Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

⁷ Turn us again, O God of Hosts. Cause Your face to shine, and we shall be saved.

⁸ You have brought a vine out of Egypt. You have cast out the heathen and planted it.

⁹ You made room for it, and caused it to take root, and it filled the land.

¹⁰ The mountains were covered with the shadow of it; and the boughs thereof were like the pleasant cedars.

¹¹ She stretched out her branches to the sea, and her boughs to the river.

¹² Why have You broken down her hedges, so that all those who pass by the way have plucked her?

¹³ The wild boar, out of the wood, has destroyed it; and the wild beasts of the field have eaten it up.

¹⁴ Return, we beg You, O God of Hosts! Look down from Heaven and behold, and visit this vine

¹⁵ and the vineyard that Your right hand has planted, and the young vine which You made strong for Yourself.

¹⁴ “Is Israel a servant, or is he born in the house? Why is he spoiled?

¹⁵ “The lions roared upon him, yelled, and they have made his land waste. His cities are burnt, without an inhabitant.

¹⁶ “Also, the children of Noph and Tahapanes have broken your head.

¹⁷ “Have you not brought this on yourself, because you have forsaken the LORD your God, when He led you by the way?

¹⁸ “And what are you now doing on the way of Egypt, to drink the water of Nilus? Or why do you take the way of Assyria, to drink the water of the River?

¹⁹ “Your own wickedness shall correct you, and your backslidings shall reprove you. Know, therefore, and behold that it is an evil thing, and bitter, that you have forsaken the LORD your God, and that My fear is not in you,” says the LORD God of Hosts.

²⁰ “For since ancient times I have broken your yoke, burst your bonds, and you said, ‘I will transgress no more.’ But, like a harlot, you run around upon all high hills, and under all green trees.

²¹ “Yet, I had planted you as a noble vine, whose plants were whole. How, then, have you turned before Me into the plants of a strange vine?

²² “Though you wash yourself with lye, and use much soap, your iniquity is marked before Me,” says the LORD God.

¹⁶ Therefore, let no one judge you as regards food and drink, or regarding a holy day or the new moon or the Sabbath,

¹⁷ which are a shadow of things to come. But the body is of Christ.

¹⁸ Let no one, at his pleasure, bear rule over you by his humbleness of mind and his worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he has never seen, being rashly puffed up with his fleshly mind

¹⁹ and not taking hold of the Head (from Whom all the body, supplied and knit together by joints and bonds, grows with a growth that is from God).

²⁰ Therefore, if you have died with Christ from the principles of the world, why then (as though you lived in the world) do you submit to ordinances such as:

²¹ “Touch not! Taste not! Handle not!”,

²² which all perish with use and are according to the commandments and doctrines of man?

²³ These things indeed have an appearance of wisdom and of voluntary religion and humbleness of mind and of not sparing the body but are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh.