Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
This picture of creation was so different from the rest of the ancient world. In so many other stories, the gods created humans on accident or to serve as slaves. In this story, the Jewish people told their children about a god who gave life as a gift, who didn’t take but breathed life into them. If we look, we will find this language over and over again in the scriptures.
The Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life.
The next verse doesn’t sound like these first two but follow this for a second and listen to how they are connected.
God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’”
At first glance, this seems like a strange thing for God to say and doesn’t sound much like the breathing emphasis from the previous verses. Until that is, we remember this was written in Hebrew. In the Hebrew language. Now, if you don’t speak Hebrew, here is a powerful lesson. The words I AM are simply the sound of breathing. Try right now breathing in with by forming the syllable YAH and breathing out with the syllable WEH. As Moses breathed, he heard the word YAHWEH, I Am in the Hebrew, the name God gave him. Moses could simply breathe and hear the name of God.
Knowing the name of a god in the ancient world was about understanding who this god was and what this god was all about. And this is a god of life who gives us our very breath.
Hundreds of years later, a Jewish man who became a follower of Jesus, a man named Paul, reflected on this incredible understanding of who God was, a story he had heard over and over again. Paul looked around at his surroundings in Athens, at the many gods competing for his allegiance and, through his words, shows us where God is found.
16 While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. 17 So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. 18 A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. 19 Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? 20 You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we would like to know what they mean.” 21 (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)
22 Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.
24 “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being…’”
Now the final verse that we just read is fascinating because we quote it all the time in Christian circles. “For in him we live and move and have our being.” But Paul didn’t write those words. Paul was quoting someone else, a philosopher and poet named Aratus from a poem in honor of the Roman God, Zeus. That’s crazy when you think about it. Paul used a poem about Zeus to help people understand something about God. Listen to how he did this.
While Paul agrees that the philosophy is correct behind the statement, he believed the application was wrong. While Aratus wrote these words in honor of Zeus, they make more sense to be attributed to this unknown god that Paul is telling them about, the God he called YAHWEH.
You see, Zeus meant shine or sky…the farthest thing from us. The poem that in him we move and have our being was a direct contradiction to his actual name. This was the reality for almost every god of the ancient world: distant, removed, far from human life. But the god that Paul was telling them about, the god he had learned about in the stories of his ancestors, Yahweh, was the breath of life, the closest we could ever be, every moment of our life.
Several years later, Paul wrote to a gathering of early church followers, a church in the Greek city of Corinth. Listen to what he said to them.
1 Corinthians 6:19
19Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own;
This would have been an extraordinarily new and powerful idea at a time when the temples of the gods and goddesses were the giant, shiny, magnificent wonders of the world, each one to a singular God. Paul tells a frumpy, divisive, flawed group of Jesus followers that individually and collectively, they are a temple of the breath of the living God.
This idea would have been so hard for them to comprehend because the ancient world wasn’t any different from our modern world. They wrestled with the idea of God and continued to place God in a box, somewhere over there while we stay somewhere over here.
Yet, all throughout the scriptures, as we peel back the layers, we discover a beautiful reality about God. He doesn’t need a temple, we, his church, individually and collectively are his temple. And through every breath you breathe you are reminded of the gift of his presence. Through Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, that breath comes alive within us in ways we never could have imagined as the story of God is told through us and into this world.
Will you recognize the life that God has given you today? Will you give it back to him and allow God to work in and through your life? Will you breathe in the Holy Spirit, allowing what is so different about the way of Jesus to permeate your life as you exhale and breathe the beauty of mercy, justice, love, and peace into this world?