Book of Common Prayer

145 ^1-2 I will praise you, my God and King, and bless your name each day and forever.

³ Great is Jehovah! Greatly praise him! His greatness is beyond discovery! ⁴ Let each generation tell its children what glorious things he does. ⁵ I will meditate about your glory, splendor, majesty, and miracles. ⁶ Your awe-inspiring deeds shall be on every tongue; I will proclaim your greatness. ⁷ Everyone will tell about how good you are and sing about your righteousness.

⁸ Jehovah is kind and merciful, slow to get angry, full of love. ⁹ He is good to everyone, and his compassion is intertwined with everything he does. ¹⁰ All living things shall thank you, Lord, and your people will bless you. ¹¹ They will talk together about the glory of your kingdom and mention examples of your power. ¹² They will tell about your miracles and about the majesty and glory of your reign. ¹³ For your kingdom never ends. You rule generation after generation.

¹⁴ The Lord lifts the fallen and those bent beneath their loads. ¹⁵ The eyes of all mankind look up to you for help; you give them their food as they need it. ¹⁶ You constantly satisfy the hunger and thirst of every living thing.

¹⁷ The Lord is fair in everything he does and full of kindness. ¹⁸ He is close to all who call on him sincerely. ¹⁹ He fulfills the desires of those who reverence and trust him; he hears their cries for help and rescues them. ²⁰ He protects all those who love him, but destroys the wicked.

²¹ I will praise the Lord and call on all men everywhere to bless his holy name forever and forever.

104 ^1-2 I bless the Lord: O Lord my God, how great you are! You are robed with honor and with majesty and light! You stretched out the starry curtain of the heavens, ³ and hollowed out the surface of the earth to form the seas. The clouds are his chariots. He rides upon the wings of the wind. ⁴ The angels^[a] are his messengers—his servants of fire!

⁵ You bound the world together so that it would never fall apart. ⁶ You clothed the earth with floods of waters covering up the mountains. ^7-8 You spoke, and at the sound of your shout the water collected into its vast ocean beds, and mountains rose and valleys sank to the levels you decreed. ⁹ And then you set a boundary for the seas so that they would never again cover the earth.

¹⁰ He placed springs in the valleys and streams that gush from the mountains. ¹¹ They give water for all the animals to drink. There the wild donkeys quench their thirst, ¹² and the birds nest beside the streams and sing among the branches of the trees. ¹³ He sends rain upon the mountains and fills the earth with fruit. ¹⁴ The tender grass grows up at his command to feed the cattle, and there are fruit trees, vegetables, and grain for man to cultivate, ¹⁵ and wine to make him glad, and olive oil as lotion for his skin, and bread to give him strength. ¹⁶ The Lord planted the cedars of Lebanon. They are tall and flourishing. ¹⁷ There the birds make their nests, the storks in the firs. ¹⁸ High in the mountains are pastures for the wild goats, and rock badgers burrow in among the rocks and find protection there.

¹⁹ He assigned the moon to mark the months and the sun to mark the days. ²⁰ He sends the night and darkness, when all the forest folk come out. ²¹ Then the young lions roar for their food, but they are dependent on the Lord. ²² At dawn they slink back into their dens to rest, ²³ and men go off to work until the evening shadows fall again. ²⁴ O Lord, what a variety you have made! And in wisdom you have made them all! The earth is full of your riches.

²⁵ There before me lies the mighty ocean, teeming with life of every kind, both great and small. ²⁶ And look! See the ships! And over there, the whale you made to play in the sea. ²⁷ Every one of these depends on you to give them daily food. ²⁸ You supply it, and they gather it. You open wide your hand to feed them, and they are satisfied with all your bountiful provision.

²⁹ But if you turn away from them, then all is lost. And when you gather up their breath, they die and turn again to dust.

³⁰ Then you send your Spirit, and new life is born^[b] to replenish all the living of the earth. ³¹ Praise God forever! How he must rejoice in all his work! ³² The earth trembles at his glance; the mountains burst into flame at his touch.

