Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

⁷ Hear, O My people, and I will speak; O Israel, I will testify to you and against you: I am God, your God.

⁸ I do not reprove you for your sacrifices; your burnt offerings are continually before Me.

⁹ I will accept no bull from your house nor he-goat out of your folds.

¹⁰ For every beast of the forest is Mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills or upon the mountains where thousands are.

¹¹ I know and am acquainted with all the birds of the mountains, and the wild animals of the field are Mine and are with Me, in My mind.

¹² If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are Mine.^(A)

¹³ Shall I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?

¹⁴ Offer to God the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and pay your vows to the Most High,

¹⁵ And call on Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall honor and glorify Me.

⁷ Jerusalem [earnestly] remembers in the days of her affliction, in the days of her [compulsory] wanderings and her bitterness, all the pleasant and precious things that she had from the days of old. When her people fell into and at the hands of the adversary, and there was none to help her, the enemy [gloated as they] looked at her, and they mocked at her desolations and downfall.

⁸ Jerusalem has grievously sinned; therefore she has become an unclean thing and has been removed. All who honored her despise her, because they have seen her nakedness; yes, she herself groans and sighs and turns [her face] away.

⁹ Her filthiness was in and on her skirts; she did not [seriously and earnestly] consider her final end. Therefore she has come down [from throne to slavery] singularly and astonishingly; she has no comforter. O Lord [cries Jerusalem], look at my affliction, for the enemy has magnified himself [in triumph]!

¹⁰ The adversary has spread out his hand upon all her precious and desirable things; for she has seen the nations enter her sanctuary [of the temple]—^[a]when You commanded that they should not even enter Your congregation [in the outer courts].^(A)

¹¹ All her people groan and sigh, seeking for bread; they have given their desirable and precious things [in exchange] for food to revive their strength and bring back life. See, O Lord, and consider how wretched and lightly esteemed, how vile and abominable, I have become!

¹⁷ These are springs without water and mists driven along before a tempest, for whom is reserved forever the gloom of darkness.

¹⁸ For uttering loud boasts of folly, they beguile and lure with lustful desires of the flesh those who are barely escaping from them who are wrongdoers.

¹⁹ They promise them liberty, when they themselves are the slaves of depravity and defilement—for by whatever anyone is made inferior or worse or is overcome, to that [person or thing] he is enslaved.

²⁰ For if, after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through [the full, personal] knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they again become entangled in them and are overcome, their last condition is worse [for them] than the first.

²¹ For never to have obtained a [full, personal] knowledge of the way of righteousness would have been better for them than, having obtained [such knowledge], to turn back from the holy commandment which was [verbally] delivered to them.

²² There has befallen them the thing spoken of in the true proverb, The dog turns back to his own vomit, and, The sow is washed only to wallow again in the mire.^(A)