… A MIXTURE OF DUST AND DIVINITY

This phrase, “… a mixture of dust and divinity”, used to describe Man, is one which I first came across in the musings of Oswald Chambers:

“God made human beings a mixture of dust and deity. The dust of a man’s body is his glory, not his shame. Jesus Christ manifested Himself in that dust, and He claims that He can presence anyone with His own divinity. The New Testament teaches how to keep the body under and make it a servant.

“Drudgery is the outcome of sin, but it has no right to be the rule of life. It becomes the rule of life because we ignore the fact that the dust of the earth belongs to God, and that man’s chief end is to glorify God. Unless we can maintain the presence of divinity in our dust, life becomes a miserable drudgery. If one lives to hoard up the means of living, he does not live at all, he has no time to, he is taken up with one form of drudgery or another to keep things going.” (Oswald Chambers, Shade of His Hand.)

A much more recent observation that speaks, in my mind, to the same issue, has been made by Eugene Peterson in Traveling Light. He likens our situation to that which the Norwegian dramatist Ibsen illustrated when his character, Peer Gynt, goes into a mental hospital and notes that no one in it acted crazy. For Peterson, our world is like that hospital in which no one, from observing them from within, seems to be crazy:

“Christ leads people out of the confines of the world hospital into the open air of God. In the open air things are not as cozy as they are in the hospital. Everything is not labelled. Every person is not defined. When we decide to leave the obsessive self-preoccupations of the world and live in expansive adoration of God, we are plunged into mystery, into growth, into an abundance beyond our abilities to classify or administer. Reality is increased beyond our capacity to manage it; it is not reduced to the cramped dimensions of our greed or lust or covetousness or fear.” (Page 70.)

Other thinkers speak of the constant conflict between the “flesh” and the “spirit” in each of us; some have even attempted to explain it away as being the result of a power struggle between eternal forces of good and evil with ourselves caught in the middle. The truth of the matter is, though, that the Creator made us to be this amalgam of dust and divinity, of matter and spirit. He did it deliberately in order that we be truly -- as His Word tells us -- the highest point, the culmination of all that He had created.

We are dust but we are invited by Jesus Christ to live in “the open air of God.” And, it can be done through simple faith that Jesus is Who He said He is.

Profdifficile