Do you believe the Bible? If so, many questions are automatically answered. For example, from where did we come? The Bible says that God made man. It also declares of us that "dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return` [Gen. 3:19].
Abraham understood our frame. "Behold now," he said, "I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes" [Gen. 18:27]. Job testified that all flesh perishes in the same manner, for "man shall turn again to dust" [Job 34:15]. Even the Psalmist David understood this truth; but he went a step further. He reminds us that God himself "remembers that we are dust" [Psalm 103:14].
If all of us go unto one place, as King Solomon points out. That is, if all of us are of the dust and all of us return to the dust [Ec. 3:20], then where does our soul and spirit go?
According to the Bible, the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul [Gen. 2:7]. Although some deny that truth, they accept as truth another declaration of the Bible, written long before men understood: "The life of the flesh is in the blood" [Lev. 17:11]. Indeed, the Bible told us long before heart surgery and our present cardiovascular health care systems that "a sound heart is the life of the flesh" [Pro. 14:30].
The greatest death of all time is the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross of Calvary. Isaiah prophesied that Christ would "pour out his soul unto death" [Is. 53:12]. The life of the flesh is in the blood, and the blood is linked to the soul and spirit of the flesh.
The Apostle Paul is so specific about the blood`s relationship to the soul and spirit that he describes it as similar to the relationship of the joints to the marrow. The Apostle writes, "For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart [Heb. 4:12].
Solomon declares that "the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it" [Ec. 12:7]. It is appointed unto man once to die, but after this the judgment [Heb. 9:27]. But what type of judgment can be given upon all, when all have sinned?
The Apostle Paul answered that question this way: "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God; yet all being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. God set him forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God. To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which has believed in Jesus [Rom. 3:23-26].
Why would God freely justify all that have believed in Jesus? That there be no boasting. The law and man`s works are excluded. Man is justified before God by the law of faith, without the deeds of the law.
This places salvation beyond the realm of one race or one religion. God is not the God of the Jews only. He is also the God of the Gentiles, whether those Gentiles are Greek or Roman or Arab or African or European or American or Oriental.
Seeing it is one God, which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision through faith, do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid. Yea, Paul declares, we establish the law. We establish it because we do, by nature, the law; not to obtain salvation, but because God has shed salvation in our hearts: in our souls and in our spirits.
We can return to dust in peace, in Jesus Christ, knowing that absent from this body is to be present with the Lord until the day he shall resurrect our vile bodies and make them glorious.