What does it mean when God tells Adam, "For dust you are and to dust you shall return" (Genesis 3:19)?

Here as before it is present and earthly judgment. On account of the man the ground is cursed. His superiority entails wider and more serious results. He too must face sorrow here below all his days. Thorns and thistles oppose the food he needs and seeks; and hard toil must be his portion to eat bread, for the herb of the field was allotted, as to the subject beasts, to him who had lost through rebellion the beautiful and abundant garden which Jehovah Elohim had planted. In the sweat of his face be was to eat till he returned to the ground whence he had been taken. How evidently the body only is here regarded, and the end of life on the earth! Yet the source of man's soul had been carefully shown in chap. 2 as emanating from Jehovah Elohim's inbreathing, contrasted with every other creature on earth, to the confusion of materialists old or new. Present government is the theme, and neither hades nor the lake of fire. So in the Psalms, though Sheol or Hades appears appropriately, we read, in Ps. 146:4, man "returns to his earth: in that very day his thoughts perish." The body alone returns to dust, out of which the soil was not taken, but, as we are told elsewhere, the spirit returns to God Who gave it. All the notice here taken of man is to humble him who did not look up to God, nor obey Him: sorrow and toil, death and dust. We shall find that more is intimated even here in what follows. If the apostle tells us that the wages of sin is death, we ought not to overlook that the sentence does not mean the whole of sin's wages, but the first part; as in the Epistle to the Hebrews we are expressly told on the one hand that it is appointed unto men once to die, and after that the judgment, on the other that Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time apart from sin to those that look for Him unto salvation: the portion respectively of unbelievers and of believers.

Then Adam came up for judgment, and the governmental effects of his sin are more clearly seen. He had hearkened to the voice of his wife instead of hearkening to what God had said, and now he must face the fruits of it. The ground is cursed for his sake. He must earn his livelihood from it with sweat and sorrow until death should overtake him, when his body should return to the dust out of which it was taken. Nothing is said here as to his soul and spirit, for it is the governmental rather than the eternal consequences that are in view. There is an equal amount of scheming to get rid of the sweat and toil and men may think they are going to achieve it. But already we have heard the slogan, "We work or we want;" to that we may add, "We sweat or we starve;" for we can no more dodge that part of the curse than we can escape death.

Nor can spiritual death, or "death in trespasses and sins," be possibly what God speaks of in His threatening to Adam. This is indeed the spiritual state which is the result of the fall but the moral state of a criminal is a very different thing from the judgment upon the criminal. Man's depravity is what he is condemned for, not what he is sentenced to; and these things cannot be synonymous. "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" is thus the only possible, as it is the divinely given, interpretation of the announcement, "In the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."

Yet it is quite true, and to be pressed, that this death, coming not only upon the first sinners, but upon all their posterity, — and surely by no mere arbitrary decree on God's part, — marks the changed relation to Him of the now fallen creature. Everywhere does Scripture recognize this, and in God's ordinances for his chosen people of old it comes fully out. Death is associated ever with uncleanness and defilement. If a man die in a tent, all that come into the tent, and all that is in the tent, are unclean seven days. Every one touching a dead body, a bone, or a grave, is similarly defiled. Nor must we look at this as merely symbolic teaching. The psalm of the wilderness is plain enough in its doctrine here: "For all our days are passed away in Thy wrath; we spend our years as a tale that is told. The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Who knoweth the power of Thine anger? even according to Thy fear, so is Thy wrath." (Ps. 90:9–11.)

This death which came in through sin we must distinguish from the judgment after death, as the apostle distinguishes them in the text already quoted. This has not always been done, and yet not to do it is to make difficult what is simple, and to obscure not a little the perfection of the divine ways. The sentence upon Adam was not a final sentence, but one in which the mercy is evident amid all the severity of righteous judgment. Without the ministration of death, sad as has been the history of the world, it would have been much sadder; but upon this I do not now need to pause. The sentence on Adam is sufficiently clear from what is actually passed upon him after the transgression, and whose meaning no one can doubt: — "Until thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." Of the second death this may be, and is, a type, and a warning: but no more.

