Why Is There Hell — Winkie Pratney

Let's look to the Lord in prayer. I want to talk today on the subject, if God is love, why is there a hell? Now, Heavenly Father, we praise you for your presence here in this building. We look to you again to teach us this morning.

The Consequences of Human Disobedience

Realize that every good and perfect gift comes from above, from the Father of mercy, in whom there is no variableness nor shadow of turning. We look to you, Lord, the Father of light. We praise you that you can shed your light in our hearts, that this light set us free from the darkness.

Now we look to you on a difficult subject. If you are our love, why is there a hell? Many young people have asked us that question. Today we pray that you'll open up our book and speak to our hearts and show us just how much your love has been injured and why there is a hell.

For Jesus' sake we pray. Amen. The question about, if God is love, why is there a hell, is actually a larger question. It involves also, if God is love, why is there evil in the world? If God is love, why is there evil in the world?

And I want to show you first of all some things that have come out of man's disobedience and rebellion. Yesterday we spent about an hour showing you how that man had made some very foolish choices. Which one?

The end one? Let's have a look at it. Is it self-destructing? Hmm. It is. Press the button here. Press that middle button. That's the one we need. So, all right. Everything in order again. I want to show you some of the things that have come out of man's selfish choices first, and then we're going to do a Bible study on hell, and the words used for hell, and to see what God has to say about hell.

First of all, I want you to see some of the problems that have come out of man's physical depravity. Remember, I said that Adam sinned two ways. I appreciate that God loves me. Remember, I said that two things happened to Adam.

He experienced two kinds of death. Remember, one was spiritual, and what was the other one? Physical. And just as there are two kinds of death, there are two kinds of depravity. Now, I believe in the total depravity of man, but I believe that there are two forms of depravity.

One inherited, which is physical depravity, and one committed by each individual moral agent, which is moral depravity or spiritual. Depravity is simply a word made up of two Latin words, praebus, which means crooked, and the word dei, which means intensive or very.

So, when we say man is deprived, we mean simply this. Man is pretty crooked, that's what we mean. Very crooked, or intensely crooked. We just say man is a crook when we say that he is deprived. Some people have felt that both spiritual and physical depravity are transmitted.

I don't believe that. I believe that physical depravity is transmitted as an inherited result of Adam's sin. It results in physical death, but it is individual choices that God holds man responsible for.

It is for those individual choices that God has to sentence a man. Now, let us see, first of all, the results of what physical depravity has done to man. This is something, by the way, that man cannot help having.

Physical depravity is not sin itself. It is, however, that which gives sin power. It gives, if you like, man a bias in his life towards selfishness. And it is the inherited result of Adam's sin. Four major things come from physical depravity.

First is dullness. Senses, our mental faculties, our eyes, our ears, our physical bodies, do not have the same intense perception and strength that the original man and woman had. In other words, the bodies that we now have before us are not as sharp and as intensive in their perceptions as they could have been.

Now, some of you who have used drugs have found that when certain things are broken down, colors and sometimes lights take on great intensity. Can you imagine what the original parents had of the tremendous intensity of perception?

They could really see colors and really hear sounds, and these senses have been dulled somewhat as a result of sin. I had a very beautiful story once, I have not forgotten it, about a young man who was growing roses.

And he really loved roses, and he had this specially fine strain of rose that he had just bred. And the Lord spoke to him and said, Son, you really love roses, don't you? And he said, Yes, Lord. He thought the Lord was going to get on his case for loving roses too much.

And the Lord said to him, Son, you are looking at a rose that has come from an earth that has been cursed by sin. Do you wait until you see a rose from my new gardens? And then you will have seen a rose.

And his mind started, hmmmm, like this. And then the Lord said to him, Son, you are looking at a rose that has come from an earth cursed by sin, with eyes that belong to a body of death. Do you wait until you see a rose from my new gardens, with your new eyes?

And then you can say, I have seen a rose. So we have a problem, this is Adam's fault, dullness of faculty. All of us have this dullness of faculties. Not all of us have our senses as sharp as they could be.

Second, another thing that is Adam's fault, a deterioration of health. Now this of course is aggravated by our own particular problems today. We will get a little later on to this and what sin has done to the world.

