<p>1:9 <i>Yes, we ourselves have had the sentence of death within ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves but in the God who raises the dead- </i>The standard interpretation of this seems to be that when Paul asked himself as to whether he would die, he found the answer &quot;sentence&quot; that he would. But this is a very odd way of putting it; and why use the language of the courtroom, let alone a phrase taken from Jewish commentary and midrash on Genesis 3. This sentence of death can be read as an allusion to the sentence which passed upon all men as a result of Adam's sin.Paul is saying that all our sufferings are common in that we each have the same sentence of death.&quot;We had the sentence of death in ourselves &quot;in our hearts we felt the sentence of death&quot;, NIV, <i>that</i> we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead&quot; (2 Cor. 1:9 AV). The fact we are going to die, relatively soon, and lie unconscious... drives the man who seriously believes it to faith in the God of resurrection. It seems that at a time of great physical distress, Paul was made to realize that in fact he had &quot;the sentence of death&quot; within him, he was under the curse of mortality, and this led him to a hopeful faith that God would preserve him from the ultimate &quot;so great a death&quot; as well as from the immediate problems. Death being like a sleep, it follows that judgment day is our next conscious experience after death. Because death is an ever more likely possibility for us, our judgment is effectively <i>almost upon us</i>. And we must live with and in that knowledge. The tragic brevity of life means that &quot;childhood and youth are vanity&quot;, we should quit the time wasting follies of youth or overgrown childhood (and the modern world is full of this), and therefore too &quot;remove anger from thy heart and put away evil from thy flesh&quot; (Ecc. 11:10 AVmg.). Ecclesiastes uses the mortality of man not only as an appeal to work for our creator, but to simply have faith in His existence.</p>