dust you are

“Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! To think’s audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.”  ~ Captain Ahab, referring to himself in Melville’s Moby Dick

What’s so great about faith?

It seems a bit odd that the ability to believe in something invisible would make the Top Three Character Traits of All Time – “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love” (I Corinthians 13). Everyone agrees, of course, that love is an easy number one – it’s wonderful, fabulous, all-around swell, as the Apostle Paul readily concurs: “the greatest of these is love.” Hope is also a simple shoe-in for the Top Three – it’s the stuff that makes life worth looking forward to. The poems, books and movies abound that extol the virtues of hope and love.

But faith? … “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11)? How does faith in any way edge out all the other contenders for the Top Three, such as joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control?

What’s particularly weird is that God uses faith, more than any other trait, as Sole Qualifier for His acceptance. Faith carried Abraham into Biblical celebrity; it won the affirmation of Jesus as He walked among the masses. An entire chapter of the Bible (Hebrews 11) praises Heroes of Faith – there’s nothing similar for Heroes of Hope or Love. And above all else, even though love tops the chart at number one, salvation doesn’t come through love – it comes through faith. Why? All of this simply for believing in something invisible?

Hypothetically, God could have designed the created order in such a way that faith wouldn’t even be necessary. Why not make a universe that manifests His presence visibly, like the sun, or like a spiritual glow shining everywhere? Granted, evidence of the Creator does surround us in the beauty of rivers, mountains, the starry cosmos, but these signposts are open to question. (Indeed, God is almost lost in them as people fanatically ascribe their beauty to the random forces of chance, chaos theory and evolution.) Why not plaster Godness so clearly and undeniably across the billboard of creation that faith would be irrelevant?

Or why not design the human mind so that God’s presence would simply be accepted as a given? Human beings may be generally inclined toward worship, and a common moral sense may be written on our hearts, but again these signposts are open to question. People worship all manner of things, and the law on our hearts can be doubted and disregarded. Why not fix worship of the one God so clearly and undeniably in our hearts that faith wouldn’t be required?

Instead, both the universe and our hearts allow us to be tossed and turned in our faith. Forgetfulness, misinterpretation and outright doubt cause our minds to lose sight of His truth all the time – and for some reason He was pleased to create us that way.

In fact, it seems He was eager to test our faith right from the start, when He issued our primary parents their first command. Had God’s real concern been to protect humanity from the knowledge of good and evil, He could have placed Adam and Eve far away from the tree, or erected an impenetrable barrier between the tree and them. The fact that the tree stood entirely within their reach indicates that protection was not the true reason for the command – it seems instead that He wanted to develop in Adam and Eve their first measure of faith.

Did the command not to eat of the tree require faith? It became invisible immediately after it was spoken (as all language does). “Out of sight, out of mind,” the adage goes; a spoken command is lost unless its hearers exert a degree of faith. Adam and Eve first needed to remember the command, recalling its actual words – a step targeted by the serpent’s first temptation (“Did God really say …?”). Second, they needed to interpret the words of the command correctly – an important requirement, since misinterpretation all too often results in sects and cults, churches homosexual and universalist. However, the serpent didn’t address this step as much as the next – they needed to embrace the command as truth, which he attacked head on: “You will not surely die …”

What a setup! Adam and Eve could break the command by forgetting it, misinterpreting it, or doubting it. Failure leered from many angles – and God deliberately placed them in that position, expecting them to demonstrate a tenacity in their faith, actively employing their minds in a manner unique among the whole of His created works – a manner worthy of His image.

God’s words in the wake of their failure reveal much about us: “dust you are and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3). The second phrase traditionally catches our attention, but the first is perhaps the more radical. “To dust you shall return” may have changed human nature from immortal to mortal, but “dust you are” declared God’s changing opinion of us: although created in His image, perhaps we were never very much like Him after all. We were always made of dust, but the prospect of returning to dust became logical only after we acted that way.

What a sad assessment of our worth. It’s a striking letdown from earlier verses. No animal, nor anything else in creation, was described as made in the image of God – only us. Accordingly, God conversed with nothing else in creation – only us. But after Adam and Eve failed the test of their faith, God did not see fit to mention humanity’s share in His likeness, instead lumping us together with the rest of the created order, as nothing but matter – nothing but dust.

It’s a dark resolution of the miraculous dichotomy that existed before Adam and Eve failed. They were made in the image of the eternal, infinite Spirit, yet also made of dust. Physical objects – animals, plants, rocks – all have a simple nature; so does God, who as spirit has no ambiguity, no divisions (aside from the paradox of the trinity). But Adam and Eve were designed with an inherent tension between matter and mind. Which would they be – basic dust or like God? Between those two poles they existed, with the potential to act like either. Their failure prompted God to judge their truer nature, declaring the disappointing pole toward which they had gravitated.

And yet God did not merely condemn them, and all of humanity, to return to the dust from whence we came – He could have done that silently without informing us. Instead He explained the curse to us even as He spoke it into existence, continuing to converse with us, relating to us as though we still had minds, could still exhibit understanding, demonstrate faith. The miraculous tension in our nature lives on – and spelling out the curse shows God’s perpetual hope for us, that we would rise above the baser part of our nature to live up to His image.

Interestingly, the modern world entices us in the opposite direction. Media and popular culture emphasize sex, drinking, drugs – sensations devoid of mental thought, as if our brains are only chemical constructions to be titillated. TV shows like Extreme Makeover concentrate on the worth of our physical bodies, paying only trite lipservice to personality. Movies like Kill Bill subordinate negligible ideas such as story and plot to the “eye candy” of violence. Modern advertising pitches products at us based on factors as fleeting as status and attitude, rather than real value. Even schools, which are supposed to develop children’s minds, use dumbed-down textbooks revised year after year to be flashier, jazzier, with more colorful graphics and images, while reducing actual readings in length and complexity. The greatest hope the modern world has for us is that we will not be minds attuned to thought and truth – it’s that we will be physical bodies craving only sensations.

Why does the world hope this of us? If we do not think, if we fail to keep our minds fixed on truth, we can be parted all the easier from our physical resources – our money. As they say, a fool and his money are soon parted, and it’s clear that the world dehumanizes us because it wants nothing of us but our money – which, in reality, is little more than dust. Matter desires matter; dust desires dust.

But the eternal Spirit desires spirit, as God eagerly wishes us to live up to His image.

He could not have made us out of anything but matter and dust – God’s creations must be separate from Him, just as matter is separate from spirit. But among all His physical creations, God made us somehow like Himself, stretching the very bounds of our created-ness by fashioning us into the wondrous paradox of dust in His image, matter that strains against the nature of matter through mind. And while He operates upon the entire created order through action, He also interacts with us through our minds. We may be dust, but He intends us to know so much more than dust.

Had God manifested Himself visibly in the universe, rendering faith unnecessary, we would have had no need for minds – and without minds, we would have been no different from the rest of creation. We would not have reflected His image, leaving the universe empty – a silent wasteland devoid of discourse, devoid of knowledge, comprised of nothing but mute and mindless animals, plants and rocks. Faith makes creation worth creating.

Perhaps this is the greatness of faith, the evidence of things not seen – it’s the fundamental element distinguishing us from everything else. God created us to know the invisibles: thought, truth, and above all, Himself, who loved us enough to fashion us in His image. In the great, broad, glorious expanse of the universe, it is ours, and ours alone, to recall His words, interpret them correctly, and embrace them as truth, affirming our relationship with our Creator.

Any less from us suggests we’re only dust.