Ecology problems, pollution of course. Man always seems to think up something that can create new forms of openness to disease. But there are no really perfect health in the world. All of us then inherit bodies that are subject to sickness and to death.

And sickness, if you like, is ultimately a result of Adam's sin. You all know how sickness can very often follow sin. You could just sit down and list a number of sins that usually result in sickness.

Often addiction will result in jaundice or something like this, if you are a heroin user. You can get yellow jaundice. You mess around sexually, you can get venereal disease. There are all kinds of sin that follows.

You smoke a great deal. You can get lung cancer. There are all kinds of sicknesses that can follow sin. But ultimately sickness is a result of Adam's sin. In the Garden of Eden there was no sickness. There was no real health.

There was never any death before sin came into the world. So you see, sin brings with it a great deal of consequences. And not always is it the result of the person's sin immediately. It could be way back in the family someplace.

Somebody in the family way back then could have broken some laws of God and then by genetic transmission could inherit deterioration of health. But however, God is good to us. These old bodies are broken down.

Every now and then he heals them just to keep them going for a little while. But he's going to give us new bodies. That's one of the most important things in the Bible. The Bible promise is not just eternal life, which in itself is a fantastic thing, but a very special thing called immortality.

And they are different. Immortality is not eternal life. Eternal life, and you'll see these, by the way, in the Book of Romans, if you have a look at Romans now. Romans, chapter 2, verse 6, who will render to every man according to his deeds, to them who by patient continuance in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, eternal life.

Now the distinction is, immortality has to refer to the physical body. God is going to give us an immortal body. You all know the program, the immortal, the guy whose body couldn't die. That's what immortality, no death to the physical body.

And God is going to give us a new body. That's what the resurrection is all about. A brand new body that will be a spiritual body. When the Bible talks about spiritual body, it does not mean a ghostly body.

It means a physical material being that is under control of the spirit. In other words, this physical being is under the control of our whole spiritual natures, and by simply deciding some things, we can alter the physical structure of our bodies with this new body we have.

Yeah, we could walk through walls, rearrange our molecules and go through, travel vast distances in a moment of time just by thinking about it. See this, the new body is a fantastic thing. It is a deathless, non-sick body.

It never gets sick, it never dies, it does not need nourishment. It's a fantastic new physical being, and it is completely under the control of the spirit. And this is a gift from God for his children.

The resurrection takes place, we get brand new bodies. Look at your bodies, think, well, blah, you know, you get a very good body. Cheer up, you'll get another one in the new world. And just think of your physical body as a frame, at the moment, in which God is painting a picture.

And it's important to God that he gets the picture right. It's just an old frame that he's painting a picture in. Do you see that? One day he'll put a frame on that matches the picture. And the moment the important thing is what is inside the frame, and not the frame itself.

So, as a matter of fact, it's kind of a put-down on the painter. Somebody comes up and looks at the picture and says, wow, what a heavy frame that is. God isn't concerned too much about our external bodies.

And I've seen a lot of beautiful people, and it's not the exterior that makes them beautiful. It's the inside, see that? And that's what God is concerned about. So remember this gift. It's important, you can read about it in Corinthians.

God says, we're looking for the resurrection of, you know, Paul talks about, we're looking for the resurrection of the body. Jesus rose from the dead, he had a, you know, a spirit body that could walk.

Think of the things that Jesus could do. He could walk through walls, he could do all kinds of things with his new body. He'll have bodies like this. Spiritual body. Sown in weakness, scripture says, it is raised in strength.

It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in corruption, it is raised in power. See, all of these beautiful things. And eternal life has to do with the soul. It has to do with our personalities.

Eternal life. Okay, that's that. Now, let's look at a second, third thing here. And this is another tragedy of sin. The defamation of innocent children. So many people ask, if God is a God of love, why are children born deformed?

The answer to this is sin. Not necessarily the parent's sin. Genetic damage takes place because of the results of sin, ultimately Adam's sin. And begins to play games with the little genes that direct and control the formation of the child.

And you know yourself how many defamations have taken place because of people introducing drugs or substances into the body that they didn't understand fully the results of. See? For instance, so many years ago there was the thalidomide.

A terrible thalidomide scare. Thalidomide was a drug that was used. Often pregnant women took it until suddenly a rash of misshapen babies were born. Some without arms, without legs. You know, just a complete mess.

