Old/New Testament

28 Woe to the city of Samaria, surrounded by her rich valley—Samaria, the pride and delight of the drunkards of Israel! Woe to her fading beauty, the crowning glory of a nation of men lying drunk in the streets! ² For the Lord will send a mighty army (the Assyrians) against you; like a mighty hailstorm he will burst upon you and dash you to the ground. ³ The proud city of Samaria—yes, the joy and delight of the drunkards of Israel—will be hurled to the ground and trampled beneath the enemies’ feet. ⁴ Once glorious, her fading beauty surrounded by a fertile valley will suddenly be gone, greedily snatched away as an early fig is hungrily snatched and gobbled up!

⁵ Then at last the Lord Almighty himself will be their crowning glory, the diadem of beauty to his people who are left. ⁶ He will give a longing for justice to your judges and great courage to your soldiers who are battling to the last before your gates. ⁷ But Jerusalem is now led by drunks! Her priests and prophets reel and stagger, making stupid errors and mistakes. ⁸ Their tables are covered with vomit; filth is everywhere.

⁹ “Who does Isaiah think he is,” the people say, “to speak to us like this! Are we little children, barely old enough to talk? ¹⁰ He tells us everything over and over again, a line at a time and in such simple words!”

¹¹ But they won’t listen; the only language they can understand is punishment! So God will punish them by sending against them foreigners who speak strange gibberish! Only then will they listen to him! ¹² They could have rest in their own land if they would obey him, if they were kind and good. He told them that, but they wouldn’t listen to him. ¹³ So the Lord will spell it out for them again, repeating it over and over in simple words whenever he can; yet over this simple, straightforward message they will stumble and fall and be broken, trapped and captured.

¹⁴ Therefore hear the word of the Lord, you scoffing rulers in Jerusalem:

¹⁵ You have struck a bargain with death, you say, and sold yourselves to the devil^[a] in exchange for his protection against the Assyrians. “They can never touch us,” you say, “for we are under the care of one who will deceive and fool them.”

¹⁶ But the Lord God says, “See, I am placing a Foundation Stone in Zion—a firm, tested, precious Cornerstone that is safe to build on. He who believes need never run away again. ¹⁷ I will take the line and plummet of justice to check the foundation wall you built; it looks so fine, but it is so weak a storm of hail will knock it down! The enemy will come like a flood and sweep it away, and you will be drowned. ¹⁸ I will cancel your agreement of compromise with death and the devil, so when the terrible enemy floods in, you will be trampled into the ground. ¹⁹ Again and again that flood will come and carry you off, until at last the unmixed horror of the truth of my warnings will finally dawn on you.”

²⁰ The bed you have made is far too short to lie on; the blankets are too narrow to cover you. ²¹ The Lord will come suddenly and in anger, as at Mount Perazim and Gibeon, to do a strange, unusual thing—to destroy his own people! ²² So scoff no more, lest your punishment be made even greater, for the Lord God has plainly told me that he is determined to crush you.

^23-24 Listen to me, listen as I plead: Does a farmer always plow and never sow? Is he forever harrowing the soil and never planting it? ²⁵ Does he not finally plant his many kinds of grain, each in its own section of his land? ²⁶ He knows just what to do, for God has made him see and understand. ²⁷ He doesn’t thresh all grains the same. A sledge is never used on dill, but it is beaten with a stick. A threshing wheel is never rolled on cummin, but it is beaten softly with a flail. ²⁸ Bread grain is easily crushed, so he doesn’t keep on pounding it. ²⁹ The Lord Almighty is a wonderful teacher and gives the farmer wisdom.

29 Woe to Jerusalem,^[b] the city of David. Year after year you make your many offerings, ² but I will send heavy judgment upon you, and there will be weeping and sorrow. For Jerusalem shall become as her name “Ariel” means—an altar covered with blood. ³ I will be your enemy. I will surround Jerusalem and lay siege against it, and build forts around it to destroy it. ⁴ Your voice will whisper like a ghost from the earth where you lie buried.

⁵ But suddenly your ruthless enemies will be driven away like chaff before the wind. ⁶ In an instant, I, the Lord of Hosts, will come upon them with thunder, earthquake, whirlwind, and fire. ⁷ And all the nations fighting Jerusalem will vanish like a dream! ⁸ As a hungry man dreams of eating but is still hungry, and as a thirsty man dreams of drinking but is still faint from thirst when he wakes up, so your enemies will dream of victorious conquest, but all to no avail.

