³ In their greed they will make up clever lies to get hold of your money. But God condemned them long ago, and their destruction will not be delayed.

² For you know quite well that the day of the Lord’s return will come unexpectedly, like a thief in the night.

²³ Instantly, an angel of the Lord struck Herod with a sickness, because he accepted the people’s worship instead of giving the glory to God. So he was consumed with worms and died.

²⁶ “When the Son of Man returns, it will be like it was in Noah’s day. ²⁷ In those days, the people enjoyed banquets and parties and weddings right up to the time Noah entered his boat and the flood came and destroyed them all.

²⁸ “And the world will be as it was in the days of Lot. People went about their daily business—eating and drinking, buying and selling, farming and building— ²⁹ until the morning Lot left Sodom. Then fire and burning sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all.

²⁰ “But God said to him, ‘You fool! You will die this very night. Then who will get everything you worked for?’

³⁰ That very night Belshazzar, the Babylonian^[a] king, was killed.^[b]

³⁴ As you watched, a rock was cut from a mountain,^[a] but not by human hands. It struck the feet of iron and clay, smashing them to bits.

³⁸ One day while he was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisroch, his sons Adrammelech and Sharezer killed him with their swords. They then escaped to the land of Ararat, and another son, Esarhaddon, became the next king of Assyria.

³⁶ That night the angel of the Lord went out to the Assyrian camp and killed 185,000 Assyrian soldiers. When the surviving Assyrians^[a] woke up the next morning, they found corpses everywhere.