M’Cheyne Bible Reading Plan

Illness

²⁰ If you do evil things and you turn away from the Lord, he will curse you. He will confuse your thoughts in everything that you do. He will turn against you so that you quickly come to an end. ²¹ The Lord will make you very ill so that you do not get better again. He will completely remove you from the land that you are now going into. ²² The Lord will give you many kinds of disease. Your bodies will become weak and very hot. They will grow big and have a lot of pain. He will send great heat and there will be no rain. Your crops will all become spoiled. You will have all this pain until you die. ²³ There will be no clouds in the sky above to give any rain. The ground under your feet will be as hard as iron. ²⁴ There will be clouds of dust instead of rain. Dirt will come down from the sky until it has destroyed you.

Enemies and other troubles

²⁵ The Lord will let your enemies knock you down. You will attack them from one direction, but you will run away from them in seven directions. When the people of other nations see what has happened to you, they will see it is a terrible thing. ²⁶ Your dead bodies will be food for all the birds and the wild animals. No one will be there to chase them away. ²⁷ The Lord will cause you to have boils on your bodies. That is what he did to the Egyptians. He will also cause you to have tumours and other bad diseases on your skin.^[a] You will not be able to get well again. ²⁸ The Lord will make you crazy and blind. He will confuse your thoughts. ²⁹ Even at midday, you will not see your way. You will be in the dark, like a blind person. You will not be able to go anywhere, whatever you do. Every day, people will be cruel to you. People will rob you. No one will be there to save you.

³⁰ A woman will promise to marry you. But another man will take her and have sex with her. You will build a house, but you will not live in it. You will plant a garden, but you will never eat the fruit that grows in it. ³¹ Someone will kill your bull while you watch. But you will not eat any of the meat. As you watch, someone will take your donkey from you. He will never give it back to you. Your enemies will take your sheep for themselves. There will be no one there to help you.

³² Foreign people will take your children away to be their slaves. Every day, you will look for them to come back to you. But you will have no power to do anything. ³³ Strangers will eat the food that you have worked hard to grow in your fields. People will be cruel to you for the rest of your lives. ³⁴ When you see what is happening to you, you will become crazy. ³⁵ The Lord will cause you to have boils on your knees and on your legs. They will give you much pain and they will never get better. They will soon cover your whole body, from your toes to the top of your head.

³⁶ When you choose a king for yourselves, the Lord will send you and him away to a foreign country. It will be a place that neither you nor your ancestors have ever heard about. There you will serve gods that people have made from stone and wood. ³⁷ The Lord will send you away to live among foreign people. When they see what has happened to you, they will all see that it is terrible. They will tell stories about you and they will laugh at you.

³⁸ You will plant many seeds in your fields, but you will not have much food at harvest time. Instead, locusts will eat your crops. ³⁹ You will plant vineyards to grow grapes. You will take care of the plants. But you will not drink any wine or bring in any grapes. Instead, worms will eat them. ⁴⁰ Olive trees will grow everywhere in your land, but you will never use any oil from them. The olives will drop off the trees before they are ready to pick.

⁴¹ You will give birth to sons and daughters, but you will lose them. Enemies will take them away as prisoners. ⁴² Crowds of locusts will eat all your trees and the food from your fields.

⁴³ Foreign people who live among you will become stronger and stronger. They will have more and more power over you, as you become weaker. ⁴⁴ They will lend money to you, but you will not lend money to them. They will become your leaders. You will have to follow behind them.

⁴⁵ All these curses will happen to you. They will be like an enemy that chases after you, catches you, and destroys you. That will happen to you, if you refuse to obey the Lord your God. If you do not obey his commands and his rules that he has given to you, these troubles will happen to you. ⁴⁶ They will show that God is very angry with you. You and your descendants will know that for ever.

⁴⁷ The Lord has given you many good things. But you have not agreed to serve the Lord your God with joy. ⁴⁸ So you will serve your enemies that the Lord will send to attack you. You will be hungry and thirsty. You will be so poor that you do not even have clothes to wear. Your enemies will make you work so hard that they will destroy you.

⁴⁹ The Lord will bring a nation from far away in the world to attack you. You will not understand their language. They will come quickly to attack you, like an eagle that comes down from the sky. ⁵⁰ They will have angry faces. They will not be kind to anyone, even old people and young children. ⁵¹ They will eat your young animals and the crops from your fields, until they have destroyed you. They will not leave any food for you. You will have no grain, no wine, no olive oil, no young cows, no lambs. They will take everything from you until they destroy you.

