When Adam sinned, and the human race fell into a condition of sin, the name of that condition was death. God had told Adam that the day he ate of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, he would surely die. But he didn’t die physically that very moment. So what did that warning mean then?
Death is not cessation. Death is not to be defined as an abrupt end. Rather, death is separation. Physical death is separation of the soul from the body. Spiritual death is the separation of fellowship between God and man. Death is separation. Because of sin, the world was shattered into a million pieces, and these fragmented pieces are all separated from one another—we live in the ways of death, as the first part of Ephesians 2 tells us.
So what does Christ bring us? The answer of course is life, but if we misunderstand this, we will think of this life as extra juice to help us do what we were already doing. But that is not life, it is super-charged death. Life re-integrates. Life overcomes the countless separations. Life knits everything back together again—in a similar manner as we are told in the psalms that a baby is knit together in his mother’s womb. Life ties things together, and this is why Christ is our life. In Christ, all things hold together. He sends his Spirit, and His Spirit gathers up all our unraveled lives. As He does this, He is not content to do it with just a few things. He integrates everything, far as the curse is found. So this is what we are after—all of Christ for all of life.