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Sin is not only rebellion against God and violation of his law but also an enslaving and corrupting power. This aspect of sin is captured, most emphatically in Romans 6-7, by personifying it as a lord or master. Correlatively, the sinner is a slave, in bondage to sin (e.g. 6:6, 12, 14, 16ff.). Elsewhere (Eph. 2:1, 5; Col. 2:13), the unrelieved desperateness of this slavery is expressed as being nothing less than “dead in … transgressions and sins,” a deadness that manifests itself as corrupt living in submission to Satan, as “the ruler of the kingdom of the air” (Eph. 2:2). Further, and this should not be missed, tying in with what we have already seen, in this deadness and corruption sinners are as culpable as they are helpless. They are “by nature children of wrath” (2:3; cf. 5:6; Col. 3:6). Sin elicits God’s wrath. As more careful study of Paul will show, divine wrath is neither an impersonal process nor a merely reflexive leaving of sinners to the baleful but penultimate, inner-worldly consequences of their sinning. Rather, God’s wrath is his active recoil against sin, a recoil that arises from concerns of his person, especially his holiness and justice, and finds its ultimate expression, necessarily judicially punitive and retributive in view of those concerns, in death as the eternal destruction of sinners. This is indisputable from statements like Romans 2:8, 1 Thessalonians 1:10, 2 Thessalonians 2:10, 12, and especially 2 Thessalonians 1:6, 8-9. For Paul human death is penal, essentially punitive.