Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

מ (Mem)

12 Here are the laws and rulings you are to observe and obey in the land Adonai, the God of your ancestors, has given you to possess as long as you live on earth. ² You must destroy all the places where the nations you are dispossessing served their gods, whether on high mountains, on hills, or under some leafy tree. ³ Break down their altars, smash their standing-stones to pieces, burn up their sacred poles completely and cut down the carved images of their gods. Exterminate their name from that place.

⁴ “But you are not to treat Adonai your God this way. ⁵ Rather, you are to come to the place where Adonai your God will put his name. He will choose it from all your tribes; and you will seek out that place, which is where he will live, and go there. ⁶ You will bring there your burnt offerings, your sacrifices, your tenths [that you set aside for Adonai], the offerings that you give, the offerings you have vowed, your voluntary offerings, and the firstborn of your cattle and sheep. ⁷ There you will eat in the presence of Adonai your God; and you will rejoice over everything you set out to do, you and your households, in which Adonai your God has blessed you. ⁸ You will not do things the way we do them here today, where everyone does whatever in his own opinion seems right; ⁹ because you haven’t yet arrived at the rest and inheritance which Adonai your God is giving you. ¹⁰ But when you cross the Yarden and live in the land Adonai your God is having you inherit, and he gives you rest from all your surrounding enemies, so that you are living in safety; (ii) ¹¹ then you will bring all that I am ordering you to the place Adonai your God chooses to have his name live — your burnt offerings, sacrifices, tenths, the offering from your hand, and all your best possessions that you dedicate to Adonai; ¹² and you will rejoice in the presence of Adonai your God — you, your sons and daughters, your male and female slaves and the Levi staying with you, inasmuch as he has no share or inheritance with you.

⁴¹ At this the Judeans began grumbling about him because he said, “I am the bread which has come down from heaven.” ⁴² They said, “Isn’t this Yeshua Ben-Yosef? We know his father and mother! How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” ⁴³ Yeshua answered them, “Stop grumbling to each other! ⁴⁴ No one can come to me unless the Father — the One who sent me — draws him. And I will raise him up on the Last Day. ⁴⁵ It is written in the Prophets, ‘They will all be taught by Adonai.’^[a] Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me. ⁴⁶ Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God — he has seen the Father. ⁴⁷ Yes, indeed! I tell you, whoever trusts has eternal life: ⁴⁸ I am the bread which is life. ⁴⁹ Your fathers ate the man in the desert; they died. ⁵⁰ But the bread that comes down from heaven is such that a person may eat it and not die. ⁵¹ I am the living bread that has come down from heaven; if anyone eats this bread, he will live forever. Furthermore, the bread that I will give is my own flesh; and I will give it for the life of the world.”