Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

26 Dismiss all the charges against me, Lord, for I have tried to keep your laws and have trusted you without wavering. ² Cross-examine me, O Lord, and see that this is so; test my motives and affections too. ³ For I have taken your loving-kindness and your truth as my ideals. ⁴ I do not have fellowship with tricky, two-faced men; they are false and hypocritical. ⁵ I hate the sinners’ hangouts and refuse to enter them. ⁶ I wash my hands to prove my innocence and come before your altar, ⁷ singing a song of thanksgiving and telling about your miracles.

⁸ Lord, I love your home, this shrine where the brilliant, dazzling splendor of your presence lives.

^9-10 Don’t treat me as a common sinner or murderer who plots against the innocent and demands bribes.

¹¹ No, I am not like that, O Lord; I try to walk a straight and narrow path of doing what is right; therefore in mercy save me.

¹² I publicly praise the Lord for keeping me from slipping and falling.

¹¹ When three of Job’s friends heard of all the tragedy that had befallen him, they got in touch with each other and traveled from their homes to comfort and console him. Their names were Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. ¹² Job was so changed that they could scarcely recognize him. Wailing loudly in despair, they tore their robes and threw dust into the air and put earth on their heads to demonstrate their sorrow. ¹³ Then they sat upon the ground with him silently for seven days and nights, no one speaking a word; for they saw that his suffering was too great for words.

3 At last Job spoke and cursed the day of his birth.

^2-3 “Let the day of my birth be cursed,” he said, “and the night when I was conceived. ⁴ Let that day be forever forgotten.^[a] Let it be lost even to God, shrouded in eternal darkness. ⁵ Yes, let the darkness claim it for its own, and may a black cloud overshadow it. ⁶ May it be blotted off the calendar, never again to be counted among the days of the month of that year. ⁷ Let that night be bleak and joyless. ⁸ Let those who are experts at cursing curse it.^{[b] 9} Let the stars of the night disappear. Let it long for light but never see it, never see the morning light. ¹⁰ Curse it for its failure to shut my mother’s womb, for letting me be born to come to all this trouble.

¹¹ “Why didn’t I die at birth? ¹² Why did the midwife let me live? Why did she nurse me at her breasts? ¹³ For if only I had died at birth, then I would be quiet now, asleep and at rest, ^14-15 along with prime ministers and kings with all their pomp, and wealthy princes whose castles are full of rich treasures. ¹⁶ Oh, to have been stillborn!—to have never breathed or seen the light. ¹⁷ For there in death the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest. ¹⁸ There even prisoners are at ease, with no brutal jailer to curse them. ¹⁹ Both rich and poor alike are there, and the slave is free at last from his master.

^20-21 “Oh, why should light and life be given to those in misery and bitterness, who long for death, and it won’t come; who search for death as others search for food or money? ²² What blessed relief when at last they die! ²³ Why is a man allowed to be born if God is only going to give him a hopeless life of uselessness and frustration? ²⁴ I cannot eat for sighing; my groans pour out like water. ²⁵ What I always feared has happened to me. ²⁶ I was not fat and lazy, yet trouble struck me down.”

²³ Until Christ came we were guarded by the law, kept in protective custody, so to speak, until we could believe in the coming Savior.

²⁴ Let me put it another way. The Jewish laws were our teacher and guide until Christ came to give us right standing with God through our faith. ²⁵ But now that Christ has come, we don’t need those laws any longer to guard us and lead us to him. ²⁶ For now we are all children of God through faith in Jesus Christ, ²⁷ and we who have been baptized into union with Christ are enveloped by him. ²⁸ We are no longer Jews or Greeks or slaves or free men or even merely men or women, but we are all the same—we are Christians; we are one in Christ Jesus. ²⁹ And now that we are Christ’s we are the true descendants of Abraham, and all of God’s promises to him belong to us.