9 Yet the potters don’t worry that they are going to come down with some terrible disease or even that they will have only a short life. Rather, they spend all their time competing with the goldsmiths and the silversmiths, imitating the bronzeworkers, and thinking it’s the greatest honor imaginable that they spend their lives making counterfeit gods.
10 Their hearts are nothing but rust. Their hopes are more useless than dirt. Their lives are worth less than the clay they mold.
11 Why? Because the potters don’t know who made them. They don’t know who breathed life into them and made them move, who put a spirit in them to become a living being.
12 They think that life is just a game. They think that our day-to-day existence is just a profit-seeking carnival. As they say: "You must earn a living however you can, even if it means doing the wrong thing."
13 These people know better than anyone else that they are sinning when they give shape to equipment and images that are easily broken, because they are both fashioned from the same earthy material.
14 But the people who are most foolish of all, and even more to be pitied than the soul of a little child, are the enemies who oppressed your people.
15 These enemies considered the nation’s idols to be gods, even though these idols have no eyes for seeing, no nostrils for breathing air, no ears for hearing, no fingers for touching, and no feet for walking.