Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)
51 Written after Nathan the prophet had come to inform David of God’s judgment against him because of his adultery with Bathsheba, and his murder of Uriah, her husband.
O loving and kind God, have mercy. Have pity upon me and take away the awful stain of my transgressions. 2 Oh, wash me, cleanse me from this guilt. Let me be pure again. 3 For I admit my shameful deed—it haunts me day and night. 4 It is against you and you alone I sinned and did this terrible thing. You saw it all, and your sentence against me is just. 5 But I was born a sinner, yes, from the moment my mother conceived me. 6 You deserve honesty from the heart; yes, utter sincerity and truthfulness. Oh, give me this wisdom.
7 Sprinkle me with the cleansing blood[a] and I shall be clean again. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. 8 And after you have punished me, give me back my joy again. 9 Don’t keep looking at my sins—erase them from your sight. 10 Create in me a new, clean heart, O God, filled with clean thoughts and right desires. 11 Don’t toss me aside, banished forever from your presence. Don’t take your Holy Spirit from me. 12 Restore to me again the joy of your salvation, and make me willing to obey you. 13 Then I will teach your ways to other sinners, and they—guilty like me—will repent and return to you. 14-15 Don’t sentence me to death. O my God, you alone can rescue me. Then I will sing of your forgiveness,[b] for my lips will be unsealed—oh, how I will praise you.
16 You don’t want penance;[c] if you did, how gladly I would do it! You aren’t interested in offerings burned before you on the altar. 17 It is a broken spirit you want—remorse and penitence. A broken and a contrite heart, O God, you will not ignore.
18 And Lord, don’t punish Israel for my sins—help your people and protect Jerusalem.[d]
19 And when my heart is right,[e] then you will rejoice in the good that I do and in the bullocks I bring to sacrifice upon your altar.
58-59 “If you refuse to obey all the laws written in this book, thus refusing reverence to the glorious and fearful name of Jehovah your God, then Jehovah will send perpetual plagues upon you and upon your children. 60 He will bring upon you all the diseases of Egypt that you feared so much, and they shall plague the land. 61 And that is not all! The Lord will bring upon you every sickness and plague there is, even those not mentioned in this book, until you are destroyed. 62 There will be few of you left, though before you were as numerous as stars. All this if you do not listen to the Lord your God.
63 “Just as the Lord has rejoiced over you and has done such wonderful things for you and has multiplied you, so the Lord at that time will rejoice in destroying you; and you shall disappear from the land. 64 For the Lord will scatter you among all the nations from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship heathen gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods made of wood and stone! 65 There among those nations you shall find no rest, but the Lord will give you trembling hearts, darkness, and bodies wasted from sorrow and fear. 66 Your lives will hang in doubt. You will live night and day in fear, and will have no reason to believe that you will see the morning light. 67 In the morning you will say, ‘Oh, that night were here!’ And in the evening you will say, ‘Oh, that morning were here!’ You will say this because of the awesome horrors surrounding you. 68 Then the Lord will send you back to Egypt in ships, a journey I promised you would never need to make again; and there you will offer to sell yourselves to your enemies as slaves—but no one will even want to buy you.”
29 It was on the plains of Moab that Moses restated the covenant that the Lord had made with the people of Israel at Mount Horeb.
17-18 “As the time drew near when God would fulfill his promise to Abraham to free his descendants from slavery, the Jewish people greatly multiplied in Egypt; but then a king was crowned who had no respect for Joseph’s memory. 19 This king plotted against our race, forcing parents to abandon their children in the fields.
20 “About that time Moses was born—a child of divine beauty. His parents hid him at home for three months, 21 and when at last they could no longer keep him hidden and had to abandon him, Pharaoh’s daughter found him and adopted him as her own son, 22 and taught him all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and he became a mighty prince and orator.
23 “One day as he was nearing his fortieth birthday, it came into his mind to visit his brothers, the people of Israel. 24 During this visit he saw an Egyptian mistreating a man of Israel. So Moses killed the Egyptian. 25 Moses supposed his brothers would realize that God had sent him to help them, but they didn’t.
26 “The next day he visited them again and saw two men of Israel fighting. He tried to be a peacemaker. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘you are brothers and shouldn’t be fighting like this! It is wrong!’
27 “But the man in the wrong told Moses to mind his own business. ‘Who made you a ruler and judge over us?’ he asked. 28 ‘Are you going to kill me as you killed that Egyptian yesterday?’
29 “At this, Moses fled the country and lived in the land of Midian, where his two sons were born.
The Living Bible copyright © 1971 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.