Gen 2:7, Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. 
	In this morning’s passage, we have the account of the creation of man. We are formed from the dust, made of the elements of this earth. The key fact of our creation is that God breathed life into us and we became a living being. We have spent many weeks in terms of the importance of the complete acceptance of the fact that we were created by God. This is a most vital road of certainty and conviction. It is something that we need to have out with the Lord if we have any doubts concerning the validity of His Word. 
	 The Psalmist gives us encouragement and insight into this truth as we discover in Ps 100:3, Know that the Lord Himself is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; We are His people and the sheep of His pasture. This is not a matter of argument with the Lord. It is a command that we are to take to heart and accept at His Word. Know that the Lord Himself is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves… This does not leave room for discussion or argument or doubt. If we know that the Lord is God, then we know that He created us.
	This then leads to the further truth of how we are to respond to the reality of Our God as Our Creator. Ps 139:14-16, I will give thanks to Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Thy works, And my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from Thee, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth. Thine eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Thy book they were all written, The days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was not one of them. 
	We are thankful to the Lord for the manner of His handiwork in creating us. We learn to appreciate His magnificent and amazingly artistic design in the work that He has fashioned in us. There is His perfect skill and the marvelous manifestation of His plan and purpose in each one of us that confounds the every thought and learning of humanity. What God has done in His creative process cannot be replicated by the imitations that we make with these hands of flesh and blood. It is beyond all comprehension how much God has instilled of Himself into us as living beings, filled by His breath of life. 
	The Prophet Isaiah marveled at this in Isa 64:8, But now, O Lord, Thou art our Father, We are the clay, and Thou our potter; And all of us are the work of Thy hand. All that man does is as nothing but filth and ashes before the majesty and the glory of God. Whenever man tries to do something good of his own accord and to his own glory, it turns to dust and decays with the ravages of time. It rusts and withers away with the wind. It must decay because it is not made with the same eternal craftsmanship that God has put into the life that He has brought forth through the breath of His Spirit into the work of His Hand. 
The body of man fades and dies with time, but the fact is that we are all created to be eternal beings. We must never forget this in our dealings with others. Our physical bodies do age and wrinkle and decay. However, our spirits will live on forever in eternity. 
The prophet Ezekiel witnessed the very life giving work of God when he was shown the valley of dried out bones. Ezek 37:3-9, And He said to me, "Son of man, can these bones live?" And I answered, "O Lord God, Thou knowest." Again He said to me, "Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, 'O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.' "Thus says the Lord God to these bones, 'Behold, I will cause breath to enter you that you may come to life. 'And I will put sinews on you, make flesh grow back on you, cover you with skin, and put breath in you that you may come alive; and you will know that I am the Lord.'" So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold, a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, sinews were on them, and flesh grew, and skin covered them; but there was no breath in them. Then He said to me, "Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, 'Thus says the Lord God," Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they come to life. 
Even though we die on this earth, we will receive the bodies that God has prepared for us to inhabit the eternal ages of the ages. We will receive the eternal life that He breathes into us. Those, who have come into a living relationship with God through Jesus Christ, the Son, will receive glorified bodies that will always show forth His power and might and dominion and majesty. Those, who reject the salvation so freely offered in Jesus Christ, will be in bodies that will receive the torment and the anguish and the pain and suffering of eternal damnation. They will be forever doomed to be separated from His fellowship and joy.
This is a reality that many seem to forget as they randomly consider the eternity that awaits them. No man will just simply decay into nothingness. Everyone whom God creates with the breath of His life will know eternity. Nothing and no one can destroy His handiwork in the life that He gives through His own breathe. Job understood this as we read in Job 33:4, The Spirit of God has made me, And the breath of the Almighty gives me life. 
We are not as the animals and the creeping things and the fish and the fowl. The life that they receive is transitory, tied to this realm. In humanity, the very breath of God makes us far more than the beasts and the insects and the serpents. However, as Job points out, even they can teach us of the work of God in the life that He brings forth in men. Job 12:7-10, "But now ask the beasts, and let them teach you; And the birds of the heavens, and let them tell you. "Or speak to the earth, and let it teach you; And let the fish of the sea declare to you. "Who among all these does not know That the hand of the Lord has done this, In whose hand is the life of every living thing, And the breath of all mankind? 
We were created by God; body, soul, and spirit. It is the soul and spirit which separates and lifts us up above the other life-forms that dwell upon the earth. It is also that spirit which determines our eternal destiny. If the Spirit of God indwells us, through the life of Jesus Christ, we know the delight and the anticipation of our eternal homecoming into the presence of our Beloved Husband and Lord. If not, we are spiritually dead to all that eternity holds, and will never experience the blessing and the joyfulness of spiritual life. Eternity will be a tormented nightmare of pain and anguish in the disregard of the life that could have been in Jesus Christ.
This spiritual life begins for Christians, when the very breath of Jesus is breathed upon us at our new birth. It is at that moment that, just as in the Garden when God breathed upon Adam and Eve, Jesus breathes life into us. John 20:22, And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. It takes the very breath of God to create eternal life and it takes the Spirit of God to create spiritual life in Jesus Christ. Without His breath upon us, we will never come into a living relationship with Him. When He does breathe His life into us, we become those spiritual beings who are included as the very members of His family. 
