Old/New Testament

34 Come here and listen, O nations of the earth; let the world and everything in it hear my words. ² For the Lord is enraged against the nations; his fury is against their armies. He will utterly destroy them and deliver them to slaughter. ³ Their dead will be left unburied, and the stench of rotting bodies will fill the land; the mountains will flow with their blood. ⁴ At that time the heavens above will melt away and disappear just like a rolled-up scroll, and the stars will fall as leaves, as ripe fruit from the trees.

⁵ And when my sword has finished its work in the heavens, then watch, for it will fall upon Edom, the people I have doomed. ⁶ The sword of the Lord is sated with blood; it is gorged with flesh as though used for slaying lambs and goats for sacrifice. For the Lord will slay a great sacrifice in Edom and make a mighty slaughter there. ⁷ The strongest will perish, young boys and veterans too. The land will be soaked with blood, and the soil made rich with fat. ⁸ For it is the day of vengeance, the year of recompense for what Edom has done to Israel. ⁹ The streams of Edom will be filled with burning pitch, and the ground will be covered with fire.

¹⁰ This judgment on Edom will never end. Its smoke will rise up forever. The land will lie deserted from generation to generation; no one will live there anymore. ¹¹ There the hawks and porcupines will live, and owls and ravens. For God will observe that land and find it worthy of destruction. He will test its nobles and find them worthy of death. ¹² It will be called “The Land of Nothing,” and its princes soon will all be gone. ¹³ Thorns will overrun the palaces, nettles will grow in its forts, and it will become the haunt of jackals and a home for ostriches. ¹⁴ The wild animals of the desert will mingle there with wolves and hyenas. Their howls will fill the night. There the night-monsters will scream at each other, and the demons will come there to rest. ¹⁵ There the owl will make her nest and lay her eggs; she will hatch her young and nestle them beneath her wings, and the kites will come, each one with its mate.

¹⁶ Search the book of the Lord and see all that he will do; not one detail will he miss; not one kite will be there without a mate, for the Lord has said it, and his Spirit will make it all come true. ¹⁷ He has surveyed and subdivided the land and deeded it to those doleful creatures; they shall possess it forever, from generation to generation.

35 Even the wilderness and desert will rejoice in those days; the desert will blossom with flowers. ² Yes, there will be an abundance of flowers and singing and joy! The deserts will become as green as the Lebanon mountains, as lovely as Mount Carmel’s pastures and Sharon’s meadows; for the Lord will display his glory there, the excellency of our God.

³ With this news bring cheer to all discouraged ones. ⁴ Encourage those who are afraid. Tell them, “Be strong, fear not, for your God is coming to destroy your enemies. He is coming to save you.” ⁵ And when he comes, he will open the eyes of the blind and unstop the ears of the deaf. ⁶ The lame man will leap up like a deer, and those who could not speak will shout and sing! Springs will burst forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert. ⁷ The parched ground will become a pool, with springs of water in the thirsty land. Where desert jackals lived, there will be reeds and rushes!

⁸ And a main road will go through that once-deserted land; it will be named “The Holy Highway.” No evil-hearted men may walk upon it. God will walk there with you; even the most stupid cannot miss the way. ⁹ No lion will lurk along its course, nor will there be any other dangers; only the redeemed will travel there. ¹⁰ These, the ransomed of the Lord, will go home along that road to Zion, singing the songs of everlasting joy. For them all sorrow and all sighing will be gone forever; only joy and gladness will be there.

36 So in the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah’s reign, Sennacherib, king of Assyria, came to fight against the walled cities of Judah and conquered them. ² Then he sent his personal representative with a great army from Lachish to confer with King Hezekiah in Jerusalem. He camped near the outlet of the upper pool, along the road going past the field where cloth is bleached.

³ Then Eliakim, Hilkiah’s son, who was the prime minister of Israel, and Shebna, the king’s scribe, and Joah, Asaph’s son, the royal secretary, formed a truce team and went out of the city to meet with him. ⁴ The Assyrian ambassador told them to go and say to Hezekiah, “The mighty king of Assyria says you are a fool to think that the king of Egypt will help you. ⁵ What are the Pharaoh’s promises worth? Mere words won’t substitute for strength, yet you rely on him for help and have rebelled against me! ⁶ Egypt is a dangerous ally. She is a sharpened stick that will pierce your hand if you lean on it. That is the experience of everyone who has ever looked to her for help. ⁷ But perhaps you say, ‘We are trusting in the Lord our God!’ Oh? Isn’t he the one your king insulted, tearing down his temples and altars in the hills and making everyone in Judah worship only at the altars here in Jerusalem? ^8-9 My master, the king of Assyria, wants to make a little bet with you!—that you don’t have 2,000 men left in your entire army! If you do, he will give you 2,000 horses for them to ride on! With that tiny army, how can you think of proceeding against even the smallest and worst contingent of my master’s troops? For you’ll get no help from Egypt. ¹⁰ What’s more, do you think I have come here without the Lord’s telling me to take this land? The Lord said to me, ‘Go and destroy it!’”

