The Catholic school I attended was adjacent to the church. On Ash Wednesday, we paraded down the sidewalk to the church then up the center aisle where two priests waited, each with a bowl of ashes, the burned fronds from the previous year’s Palm Sunday. The priest would dip a thumb into the bowl then make the sign of the cross on each child’s forehead while intoning, “Remember man that you are dust and unto dust you shall return.”
Like coal miners emerging from the ground, we paraded back to the school, our foreheads bearing a black smudge. I endured that smudge for the rest of the school day, but the instant we were dismissed, I licked my hand and scrubbed it into a grey smear. Decades later, now a Protestant minister, I do not practice this rite, but I believe the biblical truth that it communicates: we are dust, mortal beings subject to death because of sin.
When God created the first man, Adam, he formed him from “the dust from the ground,” then breathed into him the breath of life. He gave Adam charge of the newly created garden paradise to tend it, and it freely gave its produce to him. But when Adam disobeyed the one commandment God had given him, God cursed the ground because of him. Now, like an adversary, the ground reluctantly gave Adam its produce, requiring hard, sweaty work, and thorns and thistles would compete with his crops. God told Adam that he would one day return to the ground from which he was taken, “for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
But Psalm 103 encourages the believer to remember the character of our God and the benefits he freely bestows on his people. He is a God of righteousness and justice, “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” A compassionate Father, “he does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.” Instead, he has made provision for our sins, “for he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.”
What is God’s provision for our sin? God the Son came to earth as a man to bear sin’s curse for those who would put their trust in him alone. For our sake, he submitted himself to death that we might live, then he sprang forth from the ground in glorious resurrection, the first fruits of a new creation.
Yes, we are dust and to dust we will return, but in Christ, the believer is assured of a glorious resurrection into that new creation to live with Christ forever. Amen!