And they found that the thalidomide they were taking, which was apparently a safe drug, it actually altered the genetic mechanisms and it was beginning to create all these misshapen, misformed children.

Now I don't know today what other drugs that man has introduced into his being can deform children. We don't know all the results of those things. We don't know just how much damage acid and marijuana and other new drugs are doing genetically to children.

But understand, the defamation of innocent children is a natural result of selfishness. It is that which has come. Not always the immediate parent's selfishness either. It could be back further and it's taken two or three generations to hit.

But do you see this? This is not something God sat down and planned and said, I'm going to have a deformed child here. This is a horrible picture of God. This is a result of man's fooling around with God's creation.

I'm not sure of all the drugs that people introduce into their systems and I don't know the results of them, but I do know this. We can't fool with God's mechanisms when we don't understand. And now today men are beginning to fool with the genetics themselves, produce new clothing where they're trying to produce kids exactly alike from the same genetic molecule, trying to grow a strain of exactly identical people and grow them in test tubes.

The frightening thing of, who was your parent? A test tube. And now the machine has come full circle. Four, disease and sickness worldwide. This is another result and it is interesting. Disease and sickness act as automatic limiters to curb selfishness.

It's really a strange thing. Have you ever thought, when you're really messing somebody's, people's lives up and then you get sick. You can't be as active as you were before in your sin. It automatically limits.

And you see some nations, they turn away from God. They reject the true and living God and they begin to worship idols. Disease builds up and the population decimates and then in comes an awakening. The people get cleaned up spiritually and then their physical conditions change, their environments get cleaned up and then health comes back again.

You see, it's automatic limiters to selfishness. As the gospel has come in, moral purity has often resulted in social changes. And so many times in the Bible, you know, when Jesus said be whole, then he talks about the whole being.

So many times, sicknesses, somebody said about 80 to 90 of sicknesses today, what they call psychosomatic. It means it's connected directly with the personality. You feel guilty, you're angry, you get, you know, hypertension and heart attacks and all this kind of thing.

If you overeat, you get another bunch of things. And if you do this kind of sin or that kind of sin, it results in physical changes in the body. See, our beings are tied together. If you feel sick, you know, how often your soul feels rotten.

If you're bleh, I just want to die, you know, that kind of thing. All right. So that will, those are the results then ultimately of Adam's inherited depravity. That's something you can point back at Adam and say, it's your dumb fault for that, see.

And kick him if you find him. But however, we want to see now what sin has done to society and to the world. And to do this, we're going to take Luke 2 .52 and to see a well-balanced life. Jesus, the Bible tells us the only description of Jesus as teenage years, Jesus increased in wisdom, fears, in stature, in favor with God and man.

Here we have four different divisions which sin can affect. We have the personality, the soul. We can have the physical body. We can have our spiritual lives affected. And we can have our world affected, our society affected.

Sin's Effects on Body, Soul, Spirit, and Society

And let's look what sin has done to those four areas. First of all, our bodies. Let's look at those. Bodies have two problems. This bias that we call intemperance. Again as a result of Adam's sin and very often can be helped along by our own selfish choices.

I want you to think of something now about this thing we mentioned yesterday about how God visits the parents' sin onto the children to the third and fourth generation. See God designed the genetic laws.

He set them up. It was his idea. He invented these things. So when a person sins, they actually hurt not just themselves, they hurt other people along the line. And I know some people have got saved and they're going to have kids and they had to really pray that God would spare their children.

Because of all the, you know, a selfish man doesn't really care about his kids. He says, well who cares, you know. The only important thing is what I feel now. And then down the line, he could care less what happens down the line.

When a person gets saved, they start to think about other people as well as themselves. And I know a lot of people come out of a, like a drug background or something like this and they've had to really pray, God spare my kid.

I know some people took two or three hundred trips on acid and then mother's going to have a baby and she prayed like crazy and had a really beautiful kid. It was just the Lord, you know, because this, this thing here is very important to see.

And now attached to our physical bodies of course, we have these other two things, our environment and our ecology. A lot of people have a, matter of fact, people say today the reason why our ecology is in a mess is because of the Christians.

