APOSTLES CREED DEVOTIONAL 2
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On Wednesday, we gathered before God and had dust smeared across our brows. It’s a jarring practice, admittedly, but it cuts to the core of what the human is: transient, contingent dust. This is our stature before God, for he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust (Psalm 103:14). But we didn’t simply reacquaint ourselves with the facts of mortality and frailty. These truths, important though they are, are nevertheless generic. In fear and trembling, Christians soberly acknowledged our heritage as Adam’s offspring – children of inspirated earth: bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, dust of his dust. We are tethered to a genealogy of sin and destruction. Our lungs are choked with dust from the ruin and debris of our primal parent’s doing. How, then, can it be that Adam’s children cough out their creedal confession: I believe in God the Father?
The Father knows well our frame of dust, our Adamic lineage. But the Psalmist presents this fact against a deeper reality: that as a father pities his children, so the LORD pities those who fear him (Psalm 103:13). Looking upon us, creatures of dust, the Father claims us as the Father’s own. The Father looks upon us with deep compassion, moved with pity for the wounded children of Adam. The Father sends upon us that matchless grace: the Spirit of adoption (Romans 8:15). Once you were no people, but now you are God’s people (1 Peter 2:10).
By that Spirit who forgives sinners unto saintly communion through the Church, we are freely given a share in Jesus’ unique sonship. Christ alone is the Father’s true Son. Christ alone can call upon God as ‘Father’ by rights. On our own, Adam’s children – born of the dust – can claim no such right. But like Jacob, we receive the firstborn’s rightful blessing; having been clothed with the Lamb, we are reckoned as true children of God. For according to the Father’s great mercy, he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading (1 Peter 1:3-4).
This is the power of our new life in Christ: that we children of Adam are liberated from bondage to decay to obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God (Romans 8:21). We join the Ascended Son’s eternal prayer to ‘our Father’ as we await Jesus’ return at Power’s right hand. We gratefully receive our new inheritance in Christ – the Father’s gift of judgment and forgiveness, Spirit and water, bread and wine, life and hope. Adam’s hurting children dare to claim all this because God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham (Matthew 3:9). Just so, we children of dust are bold to cry confess our faith in God the Father because even from debris and dust, the Holy Spirit is able to raise up children to the Father in Jesus Christ.