It Was His Breath

Everything this study opens is in that one verse. The dust. The forming. The breathing into his nostrils. The living soul.

He Wet the Ground First

Before there was a man, God watered the ground the man came out of.

No rainfall and no farmer. Nobody watered that ground and nobody worked it, and the writer says so twice in one breath. Then a mist went up and wet the whole face of it, and the water came up out of the earth rather than down out of the sky.

The very next verse says He formed man of the dust of that ground.

Genesis does not say why the mist came. I read it as Him getting the ground ready. He wet it first, and there was nobody standing there to take credit.

Dust Will Not Hold a Shape

Blow on it and it moves. Dust does not hold a shape by itself, and that is what I see in the choosing of it. The holding was never in the dust. It was Him.

Consist means hold together. Paul is saying the creation does not hold itself, and it never did. It was Him, and it still is.

He Did Not Speak This One into Being

Much of that first chapter comes by a word. And God said, and it was so, over and over.

Not the man. He formed him.

The lexicons give the Hebrew as yatsar, to form, to fashion, to shape, and they say it is the word used of a potter at his work. The verse does not say by hand, and the word does not carry it either. Genesis 2:7 never uses the word hands at all. The potter with his hands wet and dirty is my picture. David gives me a verse near it, though he is speaking about himself and not about Adam.

David does not say when God’s hands first touched anybody. I believe it was Adam, and that the first thing that ever touched a human being was the hands of God.

And nobody handed Him a design. There had never been a man before this one, so there was no earlier man to copy. There was a reference, and Genesis has already given it. Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. It was Himself.

He looked at what His own hands had made, and He did not send it back. Man became a living soul.

The Part We Read Straight Past

That sounds like the great difference between us and the animals. It is not. Go back one chapter.

Living creature and living soul are the same two words in the Hebrew, and the animals were called it before Adam ever opened his eyes. So, being a living soul is not what sets a man apart.

Now before I say what I want to say, there is a verse I have to put up, because it comes at this from the other side.

Breath of life, in the nostrils, is not said of man alone there. It is said of everything that died in the flood. So I cannot stand here and tell you the words breath of life belong to man and nobody else, because Genesis uses them wider than that.

So what is left, and it is enough. Genesis 2:7 does not only say man had breath in his nostrils. It says where that breath came from and how it got there. God breathed it in Himself, and that is the only place in the whole account where God is described doing that with anybody.

And Genesis does not stop and tell me what He did or did not do with the rest, so what I say next is my reading of it. And let me be careful with the wording, because I could say this wrong. I am not telling you the animals got their life from somewhere other than God. Scripture never says that and I will not either. What Genesis gives me is a manner. Nobody else in the account has God bending down and doing it Himself. The difference is not what he became. It is Who bent down to give it. He breathed into his nostrils.

He Had to Come Close

Nostrils is the verse’s wording. Everything I am about to build on it is mine, so let me say that before I build it. Genesis does not describe God’s face, or a distance, or Adam feeling anything.

But you cannot breathe into somebody’s nostrils from across a field. So I see a face bent down over a face, and hands that had just been in the dust.

And I call that a nearness I do not find anywhere else in the account.

Mouth to Mouth

Moses had it too, and his brother and sister wanted to know why.

They were not wrong that God spoke to them. Miriam is called a prophetess. Aaron was appointed by God to be a mouth for Moses. That is exactly why the question came out of them.

And God does not say you two never heard from Me. He answers about the manner of it.

Mouth to mouth. It is there in the verse, and the Hebrew behind it is peh el peh, mouth to mouth, exactly as it reads.

A vision is a picture shown to you. A dream comes while you sleep. Mouth to mouth is neither of those, and Numbers is contrasting it with both.

The verse does not tell me what mouth to mouth felt like, and men who know the language differ on how far to press it. Numbers never mentions the garden.

But I see the garden in it. A man awake with the breath of God on his face, and Moses getting back what Adam had.

What I Saw

Years ago our church set aside a week of prayer and fasting. People took the whole week off and stayed in the room, praying as one. It was our own prayer room, where we met on Wednesday nights.

During that week He gave me a vision. In it a sister in the Lord came in and said, soon you guys will be like Moses, where God spoke to him mouth to mouth. Mouth to mouth. The same phrase out of Numbers 12.

