The Wages Of Sin

Romans 6:23 is rather well known for the portion where it states that the "wages of sin is death", yet some seem to not understand what this actually means.  Some might invoke this verse as a hilariously weak support for the claim that sins are equal, since they all lead to natural death, while others might say that this means that the unsaved deserve to be eternally tormented in hell (someone has actually told me that this is what Romans 6:23 means when it says no such thing).  What does it actually mean for the wages of sin to be death?

Death is the natural biological consequence of sin (Romans 5:12), and the second death (annihilation of consciousness and body) in hell is the final, ultimate punishment from God for sin [1].  The human body dies at the end of this life and God will destroy unsaved people in hell (Ezekiel 18:4, Matthew 10:28).  The unsaved, without the eternal life that salvation in Christ brings, will not merely be cut off from accessing heaven, but they will be cut off from existence in any form whatsoever.  Death, extinction, is what human sin deserves.  The second death is not eternal conscious torment; it is cessation of conscious life and physical existence.

Now, as Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy teach, some sins deserve a more immediate death in this life.  In these cases, Scripture prescribes capital punishment.  Yes, to name some of the capital crimes listed in the Bible, only when people who commit rape, sorcery, kidnapping, murder, adultery, bestiality, blasphemy, and battery against their parents are killed on the testimony of two or three witnesses will justice be administered in those cases.  In instances of lesser crimes, only when right monetary restitution is enacted for theft and assault and when 1-40 lashes are applied to other offenses will there be justice.  In cases of Biblical capital punishments, human governments are obligated (there is no such thing as terrestrial justice that deviates from Mosaic Law; all deviation from justice is injustice) to accelerate the biological death that inevitably awaits capital offenders.  The appeals to cultural ideas of justice, as well as to the subjective, unverifiable impulses of conscience, that are used as arguments against this are all dismantled in full by reason.  The intellectually weak will look to conscience and cultural consensus for their moral knowledge, while rational Christians will not.  Intellectual insects need to be intellectually crushed.

I've had some people tell me that Mosaic punishments no longer apply because all people deserve death and therefore we should love people and not enforce Biblical penalties.  What a fallacious bunch of nonsense!  As if people didn't all deserve to die of natural causes when God first revealed Mosaic Law, and before that, and as if human moral obligations depend on when and where you are born!  This is theistic cultural relativism, yet many will not admit to this.  The doctrine of sin bringing human death in no way means that justice demands that some people be executed now.  It also does not mean that all sins are equal, as God would not demand capital punishment for only some sins if they were; he would either demand it in all cases of sin or in none, as equal sins deserve equal penalties (and even some Biblical capital crimes are worse than others).  The Bible rejects in full the idea that all sins are equal in their evil [2].  Only a fool believes such a contra-Biblical belief is Biblical.

When people use Romans 6:23 in order to argue against theonomy (the position which recognizes that moral knowledge comes from divine revelation alone and that Biblical morality doesn't change between testaments)--as if the fact that all people who sin deserve to naturally die in any way means that the capital penalties in Mosaic Law are illegitimate or revoked (which would also require that God's moral nature change)--they are relying on fallacies and a distortion of Scripture in order to defend an unbiblical conclusion.  Besides, when people I know flee from Mosaic Law, they almost always end up defending or endorsing a legal system that is far more severe in some way than Mosaic Law ever is.

The Biblical teaching that the wages of sin is death in no way means that everyone deserves to be killed by other humans right now, nor does it mean that everyone should be left to die naturally.  It means that people succumb to death because sin brings human death and people sin.  And it remains true that some people deserve to be killed through legitimate methods by human governments as prescribed by the Bible.  But whether an unsaved person dies naturally or by just capital punishment, he or she will face the second death--destruction of the body and soul in hell, which is the result of God's direct judgment and not the actions of any human or natural decay.


[1].  See here:
A.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-truth-of-annihilationism.html
B.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-justice-of-annihilationism.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-alleged-equality-of-sins.html