Depending on God: 7 Days to Recognizing Your Deep Need for Himनमूना

We Depend Entirely Upon God for Our Presence

Who are we apart from God? Simply put, we aren’t. Humanity didn’t exist. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man’”. At his word, we existed “remarkably and wondrously made”. Our presence in creation begins and continues only through God’s will and work.

We exist, but what are we exactly? Remarkably weak stuff, it turns out. “Then the Lord God formed the man out of the dust from the ground”. Go run your hand across the top of your refrigerator and look at your fingers. Now take that dust and make a fully functional human body. You didn’t try it, did you? No worries, I didn’t either. I can’t make a fully functioning human being out of dust, and neither can you. But God can. That’s the point. No matter how we may feature in God’s plan, our usefulness and accomplishments don’t rest in what we are. We’re dust.

Why dust? In Scripture, dust represents a lowly status. Dust signifies poverty and humiliation. Dust is death. God made us from dust to teach us to walk with him in humility.

How can dust come to life? When God formed the first man out of dust, he was only a “lifeless corpse.” But then God “breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being”. Isn’t that a strange yet wonderful image? The all-powerful God of the universe stooping to put his lips to the face of a dead body, gently and lovingly filling it with new life. This isn’t the last time God will draw near to the dead with tender, life-giving love. The Bible is the story of God raising the dead from creation to new creation.

We are fragile earthen vessels that God filled with life. The apostle Paul meditates on this in the New Testament: “Now we have this treasure in clay jars, so that this extraordinary power may be from God and not from us”. The treasure Paul refers to is the gospel, the message of Jesus Christ crucified for our sins and raised from the dead. God ordained that the message of his saving glory would be transported in ordinary, fragile containers—clay jars (that’s us!). That’s not a new idea. We didn’t become clay jars when we received the gospel. No, we were already clay pots, ordinary and fragile vessels from the beginning. Before sin and death entered the world, God chose to display his life-giving glory to the world through fragile earthen vessels.