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.

^34-35 “Well, the Lord heard their complaining and was very angry. He vowed that not one person in that entire generation would live to see the good land he had promised their fathers, ³⁶ except Caleb (the son of Jephunneh), who, because he had wholly followed the Lord, would receive as his personal inheritance some of the land he had walked over.

³⁷ “And the Lord was even angry with me because of them and said to me, ‘You shall not enter the Promised Land! ³⁸ Instead, your assistant, Joshua (the son of Nun), shall lead the people. Encourage him as he prepares to take over the leadership. ³⁹ I will give the land to the children they said would die in the wilderness. ⁴⁰ But as for you of the older generation, turn around now and go on back across the desert toward the Red Sea.’

5 For we know that when this tent we live in now is taken down—when we die and leave these bodies—we will have wonderful new bodies in heaven, homes that will be ours forevermore, made for us by God himself and not by human hands. ² How weary we grow of our present bodies. That is why we look forward eagerly to the day when we shall have heavenly bodies that we shall put on like new clothes. ³ For we shall not be merely spirits without bodies. ⁴ These earthly bodies make us groan and sigh, but we wouldn’t like to think of dying and having no bodies at all. We want to slip into our new bodies so that these dying bodies will, as it were, be swallowed up by everlasting life. ⁵ This is what God has prepared for us, and as a guarantee he has given us his Holy Spirit.