The wages of sin is death, because, if our life has its basis in our relationship to God and to other people and if these relationships are corrupted, our very life is threatened to its core. … Sin threatens not just moral condemnation but ontological disintegration.

—Tom Smail, Like Father, Like Son: The Trinity Imaged in Our Humanity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 238, 271.