Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)
130 O Lord, from the depths of despair I cry for your help: 2 “Hear me! Answer! Help me!”
3-4 Lord, if you keep in mind our sins, then who can ever get an answer to his prayers? But you forgive! What an awesome thing this is! 5 That is why I wait expectantly, trusting God to help, for he has promised. 6 I long for him more than sentinels long for the dawn.
7 O Israel, hope in the Lord; for he is loving and kind and comes to us with armloads of salvation. 8 He himself shall ransom Israel from her slavery to sin.
30 King Hezekiah now sent letters throughout all of Israel, Judah, Ephraim, and Manasseh, inviting everyone to come to the Temple at Jerusalem for the annual Passover celebration. 2-3 The king, his aides, and all the assembly of Jerusalem had voted to celebrate the Passover in May this time, rather than at the normal time in April, because not enough priests were sanctified at the earlier date, and there wasn’t enough time to get notices out. 4 The king and his advisors were in complete agreement in this matter, 5 so they sent a Passover proclamation throughout Israel, from Dan to Beersheba, inviting everyone. They had not kept it in great numbers as prescribed.[a]
6 “Come back to the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel,” the king’s letter said, “so that he will return to us who have escaped from the power of the kings of Assyria. 7 Do not be like your fathers and brothers who sinned against the Lord God of their fathers and were destroyed. 8 Do not be stubborn, as they were, but yield yourselves to the Lord and come to his Temple which he has sanctified forever, and worship the Lord your God so that his fierce anger will turn away from you. 9 For if you turn to the Lord again, your brothers and your children will be treated mercifully by their captors, and they will be able to return to this land. For the Lord your God is full of kindness and mercy and will not continue to turn away his face from you if you return to him.”
10 So the messengers went from city to city throughout Ephraim and Manasseh and as far as Zebulun. But for the most part they were received with laughter and scorn! 11 However, some from the tribes of Asher, Manasseh, and Zebulun turned to God and came to Jerusalem. 12 But in Judah the entire nation felt a strong, God-given desire to obey the Lord’s direction as commanded by the king and his officers.
10 Yes, and those who depend on the Jewish laws to save them are under God’s curse, for the Scriptures point out very clearly, “Cursed is everyone who at any time breaks a single one of these laws that are written in God’s Book of the Law.” 11 Consequently, it is clear that no one can ever win God’s favor by trying to keep the Jewish laws because God has said that the only way we can be right in his sight is by faith. As the prophet Habakkuk says it, “The man who finds life will find it through trusting God.” 12 How different from this way of faith is the way of law, which says that a man is saved by obeying every law of God, without one slip. 13 But Christ has bought us out from under the doom of that impossible system by taking the curse for our wrongdoing upon himself. For it is written in the Scripture, “Anyone who is hanged on a tree is cursed” (as Jesus was hung upon a wooden cross[a]).
14 Now God can bless the Gentiles, too, with this same blessing he promised to Abraham; and all of us as Christians can have the promised Holy Spirit through this faith.
The Living Bible copyright © 1971 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.