In this excellent article by Mitch Chase from Desiringgod.org we are reminded of all the many ways we die daily and in our lives.
ABSTRACT: God told Adam that he would “surely die” if he ate from the forbidden tree. He and Eve did not immediately return to the dust upon eating the fruit, but they did experience death in other forms. Their immediate shame and alienation from God, along with other descriptions of the curse beyond Genesis 3, reveal that death means more than the cessation of physical life. Therefore, the new and resurrected life in Christ holds a promise far greater than mere physical life.
"Every funeral, every graveyard, is a stark reminder that everything is not right in the world. We face the reality of death. People we love, and people we’ve never met, will breathe their last breath in this life under the sun. Local churches and ministers will have a close vantage point to the suffering and sorrows of others. And there will be times, which only God knows for sure, when we will be among these “others,” when we will feel the weight of our own mortality.
While the biblical authors tell the blunt truth about the problem of death in the world, they do not leave us in the dark as to its cause and its remedy. Its cause is sin, and its remedy is resurrection. In fact, we can even say that its remedy is a person — the Lord Jesus Christ. According to the biblical authors, death will die. In an important sense, it already has.
Thinking about death is beneficial, especially when we do so with an open Bible. There in its holy pages, we read about how death is the result of sin, how the forces of death are at work in this broken world, and how Christ’s victory over death secures and foreshadows our own embodied life. Death disrupts life for now, but not forever.
‘You Shall Surely Die’
God made the first man and placed him in a garden of life. Eden was paradise, and from its ground came every tree that was pleasant to see and pleasing to eat (Genesis 2:7–9). In the garden, man experienced blessing and goodness. The God of life had both bestowed life and provided food to preserve life.
The man had a mission: to work the garden and to keep it (Genesis 2:15). These tasks sound, at first, like what farmers do. But when these verbs (“to work” and “to keep”) appear together elsewhere in the Torah, they are the duties of Levites, who were given the charge to preserve the sanctity of the tabernacle precincts (e.g., Numbers 3:7–8; 8:25–26). Likewise, Adam was responsible to serve (“to work”) the garden like it was a sanctuary and to guard (“to keep”) the garden from anything unclean.
The Lord provided everything good and necessary for Adam’s duties. Yet God’s good words came with a warning. There was a tree in the midst of the garden from which Adam must not eat (Genesis 2:9). God told him, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (2:16–17).
This prohibition was not burdensome, for God’s generosity was displayed everywhere — in every tree, every blade of grass, every piece of fruit, every beautiful flower. The prohibition was not ambiguous, for though there were two trees in the midst of the garden (Genesis 2:9), God specified the one that was forbidden (2:17). The prohibition was not unreasonable, for the God who had given Adam breath was the one who gave this command. And the prohibition was not unkind, for God told Adam in advance what would happen if the fruit was eaten..." From the article: ‘You Shall Surely Die’?Unmasking the Many Faces of Death - Mitch Chase
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