Just A Lump of Clay

    An Introduction

Genesis 3:19 says, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, til thou return unto the ground; for out of it thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.”

    As I grow older, the subject of death is more and more brought to mind. The death of my father, my wife’s father and, more recently, my mother, as well as the passing of other close relatives and friends, has served to increase the thought time that I devote to the subject.
    It is not my intent to be morbid but rather to emphasize that we, as Christians, need to be more realistic in our treatment and perception of physical death. When my father-in-law died in 1987, I remember saying something to this effect to my eldest son: “We should remember that the body in that coffin is not Grampy. It’s just a piece of clay.”
    Now, that’s sometimes hard for us to grasp, and when it’s your grandfather or your grandmother or your father or mother or you sister or your brother or your son or your daughter or your wife or your husband, or some other close relative or good friend whose coffin your gazing into, that’s not most likely to be your perception. So, perhaps misunderstanding the point I was making or where I was coming from, my son replied, “It’s a pretty special piece of clay,” and of course it was.
    The fact remains, however, if you can bring yourself to be entirely objective about it, and every true believer in the Lord Jesus Christ should, that the body lying in that coffin is really nothing more than a conglomeration of earthly minerals (clay, if you will) that temporarily bears the physical image of the person who once occupied it. Fail to, neglect to, or be unable to pump it full of embalming chemicals, and it will show obvious signs of chemical deterioration and physical decay before the sun sets on the first day of death, for dust it is and unto dust it begins immediately to return. The person who once inhabited it is no longer in it. The soul and spirit have departed (Genesis 35:18).
    As Rev. Norman Trafton, an old and dear friend of mine, so aptly put it when his wife Dorothy went to be with the Lord, “She has gone beyond us and we wouldn’t wish her back.”
    That is the subject of this poem.

    Just A Lump of Clay

Just a lump of clay - That’s all we leave behind;
Just an empty shell of dust - No spirit, no soul, no mind -
For the spirit returns to God Who gave the life and took
To await the resurrection, As He promised in His Book.
Just a lump of clay - That’s how it all began -
God moulded it and fashioned it And made into man.
He breathed into it the breath of life; Man became a living soul -
Made in God’s image they were back then, Before sin took its toll.
Just a lump of clay That will soon turn back to dust,
But the spirit and the soul live on If in Jesus Christ we trust,
For God Himself, in Jesus Christ, Came down to earth one day
To live a perfect sinless life In such a lump of clay;
To die for man on Calvary’s cross; To be sin for all mankind;
To rise triumphant over death - No clay was left behind!
And one day soon, perhaps today, He’ll return with trumpet sound,
And all who’ve died secure in Him Will rise up from the ground.
In brand new bodies they will rise To live and reign with Him,
From mortal clay their bodies changed, No longer marred by sin;
And those alive will be changed, too, On that grand and glorious day,
And we’ll all know then what can be done With just a lump of clay.

    a. franklin staples

March 6, 1991

© 1991 by A. Franklin Staples