WHEN man had not as yet been created, inanimate dead dust lay on the ground. The Omnipotent God took a handful of this dust, and again a handful, and from it shaped a human figure, with bone and muscle, with blood and nerve. It was altogether wisdom, strength and beauty, which He infused into this inanimate dust. When the human body was thus prepared, God created the soul in it, to which the body was disposed. In this way through God’s almightiness there arose this wondrous, and artistically articulated complex of spirit and dust; and what in Paradise stood erect, and for the first time looked around and observed and listened was man, as he had been created by God.
So man was nothing but dust, with the addition of the wisdom and almightiness of God, which had inworked creatively upon that dust.
So long as this selfsame almightiness held and maintained him in that dust as man, he remained as he was. But should God let go of him, or he of God, what could become of him again other than dust?
And, therefore, when in his pride man dared to do this, and cut the tie that bound him to God, the curse followed: “Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return, for out of it wast thou taken!” (Gen. 3: 19).
By reason of this, the last breath and the youngest sob, do not end all. No, the humiliation must go further. He who abandons God must return to the state in which he was before God called him into being and created him. So, after we have breathed our last, there is a grave to receive us into its bosom.
Then the earth opens itself. The ground above which God’s almightiness gave us standing; which we have trodden with our foot; over which we have exercised kingly rule; and which now avenges itself, and awaits our return to it, that it might rule over us.
The grave dissolves, consumes, devours the body. And there is no rest, until it again becomes, what originally it was; nothing but dust.
This now the Messiah has also felt beforehand and has suffered this through in advance, when the Holy Spirit drove David to write the passion-psalm, and he sang of that most bitter death on the cross, and, of sinking down into the shame of the grave, as he complained: “O, my God, Thou layest me in the dust of death!”
With us this goes by stages. First we are sick; then we die; and then we are lowered into the grave. But to the mind of the Messiah it was one continuous line of humiliation and destruction to and into the grave. One stirring up of the dust of death, that would choke Him.
Dust and Spirit stand one over against the other.
Dust is what was formless, inanimate from the hour when the earth was still waste and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. The Spirit had then not as yet entered creatively into the dust to animate it. The Spirit of God was still brooding upon the face of the waters.
But at God’s command that Spirit entered into the dust; and so came the life of all creation, till at length it received its crown in man.
So dust was to serve the Spirit, as the Spirit is called to animate and to rule the dust.
Till a breach comes into that spiritual life. For then the wheel of birth shifts. It turns about. Power is then restored to the dust, and everything goes back to what was “waste and void”. Everything again becomes dust.
And into this terrible destruction also the Messiah must enter.
As Mediator appointed in the eternal Decree, it was His lot to marry the weal and the woe of our human race. Once, the glory to which it was called; but first the corruption to which it was doomed.
He was to take our nature upon Him; but in its fallen and undone state. As it lay under the doom of sinking away into death and grave and of returning unto dust. And to this course and lot the Messiah had to subject Himself, that having sunk into the furrow of death, He with the Spirit might battle against the dust, and in the grave itself fetter the dust by His resurrection.
This was the final point to which it must come. This the deepest depth in which He had to sink away. And only when this depth of contemptuousness had been reached, with the deeply repressed adaptability of the Spirit, He would gloriously triumph over the grave that willed to destroy also Him.
The dust had no power over Jesus. In psalm 16, the note of hope had rung: “Thou wilt not suffer thine Holy One to see corruption”. And that note of hope became prophecy.
With Jesus it has gone the length to the separation of soul and body. Even His separated body has been laid in the grave. But further than this it did not come. Dust could not destroy the body; could not consume it; His body did not become dust!
Jesus was laid in the dust of death. Enclosed in a tomb. Enclosed behind a door of stone. But in the conflict which then followed, dust suffered defeat. The Spirit of life overcame and the dust of death was overcome.
Now also it went down to the root.
As in Adam the root of our race has been broken and has been abandoned to the power of the dust, for which reason every one of us must pay the toll of dissolution to the dust, so was the course of action here. In Christ the root of the new life has triumphed, and in Him, all that is attached to that root, triumphs over the dust.
It must have been dreadful for the Mediator, before He could triumph, to sink away into that depth for our sakes.
He bemoans it with a tone, in which echoes the woefulness of heart: “Thou layest me in the dust of death!”
And yet, in this word spake also confidence.
He was taken captive by that dust, but God laid Him in it.
It was only the development, unfolding, and result of the eternal Decree. Of that same Decree, which also included His triumph. For this reason, this deeply sorrowful psalm (22), before it is halfway through, turns into the tone of praise and jubilation; “Ye, that fear the Lord, praise Him; all ye seed of Jacob, glorify Him; and fear Him, all ye the seed of Israel!”
In this lay the power for the Messiah to struggle through to the end.
Nothing comes to Him by chance. Nothing overtakes Him by the power of nature or of sin. Even in His bitterest suffering, He is for no single moment out of God’s hand.
God’s Spirit drives Him into the wilderness to be tempted of the Devil; presently, it is the same Father-hand which puts the cup, the terrible cup of eternal death, to His lips.
He does not fall into the dust of death, God lays Him in it.
And so in His sinking away lies the prophecy of His ascension on high.
It is all the carrying out of the one passion-program, but in God’s decree, immediately after the passion-program follows the program of glory and triumph.
Through suffering to glory!
The gate of the Lord, through which He is to pass that He might enter into the glory, that awaits Him.
This, for the Mediator, was His only comfort in life and in death, for soul and for body.
And God’s child on earth well knows, that, coming after Jesus, in this he finds all his rest, in this the courage to bear and to tolerate, in this alone, in the midst of densest darkness, the strength of spirit to grasp the light, that though immersed in deepest sorrows, he may know: This is not by chance, neither is it brought upon me by any man. For Thou, Lord, Thou alone layest me in the dust of death.
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