Book of Common Prayer

137 Weeping, we sat beside the rivers of Babylon thinking of Jerusalem. ² We have put away our lyres, hanging them upon the branches of the willow trees, ^3-4 for how can we sing? Yet our captors, our tormentors, demand that we sing for them the happy songs of Zion! ^5-6 If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill upon the harp. If I fail to love her more than my highest joy, let me never sing again.

⁷ O Jehovah, do not forget what these Edomites did on that day when the armies of Babylon captured Jerusalem. “Raze her to the ground!” they yelled. ⁸ O Babylon, evil beast, you shall be destroyed. Blessed is the man who destroys you as you have destroyed us. ⁹ Blessed is the man who takes your babies and smashes them against the rocks!^[a]

144 Bless the Lord who is my immovable Rock. He gives me strength and skill in battle. ² He is always kind and loving to me; he is my fortress, my tower of strength and safety, my deliverer. He stands before me as a shield. He subdues my people under me.

³ O Lord, what is man that you even notice him? Why bother at all with the human race?^{[a] 4} For man is but a breath; his days are like a passing shadow.

⁵ Bend down the heavens, Lord, and come. The mountains smoke beneath your touch.

⁶ Let loose your lightning bolts, your arrows, Lord, upon your enemies, and scatter them.

⁷ Reach down from heaven and rescue me; deliver me from deep waters, from the power of my enemies. ⁸ Their mouths are filled with lies; they swear to the truth of what is false.

⁹ I will sing you a new song, O God, with a ten-stringed harp. ¹⁰ For you grant victory to kings! You are the one who will rescue your servant David from the fatal sword. ¹¹ Save me! Deliver me from these enemies, these liars, these treacherous men.

^12-15 Here is my description of^[b] a truly happy land where Jehovah is God:

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!

¹² Balaam replied, “Didn’t I tell your messengers ¹³ that even if you gave me a palace filled with silver and gold, I could not go beyond the words of Jehovah, and could not say a word of my own? I said that I would say only what Jehovah says! ¹⁴ Yes, I shall return now to my own people. But first, let me tell you what the Israelites are going to do to your people!”

^15-19 So he spoke this prophecy to him:

²⁰ Then Balaam looked over at the homes of the people of Amalek and prophesied:

^21-22 Then he looked over at the Kenites:

^23-24 He concluded his prophecies by saying:

²⁵ So Balaam and Balak returned to their homes.^[a]

¹⁸ Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will give us later. ¹⁹ For all creation is waiting patiently and hopefully for that future day^[a] when God will resurrect his children. ^20-21 For on that day thorns and thistles, sin, death, and decay^[b]—the things that overcame the world against its will at God’s command—will all disappear, and the world around us will share in the glorious freedom from sin which God’s children enjoy.

²² For we know that even the things of nature, like animals and plants, suffer in sickness and death as they await this great event.^{[c] 23} And even we Christians, although we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, also groan to be released from pain and suffering. We, too, wait anxiously for that day when God will give us our full rights as his children, including the new bodies he has promised us—bodies that will never be sick again and will never die.

²⁴ We are saved by trusting. And trusting means looking forward to getting something we don’t yet have—for a man who already has something doesn’t need to hope and trust that he will get it. ²⁵ But if we must keep trusting God for something that hasn’t happened yet, it teaches us to wait patiently and confidently.

²³ But that same day some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection after death, came to him and asked, ²⁴ “Sir, Moses said that if a man died without children, his brother should marry the widow and their children would get all the dead man’s property. ²⁵ Well, we had among us a family of seven brothers. The first of these men married and then died, without children, so his widow became the second brother’s wife. ²⁶ This brother also died without children, and the wife was passed to the next brother, and so on until she had been the wife of each of them. ²⁷ And then she also died. ²⁸ So whose wife will she be in the resurrection? For she was the wife of all seven of them!”

²⁹ But Jesus said, “Your error is caused by your ignorance of the Scriptures and of God’s power! ³⁰ For in the resurrection there is no marriage; everyone is as the angels in heaven. ³¹ But now, as to whether there is a resurrection of the dead—don’t you ever read the Scriptures? Don’t you realize that God was speaking directly to you when he said, ³² ‘I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’? So God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”^[a]

³³ The crowds were profoundly impressed by his answers— ^34-35 but not the Pharisees! When they heard that he had routed the Sadducees with his reply, they thought up a fresh question of their own to ask him. One of them, a lawyer, spoke up: ³⁶ “Sir, which is the most important command in the laws of Moses?”

³⁷ Jesus replied, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind.’ ^38-39 This is the first and greatest commandment. The second most important is similar: ‘Love your neighbor as much as you love yourself.’ ⁴⁰ All the other commandments and all the demands of the prophets stem from these two laws and are fulfilled if you obey them. Keep only these and you will find that you are obeying all the others.”