Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

146 Praise the Lord! Yes, really praise him! ² I will praise him as long as I live, yes, even with my dying breath.

³ Don’t look to men for help; their greatest leaders fail; ⁴ for every man must die. His breathing stops, life ends, and in a moment all he planned for himself is ended. ⁵ But happy is the man who has the God of Jacob as his helper, whose hope is in the Lord his God— ⁶ the God who made both earth and heaven, the seas and everything in them. He is the God who keeps every promise, ⁷ who gives justice to the poor and oppressed and food to the hungry. He frees the prisoners ⁸ and opens the eyes of the blind; he lifts the burdens from those bent down beneath their loads. For the Lord loves good men. ⁹ He protects the immigrants and cares for the orphans and widows. But he turns topsy-turvy the plans of the wicked.

¹⁰ The Lord will reign forever. O Jerusalem,^[a] your God is King in every generation! Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!

¹⁸ And when Naomi saw that Ruth had made up her mind and could not be persuaded otherwise, she stopped urging her. ¹⁹ So they both came to Bethlehem, and the entire village was stirred by their arrival.

“Is it really Naomi?” the women asked.

²⁰ But she told them, “Don’t call me Naomi. Call me Mara,” (Naomi means “pleasant”; Mara means “bitter”) “for Almighty God has dealt me bitter blows. ²¹ I went out full and the Lord has brought me home empty; why should you call me Naomi when the Lord has turned his back on me and sent such calamity!”

²² (Their return from Moab and arrival in Bethlehem was at the beginning of the barley harvest.)

9 ^1-2 Now in that first agreement between God and his people there were rules for worship and there was a sacred tent down here on earth. Inside this place of worship there were two rooms. The first one contained the golden candlestick and a table with special loaves of holy bread upon it; this part was called the Holy Place. ³ Then there was a curtain, and behind the curtain was a room called the Holy of Holies. ⁴ In that room there were a golden incense-altar and the golden chest, called the ark of the covenant, completely covered on all sides with pure gold. Inside the ark were the tablets of stone with the Ten Commandments written on them, and a golden jar with some manna in it, and Aaron’s wooden cane that budded. ⁵ Above the golden chest were statues of angels called the cherubim—the guardians of God’s glory—with their wings stretched out over the ark’s golden cover, called the mercy seat. But enough of such details.

⁶ Well, when all was ready, the priests went in and out of the first room whenever they wanted to, doing their work. ⁷ But only the high priest went into the inner room, and then only once a year, all alone, and always with blood that he sprinkled on the mercy seat as an offering to God to cover his own mistakes and sins and the mistakes and sins of all the people.

⁸ And the Holy Spirit uses all this to point out to us that under the old system the common people could not go into the Holy of Holies as long as the outer room and the entire system it represents were still in use.

⁹ This has an important lesson for us today. For under the old system, gifts and sacrifices were offered, but these failed to cleanse the hearts of the people who brought them. ¹⁰ For the old system dealt only with certain rituals—what foods to eat and drink, rules for washing themselves, and rules about this and that. The people had to keep these rules to tide them over until Christ came with God’s new and better way.

¹¹ He came as High Priest of this better system that we now have. He went into that greater, perfect tabernacle in heaven, not made by men nor part of this world, ¹² and once for all took blood into that inner room, the Holy of Holies, and sprinkled it on the mercy seat; but it was not the blood of goats and calves. No, he took his own blood, and with it he, by himself, made sure of our eternal salvation.