination and omens.” They are hypnotized to utter irrationality and self-harm. Jesus said, “everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin” (Jn. 8:34). Sin is a cruel master. It demands a whole field of one’s humanity for an ounce of fleeting pleasure, till even the pleasure is numbed and humanity lost. 

“They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved” (2 Pet. 2:19).

This calls attention to the dynamic nature of sin. In the important sense we have already covered, Adam’s sinning was not like our actual sins. In another sense, however, there is a common thread. Each actual sin has a soul-shaping consequence. Actual sin makes all souls affected worse. 

This is crucial because an overreaction can occur in our doctrine when we are correcting the modern therapeutic religion that recasts salvation as a renovation of one’s Self from the various miseries of this life. R. C. Sproul’s rhetorical question—“Saved from What?” to which we have learned to reply, “The wrath of God!”—is true and the necessary starting point. But starting points are not finish lines, and foundations to houses are not the whole house. In being cursed by God the sinner is also cursed in all, as Deuteronomy 28 makes plain to Israel. So in the same way, to be redeemed from the curse of God is to be rescued from a fallen world as well—“man is born to trouble” (Job 5:7).

Sinners have bigger problems than sickness (but because of that, they have sickness too). Sinners face a worse death than the death of the body (but because of that, their bodies will die too). 

We should not forget a main misery of this life is being under the bondage of the devil. In that Ephesians 2 passage, it is included in our being children of wrath that we were “following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience” (2:2). Moreover, “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of ithe gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Cor. 4:4).

The Pains of Hell in the Age to Come

The eternal, conscious damnation of the wicked is taught in Scripture. It is taught in the Old Testament:

“And they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh” (Isa. 66:24).

“And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Dan. 12:2).

And it is taught in the New Testament, no more clearly than by Jesus himself:

“It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, ‘where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” (Mk. 9:47-48; cf. Mat. 18:9).

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels … And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Mat. 25:41, 46).

“And in those days people will seek death and will not find it. They will long to die, but death will flee from them” (Rev. 9:6).

Jude 7 suggests that the fire poured out on Sodom and Gomorrah was both example and even the beginning of the essence of “a punishment of eternal fire”; and a few verses later, the everlasting duration is repeated, about those “for whom the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever” (v. 13).

Hell is both spiritual and physical. Note that both Matt. 10:28 and Jn. 5:28-29 imply that the body will also be condemned:  “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell”; “for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.” Or again, in Revelation, “And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night” (Rev. 14:11).

“and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever … Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire” (Rev. 20:10, 14-15). 

It will be objected that an everlasting punishment is unjust: that is does not fit the crime. However, this is called a righteous and just sentence. After twice calling it such in 2 Thessalonians 1:5, 6, Paul goes on to say, “They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction” (v. 9). So the Scriptures do not hesitate to call eternal punishment right.

How else would we argue for the justice of hell? Any text teaching satisfaction of divine justice in the atonement would also, by logical necessity, teach the same about hell. The reason is that the atonement was the alternative location for that wrath of God to be poured out. In layman’s logic: (1) If the cross saves from hell and (2) if it saves by satisfying God’s justice against those sinner’s saved, then it follows by resistless logic that those unsaved still have that justice unsatisfied for them. Hence the reason in righteousness for hell. There is more to the nature of hell than its legal reason, but there is not less. 

Of God’s very character we are told that he “will by no means clear the guilty” (Ex. 34:6-7; cf. Nah. 1:3). Since God is both immutable and simple (not composed of parts), it follows that all that is in God is immutably just. Hence the demands of his justice cannot change.

To the question of whether hell is a bad as the most infamous depictions, whether in Dante’s Inferno, or in the common imaginations of men sitting for ages around campfires, one can only reply that it will not—it must be far worse. As Watson remarks, “What is all other fire to this but painted fire?”3

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1. Watson, A Body of Divinity, 148.

2. Ralph Venning, The Sinfulness of Sin (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), 37.

3. Watson, A Body of Divinity, 153.