¹¹ Then Eliakim, Shebna, and Joah said to him, “Please talk to us in Aramaic,^[a] for we understand it quite well. Don’t speak in Hebrew, for the people on the wall will hear.”

¹² But he replied, “My master wants everyone in Jerusalem to hear this, not just you. He wants them to know that if you don’t surrender, this city will be put under siege until everyone is so hungry and thirsty that he will eat his own dung and drink his own urine.”

¹³ Then he shouted in Hebrew to the Jews listening on the wall, “Hear the words of the great king, the king of Assyria:

¹⁴ “Don’t let Hezekiah fool you—nothing he can do will save you. ¹⁵ Don’t let him talk you into trusting in the Lord by telling you the Lord won’t let you be conquered by the king of Assyria. ¹⁶ Don’t listen to Hezekiah, for here is the king of Assyria’s offer to you: Give me a present as a token of surrender; open the gates and come out, and I will let you each have your own farm and garden and water, ¹⁷ until I can arrange to take you to a country very similar to this one—a country where there are bountiful harvests of grain and grapes, a land of plenty. ¹⁸ Don’t let Hezekiah deprive you of all this by saying the Lord will deliver you from my armies. Have any other nation’s gods ever gained victory over the armies of the king of Assyria? ¹⁹ Don’t you remember what I did to Hamath and Arpad? Did their gods save them? And what about Sepharvaim and Samaria? Where are their gods now? ²⁰ Of all the gods of these lands, which one has ever delivered their people from my power? Name just one! And do you think this God of yours can deliver Jerusalem from me? Don’t be ridiculous!”

²¹ But the people were silent and answered not a word, for Hezekiah had told them to say nothing in reply. ²² Then Eliakim (son of Hilkiah), the prime minister, and Shebna, the royal scribe, and Joah (son of Asaph), the royal secretary, went back to Hezekiah with clothes ripped to shreds as a sign of their despair and told him all that had happened.

2 I wish you could know how much I have struggled in prayer for you and for the church at Laodicea, and for my many other friends who have never known me personally. ² This is what I have asked of God for you: that you will be encouraged and knit together by strong ties of love, and that you will have the rich experience of knowing Christ with real certainty and clear understanding. For God’s secret plan, now at last made known, is Christ himself. ³ In him lie hidden all the mighty, untapped treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

⁴ I am saying this because I am afraid that someone may fool you with smooth talk. ⁵ For though I am far away from you my heart is with you, happy because you are getting along so well, happy because of your strong faith in Christ. ⁶ And now just as you trusted Christ to save you, trust him, too, for each day’s problems; live in vital union with him. ⁷ Let your roots grow down into him and draw up nourishment from him. See that you go on growing in the Lord, and become strong and vigorous in the truth you were taught. Let your lives overflow with joy and thanksgiving for all he has done.

⁸ Don’t let others spoil your faith and joy with their philosophies, their wrong and shallow answers built on men’s thoughts and ideas, instead of on what Christ has said. ⁹ For in Christ there is all of God in a human body; ¹⁰ so you have everything when you have Christ, and you are filled with God through your union with Christ. He is the highest Ruler, with authority over every other power.

¹¹ When you came to Christ, he set you free from your evil desires, not by a bodily operation of circumcision but by a spiritual operation, the baptism of your souls. ¹² For in baptism you see how your old, evil nature died with him and was buried with him; and then you came up out of death with him into a new life because you trusted the Word of the mighty God who raised Christ from the dead.

¹³ You were dead in sins, and your sinful desires were not yet cut away. Then he gave you a share in the very life of Christ, for he forgave all your sins, ¹⁴ and blotted out the charges proved against you, the list of his commandments which you had not obeyed. He took this list of sins and destroyed it by nailing it to Christ’s cross. ¹⁵ In this way God took away Satan’s power to accuse you of sin, and God openly displayed to the whole world Christ’s triumph at the cross where your sins were all taken away.

¹⁶ So don’t let anyone criticize you for what you eat or drink, or for not celebrating Jewish holidays and feasts or new moon ceremonies or Sabbaths. ¹⁷ For these were only temporary rules that ended when Christ came. They were only shadows of the real thing—of Christ himself. ¹⁸ Don’t let anyone declare you lost when you refuse to worship angels, as they say you must. They have seen a vision, they say, and know you should. These proud men (though they claim to be so humble) have a very clever imagination. ¹⁹ But they are not connected to Christ, the Head to which all of us who are his body are joined; for we are joined together by his strong sinews, and we grow only as we get our nourishment and strength from God.

²⁰ Since you died, as it were, with Christ and this has set you free from following the world’s ideas of how to be saved—by doing good and obeying various rules^[a]—why do you keep right on following them anyway, still bound by such rules as ²¹ not eating, tasting, or even touching certain foods? ²² Such rules are mere human teachings, for food was made to be eaten and used up. ²³ These rules may seem good, for rules of this kind require strong devotion and are humiliating and hard on the body, but they have no effect when it comes to conquering a person’s evil thoughts and desires. They only make him proud.