Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

A Contrite Sinner’s Prayer for Pardon.

To the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David; when Nathan the prophet came to him after he had sinned with Bathsheba.

⁶ Noah was six hundred years old when the flood (deluge) of water came on the earth [covering all of the land]. ⁷ Then Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives with him entered the ark to escape the flood waters.^{(A) 8} Of ^[a]clean animals and animals that are not clean and birds and fowls and everything that crawls on the ground, ⁹ they came [motivated by God] into the ark with Noah two by two, the male and the female, just as God had commanded Noah. ¹⁰ And after the seven days [God released the rain and] the floodwaters came on the earth.

The Flood Abates

8 And God remembered and thought kindly of Noah and every living thing and all the animals that were with him in the ark; and God made a wind blow over the land, and the waters receded. ² Also the fountains of the deep [subterranean waters] and the windows of the heavens were closed, the [pouring] rain from the sky was restrained, ³ and the waters receded steadily from the earth. At the end of a hundred and fifty days the waters had diminished. ⁴ On the seventeenth day of the seventh month [five months after the rain began], the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat [in ^[a]Turkey]. ⁵ The waters continued to decrease until the tenth month; on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains were seen.

The Rise of False Prophets

2 But [in those days] false prophets arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will subtly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing swift destruction on themselves. ² Many will follow their shameful ways, and because of them the way of truth will be maligned. ³ And in their greed they will exploit you with false arguments and twisted doctrine. Their sentence [of condemnation which God has decreed] from a time long ago is not idle [but is still in force], and their destruction and deepening misery is not asleep [but is on its way].

^4 [a]For if God did not [even] spare angels that sinned, but threw them into ^[b]hell and sent them to pits of gloom to be kept [there] for judgment; ⁵ and if He did not spare the ancient world, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, with seven others, when He brought [the judgment of] a flood upon the world of the ungodly;^{(A) 6} and if He condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction by reducing them to ashes, having made them an example to those who would live ungodly lives thereafter;^{(B) 7} and if He rescued righteous ^[c]Lot, who was tormented by the immoral conduct of unprincipled and ungodly men^{(C) 8} (for that just man, while living among them, felt his righteous soul tormented day after day by what he saw and heard of their lawless acts), ⁹ then [in light of the fact that all this is true, be sure that] the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trial, and how to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, ¹⁰ and especially ^[d]those who indulge in the corrupt passions of the sin nature, and despise authority.

Presumptuous and reckless, self-willed and arrogant [creatures, despising the majesty of the Lord], they do not tremble when they revile angelic majesties,