“Adam, where are you?” (Gen 3:9), was God’s judgment on Adam’s sin, and it showed that Adam had died as God had said. He hid himself from God, and all mankind after him has sought to do hide from God in as many ways as there are people on earth. To want to hide from God is a spiritual catastrophe, a misery, a total confusion, a ruin, a depravity and, yes, a death. The question God asked sounded horrible to Adam because it carried judgment. Of course grace was with God here too in the coming to and finding Adam. But notice, Adam preferred to hide from this judgement and grace. This was truly the death of the soul.
George H. Tavard in his work on John Calvin’s Psychopannychia entitled, The Starting Point of Calvin’s Theology summarized how Calvin understood the soul’s death. “Calvin in his Psychopannychia wrote, ‘Do you wish to know what the soul’s death is? It is to miss God, to be forsaken by God, to be left to itself. For if God is the soul’s life, the soul that loses God’s presence loses its own life.’ Such a spiritual death is experienced when God’s love presence has been withdrawn. Since there is no light outside of God that is able to illumine our night, ‘our soul, buried in its darkness, is blind’ when the divine light sets. This blindness entails other tragic defects, for by the same token the soul is dumb, ‘unable to make saving confession.’ It is also deaf, ‘unable to hear the living voice.’ And finally it limps, ‘unable to function.’ Calvin asks, ‘What more do you require for death.’ All these decays of the human spirit can already be experienced by sinners in the present life” (Pg., 85-85)
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