There are a couple of ideas that should be in the background of a discussion like this. One is the recognition that God had stated cause and effect to Adam before the transgression. "You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." (Genesis 2:17) I don't think this is exactly crime and punishment. God did not say, "I will kill you," for example. But the semantics of what we mean by punishment isn't really the point. Cause and effect were defined, the consequences were as described, and "death came through a man" (1 Corinthians 15:21). Human volition brought death into the picture. God is not the author of death, but of life. He regards death as an enemy (1 Corinthians 15:25-26) because of what it does and has done to humankind (Hebrews 2:14-15). Death, fundamentally a separation from God, which is a separation from life, is the bottom line outcome of transgression, Adam's or mine. I believe that the other outcomes of the first sin, whether viewed as punishment or not, were a combination of inevitable results and necessary adjustments to allow for the possibility of deliverance and redemption.

Another background idea that is very important here is that, as the saying goes, "no man is an island." It is fundamentally true that none of us are autonomous beings. What we do produces consequences that affect others, including God himself. "For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone." (Rom 14:7 NIV) This goes back to the way that God endowed man at the very beginning with authority and responsibility. Man was to "subdue" and "rule" and "work" and "take care of" what God had made and given (Genesis 1:26ff, 2:15). God created mankind "a little lower than the angels; you crowned him with glory and honor and put everything under his feet." (Hebrews 2:7-8). What the original humans did affected not only themselves, but every area in which they had authority and responsibility. God had and does have a very high view of mankind, created in his image. He created us with purpose and dignity and power and responsibility. Sin and death altered man's position from reignal to enslavement, but God's interest has been to renew and restore all who will accept his grace to glory, to recover the potential that has been squandered in sin and death.

Ezekiel 18 is not particularly about consequences of actions that affect other people. It is about personal responsibility and guilt for our own sins, and no one else's. The sin of the first parents affected me and virtually everything about my world. My sins affected my children too, and still will, and their's affect me. But God holds me in no way accountable for Adam's sin, nor for the sins of my children. "The soul who sins is the one who will die." (Ezekiel 18:4) Adam's sin affected me, but I am not responsible for it and will not be accountable for it. It is quite sufficient that I am responsible and accountable for my own sin.

A woman reasoning with King David abut his son who had done a great wrong made this observation, "Like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be recovered, so we must die. But God does not take away life; instead, he devises ways so that a banished person may not remain estranged from him." (2 Sam 14:14 NIV)