Today's Daily Lesson comes from Genesis chapter 2 verse 7:
" [T]hen the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature."
What does it mean to be human?
The word "human" itself comes from the Latin "humanus", which means "of the earth". It's the same root word we get the word hummus from. Same origin -- us and the garbanzos in our hummus, and the beasts of the field, and the birds of the air, and the fowl of the sea. We are all "of the earth" -- meaning whether mammal or reptile or amphibian we are all fashioned of the same organic matter. We are all a part of this same animal kingdom -- and having been in a fraternity in college I know this to be true.
So what makes a person a human being? The scientific classification for the primate who reading this and hopefully actually getting something out of it is "homo sapient". "Homo" comes from the human genus -- something we are delighted to share with the Neanderthal. "Sapiens" means knowledge. And apparently it is now even appropriate to call the anatomically modern human the "Homo Sapiens Sapiens" -- because though it's taken a few million years we ain't as dumb as we used to be.
The lesson then is this: We of the genus human were all born of mud and clay and the dust of the earth; but what makes us truly human is the breath of God -- the gift of spirit. God formed "man" of the dust of the earth, the Scripture says, but it was not until God bent down and breathed into his nostrils that man became "a living being".
It is one thing to be a two-footed, self-conscious Homo Sapiens Sapiens of the primate order and the mammal class; but it is another thing to have the spirit of God inside of us. And it is only when we have been given this breath in the intimacy of divine encounter with God, that we can be said to be a living being, truly alive, what God intended for us to become when God set out in the beginning to go and play in the mud.
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