THE HOPE OF ISRAEL - The Preterist Archive

The Hope of Israel: What Is It? 249
"If then eternal punishment is the second
death, it follows that, in the conception of John
as well as according to Biblical history, the first
death is the banishment and punishment that
came upon the race on account of the first sin :
'In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt
surely die' (Gen. 2:17). John chose not to consider
in this connection physical death, or else
he counted it a part of the curse of the first
death, which it is."
Thus it is made evident that John is here speaking
of death in the spiritual sense; which is no new thing
in the Bible, that being indeed the true sense of the
word and the sense in which it is first used in the
Bible (Gen. 2:17. See also John 5:24; 8:51; 11:25,
26; Rom. 5:14; 6:9; 8:6; Eph. 2:1, and many other
passages) If then eternal banishment from the presence
of God (2 Th. 2:9) is, in the terminology of .
the
passage we are studying, "the second death," that fact
directs us to the meaning of the antithetical statement,
"This is the first resurrection"; for if the second
death is not the death of the body, neither is the
first resurrection the resurrection of the body.
According to the passage itself the first resurrection
is sitting upon "thrones" and exercising "judgment";
it is living and reigning with Christ a thousand
years.
They who thus lived and reigned were the
souls of those that had been beheaded on account of
the testimony of Jesus, and also those who did not
worship the beast or his image or receive his mark;
and this includes, not the martyrs only, but all the
saved; for verse 6 says, "Blessed and holy is he who
has part in the first resurrection. Over these the sec-