Dust to Dust: Human Bodies Composed of Dust

By Benjamin E. Dock

Jesus walked dusty roads in His own dust without stumbling!

This book of simple admonitions should be taken very seriously! Mankind's mark on civilization can be made with exacting and consistencies to himself and the world twirling around him.

Just as dust can be moved around with little resistance, the world easily impairs us. Yet

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Jun 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685563875

Benjamin E. Dock

My life's work has been spent in several technical trades: sales, tool and die, machine building, apprenticeship trainer, college instructor in skilled industries. Becoming aware of the many elements used in secular work made it seem a bit uncanny that God had used these in creating our bodies.These elements come from many places of God's creative acts to form His just desires to envelope Himself to such a degree that He would provide His own Son to redeem us, lift us up to be kings and priests unto Him.How He favored us over His angels is beyond comprehension.

Book preview

Dedication

I present this work to my son, Benjamin Earnest Dock, who bears my first name, as I also bear my father’s name. He was June and my first child after five years of marriage. A chubby little boy, he was always in a happy and cheerful mode. Our son took a high fever (105–106 degrees) one day. We called our doctor, describing that he was stiffened back in a strange position; the doctor said to take him immediately to the hospital. We got in the car, and as we were beginning to turn out into the road, I stopped, and we prayed for his healing. When we got there, the nurse took him back into the examination area. They said he would probably die, and if he lived, he would be like a vegetable with severe brain damage; they took spinal fluid from his spine—we heard the shrieks from our son’s pain. They continued to check and read his test, becoming perplexed, as none of what they expected showed up. They put him in a room close to the nurse’s station and said, He will probably break out with roseola. Several hours passed as we waited; the doctor returned our son to my wife’s arms, He is okay now—take him home and just keep his fever down using ice baths and aspirin. He soon recovered completely.

He liked to stand near the street and wave at people who drove by. Going for a ride in the car, he would often stand on the hump in the back floor and sing his favorite song, Send Down the Power Lord. One day, returning from a visit in the country, where we would go swimming in a large pool provided by a cold spring, we were back in the edge of Springfield, Missouri, and our son began to sing that song. You must know we usually joined in with him. As our singing came to the word power in the song, we would intensify our voices. As the words went out, so did one of our tires blow out. Without a spare, we were in a difficult situation. It so happened we were at the side of a tire store. We went inside the store and told them of our plight; the owner came outside, looked at the tires on our car, and said, You need tires all the way around. I said, Yeah, I know but do not have the money just now. He gave a price of four tires and said he would put it on a charge ticket, and we could pay as little as five dollars a week. We got new tires that day—a good discount price—at the right time. I believe the Lord allowed that to happen at that time and place. He had already planned this for three dust bags that had truly little finances. I believe the name of the tires was from General Tire Co. God is so good! It is hard to believe that He was always with us. Why does God do these acts for dust bags? Jesus!

Endorsement

Pastor Dock has again offered an excellent work filled with biblical insight, intriguing storylines, with preaching-focused structure and life-changing scripture-based research. His theme, ‘Dust to Dust,’ represents monotony, death, or the cyclicality of life. The Bible’s ‘dust to dust’ implies dust as the absence of existence, either pre- or post-life. You’ll be pulled further to the deep with this study!

—Joseph S. Girdler

DMin, Network Pastor/Superintendent, Kentucky Ministry Network, Assemblies of God, USA

Pastor Benjamin E, Dock Jr. BA

[e-mail]

Foreword

My heart and soul are in tremble mode to write something of myself. This is my attempt at writing a second book, the first being The Four Horses of the Apocalypse. This try is centered around the creation of Adam and Eve, who were encapsulated in dust, bringing my estimation of self and mankind to an extremely low level with a handicapped soul.

Choosing several Bible characters to stroll along with down their dusty road traveled in their lives builds up their persons of achievements in my own life. How could a creature folded in dust be capable of breaking the bounds of his or her wrapper?

Sharing with you, the reader, these stories of a few Bible characters will help us to stand against the blows of satanic attacks and the darts of helplessness he so often aims at us. When we stumble a little away from our righteous Lord, we soon become the epitome of scorn and hypocrisy. When we stand secure and pure towards the world, we are often called braggarts. Admitting our weakness as dust bags, we are empowered by Jesus Christ our Lord to do so, and people need to recognize it. We lay our crowns of success—not of any works we have done—at His feet.

Pastor Benjamin E, Dock Jr. BA

Introduction

In the gospel calling ministry for six and a half decades and now the age of ninety. I doubt that I will be one of the ninety and nine. Studying the Bible, meaning the Old Testament and the New Testament, I would often run across the word dust. Not considering what the word meant, I never became intrigued by the concept and counted the times the word was used in the Scriptures—well over one hundred times, while the words dirt and mud were used much less. I think it was in 1937 when we had a dust storm starting in Oklahoma drifting eastward. Going out the back door as a six-year-old boy in Indiana, I saw dust as thick as a quarter-inch by the measurement of my father on everything.