Do you know they said that? They said the Christians had this idea that the earth was something to be raped and used in, in their, you know, it says conquer the earth. That's what the Bible says. Do you know that the ecology problems of the world have come because of a violation of the very first commandment God ever gave man?

I want you to look in the book of Genesis and you'll see what the real commandment was that God gave. Genesis chapter one, verse twenty-eight. And God blessed them and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it.

See it's not just subdue, it's replenish first. First command, be fruitful, multiply, replenish the earth. Number one command in the Bible, first one broken. And now after many, many hundreds and hundreds of years, the cyclist comes full circle and man's environment begins to turn in on him and locks him in, in an ever decreasing spiral of judgment.

Isn't that interesting? You cannot mess with God's book and not pay a price. There's just no way you can. And do you realize why there is such a great problem of ecology today? It is this, it's because selfish men are committed to making money over and above preserving the environment.

Ecological problems in this country could be cleaned up within two years, but it would cost a great deal of money and some people would have to just shell out. That's where it's at. But they're not willing to do that.

They don't want to lose that much money to preserve their planet and they'd rather collect their buck and split someplace if they can find a convenient planet in some other place that's not polluted yet.

So here we have a whole bunch of problems and this of course has become a big issue now. Preserve Mother Nature at all costs. Where's it started? Man's selfishness. Do you wonder why God gets so angry at men sometimes?

What he's done, he gives them a beautiful world and then man wrecks it. Then secondly let's look at the soul. The soul is afflicted with two major problems, pride and belief. Burke said this many years ago, it's a very powerful thing.

He said, men qualify for freedom in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetite. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power is put somewhere on will and appetite and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. And you saw last night how those three physical drives go booming right out of control.

All of the physical drives get pushed right up out of control because the soul has turned away from God. By the way I'll give you a definition of these two things. Pride is the refusal to acknowledge or accept yourself as you are.

Yourself as you really are. That's what pride is. And it doesn't always mean that you put yourself up. Sometimes it means that you put yourself down. Every now and then you find a person who goes around calling himself a worm, see, and he never takes any responsibility.

He just says, I'm a nothing, I'm a nobody, God will never be able to use me, I'm a useless nothing, you know. And he says this so often that he begins to put down God's creation, which is his body. Now the Bible has never taught to put yourself down.

It says accept yourself for what you are and let God change your life. It's not a, it's not a sort of an asceticism where people are going around seeing if they can self-destruct in order that God may be all.

Do you see, it's not that. It's that you, real Christian humility, if you want to call it, is not putting yourself down. It is forgetting yourself. That's what humility is. Some people think if I'm really humble I'll go around constantly saying self-deprecating things.

I'll say, well, I'm nobody really and I'm nothing. You're talking too much about yourself. Not I am nothing and I am nobody and I am, see. It's just the real person who's learned humility has forgotten about himself.

He's just interested in doing what God wants him to do and interested in other people. He's forgotten about himself. You can always tell a proud man because he's got eye trouble. No, I mean, he has eye trouble.

His speech is filled with either I can't do this or I will do this. The true Christian simply accepts himself and this is a hard thing for some people to learn. Pride is the refusal to accept yourself as God says.

You look at yourself in the mirror, you say, oh, that's me. It's not too cool, not too fantastic, but it's also God has given me this body and this personality as good as I have at the moment. So I praise the Lord for what I am.

They asked George Whitfield after he'd been preaching all these years, they said, listen, do you, they said, how is it with your soul brother today? He said, I forgot I had one. And that's the Christian.

He's not thinking about himself all the time. You can always tell a backslider, they're always praying for themselves, prayer meetings. Oh, help me, Lord, help me again, help me. Instead of praying for other people.

Unbelief is not disbelief. I think God encourages a man who is a disbeliever because disbelief simply says this, listen, I don't have enough information. I can't commit myself to something I'm not sure of.

Do you see that? That's disbelief. Unbelief says, I know, I understand, but I'm not going to do it. That's the difference. Disbelief says, give me some more facts. I'm not sure about this at all. Unbelief says, I know all the facts, but I'm not going to do it.

Unbelief is moral. Disbelief is lack of knowledge. Do you see the difference? And God says, come on, bring your questions. That's disbelief. He doesn't mind disbelievers. It's unbelievers that God gets uptight about because they know and they're not going to do anything about it.