⁵² They will attack all your towns, everywhere in the land that the Lord your God has given to you. They will knock down the strong walls that you thought would keep you safe. They will make their camps around your towns until they can take the towns for themselves. ⁵³ When that happens, you will have no food, because your enemy's soldiers are all around your town. You will be so hungry that you eat your own children. Those are the sons and daughters that the Lord your God has given to you. ⁵⁴ Even the best and kindest man among you will turn against his brother. He will turn against the wife that he loves and against his children who are still alive. ⁵⁵ He will be so hungry that he eats meat from his own child, because there is no other food. He will not share it with any of his own family. He will do that because your enemy is so strong. The soldiers will stop any food from coming into your towns. ⁵⁶ Even the best and kindest woman among you will turn against the husband that she loves. She will turn against her sons and daughters. She has been rich enough to have everything that she needs. ⁵⁷ But now she will be so hungry that she will eat her new baby and the afterbirth.^[b] She will eat them secretly because there is nothing else for her to eat. She will not share anything with her family because your enemy will be too strong. The soldiers will stop any food from coming into your towns.

Moses warns the people again

⁵⁸ Be careful to obey all the words of this law that I have written in this scroll. Always respect the Lord your God. Give him the honour that his great name deserves. ⁵⁹ If you refuse to do that, the Lord will punish you and your descendants more and more. You will have lots of pain and many kinds of terrible disease that will not get better. ⁶⁰ He will cause you to have all the same diseases that hurt the Egyptians and that made you very afraid. Those diseases will never leave you alone. ⁶¹ The Lord will also cause you to have many other terrible diseases. This scroll of God's Law does not say anything about those diseases, but they will destroy you completely.

⁶² At one time, you were as many people as the stars in the sky. But if you do not obey the Lord your God, only a few of you will remain alive. ⁶³ At one time, the Lord was happy to help you with good things. He gave you many children. But if you do not obey him, he will be happy to destroy you. He will remove you from the land that will soon become your new home.

⁶⁴ If that happens, the Lord will send you away to live among many other nations, all over the world. There you will worship other gods. They are gods that people have made from wood and from stone. Neither you nor your ancestors have ever known those gods before. ⁶⁵ When you live among those nations, you will not be happy. You will not find a home where you can live safely in peace. The Lord will cause you to have troubles in your mind. Your eyes will not see well. You will be sad and upset. ⁶⁶ You will be in danger of death all the time. You will be afraid in the day and at night. You will never know if you will live for one more day. ⁶⁷ Every morning you will say, ‘I want the night to come quickly!’ And every evening you will say, ‘I want the morning to come quickly!’ You will say that because of all the terrible things that you see. ⁶⁸ The Lord told you that you must never travel on the road back to Egypt. But he will send you back to Egypt in ships. In Egypt, you will try to sell yourselves to your enemies, as slaves. But no one will agree to buy you.

DALETH

HE

WAW

Come to the Lord!

John the Baptist prepares a way for Jesus

3 While Jesus still lived in Nazareth, a man called John the Baptist was speaking a message from God. He was doing this in the wilderness in Judea.^{[a] 2} He told people, ‘You have done many wrong things. You must turn away from them and change how you live. Do this now, because the kingdom of heaven has come very near.’

³ God's prophet Isaiah spoke about this man John long ago. He said:

⁴ John wore clothes made from the hair of a camel. He also wore a belt made from leather. His usual food was locusts and honey from the wilderness.^[c]

⁵ Many people went to listen to John. They lived in Jerusalem and all over the country called Judea and many other places near the Jordan River. ⁶ The people told God about all the wrong things that they had done. Then John baptized them in the Jordan River.^[d]

⁷ Many Pharisees and Sadducees came to John.^[e] They wanted John to baptize them. He said to them, ‘You are like dangerous snakes. God is angry. You are trying to run away from him. But he will soon punish people like you. ⁸ You have to show that you are sorry. Change how you live. Stop doing things that God does not like. ⁹ Do not say to yourselves, “We are in the family of Abraham. God will surely not punish us.” Listen! God can take these stones and make children for Abraham out of them! ¹⁰ You are like trees that have bad fruit. God has an axe ready to use. He will cut down every tree that does not make good fruit. He will throw those trees into the fire.

¹¹ I baptize you with water. This shows that you want to change the way that you live. But another person will come soon.^[f] He is greater than I am. I am not good enough even to carry his shoes for him. This other person will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. ¹² He is like a farmer that brings the wheat home from his field. He uses a special tool to throw the wheat up in the air. He does this to make the wheat seeds separate from what remains. Then he cleans his yard. He carefully stores all the seeds to keep them safe. But he burns everything else in a great fire that nobody can put out.’

John baptizes Jesus

¹³ Then Jesus went from Galilee to the Jordan River. He wanted John to baptize him. ¹⁴ But John tried to stop him. He said to Jesus, ‘I should ask you to baptize me. You should not ask me to baptize you.’

¹⁵ Jesus replied, ‘This time, do what I ask you to do. We must do everything correctly, as God wants it.’ So John did what Jesus asked him to do.

¹⁶ When John baptized him, Jesus came up out of the water. At that moment, the skies opened. Jesus saw God's Spirit coming down. He came down like a dove and he stayed on Jesus. ¹⁷ Then a voice spoke from heaven, which said, ‘This man is my Son and I love him. He makes me very happy.’