Hope for Virus-Infected Bodies, Part 1

Dr. Alan Dunn

Contamination, contagion, infection – the familiar vocabulary of the CV19 pandemic. A teeny-tiny particle can float on an invisible vapor molecule and enter our bodies through our eyes, nose, or mouth. The threat of death looms invisibly in the air we breathe! How tragic it is when we are afraid to be with the people we love because we fear that we could be infected or that we could infect them. Why are we vulnerable to things like viruses? Is there something wrong with our bodies? Does Scripture give us any answers to these kinds of questions?

God Established the Relationship between Our Bodies and This Earth in Creation

Moses, the great prophet of the Old Covenant, tells us that the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being [Gen 2:7]. The Lord God Himself formed Adam directly from the earth. “Adam” means red, ruddy, the same color as the earth. Adam is the unique culmination of God’s work of creation, the only creature who is animated by the breath of God. God acts and speaks in ways that we, mere creatures, can understand. Moses presents us with a tender scene. No doubt you have seen Michelangelo’s depiction of the creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. God is anthropomorphized [pictured in the form of a man]. God extends His index finger to touch Adam’s extended index finger. Scripture often anthropomorphizes God. In Genesis 2:7, we see not a bare touch, [Michelangelo’s God figure does not actually touch Adam], but something that resembles a kiss, or artificial resuscitation. Adam receives a life vitally connected to the God with whom he is intimately bound. In Moses’s prologue, we learn that God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them [Gen 1:27]. We are alive unto God and defined in relation to God, our Creator-Father. Can you conceive of a nobler or more dignified creaturely status than being the image of God?

Without any diminishment of dignity, man became a living being. Here is Adam in his creatureliness. As living beings, we share this creaturely life with other living beings, such as birds and animals, that God also formed out of the ground [Gen 2:19]. As creatures vitally connected to the earth, the animals and we share a common creaturely life. But we are not animals. We are the image of God, made to be like God, and to live with God. This creaturely physicality extends to Adam’s wife, Ishshah, who, like Adam, was formed by a direct act of God. Whereas God formed Adam from the dust of the ground, He fashioned the woman from his rib. As one flesh with Adam, Ishshah is likewise of the same material substance as the earth as well [Gen 2:18-25]. God’s creative acts establish the relationship of our bodies to the earth. Adam can only be Adam if he lives in relation to the dust of the earth. Man is not man apart from his planet. He is animated earth elevated to the status of creaturely sonship: the image of God.

As the image of God, Adam understood the significance of God’s acts which revealed meaning and purpose to him. As God had formed and filled the material of the original chaos [Gen 1:2], so too, our first parents were to form and fill the earth beginning in the garden that God planted and into which He placed Adam [Gen 2:8-9,15]. Man, male and female, was to exercise dominion over creation [Gen 1:26-28]. Adam knew, without being given a direct verbal command, that he was meant to imitate God and to cultivate and to keep the garden [Gen 2:15]. To cultivate and keep are terms used later in the Old Testament to describe the duties of priests in God’s temple. The Garden of Eden was a nascent earthly temple where God came to dwell with man. As the image of God, Adam was God’s royal priestly son, ruling the earth to reflect and glorify his Creator-Father, who rules all created reality. As the image of God, in-breathed by the breath of God, Adam was the unique word-creature and was also capable of communing with the speaking God who created and continues to sustain all things by His Word. God created Adam with the ability to understand and speak words. He was not only God’s royal priestly son, but he was also God’s prophet, who was responsible to minister God’s Word to God’s world. God’s words defined his world [Gen 1:28-30]. God’s words conveyed divine blessing to the sanctified time of the Sabbath [Gen 1:28; 2:3]. God’s words formed the law which Adam was to obey upon threat of death [Gen 2:16-17]. Man was made to be like God and to live with God. Our interest in the CV19 pandemic highlights Adam’s creaturely physicality. His dominion means that as it goes with Adam, so it goes with the earth. Likewise, as we will see, as it goes with the earth, so it goes with Adam. Adam and the ground live in mutually symbiotic union.

The Fall Affected the Relationship between Our Bodies and This Earth

As God warned, Adam’s rebellion and sin brought death into the world. We must understand that death is not annihilation. The essential dynamic of death is that of severance, separation. Creation is like a throbbing tapestry woven with individual threads, each stitched together with their corresponding companion threads into a unified whole. Death is the tearing apart of those threads. Death is what happens when the things that God created fall out of their designated place and no longer function as God originally designed to function for the benefit of His creation and His glory. Death is a collapse back into the dark, empty, formlessness of the primeval chaos.[1] Death separates the vital connections which God constituted in creation. When Adam sinned, death came to Adam’s realm, and things began to rip apart.