⁹ You are amazed, incredulous? You don’t believe it? Then go ahead and be blind if you must! You are stupid—and not from drinking, either! Stagger, and not from wine! ¹⁰ For the Lord has poured out upon you a spirit of deep sleep. He has closed the eyes of your prophets and seers, ¹¹ so all of these future events are a sealed book to them. When you give it to one who can read, he says, “I can’t, for it’s sealed.” ¹² When you give it to another, he says, “Sorry, I can’t read.”

¹³ And so the Lord says, “Since these people say they are mine but they do not obey me, and since their worship amounts to mere words learned by rote, ¹⁴ therefore I will take awesome vengeance on these hypocrites and make their wisest counselors as fools.”

¹⁵ Woe to those who try to hide their plans from God, who try to keep him in the dark concerning what they do! “God can’t see us,” they say to themselves. “He doesn’t know what is going on!” ¹⁶ How stupid can they be! Isn’t he, the Potter, greater than you, the jars he makes? Will you say to him, “He didn’t make us”? Does a machine call its inventor dumb?

¹⁷ Soon—and it will not be very long—the wilderness of Lebanon will be a fruitful field again, a lush and fertile forest. ¹⁸ In that day the deaf will hear the words of a book, and out of their gloom and darkness the blind will see my plans. ¹⁹ The meek will be filled with fresh joy from the Lord, and the poor shall exult in the Holy One of Israel. ²⁰ Bullies will vanish and scoffers will cease, and all those plotting evil will be killed— ²¹ the violent man who fights at the drop of a hat, the man who waits in hiding to beat up the judge who sentenced him, and the men who use any excuse to be unfair.

²² That is why the Lord who redeemed Abraham says: “My people will no longer pale with fear or be ashamed. ²³ For when they see the surging birthrate and the expanding economy,^[c] then they will fear and rejoice in my name; they will praise the Holy One of Israel and stand in awe of him. ²⁴ Those in error will believe the truth, and complainers will be willing to be taught!

3 Whatever happens, dear friends, be glad in the Lord. I never get tired of telling you this, and it is good for you to hear it again and again.

² Watch out for those wicked men—dangerous dogs, I call them—who say you must be circumcised to be saved. ³ For it isn’t the cutting of our bodies that makes us children of God; it is worshiping him with our spirits. That is the only true “circumcision.” We Christians glory in what Christ Jesus has done for us and realize that we are helpless to save ourselves.

⁴ Yet if anyone ever had reason to hope that he could save himself, it would be I. If others could be saved by what they are, certainly I could! ⁵ For I went through the Jewish initiation ceremony when I was eight days old, having been born into a pure-blooded Jewish home that was a branch of the old original Benjamin family. So I was a real Jew if there ever was one! What’s more, I was a member of the Pharisees who demand the strictest obedience to every Jewish law and custom. ⁶ And sincere? Yes, so much so that I greatly persecuted the Church; and I tried to obey every Jewish rule and regulation right down to the very last point.

⁷ But all these things that I once thought very worthwhile—now I’ve thrown them all away so that I can put my trust and hope in Christ alone. ⁸ Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the priceless gain of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. I have put aside all else, counting it worth less than nothing, in order that I can have Christ, ⁹ and become one with him, no longer counting on being saved by being good enough or by obeying God’s laws, but by trusting Christ to save me; for God’s way of making us right with himself depends on faith—counting on Christ alone. ¹⁰ Now I have given up everything else—I have found it to be the only way to really know Christ and to experience the mighty power that brought him back to life again, and to find out what it means to suffer and to die with him. ¹¹ So whatever it takes, I will be one who lives in the fresh newness of life of those who are alive from the dead.

¹² I don’t mean to say I am perfect. I haven’t learned all I should even yet, but I keep working toward that day when I will finally be all that Christ saved me for and wants me to be.

¹³ No, dear brothers, I am still not all I should be, but I am bringing all my energies to bear on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, ¹⁴ I strain to reach the end of the race and receive the prize for which God is calling us up to heaven because of what Christ Jesus did for us.

¹⁵ I hope all of you who are mature Christians will see eye-to-eye with me on these things, and if you disagree on some point, I believe that God will make it plain to you— ¹⁶ if you fully obey the truth you have.

¹⁷ Dear brothers, pattern your lives after mine, and notice who else lives up to my example. ¹⁸ For I have told you often before, and I say it again now with tears in my eyes, there are many who walk along the Christian road who are really enemies of the cross of Christ. ¹⁹ Their future is eternal loss, for their god is their appetite: they are proud of what they should be ashamed of; and all they think about is this life here on earth. ²⁰ But our homeland is in heaven, where our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, is; and we are looking forward to his return from there. ²¹ When he comes back, he will take these dying bodies of ours and change them into glorious bodies like his own, using the same mighty power that he will use to conquer all else everywhere.