Ashes to Ashes…But Something More

Ashes for Ash Wednesday. But what is this darkened soot placed upon my forehead? This dirt? It is an echo back to our primal memories. We are but dust and to dust we shall return. We are mortals with expiration dates.

But the Lord God formed Adam from the dirt and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the first man became a living being. Since it was not good for the man to be alone, Lord God formed the woman from the rib of the man. She was Eve, the mother of all living.

Adam and Eve dwelt in the Garden of Eden. They were neither mortal nor immortal.

Now the Garden of Eden had two trees: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Lord God prohibited the man from eating the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but one the day he ate the fruit, he would surely die.

Yet Adam and Eve disobeyed the Lord God and ate the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They were then expelled from the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life became inaccessible to them. They took on mortality. They would eventually return to dust for from dust they were made. Not that they would immediately die upon eating the forbidden fruit, but that they would surely die, and died they surely did. Just as the severed branch vine withers away for being cut off from the nourishment flowing from the vine, so too Adam and Eve along with their progeny would eventually come to their own respective ends having been cut off from our source of everlasting life. From dust we came, and to dust we return.

Severed from communion with the Lord God. we are disconnected from the one whom truly offers our lives meaning and purpose. No longer do we find our life and being as having a teleology. The idea of being creatures made in the image of God is dispensed for the story of being material organism brought about by unguided processes, chance, and random mutations. The godless ones might imagine being particles of stardust scattered about the universe as the result of stars having gone supernova eons ago, but in the end, they can only admit themselves to be specks on a speck orbiting a speck, in the corner of a speck, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Having dispensed with the Lord God who gives meaning and purpose in life, the godless ones find themselves doing whatever is right in each one’s own eyes. Not objective moral values delivered from the Moral Lawgiver, they make up their own rules about the way they treat self and others. The downside is they no longer see their neighbor as having the intrinsic worth as a fellow creature made in the image of God. Even the body ceases to be viewed as something fearfully and wonderfully made and fashioned by the Lord God. The godless ones become plastic people, bodies without purpose, without sign of intelligent design, a collection of fleshly parts that can be cut, shaped, and rearranged according to whim.  

The Apostle Paul finds describes the folly of the godless ones this way:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them (Rm. 1:18-32, ESV).

Dust we are and to dust we return.

But Adam and Eve were not abandoned. God became a man to redeem lost humanity. The Son of God incarnates as Christ Jesus of Nazareth, He dwells among us, and through the giving of His own life upon the cross as a sacrifice for sin, and He rises again on the third day. Thus, Christ defeats death through His own death, and whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life. Those who believe have the blessed hope of being resurrected immortal, imperishable, incorruptible.

The ashes of Ash Wednesday recall our mortality. The very mortality that came about as the result of the Fall. Dust we are and to dust we return. But the ashes point us forward to Resurrection Sunday. The resurrection of the Son of God is apex of redemptive history, where the Lord won the decisive battle against the powers of darkness, and the problem of sin, Satan, and death were resolved. The risen Lord appeared to His disciples, “breathed on them” and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (Jn. 20:22). Just as the Lord God breathed the breath of life into the first man fashioned out of the mud, Christ the Lord the Last Adam breaths upon the new spiritual life energized by the Holy Spirit.

Yes, from the dust we came, but reunited with the Lord God, everlasting life flows through us, revivifying the body and soul, so that we can resume the life with the Lord God which began in the Garden.

— WGN