That's that. You'll find that all attack in the soul basically stems out of those two things, the roots of pride and unbelief. And then the spirits are part of our lives, our spirits. Remember God gave us a spirit to put us in contact with the spiritual world.

What do you think has happened because of sin? Two things. One, darkness. When you talk to a person who's not saved, have you ever wondered why he doesn't just get it immediately? Sometimes it's really hard to get through.

They just do not understand. I want you to look in the book of Corinthians and you'll see why this is. First Corinthians, maybe it's second. Let me check. Yes, second Corinthians, chapter four, verse three.

If our gospel be hid, second Corinthians four, it is hid to them that are lost, in whom the God of this world has blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.

For we preach not ourselves but Christ Jesus the Lord and ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake. For God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness has shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

So here's the thing. When you're talking to a person, if you could imagine a spiritual cloud over his mind and Satan has no fear of light, providing he can rob the victim of sight. And what is that which removes that cloud?

Two things. Complete honesty on our side and prayer. And in prayer we put the power of God against that cloud on the mind. You can actually bind that force that surrounds the mind and resist the power of the enemy to cloud the mind.

And how many of you have known cases where you've talked to kids that were spaced out or they couldn't understand and you prayed and suddenly their minds cleared. I had a kid, he put a whole case of beer away and he was standing there like this, walking around.

And I started, I just felt constrained to talk. I very rarely talk to a person that's drunk or high. I wait till I come down and talk. I just felt constrained to do it. And as I talked, suddenly he was stone cold sober.

God just sobered him up and I led him to Christ. His friend was standing there laughing all the time. He thought he was going through just a drunk thing. And the guy was sober as anything. He gave his life to Christ.

Friend standing there laughing all the time while he was praying. And when he finished, he looked up and he said goodbye to his friend and walked away. That really blew his friend's mind. But he still got on for the Lord.

But see, it requires honesty on our part. If we have any dishonesty in our lives, then we can't break that blind. There'll be an instinctive loss. You see here in Corinthians these words. We have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty in verse 2.

Not walking in craftiness, nor handling the Word of God deceitfully. We don't use the Bible to try and put across our own particular opinions. We just use the Word of God as God wants it to be used. And then it says by manifestation of the truth, by actually showing people the truth, we commend ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God.

And I am excited when I talk to a sinner. I know I've got an ally right inside his soul and it's his conscience. And I'm aiming at that dude in there, see. This is an important thing to remember when you're witnessing.

A lot of people will throw up blinds. Satan will help them. See, you'll find they get geniuses in getting up, in thinking up excuses. And think back to your own life. When you ran off, you know, some Christian or somebody religious would try to get on your case about Jesus.

And think of all the brilliant excuses you could make up. People talk to me, you know, and they'd lay all this thing on me. And then I'd throw out a question to them. And then while they're trying to answer that question, I was busy thinking up another one.

I could care less what they answered, you know. I just wanted to find another question and keep them freaked out so they couldn't get on my case. But what happens, see, you can throw this up. And usually sinners only have about six standard questions.

If you can blow those, you can blow everything. They run out some. Most of them, they throw it out and the Christians say, well, you know, there are some things we can't understand. And they just, you know, they have to handy it out.

We're hopefully being able to give you some, some exploders to just blow up these things. And it's a lot of fun to have, to know there's about six questions they're going to ask. And you can just go in, boom, the next one, boom, you know, boom, and ah!

And some of you in this place you got saved because somebody blew up your six questions and you never had them blown before. See, that's the exciting thing about this. And the important thing to remember about this is that we are dealing with a satanic force that blinds the mind.

So we have to work with God, the Holy Spirit, and often when you're witnessing, a guy may be giving you all these hassles, you pray inside, you pray that God will bind the spirit that's on his mind. See that?

And it's quite funny to see sometimes their words run out, you know, they're getting all the satanic anointing and you're binding, see, and then suddenly, ah, well, you know, and their minds go blank and you come in, wham, wham, wham, collapse in flames, you know, and get saved.

This is, this is a lot of fun to see that. But that doesn't mean that you'll fall on your knees while they're talking and say, oh, oh, oh, oh, you don't have to do that, you can do it under your breath and, and just do it quietly.