And He gave it in a vision. I have been leaning on verse 6, and it was not on this page.

A vision and a dream, that is the prophet’s manner. Mouth to mouth is Moses. Numbers puts the two side by side and I am the one calling one lesser and one greater. And what I took from that night is that He gave me the one and was pointing me at the other. That is what I understood it to mean. I will not tell you God said it in those words. It has not come for me yet.

But hey, Moses got his at eighty.

Eighty, and Stephen breaks the eighty in two for us.

Forty years in Egypt and forty in the desert before the bush. That is the first time we are told God spoke to him. Whether anything came before it that was not written down, I do not know. And the mouth to mouth came after that, out in the wilderness, when he was past eighty.

So the man Numbers sets apart from every other prophet was past eighty when we are told of it. And whether he had it earlier without it being written down, or whether he knew it was coming, or was waiting on it, I do not know. What I can see is where it is written.

The Breath was Never Ours to Keep

Somebody will say God gives with one hand and takes back with the other.

Genesis says God breathed it in, so it came out of God. I read it as never Adam’s to own and never his to keep.

Now I want to lean on that word his, and I have to be honest about it first. The King James prints his twice, and men who read the Hebrew do not all agree on which his is meant. So I am not going to build the whole thing on a pronoun. What the verse does say plainly is this. If He gathers it, all flesh perishes. Whoever the his belongs to, the gathering is His.

So, when it goes, nothing is being taken. The dust goes back to the ground it came out of, and Ecclesiastes says the spirit returns to God who gave it. And when I say it goes back to the mouth it came out of, that is me joining Genesis 2:7 to Ecclesiastes, and neither verse says mouth. But both go home.

As it was, not as it became. And I am not saying the body falls apart the moment the breath goes, because it does not. I am saying what Ecclesiastes says. It is going back.

He said that to a man standing up on two feet. You are dust right now, even standing.

The Mercy Reaching Out

Elisha knew about mouth to mouth.

Mouth upon his mouth. Now it is not the same Hebrew as Numbers 12, and the two are not doing the same thing, one is how God spoke to Moses and this is a man laid out on a dead boy. But the English rings the same in my ear, and I am the one hearing it. Not a hand on a forehead from standing height. The whole man laid over the whole man. And the flesh became warm.

That is what a man does bending over a face, breathing into somebody, trying to put life back in. And Elisha was not doing medicine, and I am not making him the pattern for it. I am the one hearing the same shape in the two. And that is not a man fighting God. I read it as the mercy of God reaching out.

No medic can call a breath that is going home, but God never asked him to. He gave him something else, and He gave it for us.

So, the skill in that surgeon’s hands came down. James does not say surgeons. I am carrying it there. He studied, and thank God for the man who studied, and the ability was granted and granted for us. All that knowledge sitting in his head was put there for the person lying on the table.

People leave off the end of that verse. That we may do all the words of this law.

Moses is speaking to Israel about the covenant God had revealed to them, and the doing is the doing of that law. He is not talking about medicine, or a surgeon, or anything in a hospital.

So I am taking a principle out of it and carrying it somewhere Moses was not looking, and I will say plainly that I am the one carrying it. And I will keep it as small as the verse keeps it. What God revealed to Israel, He revealed so it could be done, and He said so in the verse. That God does the same with everything He ever reveals is my own conclusion, and Deuteronomy will not prove it for me.

And this last line is my own saying and not the verse’s. A mercy revealed and not used is a mercy wasted.

So, use it, use everything, breathe, call, work, fight for the person. And if it does not come back, nothing was dropped and nobody let anything slip. The breath was never ours to keep, so it was never ours to lose. Ecclesiastes says the spirit returns to God who gave it, and when I say He called it home, that is my way of saying it and not the verse’s.

So This Is How I Pray

When I pray for my ailing loved ones, for friends and for family, I am asking God to send mercy. And I am asking Him to send the man with the ability, to work on my behalf, because everything is in His hands anyway.

The prayer is not, do it this way, Lord. The prayer is, send it.

If you have stood in a hospital corridor and felt foolish praying while the machines were running, hear me. You are not praying instead of the medicine, you are praying for it.

And God knows I thank Him for His mercy. It rewrote my in between many times over.