Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

100 Shout with joy before the Lord, O earth! ² Obey him gladly; come before him, singing with joy.

³ Try to realize what this means—the Lord is God! He made us—we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.

⁴ Go through his open gates with great thanksgiving; enter his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and bless his name. ⁵ For the Lord is always good. He is always loving and kind, and his faithfulness goes on and on to each succeeding generation.

²⁷ Now Jehovah said to Aaron, “Go into the wilderness to meet Moses.” So Aaron traveled to Mount Horeb, the mountain of God, and met Moses there, and they greeted each other warmly. ²⁸ Moses told Aaron what God had said they must do, and what they were to say, and told him about the miracles they must do before Pharaoh.

²⁹ So Moses and Aaron returned to Egypt and summoned the elders of the people of Israel to a council meeting. ³⁰ Aaron told them what Jehovah had said to Moses, and Moses performed the miracles as they watched. ³¹ Then the elders believed that God had sent them, and when they heard that Jehovah had visited them and had seen their sorrows, and had decided to rescue them, they all rejoiced and bowed their heads and worshiped.

³⁵ And so God sent back the same man his people had previously rejected by demanding, ‘Who made you a ruler and judge over us?’ Moses was sent to be their ruler and savior. ³⁶ And by means of many remarkable miracles he led them out of Egypt and through the Red Sea, and back and forth through the wilderness for forty years.

³⁷ “Moses himself told the people of Israel, ‘God will raise up a Prophet much like me^[a] from among your brothers.’ ³⁸ How true this proved to be, for in the wilderness, Moses was the go-between—the mediator between the people of Israel and the Angel who gave them the Law of God—the Living Word—on Mount Sinai.

³⁹ “But our fathers rejected Moses and wanted to return to Egypt. ⁴⁰ They told Aaron, ‘Make idols for us, so that we will have gods to lead us back; for we don’t know what has become of this Moses, who brought us out of Egypt.’ ⁴¹ So they made a calf idol and sacrificed to it, and rejoiced in this thing they had made.

⁴² “Then God turned away from them and gave them up, and let them serve the sun, moon, and stars as their gods! In the book of Amos’ prophecies the Lord God asks, ‘Was it to me you were sacrificing during those forty years in the desert, Israel? ⁴³ No, your real interest was in your heathen gods—Sakkuth, and the star god Kaiway, and in all the images you made. So I will send you into captivity far away beyond Babylon.’