What does the Bible mean by "the wages of sin is death"?

Home - Quora Link

Abrahamic theology starts and ends with God. God creates the world, then us, and then tries to make His plans work. We reject God, His plans, and His delights and wonders, so that we can be the makers ourselves. The story of Adam and Eve is best read as commentary on the human condition, not as a specific event that happened a long time ago, but rather something that is happening right now, in the hearts and minds of everyone.

We listen to the snake at our feet promising us that we could be God ourselves. We listen to each other rather than God. Our religions start with God, but end with our rejection of them and the subjugation of divine direction under human whim.

Sin is this process of turning away from God. You cannot stop yourself from turning away, it is your nature as a human being. There will always be that snake and you will always be led astray. God in this case is anything good. Turning away is choosing bad things over good.

You don’t have to believe in a literal God in order to see the poignancy here. If someone, any human, brings you amazing, wondrous things, how long do you think it will be until you start looking those gift horses in the mouth? “Oh brother, these horses you brought me just aren’t strong and tough enough, they don’t plow my fields with as much gusto as I would like, bring me some better horses.”

Your brother tries to show you how to breed the horses yourself. You don’t have time for his silly nonsense. “Just bring me better horses, I have to prepare for my evening with Delilah.”

You can see how eventually this will cause your brother to stop bringing you horses, and indeed, you’ll eventually push your brother away completely.

Now apply this to God, a being of infinite power and wisdom. God gave us not just horses, but our very lives. And we turn away from God and say to Him, life is not enough. And God eventually stops giving it to us, because we demand the ability to create life for ourselves.

And so we can keep going for awhile after we turn away from God, but once we turn away, we start a slow process of the rotting away of everything that makes life wonderful and good.

The wages, the product of our toil, of sin, the desire of humans to assume the position of God and provide His gifts to ourselves, is death, the slow destruction of everything God provided.

Because life is not a singular thing that can be given or taken away. If it’s not constantly provided, then it’s ultimately death.

Christianity seeks to give you constant access to God through the Savior, our personal conduit through which we can find God. The rest of the sentence reads “but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” God didn’t just create the world and give it life once. He keeps doing it.

Another clue here is the phrase “man cannot live by bread alone.” Physical sustenance is a pale shadow of life, we need more, we need spiritual sustenance. Christians believe Jesus is the one to ask for that. Spiritual sustenance is the return of man to his metaphoric Garden of Eden, where God can show us how to rule over the land the way He had planned it.