How dead in sin does one have to be, to be literally dead?
You cannot be alive in Christ from the time you were inside your mother's womb. Therefore if you were never dead, you have no need to ever be alive in Christ.
You cannot claim to be alive in Christ, until after being dead in sin. This body is the result of being dead in sin. Did your body change when you became alive in Christ? Did you recieve a new body at that moment?
We are talking about spiritual death.
The Psalmist outlines man’s grim state:
“Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5).
The Bible says, we are all
“by nature the children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3). We are rebels against God and His plan and purpose for our lives.
The first death that man experienced in the garden after Adam ate of the fruit and consequently sinned was
spiritual death. God said to Adam, in Genesis 2:17,
“of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
Whilst we know from Scripture that Adam ate of that forbidden fruit, we equally know that he didn't physically die on that same day. This warning wasn’t therefore just talking about bodily death. In fact, Genesis 5:5 tells us, “And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.” It couldn’t also have been his soul that would die otherwise life would immediately become extinct. The soulish man lived on. This must have been referring to a spiritual death which would separate man from that perfect communion he enjoyed with God. If spiritual death was the first death man experienced, the next death that he experienced, which was a direct result of the first, was
physical death. The fall left mankind in a hopeless ruined state facing a certain two-fold death. Left to his own devices, man was destined for “the Lake of Fire” and
eternal spiritual and physical death.
Every man since Adam is born with original sin and therefore completely guilty before a righteous God. The Bible says,
“Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Romans 5:12).
When Adam fell his desires automatically changed from being God-ward to being self-ward. Natural man with Adam’s blood is born with that same corrupt aspiration. He is a rebel. In this, he will always go the way of sin. That is his natural inclination. This had to be corrected. That is why Christ (the second Adam) came. In salvation, Christ restores that desire for God and the things of God.
Since Adam, and because of original sin, our soulish man is alive, but our spiritual man is dead. separation from God is defined in Scripture as death, blindness, and deafness.
Man – in all generations – inherited Adam’s awful sinful nature, which ultimately separates man from a holy God. The first resurrection therefore that man needed was a spiritual resurrection to expiate the awful spiritual death sentence that he inherits. The second resurrection he required was a physical resurrection to (redeem or) replace the corruptible physical tabernacle that he inhabited.