<p>12:20 <i>But God said to him: You foolish one, this night is your soul required from you, and the things which you have prepared, whose shall they be?</i>- Gk. / RVmg. &quot;They shall require of thee&quot;- i.e. the Angels, to whom we shall give account at the day of judgment (:9). A similar, related Greek word is in :48- as God has given much to us, so &quot;they&quot;- the Angels- will require of us during the judgment process. But the exact same Greek word translated &quot;required&quot; occurs only in Lk. 6:30- we should give to others and not 'ask again' of them. The connection teaches that insofar as we 'require' of others, so it will be 'required' of us. If we forgive freely without demanding repentance, so God will treat us; if we 'require again' of others in this life, so God will of us. In a sense our lives are required of us when we die in that our next conscious moment will be the judgment.</p><p>This is an allusion to various passages from the Apocrypha, especially Ecclesiasticus- as noted on :19, the Lord is again&nbsp;engaging with contemporary ideas.</p><p>&quot;Prepared&quot; is the same word as &quot;prepared&quot; in v. 47. We must prepare ourselves, our character and personality; we provide or prepare by being generous to others, v. 33. Because we do not have an immortal soul that is somehow recycled into us through reincarnation, our soul / life is given to us by God. In the parable of the rich fool, the Lord says that in the day of his death, his soul was &ldquo;required&rdquo; of him. The Greek word for &lsquo;required&rsquo; means &lsquo;to ask back, to request to be given again&rsquo;. The fact we have life a &lsquo;soul&rsquo; makes us responsible to God; and at the judgment we will be asked to give that life back to Him with an account. And, as the parable shows, this utterly precludes a focus upon material acquisition. The Lord goes on to say that therefore we should take no anxious thought about what our soul will eat or wear- because our soul / life is in fact God&rsquo;s soul / life, and He will care for it until He takes it back to Himself (Lk. 12:22). The soul is greater than food and clothes (Lk. 12:23 Gk.). The wonder that we are alive, with God&rsquo;s life in us, should be far greater to us than what we feed or clothe it with. Because we can&rsquo;t take that life out of ourselves until God does, nor can we give it to another person, nor can we make our body / soul grow taller, <i>therefore </i>we should not take anxious thought for the material things related to it, which are all peripheral compared to the wonder of the fact that we have life from God: &ldquo;why take ye thought for the rest Gk. &lsquo;the things that are left over / extraneous&rsquo;?&rdquo; (Lk. 12:26). And to drive the point home, we are bidden &ldquo;consider&rdquo; (s.w. &lsquo;discover&rsquo;) the birds and plants, who are simply content with the life God has given them. This was the Lord&rsquo;s way of doing what Solomon did in Ecc. 3:17-20- showing that man and plants and animals are all possessed of the same God-given spirit / life. As Gen. 2:7; Ecc. 12:7 make clear, the spirit / life is given by God to our bodies; it doesn&rsquo;t come from anywhere else. There is no reincarnation. And this is no painless Bible fact; it demands that we live lives that are <i>His</i>, and not lived out as if our spirit / life / soul is <i>ours</i>. The fact that God &ldquo;holdeth our soul in life&rdquo;, a reference to Gen. 2:7, means that David wanted to &ldquo;make the voice of his praise to be heard&rdquo; (Ps. 66:8,9). This was the meaning of the basic facts of creation for David</p><p>The man who built greater barns realized on the night of his death that all his laid up treasures could not be his after his death. And yet this is couched in the very language of Ecclesiastes. We can come to that attitude and understanding right now; and if we don&rsquo;t, we will come to it on our deathbeds or at judgment day. The parable of the pounds may be intended to describe our dealing with wealth. This is how it would have appeared to the Lord&rsquo;s first hearers.</p>