Chapter 3
To Dust We Return
The story of the Old Testament is the story of humans failing. Despite God’s refusal to abandon the creation that rebelled against him, the humans he chose to walk alongside proved fragile and mortal. Not long after Adam and Eve left Eden, the people that God formed from dust to rule his good creation turned to jealousy and murder. Despite his patience with humanity, they turned farther and farther into themselves, plunging the earth they were meant to make beautiful into the oil slick of corruption and unmaking.
Even the washing clean of the earth in the great flood couldn’t purge the effects of Adam’s choice from humanity. As God walked alongside Abraham and cultivated the family of promise through its generations, each human died. There were pinpricks of light—a hope that the human race that turned its back on God could actually follow faithfully. But despite the successive successes, people still died. The great faithful men and women who worked to undo the corruption brought on humanity by Adam’s failure couldn’t escape Adam’s road. Their steps led to the yawning mouth of death’s cave. The inevitability of their unmaking was simply accepted over the course of the centuries, because nothing could be done about it.
For centuries God’s people walked with their Creator and he walked with them. And for centuries they experienced his promised blessings. Generation after generation, God had to renew his relationship with humans because humans die. Abraham’s blessing passed to Isaac. Isaac’s blessing passed to Jacob. Jacob blessed his sons, and his sons’ sons’ sons centuries later carried the blessings of their fathers with them from Egypt. That generation itself died in the wilderness and a new group of humans took up God’s promise and bore it into the land of Canaan where Abraham had walked so long ago.
Generation after generation humans came into this world, met their God, lived in trusting faith, and then died. The curse of Adam hovered over all people—each returned to the very dust from which they were taken. In his kindness and grace, the Creator–God accompanied his people on their journey, taking them by their infant hand and not letting go until it lay across their chest in the grave.
It’s the very inevitability of death despite God’s presence that prompted the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes to pick up his pen. The teacher had access to every good thing that life could offer. He could sate any and every appetite and had the health and youth to enjoy it. For most of us, if we had even a small piece of that luxury, we’d feel much better about our lives. It’s easier to endure pain when we can purchase filet mignon or vacation on sun–bleached beaches.
But the realization that the teacher comes to after sampling from the smorgasbord of life is that none of it really matters because the same destiny waits for every human being.
This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun:
The same destiny overtakes all.
For the living know that they will die,
but the dead know nothing;
they have no further reward,
and even their name is forgotten.
Their love, their hate
and their jealousy have long since vanished;
never again will they have a part
in anything that happens under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 9:3, 5–6)
The question hanging over the words of the teacher is the same question that followed God’s people and grew larger as the centuries passed: Is life worth living if it always ends in death? While it would be tempting to join the teacher in Ecclesiastes and say, “no,” the picture of the Old Testament is a God who walks alongside mortal humans from the day of their birth to the day they return to the dust. Humans, die, yes. But God has not abandoned them.
The prophets hint at a plan where God will rescue from death all who followed him in life. Isaiah sang a song of lament over the destruction of his people, but looked to a day when his God would restore those who lived faithfully and would forsake their graves and return to the land of the living (Isaiah 26:19). Daniel marveled at a vision of a far–away future when the faithful who sleep in the dust of the earth would arise into never–ending life (Daniel 12:2). Ezekiel oversaw the reknitting of flesh and tendon and bone into resurrected humanity. He anticipated a future where God’s people return to life, leaving their moldering tombs behind (Ezekiel 37:13–14).
No matter how profound those prophetic promises were, however, they did little to fracture the darkness in death’s cave. The path of humanity continued inexorably into unmaking just the same as it always had. Life ends in death. Maybe there’s something on the other side, the ancients mused, but no one knew exactly what.
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