Book of Common Prayer

45 My heart is overflowing with a beautiful thought! I will write a lovely poem to the King, for I am as full of words as the speediest writer pouring out his story.

⁸ Your robes are perfumed with myrrh, aloes, and cassia. In your palaces of inlaid ivory, lovely music is being played for your enjoyment. ⁹ Kings’ daughters are among your concubines.^[a] Standing beside you is the queen, wearing jewelry of finest gold from Ophir.

^10-11 “I advise you, O daughter, not to fret about your parents in your homeland far away. Your royal husband delights in your beauty. Reverence him, for he is your lord. ¹² The people of Tyre, the richest people of our day, will shower you with gifts and entreat your favors.”

¹³ The bride,^[b] a princess, waits within her chamber, robed in beautiful clothing woven with gold. ¹⁴ Lovely^[c] she is, led beside her maids of honor to the king! ¹⁵ What a joyful, glad procession as they enter in the palace gates! ¹⁶ “Your sons will some day be kings like their father. They shall sit on thrones around the world!

¹⁷ “I will cause your name to be honored in all generations; the nations of the earth will praise you forever.”

47 Come, everyone, and clap for joy! Shout triumphant praises to the Lord! ² For the Lord, the God above all gods, is awesome beyond words; he is the great King of all the earth. ³ He subdues the nations before us ⁴ and will personally select his choicest blessings for his Jewish people^[a]—the very best for those he loves.

⁵ God has ascended with a mighty shout, with trumpets blaring. ^6-7 Sing out your praises to our God, our King. Yes, sing your highest praises to our King, the King of all the earth. Sing thoughtful praises! ⁸ He reigns above the nations, sitting on his holy throne. ⁹ The Gentile rulers of the world have joined with us in praising him—praising^[b] the God of Abraham—for the battle shields of all the armies of the world are his trophies. He is highly honored everywhere.

48 How great is the Lord! How much we should praise him. He lives upon Mount Zion in Jerusalem. ² What a glorious sight! See Mount Zion rising north of the city^[c] high above the plains for all to see—Mount Zion, joy of all the earth, the residence of the great King.

³ God himself is the defender of Jerusalem.^{[d] 4} The kings of the earth have arrived together to inspect the city. ⁵ They marvel at the sight and hurry home again, ⁶ afraid of what they have seen; they are filled with panic like a woman in travail! ⁷ For God destroys the mightiest warships with a breath of wind. ⁸ We have heard of the city’s glory—the city of our God, the Commander of the armies of heaven. And now we see it for ourselves! God has established Jerusalem forever.

⁹ Lord, here in your Temple we meditate upon your kindness and your love. ¹⁰ Your name is known throughout the earth, O God. You are praised everywhere for the salvation^[e] you have scattered throughout the world. ¹¹ O Jerusalem,^[f] rejoice! O people of Judah, rejoice! For God will see to it that you are finally treated fairly. ¹² Go, inspect the city! Walk around and count her many towers! ¹³ Note her walls and tour her palaces so that you can tell your children.

¹⁴ For this great God is our God forever and ever. He will be our guide until we die.

⁴ “Then, when the Lord has done this for you, don’t say to yourselves, ‘The Lord has helped us because we are so good!’ No, it is because of the wickedness of the other nations that he is doing it. ⁵ It is not at all because you are such fine, upright people that the Lord will drive them out from before you! I say it again, it is only because of the wickedness of the other nations, and because of his promises to your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that he will do it. ⁶ I say it yet again: Jehovah your God is not giving you this good land because you are good, for you are not—you are a wicked, stubborn people.

⁷ “Don’t you remember (oh, never forget it!) how continually angry you made the Lord your God out in the wilderness, from the day you left Egypt until now? For all this time you have constantly rebelled against him.

⁸ “Don’t you remember how angry you made him at Mount Horeb? He was ready to destroy you. ⁹ I was on the mountain at the time, receiving the contract which Jehovah had made with you—the stone tablets with the laws inscribed upon them. I was there for forty days and forty nights, and all that time I ate nothing. I didn’t even take a drink of water. ^10-11 At the end of those forty days and nights the Lord gave me the contract, the tablets on which he had written the commandments he had spoken from the fire-covered mountain while the people had watched below. ¹² He told me to go down quickly because the people I had led out of Egypt had defiled themselves, quickly turning away from the laws of God, and had made an idol from molten metal.

3 Therefore, dear brothers whom God has set apart for himself—you who are chosen for heaven—I want you to think now about this Jesus who is God’s Messenger and the High Priest of our faith.

² For Jesus was faithful to God who appointed him High Priest, just as Moses also faithfully served in God’s house. ³ But Jesus has far more glory than Moses, just as a man who builds a fine house gets more praise than his house does. ⁴ And many people can build houses, but only God made everything.

⁵ Well, Moses did a fine job working in God’s house, but he was only a servant; and his work was mostly to illustrate and suggest those things that would happen later on. ⁶ But Christ, God’s faithful Son, is in complete charge of God’s house. And we Christians are God’s house—he lives in us!—if we keep up our courage firm to the end, and our joy and our trust in the Lord.

^7-8 And since Christ is so much superior, the Holy Spirit warns us to listen to him, to be careful to hear his voice today and not let our hearts become set against him, as the people of Israel did. They steeled themselves against his love and complained against him in the desert while he was testing them. ⁹ But God was patient with them forty years, though they tried his patience sorely; he kept right on doing his mighty miracles for them to see. ¹⁰ “But,” God says, “I was very angry with them, for their hearts were always looking somewhere else instead of up to me, and they never found the paths I wanted them to follow.”

¹¹ Then God, full of this anger against them, bound himself with an oath that he would never let them come to his place of rest.

¹³ Then it was time for the annual Jewish Passover celebration, and Jesus went to Jerusalem.

¹⁴ In the Temple area he saw merchants selling cattle, sheep, and doves for sacrifices, and moneychangers behind their counters. ¹⁵ Jesus made a whip from some ropes and chased them all out, and drove out the sheep and oxen, scattering the moneychangers’ coins over the floor and turning over their tables! ¹⁶ Then, going over to the men selling doves, he told them, “Get these things out of here. Don’t turn my Father’s House into a market!”

¹⁷ Then his disciples remembered this prophecy from the Scriptures: “Concern for God’s House will be my undoing.”

¹⁸ “What right have you to order them out?” the Jewish leaders^[a] demanded. “If you have this authority from God, show us a miracle to prove it.”

¹⁹ “All right,” Jesus replied, “this is the miracle I will do for you: Destroy this sanctuary and in three days I will raise it up!”

²⁰ “What!” they exclaimed. “It took forty-six years to build this Temple, and you can do it in three days?” ²¹ But by “this sanctuary” he meant his body. ²² After he came back to life again, the disciples remembered his saying this and realized that what he had quoted from the Scriptures really did refer to him, and had all come true!