Even Moses

Dust, Death, and the Promise Beyond

You turn us back to the dust and say, "Go back, O child of earth.” 

— Psalm 90:3

…they are like chaff which the wind blows away. 

— Psalm 1:4

Yesterday, we considered the remarkable moment when Moses laid his hands upon Joshua, entrusting him with the leadership of Israel. It was a moment of blessing, continuity, and hope. But there is another detail in that same account that we cannot overlook. Moses died. After all those years of leading God's people, confronting Pharaoh, crossing the wilderness, and speaking with God, even Moses reached the end of his earthly life. And today's Psalms confront us with that same unavoidable reality. God turns us back to dust. The chaff is carried away by the wind. Whatever our accomplishments, whatever our importance to the people around us, our earthly lives eventually come to an end.

This is one of those remarkable places where Scripture and science speak with striking agreement. Our bodies are made of the same elements found throughout the natural world. When life ends, the biological processes that sustain us cease, and our bodies eventually return their elements to the earth. Genesis expressed this reality long before modern science: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” My Adventist roots make this imagery especially meaningful to me. I grew up with an understanding of death that emphasized the mortality of the whole person and the hope of resurrection, rather than assuming that some immortal portion of us simply escapes the body when we die. The physical reality of death was never something to be explained away. It was something to be taken seriously.

And the Psalms take it seriously indeed. Psalm 90 reminds us how brief our lives are in comparison with the enduring existence of God. Psalm 1 contrasts the fruitful tree planted beside streams of water with the chaff blown away by the wind. These are different images: one describes the mortality we all share, while the other distinguishes a rooted, fruitful life from one without that foundation. But together they raise a question that every human being must eventually confront. If our bodies return to dust, what becomes of everything we have been? What becomes of our love, our work, our hopes, and our relationships? Science can describe the physical processes of death, but it cannot establish from those processes alone whether anything lies beyond them. Scripture invites us to consider a promise that reaches beyond what we can presently observe.

And here we encounter the extraordinary center of the Christian Gospel. Jesus died. Not figuratively, not merely as an example of suffering, but physically. His body was taken down from the cross and placed in a tomb. He entered the very human condition that Psalm 90 describes. Yet on the third day, something happened that changed the entire Christian understanding of death. Jesus rose. The New Testament does not describe his body as having undergone decay; indeed, it specifically proclaims otherwise. But it insists that he truly died and that death did not hold him. This was not simply the survival of a teaching or the continuation of a movement. The disciples proclaimed that the crucified Jesus was alive. The one who entered death had overcome it.

And so I return to a question I remembered yesterday from my conversations with Fr. Harry Schaefer, my rector at St. James Episcopal Church nearly fifty years ago. Christians are forever proclaiming that Jesus saves. But saves us from what? From sin, certainly. Yet Paul tells us that death itself is the last enemy to be destroyed. The Resurrection is the astonishing promise that our mortality is not the end of God's purposes for us. Even Moses died. Even the greatest leaders, teachers, healers, and saints return to the dust. But Christianity proclaims that death does not have the final word. The God who raised Jesus from the dead has promised resurrection to those who belong to him.

Perhaps that is why Psalm 90 concludes with such a moving prayer: “Establish the work of our hands.” We know our time is limited. We know that much of what we begin will be completed by others, if it is completed at all. Moses prepared Joshua for a future he would never see. And we, too, must live faithfully within the limits of our earthly lives, loving the people before us, tending what has been entrusted to us, and preparing others to carry the work forward. But we need not confuse those limits with the limits of God's promises. We return to dust. Yet the Christian hope is that God is not finished with us when we do.

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