“…and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being…” Gen. 2:7 Several years ago, I went to see one of my members, Jerry He was very sick He had acute COPD, lung and colon c anc e r and hemochro-matosis.
He took radia tion and c h emo for the can cer and went in every month and gave a unit of blood for the hemochromatosis.
Jerry had a hard time breathing and takes a breathing treatment every four hours. He uses oxygen throughout most of the day. His lungs are just shot. Cigar and cigarette smoking is the culprit. A breath of air is life or death for him. Then there was Buck. His COPD is more advanced. He also had acute diabetes to complicate his condition. He takes steroids to keep lungs open but the steroids made his blood sugar go up. Buck could only walk about ten feet and then he was gasping for air.
And David passed away from acute COPD. Actually it was a lung infection (very rare) that occurs in people primarily with COPD. The lungs gradually fill with fluid restricting air capacity. A person slowly suffocates.
One of the guys in my Sunday School class told of a friend whose dad and two other men were fishing on the river and got lost. While trying to find their way back to camp, they somehow sank the boat. The two men swam to shore. but the dad drowned. He was found a couple days later.
As I am writing this, I remember that the average person breathes 12-18 times a minute. This means that I have taken 120-180 breaths as I write this article… and I have never given it a thought or care.
But, how much is a breath of air worth? Ask a fireman in a house filled with smoke and flames as he looks for the lost child. Ask a scuba diver who has only two minutes of air left and is four minutes from the surface. Ask the child who suffers from cystic fibrosis. Ask the person in ICU who just had a diseased lung removed and now will depend on one lung to do the work of two. Or ask the paramedic who is performing CPR on the child who fell in the swimming pool and is not breathing.
A single breath gives life and a single (final) breath ends life. I have witnessed a baby’s gasp and cry at birth, the chest cavity collapse as the breathing machine was unhooked and sitting with a family as the patriarch sighed for the last time and the breath of life was gone.
Again I ask, “How much is a breath of life worth?” God knows. He has the answer. After all in Genesis it says God scooped up the dust (dirt) of the earth, formed a man and BREATHED life into his nostrils and he lived (Gen. 2).
But that was not the cost. This was the creation. Maybe the cost was expulsion from the Garden of Eden? This is not it either, that was the casualty from the breath of life…sin.
The breath of life cost one life, Jesus. God created us, breathed life into us and because of our separation from Him at the original sin in the Garden, Jesus redeemed us giving His life. In doing this, we can have eternal life.
As God breathed life into us and life began, Jesus exhaled that breath and died so we could have eternal life (Mark 15:37& Luke 23:46), “Jesus breathed His last.” And in John 19:30 it says, “It is finished and bowing His head, He gave up His spirit.”