God led me to put the word dust into my Google search engine. With a surprise, there was much ado about the word dust. Clicking on one of the sites, I found out the research done by scientists on this subject was huge. It was much different than clay or mud, made up of many elements, vegetation, and possible groups of sickness. It allowed me to see the extent to which common dust was filled up with many technical and facetious particles.

I trust ordering my book will prove to delight and be an enlightening of the human creation by God, stating how common dust forms inside our houses and other buildings looking much the same as any place one would find dust. Dust spreads across a bench, table, or cabinet, looking the same—the same color—and the finger moves it with a touch. No matter where I lived, a town, a state, it looked the same across the board. The dust God used for our bodies is the same dust for everyone. Whether rich, poor, race or creed, fat or skinny, it is the same. Do not forget this; it will keep you humble when you attempt to brag and think you are better than someone else.

Dust to Dust

Genesis 2:7.

Perhaps you do not like to think of yourself as dust or anything connected to dust particles. Maybe we just have a lot of pride and just can’t find ourselves coming from such a place. My wife and I, some years ago before she passed away, shared the house cleaning—I did all the cleaning except dusting, as I detested that side of the task. In reality, there wasn’t a great deal of dust, but how it gathered around glass collectibles caused the need for a whole lot of finesse, patience, and careful hand-and-eye coordination to dust or clean.

Perhaps you cannot conceive how it would be possible for God to use dust to make the entire individual. Many like-oil products are much more used for such things as clothing and plastics than for gasoline for your car. This is biblical information used, and after examining the term and the makeup of this trite stuff called dust, you might just change your mind. For those made from dust in the earlier years or closer to that of Adam and Eve, the possibilities of what mankind could achieve were far above the imagination of most earth dwellers to date. One hundred years ago, the analysis of bygone days didn’t put much stock in the initiatives that were coming down the pike in innovations to our world.

By that time or immediately before, all the machinery needed to support such an industrial revolution was intact. What happened since then was updates of ideas to bring a better product into being with more exact tolerances. With the dust bags’ minds, the computer age driving these machines became more and more plentiful with an increase in production and the fine art of close tolerances. A machine that could reproduce itself. Technology puts a driver attached to a lead screw and runs it with great precision to a spot or destination for work to be done. Perhaps, several jobs would take place at that one particular spot; while a tool attachment could change itself, being programmed to do so would finish the particular job before it moved on to the next operation on the same part or parts. The earlier programmable NC machines were controlled by tape feeds, and holes punched in certain places being manually typed in by a controller tape writer made the job a little difficult to bring to finish. If you made a mistake, the tape would need to be typed over starting from the beginning. Later, CNC upgrades placed on discs made the job a lot easier. New technology made this task easier—better every year or so. Whole machining factories eventually were set up to run themselves.

Dust As Mud, Clay, or Dirt

Analyzing the components or elements of these three often used terms that we are from, I realized these typically called names might just not be very correct. I am not a chemist or scientist, but having looked over some of their research brings a strange twist to this creation act of Adam and Eve by God. God did form man, yet it is unlikely He had them on the potter’s wheel. God may have swooped up the dust knelt on the earth and with water may have formed the shape backside out, layer by layer and organ by organ, bone by bone, placing them in their position required.

Then again, he may have placed the dust on a table, forming Adam and Eve. In my mind, when I was a boy, we often made mud pies, mud babies, mud trucks and cars, and what we formed from mud, we set them up to dry. The structure of the dry mud was thick, hard, and unyielding and didn’t seem to jive too much with the body—we couldn’t get the mud babies we made to get up and walk around and didn’t speak back when we talked to them. If you want to think of yourself as mud or clay, that is okay, but the Scripture does use the term dust over one hundred times, affirming the use of dust.

Some people today, when considering the human body, think of it in terms that downgrade us to near nothing, but God was selective in His use of dust. I cannot relate the actual reason but make an attempt to reason by scrutinizing the elements found in dust that may have been confined to most places on earth having survived the water-covered earth in Genesis chapter 1, developing the underground fountains as were destroyed during Noah’s flood and rains, lightning strikes, fires, volcanoes, and so on mixing fine particles distributed by the winds. When God approached the time to form Adam, there was a trace, no doubt, of this dust on top of the dirt, mud, rocks on the earth’s crust as it continues today.

In my own house, dust creates a problem for me. This house had to pass a government test for being sealed to the wind, rain, heat, and cold, but dust still gets in somehow. I have curio cabinets that hold various things we collected over time and are enclosed with glass, but inspecting the closed cabinets, I notice a good amount of dust finds its way in. The enclosure merely keeps most of the dust out. Dust is probably the smallest part in the earth for man’s eyes to see. For God to use the dust of the earth would require a lot of gathering to make a man’s body and the insides that go with it.

Technology has for quite some time had machines that can reproduce a part by layer at a time until the part is completed. I assume the Lord formed man a layer at a time—impossible? No! It just makes more sense. This technology has been passed along to the medical services for building hearts, livers, and so on. The time between Adam and Eve’s creation may have been as much as one thousand years and could have required some sort of growth of organs in solutions. We