Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

⁸ Jehovah is kind and merciful, slow to get angry, full of love. ⁹ He is good to everyone, and his compassion is intertwined with everything he does. ¹⁰ All living things shall thank you, Lord, and your people will bless you. ¹¹ They will talk together about the glory of your kingdom and mention examples of your power. ¹² They will tell about your miracles and about the majesty and glory of your reign. ¹³ For your kingdom never ends. You rule generation after generation.

¹⁴ The Lord lifts the fallen and those bent beneath their loads.

1 Subject: messages from the Lord. These messages from the Lord were given to Zechariah (son of Berechiah and grandson of Iddo the prophet) in early November of the second year of the reign of King Darius.

² The Lord Almighty was very angry with your fathers. ³ But he will turn again and favor you if only you return to him. ⁴ Don’t be like your fathers were! The earlier prophets pled in vain with them to turn from all their evil ways.

“Come, return to me,” the Lord God said. But no, they wouldn’t listen; they paid no attention at all.

^5-6 Your fathers and their prophets are now long dead, but remember the lesson they learned, that God’s Word endures! It caught up with them and punished them. Then at last they repented.

“We have gotten what we deserved from God,” they said. “He has done just what he warned us he would.”

7 Don’t you understand yet, dear Jewish brothers^[a] in Christ, that when a person dies the law no longer holds him in its power?

² Let me illustrate: when a woman marries, the law binds her to her husband as long as he is alive. But if he dies, she is no longer bound to him; the laws of marriage no longer apply to her. ³ Then she can marry someone else if she wants to. That would be wrong while he was alive, but it is perfectly all right after he dies.

⁴ Your “husband,” your master, used to be the Jewish law; but you “died,” as it were, with Christ on the cross; and since you are “dead,” you are no longer “married to the law,” and it has no more control over you. Then you came back to life again when Christ did and are a new person. And now you are “married,” so to speak, to the one who rose from the dead, so that you can produce good fruit, that is, good deeds for God. ⁵ When your old nature was still active, sinful desires were at work within you, making you want to do whatever God said not to and producing sinful deeds, the rotting fruit of death. ⁶ But now you need no longer worry about the Jewish laws and customs^[b] because you “died” while in their captivity, and now you can really serve God; not in the old way, mechanically obeying a set of rules, but in the new way, with all of your hearts and minds.