The well-known sentence of Genesis 3.19 says: "For you were made from dust, and to dust, you will return." According to the...
The well-known sentence of Genesis 3.19 says:
"For you were made from dust, and to dust, you will return."
According to the Bible, it was said by God to Adam after Adam and Eve fell into sin. The regular interpretation of this statement is related to an earlier description of the Bible when it is said that God created Adam from the dust of the earth. And, as it was written, when we die, we return to the dust of the earth again.
However, our body does not consist of dust; we are not made from the substance of dust. The main part of our body is more like colloid in a water solution. Our life does not start from the state of dust. Our life starts with two living cells, one from our mother, and one from our father. And these cells are not dust. They are the same colloid solution as what our body is made of.
Moreover, when we die, we do not return to dust. We are merely decomposing, and most of the matter that makes up our body is reused and recycled to another life, by bacteria. In this sense, we just turn ourselves into other living creatures after we die. Even if we were cremated, most of our body would turn to water and carbon dioxide, which are not dust either. Only little fragments of our body, a small remnant of our bones turn to dust, as ash.
Then maybe life on Earth started from dust? That is not true either. The first living organisms started life in the medium of water. The first cells were colloid solutions as well, and life continued to be in this state, undisrupted for billions of years.
We do not come from dust. Then is the Bible not true? Or do we just not understand it? Maybe it reveals something true, but we are misunderstanding it.
We are made from dust but in a different way. First of all, what is dust? Dust consists of small, solid particles. How can we be made from small solid particles? We were indeed dust, just before life started on Earth. The Earth was dust before it formed; the whole Solar System was formed from a big cloud of dust and gas in space. Most of the Earth that we know formed from dust particles. Most of the gas part of the cloud collapsed onto the central region and formed the Sun, or blew to the outside regions and formed the giant planets. Earth was made mostly of dust, and this way, even if indirectly, we were made from dust as well.
And when our Solar System comes to an end, when the Sun finishes its life cycle, the Earth will ultimately finish its active life as well, becoming a cold, dead planet, without any form of life on it. It will become a dust particle in the Universe. We won't be on the Earth by then. We will either become extinct long before, or we will leave the planet, maybe as machines. But all life which remained on Earth will turn into dust again.
The Bible tells the truth, but in a different way from how we think. It reveals to us the truth from where we came from, and what will become of us, on another scale than we thought.
How our solar system was formed is a modern era discovery. How we started, and what will be the end is also a modern discovery. But was it already written in the Bible?
When the Bible was written, no one knew about the role of dust in our lives. "For you were made from dust, and to dust, you will return” maybe the existing God's revelation to humans. The writer of this line interpreted it the way he or she understood it, which might serve as an explanation of how it was written in the Bible. Or it can just be blind luck that it was written this way, a pure coincidence with today's knowledge. Or it is today's plain explanation of mythology, a tale of the human. We might’ve just wanted to explain something with truth where there is none. We need to choose between these possible interpretations personally.
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