Dust to dust

In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread Till you return to the ground, For out of it you were taken; For dust you are, And to dust you shall return." – Genesis 3v19

“Ashes to ashes – dust to dust.’ That doesn’t sound like much of a summary of life, does it? Yet that is what we often here at funerals. Sadly, there is a truth to it, When it is all said and done we will return to the dust that man came from.

Although life spans are stretching out, we still must deal with that fact that unless Jesus comes back we are all going to end up back in the dirt. We can’t do anything about that.

There is something we can do something about though. What are we doing on the meantime? What are we doing during the ‘to’ in ‘dust to dust?’

Much of scripture speaks of the brevity of the span between dust and dust. Life is like a vapour, it appears for a little and then vanishes. It is like the wild flowers in a field which appear and then wilt away.

‘For all our days have passed away in Your wrath; We finish our years like a sigh. The days of our lives are seventy years; And if by reason of strength they are eighty years, Yet their boast is only labour and sorrow; For it is soon cut off, and we fly away.’

That passage from Psalm 90 really ties this in with yesterday’s thought. Seventy, eighty years, maybe a few more, and it is all done. I am not an old man, but the seventy year mark is much closer than birth now.

What have I done with years I have before I return to the dust? I have redeemed those precious few years?

A few weeks ago I mentioned a Twilight Zone episode where a man lives for 2000 years. The story ends when he finally dies, his body decays quickly, and at the end the wind blows away the dust that is left. That image has a sense of finality to it. I am not going to live 2000 years. Chances are, even at the best, I will be returned to the dust before this century is half way over.

I can’t fix what I have done with the fifty some years that have passed. What will I do with the rest?