But remember that we're not just dealing with, our battle is not just with, with human intellect, we're dealing sometimes with satanic anointing and we need to understand it. Those of you who have been in the rock world will, will know the satanic anointing that comes on the singing and, and you get a, a supernatural thing comes on you to do it.

Now the same thing can happen in defense. Some kids' minds are just bound by, by Satan and they get really satanic words of wisdom and you've got to come back and blow them up with the truth. The exciting thing about this is, when you understand this darkness on the mind, you can go right through and blow up the core of it, because you do not have to answer always the objections, you can hit right at the core of the thing.

Let's say a kid says to you, well, what do you mean God, I don't believe in God, and so I understand why you say that, because you're running away from God. And the guy says, well God, I don't believe there's a God, and so I used to say that too, but God got on my case, you know, wham, you're just blowing right into all the smoke signals and coming right into the center of the heart.

Do you see this? What's that? That's right, yeah, that's, all the, the Romanian Christians, funny, you know, they said, why do you believe in a God? He says, well, when Russia went off to fight the, you know, whoever they fought, they sent up a big army and I knew that there was that country there because of the army they sent off.

And he says, I see all your active propagandists against God, I know there must be a God, because you're working so hard to block him. And that's a really interesting little thing. Keep that in mind though, the Bible uses a very interesting word, it says, we must take captive the thoughts of men for Jesus Christ.

It's like a net, you throw over their thoughts and bring them into Christ. And that takes intelligent witnessing, and it is a thing of the Spirit. It's amazing how God will give you words that really cut right through the darkness.

And I remember preaching one time in an open air meeting, and a guy came up, you know, and he's standing there, and he started calling these things out. And it was just like a, like an attack, you know.

I was preaching, everybody's listening, there was a real silence, except for this guy coming out, you know, just these words coming out from this young guy standing there, just like this, you know. And it just felt like a niggling, I felt all this anointing and this little niggling coming out, you know, like that.

And I remember turning around and just word, God dropped a scripture in my mind, it came out like a machine gun. I said, rejoice, young man, in the days of your youth, walk in the ways of your heart, in the sight of your eyes, that you know for all these things God will bring you into judgment.

And it melted. It just came out like a machine gun bullet, it went, and that was the end, he didn't say a word after that. God will give you an anointing to understand and to deal with these things. When we get to street meetings, we're going to put a trailer together and go out in the streets.

You'll have your own experiences here, brethren. All right, now, man and the world. Let's look at this, and we'll come back to our original question. I had to show you some of the things that are not God's fault.

Worldliness, Selfishness, and the Distortion of Creation

Man, you can see what a mess the world is. And then society has become degenerate because of what is called worldliness, which is the spirit of the secular, and lust, which is then committal to gratification of selfish desire.

And the very things that God designed to help man forge in his happiness, they've become tools of selfishness. Friendships, see, affection, when God gave, there are two men born, one is Cain and one is Abel.

Sin comes in and one becomes a murderer. See that? And then sexual immorality comes on the beautiful relationship God designed, and companionship in marriage, and all of these things. The word flesh is a word for us to think about here.

In an emotional connotation, if you could cut off that H and write it backwards, that's what it is. It is selfishness. It is the concentration on gratifying the emotions by the five senses. That's what flesh means in the moral sense.

All right? Okay, let's look at all that. Now we're going to come back to, if God is love, why is there a hell? And I'll give you a few things to remember about this. First of all, God did not design hell for man.

Hell was never meant for man. Never. Hell was made for the devil and his angels. When a man aligns his life with the devil, he chooses hell. God never sends anybody to hell. Secondly, we're going to look at some of the bible words on hell, because some people don't believe hell exists.

They say, if God really was love, there would not be a hell. Well, God really is love, and there is a hell. But I think some people have a very poor conception, either of what love means or what hell is.

Now the bible is very plain. There are a lot of words used to describe the agony of separation from God, because basically that's what death is. Death is separation from God. Physical death is separation from our environment.

Spiritual death is separation from God. And there are not just two deaths in the bible, but actually four. Minimum four. There is physical, which is dying to the world around you. There is spiritual, which is basically sin.

The bible says, she that lives in pleasure is dead while she lives. And then there is the awful result of these two, that is called endless death. This is what Romans 6 .23, the wages of sin is. Death.