Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

68 Arise, O God, and scatter all your enemies! Chase them away! ² Drive them off like smoke before the wind; melt them like wax in fire! So let the wicked perish at the presence of God.

³ But may the godly man exult. May he rejoice and be merry. ⁴ Sing praises to the Lord! Raise your voice in song to him who rides upon the clouds!^[a] Jehovah is his name—oh, rejoice in his presence. ⁵ He is a father to the fatherless; he gives justice to the widows, for he is holy.^{[b] 6} He gives families to the lonely, and releases prisoners from jail, singing with joy! But for rebels there is famine and distress.

⁷ O God, when you led your people through the wilderness, ⁸ the earth trembled and the heavens shook. Mount Sinai quailed before you—the God of Israel. ^9-10 You sent abundant rain upon your land, O God, to refresh it in its weariness! There your people lived, for you gave them this home when they were destitute.

¹⁹ What a glorious Lord! He who daily bears our burdens also gives us our salvation.

²⁰ He frees us! He rescues us from death.

22 Another address from Eliphaz:

² “Is mere man of any worth to God? Even the wisest is of value only to himself! ³ Is it any pleasure to the Almighty if you are righteous? Would it be any gain to him if you were perfect? ⁴ Is it because you are good that he is punishing you? ⁵ Not at all! It is because of your wickedness! Your sins are endless!

⁶ “For instance, you must have refused to loan money to needy friends unless they gave you all their clothing as a pledge—yes, you must have stripped them to the bone. ⁷ You must have refused water to the thirsty and bread to the starving. ⁸ But no doubt you gave men of importance anything they wanted and let the wealthy live wherever they chose. ⁹ You sent widows away without helping them and broke the arms of orphans. ^10-11 That is why you are now surrounded by traps and sudden fears, and darkness and waves of horror.

¹² “God is so great—higher than the heavens, higher than the stars. ¹³ But you reply, ‘That is why he can’t see what I am doing! How can he judge through the thick darkness? ¹⁴ For thick clouds swirl about him so that he cannot see us. He is way up there, walking on the vault of heaven.’

^15-16 “Don’t you realize that those treading the ancient paths of sin are snatched away in youth, and the foundations of their lives washed out forever? ¹⁷ For they said to God, ‘Go away, God! What can you do for us?’ ¹⁸ (God forbid that I should say a thing like that.) Yet they forgot that he had filled their homes with good things. ¹⁹ And now the righteous shall see them destroyed; the innocent shall laugh the wicked to scorn. ²⁰ ‘See,’ they will say, ‘the last of our enemies have been destroyed in the fire.’

2 Then fourteen years later I went back to Jerusalem again, this time with Barnabas; and Titus came along too. ² I went there with definite orders from God to confer with the brothers there about the message I was preaching to the Gentiles. I talked privately to the leaders of the church so that they would all understand just what I had been teaching and, I hoped, agree that it was right. ³ And they did agree; they did not even demand that Titus, my companion, should be circumcised, though he was a Gentile.

⁴ Even that question wouldn’t have come up except for some so-called “Christians” there—false ones, really—who came to spy on us and see what freedom we enjoyed in Christ Jesus, as to whether we obeyed the Jewish laws or not. They tried to get us all tied up in their rules, like slaves in chains. ⁵ But we did not listen to them for a single moment, for we did not want to confuse you into thinking that salvation can be earned by being circumcised and by obeying Jewish laws.

⁶ And the great leaders of the church who were there had nothing to add to what I was preaching. (By the way, their being great leaders made no difference to me, for all are the same to God.) ^7-9 In fact, when Peter, James, and John, who were known as the pillars of the church, saw how greatly God had used me in winning the Gentiles, just as Peter had been blessed so greatly in his preaching to the Jews—for the same God gave us each our special gifts—they shook hands with Barnabas and me and encouraged us to keep right on with our preaching to the Gentiles while they continued their work with the Jews. ¹⁰ The only thing they did suggest was that we must always remember to help the poor, and I, too, was eager for that.