Really, there is no difficulty as to the threatening, if we will only learn from Scripture what death is. It is the quiet assumption of foundations which allows so many arguments to be built up apparently so impregnably. "Dust thou art, and unto dust shall thou return" is the divine judgment as announced to man when fallen, the divine interpretation of the doom threatened before. But the soul is not dust; nor the spirit. These, then, are not to return to dust. And when, at the end of ages of mortal existence, the dead — the wicked dead — are called up before the "great white throne," "death and hell" (or "hades") deliver up the dead which are "in them." Why "in them," if death in the same way applies to all? No; though the man dies, yet the blow falls directly upon the body only. Death gives up the body; hades, the soul.

The judgment upon Adam was, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen. 3:19). In this there is no mention of anything but that which relates to human life on earth; there is no, “after this the judgment” (Heb. 9:27). Where the vital principle that was by the breath of God would find an abiding place is not taken into account; the end of human life down here is what is involved in His judgment. Man as formed out of dust is all that God speaks of here; and this, He says, man is; but He does not say it is all that man is. Stephen was carried to his burial, and the dust returned to dust, but the Lord Jesus received his spirit (Acts 8:2; 7:59). And Paul speaks of his not knowing at one time whether he was in the body or out of it (2 Cor. 12:2), and were the body everything a man is, the statement would be senseless. But this is not taken into account in the Scripture under consideration, for it has nothing to do with it.

Adam is driven out of the garden to toil for his bread until this judgment would be consummated, and he should return to dust. His posterity, all sinners like himself, come under the same judgment, for God must put a period to the life of the sinner on earth; hence all are debarred from partaking of the tree of life, which would have renewed the waste and decay that a body derived from the dust would naturally undergo. Death is man’s portion here below, because he is a sinner.

God took a handful of dust to make a wonderful being - man: and he goes back to a handful of dust! God is going to make a wonderful thing in glory, and He takes up a poor degraded sinner to make him an heir of glory, something suited to Himself.

“The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” There was first the figure of clay, formed of the dust, concerning which it is written—“Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen. 3:19). Into this lifeless form, God inbreathed “the breath of life.” The body is spoken of in Scripture as man's “tabernacle,” which he may “put off” (2 Pet. 1:14), in which he may be “at home” (2 Cor. 5:6), or from which he may be “absent” (v. 8). It is said to be “mortal” (Rom. 8:11 ), that is, subject to death, as a result of the fall. Men may kill it (Matt. 10:28 ), and it may see corruption (Acts 13:36 ), from which it will be delivered at resurrection (John 5:28 -29). Materialists say the body is the man, ignoring spirit and soul as Scripture describes them and their functions, and denying consciousness or any survival after death. With Annihilationists, death is the “extinction” of man's being.

Adam is sentenced also because he had accepted the voice of his wife when God had spoken otherwise. For his sake the ground was cursed. Adam would labor all his life in order to have the ground bring forth a living for him (v. 18). This labor would be increased in his seeking to control the thorns and thistles that would arise. His food would be gained by the sweat of his face, not merely the sweat of his brow (v. 19). Thus he was not promised any happy existence, and the end was not happy either: he would return by death to the ground from which he was taken, for he was reminded he was dust and would return to dust. Today men have invented many means — automation etc. — to reduce physical labor, though it is only a certain percentage who have profited by this, and the increase of inventions has increased work to keep them operating, while people become more and more unhappy with their circumstances, many being left in the misery of unemployment. But all will yet come down to the dust of death.

Adam is sentenced also because he had accepted the voice of his wife when God had spoken otherwise. For his sake the ground was cursed. Adam would labor all his life in order to have the ground bring forth a living for him (v.18). This labor would be increased in his seeking to control the thorns and thistles that would arise. His food would be gained by the sweat of his face, not merely the sweat of his brow (v.19). Thus he was not promised any happy existence, and the end was not happy either: he would return by death to the ground from which he was taken, for he was reminded he was dust and would return to dust. Today men have invented many means -- automation etc. -- to reduce physical labor, though it is only a certain percentage who have profited by this, and the increase of inventions has increased work to keep them operating, while people become more and more unhappy with their circumstances, many being left in the misery of unemployment. But all will yet come down to the dust of death.