³³ I will sing to the Lord as long as I live. I will praise God to my last breath! ³⁴ May he be pleased by all these thoughts about him, for he is the source of all my joy. ³⁵ Let all sinners perish—all who refuse to praise him. But I will praise him. Hallelujah!

^17-18 So at last Pharaoh let the people go.

God did not lead them through the land of the Philistines, although that was the most direct route from Egypt to the Promised Land. The reason was that God felt the people might become discouraged by having to fight their way through, even though they had left Egypt armed; he thought they might return to Egypt. Instead, God led them along a route through the Red Sea wilderness.

¹⁹ Moses took the bones of Joseph with them, for Joseph had made the sons of Israel vow before God that they would take his bones with them when God led them out of Egypt—as he was sure God would.

²⁰ Leaving Succoth, they camped in Etham at the edge of the wilderness. ²¹ The Lord guided them by a pillar of cloud during the daytime and by a pillar of fire at night. So they could travel either by day or night. ²² The cloud and fire were never out of sight.

14 Jehovah now instructed Moses, ² “Tell the people to turn toward Piha-hiroth between Migdol and the sea, opposite Baal-zephon, and to camp there along the shore. ³ For Pharaoh will think, ‘Those Israelites are trapped now, between the desert and the sea!’ ⁴ And once again I will harden Pharaoh’s heart and he will chase after you. I have planned this to gain great honor and glory over Pharaoh and all his armies, and the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord.”

So they camped where they were told.

¹⁶ That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our inner strength in the Lord is growing every day. ¹⁷ These troubles and sufferings of ours are, after all, quite small and won’t last very long. Yet this short time of distress will result in God’s richest blessing upon us forever and ever! ¹⁸ So we do not look at what we can see right now, the troubles all around us, but we look forward to the joys in heaven which we have not yet seen. The troubles will soon be over, but the joys to come will last forever.

5 For we know that when this tent we live in now is taken down—when we die and leave these bodies—we will have wonderful new bodies in heaven, homes that will be ours forevermore, made for us by God himself and not by human hands. ² How weary we grow of our present bodies. That is why we look forward eagerly to the day when we shall have heavenly bodies that we shall put on like new clothes. ³ For we shall not be merely spirits without bodies. ⁴ These earthly bodies make us groan and sigh, but we wouldn’t like to think of dying and having no bodies at all. We want to slip into our new bodies so that these dying bodies will, as it were, be swallowed up by everlasting life. ⁵ This is what God has prepared for us, and as a guarantee he has given us his Holy Spirit.

⁶ Now we look forward with confidence to our heavenly bodies, realizing that every moment we spend in these earthly bodies is time spent away from our eternal home in heaven with Jesus. ⁷ We know these things are true by believing, not by seeing. ⁸ And we are not afraid but are quite content to die, for then we will be at home with the Lord. ⁹ So our aim is to please him always in everything we do, whether we are here in this body or away from this body and with him in heaven. ¹⁰ For we must all stand before Christ to be judged and have our lives laid bare—before him. Each of us will receive whatever he deserves for the good or bad things he has done in his earthly body.

¹⁸ Then the Sadducees stepped forward—a group of men who say there is no resurrection. Here was their question:

¹⁹ “Teacher, Moses gave us a law that when a man dies without children, the man’s brother should marry his widow and have children in his brother’s name. ^20-22 Well, there were seven brothers and the oldest married and died, and left no children. So the second brother married the widow, but soon he died too and left no children. Then the next brother married her and died without children, and so on until all were dead, and still there were no children; and last of all, the woman died too.

²³ “What we want to know is this:^[a] In the resurrection, whose wife will she be, for she had been the wife of each of them?”

²⁴ Jesus replied, “Your trouble is that you don’t know the Scriptures and don’t know the power of God. ²⁵ For when these seven brothers and the woman rise from the dead, they won’t be married—they will be like the angels.

²⁶ “But now as to whether there will be a resurrection—have you never read in the book of Exodus about Moses and the burning bush? God said to Moses, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and I am the God of Isaac, and I am the God of Jacob.’

²⁷ “God was telling Moses that these men, though dead for hundreds of years,^[b] were still very much alive, for he would not have said, ‘I am the God’ of those who don’t exist! You have made a serious error.”