Bite the Dust (2)

“By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground, because from it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  Genesis 3:19  NASB

Dust – Remember this: The Hebrew word dakkāʾ means both “crushed” and “contrite.”  However, it has a second root spelling exactly the same way which means “dust” (that which is crushed) found in Psalm 90:3.  Yesterday we asked if “bite the dust” wasn’t a necessary condition of drawing close to God.  Today we discover that it’s more than a necessary condition.  It’s an essential part of our very being!

Perhaps the psalmist had this verse in Genesis in mind when he wrote “You turn mortals back into dust and say, ‘Return, you sons of mankind.’”  He uses the Hebrew dakkāʾ to remind us of our beginnings.  Genesis 3 uses a different word with the same meaning, ʿāpār.

Man in his physical body was formed from dust, and it is to dust that his physical body returns (Gen 3:19; Eccl 3:20; 12:7; Job 4:19; 8:19; 10:9; 34:15; Ps 104:29). . .  The fact that man comes from the dust of the earth is a reminder of the sovereignty of God in his creative acts, and of the insignificance of man apart from the intervening “breath of life” of his goodness.^[1]

Let’s be extremely clear about this Hebraic point.  The only reason we have worth (and existence) is because we are animated by divine breath.  Once that leaves, we’re nothing more than dust, and as far as I know, no one considers dust a valuable commodity.  What this tells us is that God is the reason we have value.  We have borrowed something of the divine nature.  On our own (if that were even possible), we’re nothing.

Put this into the frame of the Western obsession with success.  Do all those badges of accumulation really matter?  Oh, I don’t mean to suggest that they don’t have a purpose.  We are, as agents of the divine, designed to bring order to chaos, to be fruitful, to expand the Garden, to find ourselves in community.  Of course, these count because they fulfill the purposes of our existence.  But our being here, our life, is based on something else, something not subject to accumulation or distribution.  We are because He says so.  We are dust—animated by His desire.  And in the end, when it’s all over, what really counts is this participation with His spirit.

ʿāpār is the Hebraic reminder that God gives me my being.  It’s His, not mine, and I am loaned this “whatever it is” thing in order to experience a relationship with Him.  That’s it in a nutshell.  The end.

Topical Index: ʿāpār, dust, dakkāʾ, Genesis 3:19

^[1] Allen, R. B. (1999). 1664 עָפַר. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 687). Chicago: Moody Press.