²⁵ So I lay facedown before the Lord for forty days and forty nights. I lay facedown because the Lord said he would destroy you. ²⁶ So I prayed to the Lord and said, “Lord God, do not destroy your people, your inheritance that you have redeemed by your greatness, whom you brought out of Egypt with a strong hand.

²⁷ “Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Do not look at the stubbornness of these people and at their wickedness and their sin. ²⁸ Otherwise the land out of which you brought us will say, ‘This happened because the Lord did not have the power to bring them to the land that he had promised to them, or this happened because he hated them and brought them out to kill them in the wilderness.’

²⁹ “But they are your people and your possession, whom you brought out by your great power and by your outstretched arm.”