Dust and breath

Start at the beginning

If you want to know what happens when a person dies, the first question is not “Where do they go?” It is “What is a person?” The Bible answers that question on its second page, in a single sentence that repays slow reading.

And 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 being.

Notice the arithmetic. There are two ingredients and one result. God formed a body from the dust of the ground. God breathed into that body the breath of life. And the result of dust plus breath was a living being. The Hebrew word translated “being” here is nephesh, the word the older English versions render “soul”. Man did not receive a soul as a separate component. Man became a soul. The soul is the whole living person: the body animated by the breath of God.

That is not a small point. It changes the shape of every later question. If the soul were a separate, conscious thing that lives inside the body like a driver in a car, then death would be the driver stepping out. But if the soul is the living person, then death is what happens when the two ingredients are separated again, and the living being ceases to be, until God puts them together once more.

The word Scripture uses for animals too

The Bible uses the same word, nephesh, for animals. In Genesis 1 the sea creatures and the land animals are “living creatures”, literally living souls, long before man is made (Genesis 1:20-24). Nobody concludes from this that animals have immortal souls. The word simply means a living, breathing creature. Solomon makes the point without any softening:

For what happens to the sons of men also happens to animals; one thing befalls them: as one dies, so dies the other. Surely, they all have one breath; man has no advantage over animals, for all is vanity. All go to one place: all are from the dust, and all return to dust.

Solomon is not saying that human beings are nothing more than animals; the rest of his book makes clear that God has “put eternity in their hearts” (Ecclesiastes 3:11) and that there is a judgment to come. He is saying that with respect to death itself the mechanism is the same. The breath goes, and the dust returns to dust.

The sentence pronounced in Eden

When sin entered, God told Adam what death would mean, and He described it in the same terms as the creation, only in reverse:

In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread Till you return to the ground, For out of it you were taken; For dust you are, And to dust you shall return.

“Dust you are.” Not “dust is your house” or “dust is your shell”. Adam himself was made of the ground, and to the ground he would go. Solomon, writing centuries later, puts creation and death side by side:

Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, And the spirit will return to God who gave it.

This verse is often read as though it taught that a conscious spirit flies to heaven at death. Read it again in the light of Genesis 2. What did God give? He gave the breath of life. The word translated “spirit” here is ruach, which is also the ordinary Hebrew word for breath and wind. At death the body goes back to the dust it came from and the breath of life goes back to the God who lent it. The two ingredients are separated, and the living being, the soul, is no more. Ecclesiastes 12:7 is the undoing of Genesis 2:7. It does not describe a third thing that survives.

The psalmist says the same of every creature:

You take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.

“Spirit” means breath, not ghost

Because this point carries so much weight, it is worth testing it with other passages. James uses the body-and-breath picture to explain faith:

For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.

Some translations put “breath” in the margin here, and rightly. A body without breath is dead. James is not describing a ghost leaving; he is describing life leaving. When Jesus raised the daughter of Jairus, Luke says “her spirit returned, and she arose immediately” (Luke 8:55). The girl had not been conscious somewhere for the hours she lay dead; Jesus Himself said she was “sleeping” (Luke 8:52). What returned was the breath of life, and with it the whole living girl.

When Moses and Aaron cried out to “the God of the spirits of all flesh” (Numbers 16:22), they meant the God who gives breath to every living thing. The spirit that returns to God at death is not the person minus the body. It is the life principle that belongs to God and goes back to Him, to be given again on the resurrection morning.

The soul can die

If the soul were by nature immortal, we should expect the Bible to say so. It never does. On the contrary, it says the opposite in the plainest words it has:

The soul who sins shall die.

Jesus warned His followers to fear God, “who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). Whatever else that verse teaches, it teaches that the soul can be destroyed. The word “immortal” is used of only one being in all of Scripture, and that being is God, “who alone has immortality” (1 Timothy 6:16). Human beings are told to seek immortality (Romans 2:7) and promised that one day they will put it on (1 Corinthians 15:53). You do not seek what you already own, and you do not put on what you are already wearing.

Why this is the right place to begin

Everything in this book rests on this chapter. A human being is a unity: a body made alive by the breath of God. Death is the reversal of creation: the body returns to dust and the breath returns to God. There is no third component that goes on thinking, feeling and watching. That is not a bleak conclusion; it is simply an honest one, and in Part Four we will see that it makes the resurrection not an optional extra but the very centre of Christian hope. If nothing of me survives the grave, then everything depends on the God who can call me back. And He has said that He will.