Eternal life with God or death (condemnation) without Him. Without God there is no eternal life. The opposite of life is death which means condemnation to hell without hope of ever leaving there.
The problem with this argument is that it is circular, unless you have
otherwise made the case that that the concept of "death" as used in the time and place this text was written included, by
definition, the notion of condemnation in hell. That seems a priori very unlikely, but please point me to a post where this case has been made. Let me try to explain a little further: if someone asked a
typical American in 2016 "
What does 'death' mean?, the response would most assuredly be "death in the full permanent 'lights-out' sense" - there would nothing about hell at all. That is what death generally means in
our culture. So, if the statement "the wages of sin is death" were written
today in North America, it would be reasonable to take it as supporting annihilation. Does that mean the writer could not possibly have intended us to take in the "eternal torment" sense? No, but you would have to make a case for that unusual reading and, importantly, that case could not be circular - it could at no point sneak in an
assumption that "death", as a concept, entails an assumption of continued conscious existence.
Same thing with the notion of "perish"; if you are going to say that "perish" means to live on in a state of eternal torment, you need to make that case, not simply
assume it.
Now, to be fair, it is within your rights to challenge me to make a case that the concept of "perish" (for example) as used in the world of first-century Palestine really did mean "lights out".
