Adam Heard Dust Claim Him While Breath Still Lived

Adam pushed both hands into the dirt after the sentence landed, and the dirt was warm and gritty and exactly what he had just been told he was.

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Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return (Genesis 3:19). He heard the dust claim him while he was still plainly alive, and he breathed in, and the breath did not feel like dust. It never had.

Made of Earth and of Heaven

He had not been scraped out of the ground and left at that. Anyone who had watched the making would say so. Clay was one half of it. The other half had come down from somewhere with no clay in it anywhere, and the two had been fitted together into a single man who could stand up and walk about and know what he was doing.

So the sentence was strange on its face. If he was earth and heaven both, why did only the earth get named when the end of him was read out? Half of him had never been in the ground and could not be put back into it.

He turned his palms over and looked at the dirt packed into the creases.

He Went Down to the Heavier Half

The answer sat in what he had already done.

He had not stayed uncorrupted. He had been handed one command and had held it cheap, and in the hour he held it cheap he ran from the better part of himself, the part that came from above, and threw his whole weight in with the other. Earth is the denser element. It is the heavier one. It is what goes down when a hand lets go. Adam had let go.

A man does that twice, as it turns out. Once when he first prefers pleasure to the thing that would have kept his soul alive, and again every time afterward. Anyone burning for what is good is travelling the opposite way and will finish where he began, above. Anyone greedy for the other thing finishes where he began as well. He came out of the ground and he is going back into it, and the ground is his door and his floor both.

Adam had picked his element. The sentence only read it back to him.

The Spirit Would Not Keep Striving

Generations later the earth filled up with people who made the same choice faster.

Then a word came down over the whole race. My spirit shall not always strive with man, because he is but flesh (Genesis 6:3). It came out sounding like a statute, and a statute is what it was.

Nobody in those cities felt a wind change. There was no sound to hear. What there was, for anyone who would have recognised it, was an absence. Something that used to arrive and stand inside a person and make him able to see straight had stopped arriving.

What Filled Bezalel

Because that spirit was never a movement of air.

Long after the water went down, a man named Bezalel sat in a camp in the wilderness with gold and acacia wood in front of him and no training behind him, and God filled him with the divine spirit of wisdom and understanding, and he built the tabernacle. He cut the stones and set them. He worked the gold and the silver and the brass and carved the timber, and every join in the thing came out right the first time.

Intelligence, then. Not breath. Wisdom, arriving whole in a man who did not have it an hour earlier.

And it comes, and then it does not stay. It visits. It does not settle in and take up residence, and God said plainly why. Because they are flesh.

Because They Are Flesh

Flesh will not hold wisdom, because flesh has already sworn itself to something else. It is bound to wanting. The two cannot both live at full strength in one house, and the one that collects rent daily wins.

A light soul with nothing dragging behind it has no trouble whatever. It looks at the world and understands what it is looking at, because a clean disposition arrives together with steadiness, and the two of them come as one gift.

The generation before the flood had neither. When the rain started they walked out into it with their mouths open, and the water took what the ground had been promised, and Adam's old sentence came due on every one of them in the same week.