Why does our hair turn gray and our skin get wrinkly? Why do we all eventually die and “return to dust,” as Genesis 3:19 says?
In Genesis 1, God speaks his good creation into existence. And in Genesis 2, we see a difference between two key spaces within creation—the world at large and the world inside of a unique garden that God plants in Eden (Gen. 2:8).
The garden is like a home to God, an image of Heaven on Earth where God walks with humans and shares his endless, flourishing life with them as his partners. And because God is the infinite source of life, the garden is a death-free zone. Outside the garden, the world still has beauty, goodness, and life, but it also has expiration dates. Unlike in the garden, living things come out of the dust and return back to it—they die. Interestingly, God first forms the human outside the garden, in the realm of dust.
Genesis 2:7 shows God forming the adam, which is Hebrew for “human,” from the adamah, which means “soil, clay, or dust,” the substance of the ground. After forming the adam and breathing his Spirit of life into him, God then plants a garden and places the human inside it (Gen. 2:8, 2:15). Once the human is inside the garden, God offers a choice. Humans can keep living with him in the garden forever, or stop living with him in the garden and return to the dust—the adamah. The right choice seems obvious. Why would anyone want to leave?
The story in Genesis 2:15-17 shows God planting two trees that represent these life-or-death options, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. Eating from the tree of life means trusting God’s wisdom, thereby living forever with him and according to his instruction. However, eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and bad means trusting in human wisdom, thereby rejecting God’s instruction and life. If you eat from that tree, God says, you will “surely die” (Gen. 2:17).
The humans probably never intended to leave the garden, but they didn’t take God’s words seriously and trusted the wisdom of a snakey deceiver instead of God. After making the wrong choice, the human (adam) is sent out of the garden, back to the place he was originally formed—“the ground (adamah) from which he had been taken” (Gen. 3:19). The human must now live outside the garden where people wrinkle and turn gray and eventually die on their way back to dust.
The basic message of the Eden story is this: Humans die because we have, from the beginning, rejected God’s offer of ultimate life. God’s offer requires a surrender of what we might think is life, so that we can receive the true life that God wants to give us. Tragically, we often decide to choose life as defined by our own wisdom, embracing our own self-ruin. Often these choices seem as innocent as eating tasty, good-looking fruit (cf. Gen. 3:6), but when those choices oppose God’s wise instruction, they corrupt life and bring death.
