A Dirty Start

There’s a lot of dirt in the first three chapters of the Bible.  It’s a theme of some kind.  We all know that Adam was created “from the dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7).  And the name “Adam” means “ground” because Adam was created from the ground.  Then God forms all the beasts and birds from the ground (2:19).  After the humans sin, God curses the serpent by saying “you will eat dust all the days of your life” (3:14).  And he curses Adam by saying “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. . . .By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (3:17,19)

I don’t know anyone who really likes that last verse.  This curse from God that work will be hard and we will have painful toil to get food, and that even then we will return to the ground as dust – this is not the most encouraging verse.  But Sara Matheny told me that the Africans read it a different way.  Through their lens, verse 19 is a comfort to them that God is not a God who created it to be this way.  This verse is confirmation that the hard life they live of subsistence farming is not what God wanted and not what he designed.  There was supposed to be something much better, but it got cursed.  But there will be something much better in the end.

Adam (ground or dirt) and Eve (living) together make “living dirt” – humans.  That’s what we are.  But God dignified this living dirt so loftily by “breathing into [our] nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living being“ (2:7).  The Hebrew word for breath is the same as the word for Spirit, so God gave us not only the breath of life, but His very Spirit to animate and fill us.  This is a transformation of that dust into something transcendent. We don’t have to stay rooted to the ground, stuck in the mud of our earthly dirtiness, bound to a hard meager existence.  We are bodies of mud (“jars of clay,” as Paul says) alive with the Spirit of God, living with the hope and faith that this is not the way it is supposed to be, and God will make it right one day.