Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

⁸ Bless our God, O peoples, give Him grateful thanks and make the voice of His praise be heard,

⁹ Who put and kept us among the living, and has not allowed our feet to slip.

¹⁰ For You, O God, have proved us; You have tried us as silver is tried, refined, and purified.

¹¹ You brought us into the net (the prison fortress, the dungeon); You laid a heavy burden upon our loins.

¹² You caused men to ride over our heads [when we were prostrate]; we went through fire and through water, but You brought us out into a broad, moist place [to abundance and refreshment and the open air].

¹³ I will come into Your house with burnt offerings [of entire consecration]; I will pay You my vows,

¹⁴ Which my lips uttered and my mouth promised when I was in distress.

¹⁵ I will offer to You burnt offerings of fat lambs, with rams consumed in sweet-smelling smoke; I will offer bullocks and he-goats. Selah [pause, and calmly think of that]!

¹⁶ Come and hear, all you who reverently and worshipfully fear God, and I will declare what He has done for me!

¹⁷ I cried aloud to Him; He was extolled and high praise was under my tongue.

¹⁸ If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me;^(A)

¹⁹ But certainly God has heard me; He has given heed to the voice of my prayer.

²⁰ Blessed be God, Who has not rejected my prayer nor removed His mercy and loving-kindness from being [as it always is] with me.

⁵ The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination and intention of all human thinking was only evil continually.

⁶ And the Lord regretted that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved at heart.

⁷ So the Lord said, I will destroy, blot out, and wipe away mankind, whom I have created from the face of the ground—not only man, [but] the beasts and the creeping things and the birds of the air—for it grieves Me and makes Me regretful that I have made them.

⁸ But Noah found grace (favor) in the eyes of the Lord.

⁹ This is the history of the generations of Noah. Noah was a just and righteous man, blameless in his [evil] generation; Noah walked [in habitual fellowship] with God.

¹⁰ And Noah became the father of three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

¹¹ The earth was depraved and putrid in God’s sight, and the land was filled with violence (desecration, infringement, outrage, assault, and lust for power).

¹² And God looked upon the world and saw how degenerate, debased, and vicious it was, for all humanity had corrupted their way upon the earth and lost their true direction.

¹³ God said to Noah, I intend to make an end of all flesh, for through men the land is filled with violence; and behold, I will ^[a]destroy them and the land.

¹⁴ Make yourself an ark of gopher or cypress wood; make in it rooms (stalls, pens, coops, nests, cages, and compartments) and cover it inside and out with pitch (bitumen).

¹⁵ And this is the way you are to make it: the length of the ark shall be 300 cubits, its breadth 50 cubits, and its height 30 cubits [that is, 450 ft. x 75 ft. x 45 ft.].

¹⁶ You shall make a roof or ^[b]window [a place for light] for the ark and finish it to a cubit [at least 18 inches] above—and the ^[c]door of the ark you shall put in the side of it; and you shall make it with lower, second, and third stories.

¹⁷ For behold, I, even I, will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy and make putrid all flesh under the heavens in which are the breath and spirit of life; everything that is on the land shall die.

¹⁸ But I will establish My covenant (promise, pledge) with you, and you shall come into the ark—you and your sons and your wife and your sons’ wives with you.

¹⁹ And of every living thing of all flesh [found on land], you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female.

²⁰ Of fowls and birds according to their kinds, of beasts according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind—two of every sort shall come in with you, that they may be kept alive.

²¹ Also take with you every sort of food that is eaten, and you shall collect and store it up, and it shall serve as food for you and for them.

²² Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him.

27 Now when it was determined that we [including Luke] should sail for Italy, they turned Paul and some other prisoners over to a centurion of the imperial regiment named Julius.

² And going aboard a ship from Adramyttium which was about to sail for the ports along the coast of [the province of] Asia, we put out to sea; and Aristarchus, a Macedonian from Thessalonica, accompanied us.

³ The following day we landed at Sidon, and Julius treated Paul in a loving way, with much consideration (kindness and care), permitting him to go to his friends [there] and be refreshed and be cared for.

⁴ After putting to sea from there we passed to the leeward (south side) of Cyprus [for protection], for the winds were contrary to us.

⁵ And when we had sailed over [the whole length] of sea which lies off Cilicia and Pamphylia, we reached Myra in Lycia.

⁶ There the centurion found an Alexandrian ship bound for Italy, and he transferred us to it.

⁷ For a number of days we made slow progress and arrived with difficulty off Cnidus; then, as the wind did not permit us to proceed, we went under the lee (shelter) of Crete off Salmone,

⁸ And coasting along it with difficulty, we arrived at a place called Fair Havens, near which is located the town of Lasea.

⁹ But as [the season was well advanced, for] much time had been lost and navigation was already dangerous, for the time for the Fast [the Day of Atonement, about the beginning of October] had already gone by, Paul warned and advised them,

¹⁰ Saying, Sirs, I perceive [after careful observation] that this voyage will be attended with disaster and much heavy loss, not only of the cargo and the ship but of our lives also.

¹¹ However, the centurion paid greater attention to the pilot and to the owner of the ship than to what Paul said.

¹² And as the harbor was not well situated and so unsuitable to winter in, the majority favored the plan of putting to sea again from there, hoping somehow to reach Phoenice, a harbor of Crete facing southwest and northwest, and winter there.