⁹ For ^(A)if you return to the Lord, your brothers and your children ^(B)will find compassion with their captors and return to this land. For ^(C)the Lord your God is gracious and merciful and will not turn away his face from you, ^(D)if you return to him.”

God's Steadfast Love and Compassion

⁵⁰ and forgive your people who have sinned against you, and all their transgressions that they have committed against you, and ^(A)grant them compassion in the sight of those who carried them captive, that they may have compassion on them

² and ^(A)return to the Lord your God, you and your children, and obey his voice in all that I command you today, with all your heart and with all your soul, ³ then the Lord your God ^(B)will restore your fortunes and have mercy on you, and he will ^(C)gather you again from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you. ^4 (D)If your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of heaven, from there the Lord your God will gather you, and from there he will take you.

⁶ The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, ^(A)“The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and ^(B)gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast ^(C)love and faithfulness, ^7 (D)keeping steadfast love for thousands,^{[a] (E)}forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but ^(F)who will by no means clear the guilty, ^(G)visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

¹⁷ They refused to obey ^(A)and were not mindful of the wonders that you performed among them, but they stiffened their neck and appointed a leader to return to their slavery in Egypt.^[a] But you are a God ready to forgive, ^(B)gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and did not forsake them.