Never think that we become deity. That is not the case in any measure. Only the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are God. We are made members of God’s family in Jesus Christ, through the effective work of His death and resurrection and our belief upon Him, but we are not made God. The Holy Spirit works in our lives to bring us more and more into conformity with the life of Jesus. It is because He is living forth from us that we are the living witness of Him wherever He leads us. He dwells in us and our eternal security is set in Him. However, we do not possess any power or wisdom or righteousness apart from Him.  
	Acts 17:24-28, "The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; neither is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all life and breath and all things; and He made from one, every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times, and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we also are His offspring.' This is the life that we have in Christ Jesus. We become the beneficiaries of being His dwelling place on this earth, His very eternal offspring. 
	Not only does He make every provision for us to become His offspring in Jesus, but He cares for us as His children. This was even evident in the Old Testament days in the prayer of Moses for the provision of the Lord to cover them with a leader who would shepherd them in care and love under the direct influence of the Spirit of God. Num 27:15-17, Then Moses spoke to the Lord, saying, "May the Lord, the God of the spirits of all flesh, appoint a man over the congregation, who will go out and come in before them, and who will lead them out and bring them in, that the congregation of the Lord may not be like sheep which have no shepherd." Joshua became that leader, giving himself to the will of God into the possession of the Promised Land. As he was a type of the Christ to come, so are we guided into all the truth and the reality of our spiritual life by the very Holy Spirit.
	This is exactly what separates us from the other created beings. We know the will of God in the spirit that He instilled into us. As we read in Prov 20:27, The spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord, Searching all the innermost parts of his being. We know the difference between right and wrong because we have the very lamp of God enlightening us to show forth that which is pleasing to God from that which is displeasing. Our human nature stubbornly battles the obedience and the place of honor that He deserves, but we know what should be done and what shouldn’t be done.
	The Prophet Zechariah maintained this truth as we read in Zech 12:1, The burden of the word of the Lord concerning Israel. Thus declares the Lord who stretches out the heavens, lays the foundation of the earth, and forms the spirit of man within him… He recognized that God had created man with a spiritual reality at his very core. We are infused with the desire after being brought to life by the Holy Spirit. There is a yearning and identification with the need to discover our spiritual, innermost being which guides our manner of living on this earth. 
Many of us search in ways that are destructive and unable to manifest anything other than corruption and a cancerous malignancy of despair and despondency. We try to meet the need for spiritual life by means of self-gratification and artificial stimulation, but that will never even begin to fill the void that God’s Spirit has prepared for Himself in those who are called to become the Children of God in Jesus Christ. 
	It is only in Jesus that we can find that spiritual life as He fills us with His own Holy Spirit. As Our Lord, Himself so richly elaborates for us in John 6:63, "It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life. 
There is no other manner of coming into this spiritual fulfillment. We cannot find it in any plan or scheme of mankind. It is not available through transcendental means or greater methods of trying to achieve human consciousness. We cannot will ourselves into it and neither can we do enough good works to earn it. It is only through Christ, by the ministry of the Holy Spirit that we can freely receive spiritual life. 
1 Cor 15:43, So also it is written, "The first man, Adam, became a living soul." The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. All men have a soul. All men have the ability to become spiritually alive unto God. But not all men will choose to appropriate this truth into the very core of their beings. It is only those, in whom the Lord Jesus Christ, the last Adam becomes a living reality, who will come into the full realization of what spiritual life entails. We will be enabled to rejoice in all the goodness of Our God, pleasing Him in the manner in which we conduct ourselves, now and forever. We will have peace which reigns in our minds and our thoughts. We will enjoy the freedom of being a spiritual creation as was always the intent and plan and purpose of God. We will know the full enthrallment of being able to express the love of God with which we have been so richly and gloriously loved. 
	The Prophet Isaiah foretells of the living and splendid and magnificent relationship with God that is opened in our new spiritual life in Isa 42:5-9. Thus says God the Lord, Who created the heavens and stretched them out, Who spread out the earth and its offspring, Who gives breath to the people on it, And spirit to those who walk in it, "I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I will also hold you by the hand and watch over you, And I will appoint you as a covenant to the people, As a light to the nations, To open blind eyes, To bring out prisoners from the dungeon, And those who dwell in darkness from the prison. "I am the Lord, that is My name; I will not give My glory to another, Nor My praise to graven images. "Behold, the former things have come to pass, Now I declare new things; Before they spring forth I proclaim them to you." 
	As those who have come into this spiritual life through the work of God, alone, we are a witness and a testimony to others. We are the light of God’s love and salvation to the nations. We are privileged, through the great love of God, to know the newness of life that He breathes forth into those who will believe upon His Only Begotten Son. Let us ever show forth His life and His Honor and His eternal majesty in the manner in which we live to His glory Alone on this earth. So be it!
Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. Amen.

	This morning’s benediction is Ps 139:14. I will give thanks to Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Thy works, And my soul knows it very well. Amen.