I think it's the capacity to die that comes upon God in the flesh. Adam and Eve had the capacity to die from their creation. I don't think God has the capacity to die, nor do the angels (though I don't know for certain about the angels), but humans always have. That appears to change with the resurrection.
It depends on what you mean by "die".
Jesus, having the human capacity to die, but not the death sentence that seems to be passed through our fathers, was not immortal.
I disagree. Had He not intentionally laid down His life, He would never have died at all. His body was so devoid of the curse that His body didn't even decay while He was in the grave. There's no evidence that He would have ever experience the geriatric process and died of old age and, being God, He would not have been susceptible to accidental death or disease.
Someone (
@Right Divider?) pointed out that Jesus died in His human nature, but I wonder if we've made too much of the "natures" of Jesus, especially in how we separate them. Did Jesus only partially die (the human part only)? That makes sound like Jesus wasn't fully man. But if He did fully die, that makes it sound like He was no longer God.
I didn't see what
@Right Divider actually said but perhaps there is a point of doctrine on which he and I disagree because I believe there is strong biblical evidence to support the belief that Jesus died - period. When Jesus died, He was as dead as any other
righteous person who had preceded him to the grave.
Of course, this leads us back to the question of what death is, too.
Precisely! Oh this website is fun when you find someone who can actually think!
What does it mean to die?
Well, biblically speaking, death is a spiritual issue, not a biological one. It is a spiritual separation. When your spirit separates from your physical body then your body is dead. When (if) your spirit is separated from God then you are spiritually dead.
Notice that death hasn't anything to do with whether or not you exist. When you die, you do not cease to exist, you simply move from one mode of being to another. (There are some who believe that those thrown into the Lake of Fire will be destroyed and no longer exist and I've heard decent arguments on both sides of that issue. Suffice it to say that IF that is the case (which I doubt but am not willing to be dogmatic about it) then that being the "second death" is the only sense in which death has anything to do with a cessation of one existence.)
As for Jesus' death, no one denies that Jesus gave up His Spirit and died physically but, in addition to that, Matthew 27:46 seems to make really clear that the Father had forsaken Jesus, which is to say that there had been a separation introduced between Christ and the Father, which is spiritual death, by definition. Jesus then gave up His Spirit (i.e. His Spirit left His body) and went to the place of the righteous dead (i.e. Abraham's Bosom or Paradise) for three days where all the other righteous dead had gone up to that point because they where not yet able to be in God's presence since the atonement had not yet been made. After being spiritually separated both from His body and from the Father for three days, Jesus not only rose from the dead but Abraham's Bosom would have been emptied out since there was now nothing separating those folks from being in the presence of God. Thus Jesus was every bit as dead as any righteous person has ever been.
Clete
No it doesn't.
No he isn't.