^26 (A)Then God said, “And now we will make human beings; they will be like us and resemble us. They will have power over the fish, the birds, and all animals, domestic and wild,^[a] large and small.” ^27 (B)So God created human beings, making them to be like himself. He created them male and female,

God Is Love

⁷ Dear friends, let us love one another, because love comes from God. Whoever loves is a child of God and knows God. ⁸ Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.

¹⁶ And we ourselves know and believe the love which God has for us.

God is love, and those who live in love live in union with God and God lives in union with them.

¹⁶ And he said to the woman, “I will increase your trouble in pregnancy and your pain in giving birth. In spite of this, you will still have desire for your husband, yet you will be subject to him.”

^17 (A)And he said to the man, “You listened to your wife and ate the fruit which I told you not to eat. Because of what you have done, the ground will be under a curse. You will have to work hard all your life to make it produce enough food for you. ¹⁸ It will produce weeds and thorns, and you will have to eat wild plants. ¹⁹ You will have to work hard and sweat to make the soil produce anything, until you go back to the soil from which you were formed. You were made from soil, and you will become soil again.”

The Tower of Babylon

11 At first, the people of the whole world had only one language and used the same words. ² As they wandered about in the East, they came to a plain in Babylonia and settled there. ³ They said to one another, “Come on! Let's make bricks and bake them hard.” So they had bricks to build with and tar to hold them together. ⁴ They said, “Now let's build a city with a tower that reaches the sky, so that we can make a name for ourselves and not be scattered all over the earth.”

⁵ Then the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which they had built, ⁶ and he said, “Now then, these are all one people and they speak one language; this is just the beginning of what they are going to do. Soon they will be able to do anything they want! ⁷ Let us go down and mix up their language so that they will not understand each other.” ⁸ So the Lord scattered them all over the earth, and they stopped building the city. ⁹ The city was called Babylon,^[a] because there the Lord mixed up the language of all the people, and from there he scattered them all over the earth.

^29 (A)If you belong to Christ, then you are the descendants of Abraham and will receive what God has promised.

^6 (A)Do this because you belong to the Lord your God. From all the peoples on earth he chose you to be his own special people.

⁷ “The Lord did not love you and choose you because you outnumbered other peoples; you were the smallest nation on earth. ⁸ But the Lord loved you and wanted to keep the promise that he made to your ancestors. That is why he saved you by his great might and set you free from slavery to the king of Egypt. ^9 (B)Remember that the Lord your God is the only God and that he is faithful. He will keep his covenant and show his constant love to a thousand generations of those who love him and obey his commands, ¹⁰ but he will not hesitate to punish those who hate him. ¹¹ Now then, obey what you have been taught; obey all the laws that I have given you today.