Old/New Testament

4 Listen to me, you “fat cows” of Bashan living in Samaria—you women who encourage your husbands to rob the poor and crush the needy—you who never have enough to drink! ² The Lord God has sworn by his holiness that the time will come when he will put hooks in your noses and lead you away like the cattle you are; they will drag the last of you away with fishhooks! ³ You will be hauled from your beautiful homes and tossed out through the nearest breach in the wall. The Lord has said it.

⁴ Go ahead and sacrifice to idols at Bethel and Gilgal. Keep disobeying—your sins are mounting up. Sacrifice each morning and bring your tithes twice a week! ⁵ Go through all your proper forms and give extra offerings. How you pride yourselves and crow about it everywhere!

⁶ “I sent you hunger,” says the Lord, “but it did no good; you still would not return to me. ⁷ I ruined your crops by holding back the rain three months before the harvest. I sent rain on one city but not another. While rain fell on one field, another was dry and withered. ⁸ People from two or three cities would make their weary journey for a drink of water to a city that had rain, but there wasn’t ever enough. Yet you wouldn’t return to me,” says the Lord.

⁹ “I sent blight and mildew on your farms and your vineyards; the locusts ate your figs and olive trees. And still you wouldn’t return to me,” says the Lord. ¹⁰ “I sent you plagues like those of Egypt long ago. I killed your lads in war and drove away your horses. The stench of death was terrible to smell. And yet you refused to come. ¹¹ I destroyed some of your cities, as I did Sodom and Gomorrah; those left are like half-burned firebrands snatched away from fire. And still you won’t return to me,” says the Lord.

¹² “Therefore, I will bring upon you all these further evils I have spoken of. Prepare to meet your God in judgment, Israel. ¹³ For you are dealing with the One who formed the mountains, made the winds, and knows your every thought; he turns the morning to darkness and crushes down the mountains underneath his feet: Jehovah, the Lord, the Lord Almighty, is his name.”

5 Sadly I sing this song of grief for you, O Israel:

² “Beautiful Israel lies broken and crushed upon the ground and cannot rise. No one will help her. She is left alone to die.” ³ For the Lord God says, “The city that sends a thousand men to battle, a hundred will return. The city that sends a hundred, only ten will come back alive.”

⁴ The Lord says to the people of Israel, “Seek me—and live. ⁵ Don’t seek the idols of Bethel, Gilgal, or Beersheba; for the people of Gilgal will be carried off to exile, and those of Bethel shall surely come to grief.”

⁶ Seek the Lord and live, or else he will sweep like fire through Israel and consume her, and none of the idols in Bethel can put it out.

⁷ O evil men, you make “justice” a bitter pill for the poor and oppressed. “Righteousness” and “fair play” are meaningless fictions to you!

⁸ Seek him who created the Seven Stars and the constellation Orion, who turns darkness into morning and day into night, who calls forth the water from the ocean and pours it out as rain upon the land. The Lord, Jehovah, is his name. ⁹ With blinding speed and violence he brings destruction on the strong, breaking all defenses.

¹⁰ How you hate honest judges! How you despise people who tell the truth! ¹¹ You trample the poor and steal their smallest crumb by all your taxes, fines, and usury; therefore, you will never live in the beautiful stone houses you are building, nor drink the wine from the lush vineyards you are planting.

¹² For many and great are your sins. I know them all so well. You are the enemies of everything good; you take bribes; you refuse justice to the poor. ¹³ Therefore, those who are wise will not try to interfere with the Lord in the dread day of your punishment.

¹⁴ Be good, flee evil—and live! Then the Lord, the Lord Almighty, will truly be your Helper, as you have claimed he is. ¹⁵ Hate evil and love the good; remodel your courts into true halls of justice. Perhaps even yet the Lord God of Hosts will have mercy on his people who remain.

¹⁶ Therefore the Lord God says this: “There will be crying in all the streets and every road. Call for the farmers to weep with you too; call for professional mourners to wail and lament. ¹⁷ There will be sorrow and crying in every vineyard, for I will pass through and destroy. ¹⁸ You say, ‘If only the Day of the Lord were here, for then God would deliver us from all our foes.’ But you have no idea what you ask. For that day will not be light and prosperity, but darkness and doom! How terrible the darkness will be for you; not a ray of joy or hope will shine. ¹⁹ In that day you will be as a man who is chased by a lion and is met by a bear, or a man in a dark room who leans against a wall and puts his hand on a snake. ²⁰ Yes, that will be a dark and hopeless day for you.

