During their sojourn in the garden at Eden, Adam and Eve received instructions and commands from their Heavenly Father personally. The report of one such command we have recorded as follows: “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat, But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, nevertheless, thou mayest choose for thyself, for it is given unto thee; but, remember that I forbid it, for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” Moses 3:16-17). In time, Eve and then Adam partook of that fruit which had been forbidden them.
The consequences of their actions were several and of eternal importance. Their physical bodies evolved from a state of immortality to a state of mortality thereby introducing death’s destructive impact into the world. The earth itself fell from its terrestrial condition to that of a telestial body. Our first parents experienced the impact of the first spiritual death as they were no longer able to associate intimately with their Father. As they were banished from the garden, they were just as certainly banished from God’s presence. Jesus Christ became their mediator with the Father, and their contacts with God were limited to their uttering prayers to Him and in return, His inspiration to them through the power of the Holy Ghost. There were also positive effects of their transgressions. Through the exercise of their agency, they would gain experience through dealing with the effects of good and evil. Indeed, this was the core argument Lucifer had used to persuade Eve to partake of the forbidden fruit. By learning to choose between the consequences of good and evil, she and Adam could learn wisdom and become more like their Heavenly Father. Also in their fallen condition, they had received the ability to procreate thus making the human family possible. In this context, it is not unimportant that another of God’s commands to Adam and Eve was that they “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it” (Moses 2:28).
Thus two deaths were brought into the world through the transgressions of Adam and Eve. One was physical in nature, and the other was spiritual. Given our mortal condition, the day would come that our immortal spirit being would separate itself from our mortal body in death. The spiritual death, our inability to have any intimate, face-to-face relationship with our Heavenly Father, is the result of mankind’s sinful nature. God cannot abide sin in any degree, and therefore we must exist here on the earth absent personal contact with Him.
The consequences of these two deaths were overcome through the atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. The healing results of Christ’s atonement apply to us mortals individually in conditional and unconditional terms respectively. Through the atonement, the effects of the physical death are overcome for each of God’s spirit children unconditionally. It was Adam’s transgression that brought physical death into the world; we had no role to play in producing that consequence. Thus our freedom from the effects of this death, our resurrection, is a gift wrought through the Lord’s atonement that we cannot refuse. However, our freedom from the effects of the spiritual death, a death that comes upon each of us individually as a result of our birth into this telestial environment as well as our own sinning, is of a conditional nature. The degree of freedom from this spiritual death or the degree of salvation that will be our reward is conditionally dependent upon our faithfulness in living the gospel of Jesus Christ. Simply stated, we as individuals are not responsible for the consequences of father Adam’s transgression, but we are fully accountable for our own sins. The second Article of Faith of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reads, “We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression.”
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