In Genesis 3, God graciously mitigated the separating dynamic of death by salvaging and retaining the order and operations of the original creation. The couple would still form and fill the earth, but each would experience their respective pain in the fulfillment of their mandate. The woman would have pain in childbirth [Gen 3:16], and the man would also experience pain or toil[2] [Gen 3:17]. Adam’s pain comes at the point of his labor in the earth. His work in which he nobly images God will continue as the means by which he obtains his sustenance, but his labor is now painfully frustrating and even subject to failure. Whereas his labor in a compliant soil would have been delightful, now he toils by the sweat of his face to obtain his food from a resistant earth. Although he yet reaps an edible harvest, painful efforts often garner only thorns and thistles.

Our interest is how death affected the earth and, by extension, Adam himself. Adam sinned, and death comes to the earth. As it goes with Adam, so it goes with the earth. In Genesis 3:17-19, we hear the Lord curse the ground because of Adam’s sin. Now we see that as it goes with the earth, so it goes with Adam. The curse of death on the earth encompasses and consumes Adam and Ishshah because they are animated dust. So too, the living beings that God formed from the dust are enveloped in the curse of death. Everything formed from and dependent on the ground is now cursed. Since Adam is materially, the dust of the ground, when God cursed that ground, Adam was enveloped in that curse for he is dust and to dust he shall return.

As the holy and righteous God, He did curse creation with death just as He had warned Adam [Gen 2:16-17]. When we read that he ate [Gen 3:6], we immediately know that things are about to get bad. We reject Satan’s slander that God is neither good nor righteous and therefore not to be trusted [Gen 3:1-5]. No. Adam ate. God is God. Death is inevitable. But, amazingly, God did not execute Final Judgment after the couple’s rebellion and treasonous embrace of Satan’s lies. We are stunned instead by the revelation of God’s kindness and redeeming grace to rebellious sinners. God salvaged creation, retaining the man and the woman in their original roles and functions. The world is yet ours, and God is our Creator and Sustainer. God causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous [Mat 5:45]. Indeed, even though Adam abdicated his dominion to Satan and was sentenced to death due to his sin, God yet purposes to elevate His image-son, along with this creation, into the glories of His eternal Sabbath Rest. God’s ultimate purpose for creation is unchanged. Man was made to be like God and to live with God, which has always meant and continues to mean, that God sets His Sabbath Rest before us as our ultimate destiny.

We live in this good world which God created, but we and it are fallen. We are yet mandated to form and fill the world, but we can mistakenly effect harm even when we intend good. We can also abuse our world when we rule it more like tyrants than like royal priestly sons serving in God’s temple. And the ground is cursed. The earth fights against the exercise of our stewardship over it. We and so much that we accomplish collapse back into the dust. The dust lays claim on civilizations and cities, on men great and small. A microscopic minuscule particle of DNA, smaller than a speck of dust, can sweep across the planet and humble people of every race and social position, demanding that we come to terms with the curse of death, for we are dust and to dust we must return. Death. What tragedy, what criminality, what desperation is ours! We are the image of God, the culmination of God’s work of creation, yet we are creatures of dust, cursed dust at that. Ours is an existence conditioned by death. We live in the world while experiencing our separation from the world, from each other, even a separation experienced within our own selves. We live with a constant sense of severance, separation – death.

The greatest tragedy in all this is the death of man’s relationship with God. Because God is holy, He must separate Himself from man, and man, in death, can do nothing to save himself. Although we live as image of God in God’s creation, we are born separated from God, encompassed by and infused with death. We are totally at the mercy of God. Unless God does something to defeat death and give life to dead men, man and his world are doomed to an eternal death of separation from God. Like Jonah in the belly of the great fish, we are encompassed and overwhelmed. But Jonah learned something which God revealed to Adam and which we are encouraged to learn: Salvation is from the Lord [Jonah 2:9]. If there is any hope for our virus-infected, death-conditioned bodies, it is going to have to come to us from the God. Our hope can only come from the God who raises the dead, the living God who comes to undeserving sinners like us to give us new life in Christ Jesus.

[1] See Zephaniah 1:2-3, where the judgment of God, death, is described as reversing the sequence of God’s work of creation. In Jeremiah 4:23, Jeremiah describes God’s judgment with the vocabulary of Genesis 1:2, I looked on the earth, and behold, it was formless and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light.

[2] Moses uses the same Hebrew word to describe the effects of the fall on both the woman and the man.