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There's an old joke about some scientists who go to God and tell him they have figured out how he made a man from the dust of the ground. “Oh?” God responds skeptically. “Show me.” The scientists start to scoop up a pile of dirt from the ground, but God stops them. “Not so fast,” says the Lord. “Get your own dirt.”
As is often the case, this joke masks a serious point. Einstein had once claimed an ambition to know God’s thoughts, but he also acknowledged that the universe revealed “an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.” The Lord himself informed the Prophet Isaiah, “My thoughts are not your thoughts.” He was even blunter in confronting the hapless Job: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?” The fact is we don’t know the first thing about where we came from or how we got here. And yet no sooner do we arrive than we start acting like we own the place.
We come into the world owning nothing and go out the same way. So where did we get the idea that we owned anything? The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau marked it down to the momentous occasion when the first person fenced off the first piece of real estate and called it “mine.” (No doubt this occurred at some point after nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes settled in one location to grow crops and graze livestock.) But that really begs the question. Just where did the concept of “mine” come from in the first place?
I’m guessing the reason people first fenced off the landscape and called it mine is that they had already laid claim to themselves and called it “me.” The concept of private property is merely an extension of our most fundamental relationship to the world. As any developmental psychologist will tell you, we do not come into the world with an innate sense of self. It takes a couple of years to develop a psyche separate from our mother and to stake out our own boundaries. Soon after, we begin to grab everything in sight and only gradually learn the social skills that make us fit company for others, such as sharing and taking turns.
A sense of ownership of oneself can easily give rise to the notion that we have somehow made ourselves as well. We see this in the sometimes comical displays of two-year-olds who loudly declare their independence while remaining utterly dependent on their caregivers for nearly everything. Jesus of Nazareth told a story about a quintessential self-made man who was all set to tear down his barns to build even bigger ones so he could store all his goods. The self-made man thought he had it made, until God informed him, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” As it turns out, our ownership of anything — not the least of our own soul — is, at best, provisional.
That old joke about making a man from the dust of the ground tells its own kind of truth. The fact is we don’t know the first thing about how we are made, much less how to make ourselves. Only after we get beyond our sense of ownership can we appreciate what the Psalmist meant when he said, “The earth is the LORD's and the fulness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.” Then perhaps we can begin to understand who we truly are and why we are here.
Isaiah 55:8
Job 38:4-7
Luke 20:20
Pslam 24:1
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