²¹ “I hate your show and pretense—your hypocrisy of ‘honoring’ me with your religious feasts and solemn assemblies. ²² I will not accept your burnt offerings and thank offerings. I will not look at your offerings of peace. ²³ Away with your hymns of praise—they are mere noise to my ears. I will not listen to your music, no matter how lovely it is.

²⁴ “I want to see a mighty flood of justice—a torrent of doing good.

^25-27 “You sacrificed to me for forty years while you were in the desert, Israel—but always your real interest has been in your heathen gods—in Sakkuth your king, and in Kaiwan, your god of the stars, and in all the images of them you made. So I will send them into captivity with you far to the east of Damascus,” says the Lord, the Lord Almighty.

6 Woe to those lounging in luxury at Jerusalem and Samaria, so famous and popular among the people of Israel. ² Go over to Calneh and see what happened there; then go to great Hamath and down to Gath in the Philistines’ land. Once they were better and greater than you, but look at them now. ³ You push away all thought of punishment awaiting you, but by your deeds you bring the Day of Judgment near.

⁴ You lie on ivory beds surrounded with luxury, eating the meat of the tenderest lambs and the choicest calves. ⁵ You sing idle songs to the sound of the harp and fancy yourselves to be great musicians as King David was.

⁶ You drink wine by the bucketful and perfume yourselves with sweet ointments, caring nothing at all that your brothers need your help. ⁷ Therefore you will be the first to be taken as slaves; suddenly your revelry will end.

⁸ Jehovah the Almighty Lord has sworn by his own name, “I despise the pride and false glory of Israel and hate their beautiful homes. I will turn over this city and everything in it to her enemies.”

⁹ If there are as few as ten of them left and only one house, they too will perish. ¹⁰ A man’s uncle will be the only one left to bury him, and when he goes in to carry his body from the house, he will ask the only one still alive inside, “Are any others left?” And the answer will be, “No,” and he will add, “Shhh . . . don’t mention the name of the Lord—he might hear you.”

¹¹ For the Lord commanded this: that homes both great and small should be smashed to pieces. ¹² Can horses run on rocks? Can oxen plow the sea? Stupid even to ask—but no more stupid than what you do when you make a mockery of justice and corrupt and sour all that should be good and right. ¹³ And just as stupid is your rejoicing in how great you are when you are less than nothing—and priding yourselves on your own tiny power!

¹⁴ “O Israel, I will bring against you a nation that will bitterly oppress you from your northern boundary to your southern tip, all the way from Hamath to the brook of Arabah,” says the Lord, the Lord Almighty.

7 Then I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds from blowing so that not a leaf rustled in the trees, and the ocean became as smooth as glass. ² And I saw another angel coming from the east, carrying the Great Seal of the Living God. And he shouted out to those four angels who had been given power to injure earth and sea, ³ “Wait! Don’t do anything yet—hurt neither earth nor sea nor trees—until we have placed the Seal of God upon the foreheads of his servants.”

^4-8 How many were given this mark? I heard the number—it was 144,000; out of all twelve tribes of Israel, as listed here:

⁹ After this I saw a vast crowd, too great to count, from all nations and provinces and languages, standing in front of the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white, with palm branches in their hands. ¹⁰ And they were shouting with a mighty shout, “Salvation comes from our God upon the throne, and from the Lamb.”

¹¹ And now all the angels were crowding around the throne and around the Elders and the four Living Beings, and falling face down before the throne and worshiping God. ¹² “Amen!” they said. “Blessing, and glory, and wisdom, and thanksgiving, and honor, and power, and might, be to our God forever and forever. Amen!”

¹³ Then one of the twenty-four Elders asked me, “Do you know who these are, who are clothed in white, and where they come from?”

¹⁴ “No, sir,” I replied. “Please tell me.”

“These are the ones coming out of the Great Tribulation,” he said; “they washed their robes and whitened them by the blood of the Lamb. ¹⁵ That is why they are here before the throne of God, serving him day and night in his temple. The one sitting on the throne will shelter them; ¹⁶ they will never be hungry again, nor thirsty, and they will be fully protected from the scorching noontime heat. ¹⁷ For the Lamb standing in front of the throne^[a] will feed them and be their Shepherd and lead them to the springs of the Water of Life. And God will wipe their tears away.”