Acknowledge that the LORD is God. He made us, and we belong to him; we are his people, we are his flock.

I praise you because you are to be feared; all you do is strange and wonderful. I know it with all my heart.

When my bones were being formed, carefully put together in my mother's womb, when I was growing there in secret, you knew that I was there---

But you are our father, LORD. We are like clay, and you are like the potter. You created us,

You will have to work hard and sweat to make the soil produce anything, until you go back to the soil from which you were formed. You were made from soil, and you will become soil again."

So the LORD God sent them out of the Garden of Eden and made them cultivate the soil from which they had been formed.

Do you think he will trust a creature of clay, a thing of dust that can be crushed like a moth?

You and I are the same in God's sight, both of us were formed from clay.

He knows what we are made of; he remembers that we are dust.

the time for tearing and the time for mending, the time for silence and the time for talk.

They are both going to the same place---the dust. They both came from it; they will both go back to it.

Our bodies will return to the dust of the earth, and the breath of life will go back to God, who gave it to us.

But you are our father, LORD. We are like clay, and you are like the potter. You created us,

But who are you, my friend, to talk back to God? A clay pot does not ask the man who made it, "Why did you make me like this?"

The first Adam, made of earth, came from the earth; the second Adam came from heaven.

Yet we who have this spiritual treasure are like common clay pots, in order to show that the supreme power belongs to God, not to us.

For we know that when this tent we live in---our body here on earth---is torn down, God will have a house in heaven for us to live in, a home he himself has made, which will last forever.

as long as God gives me breath,

God's spirit made me and gave me life.

Then he breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit.

Nor does he need anything that we can supply by working for him, since it is he himself who gives life and breath and everything else to everyone.

Everything on earth that breathed died.

How can anyone be sure that the human spirit goes upward while an animal's spirit goes down into the ground?

Put no more confidence in mortals. What are they worth?

But Moses and Aaron bowed down with their faces to the ground and said, "O God, you are the source of all life. When one of us sins, do you become angry with the whole community?"

" LORD God, source of all life, appoint, I pray, a man who can lead the people

The LORD gave us mind and conscience; we cannot hide from ourselves.

This is a message about Israel from the LORD, the LORD who spread out the skies, created the earth, and gave life to man. He says,

For the scripture says, "The first man, Adam, was created a living being"; but the last Adam is the life-giving Spirit.

In the case of our human fathers, they punished us and we respected them. How much more, then, should we submit to our spiritual Father and live!