Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

127 Unless the Lord builds a house, the builders’ work is useless. Unless the Lord protects a city, sentries do no good. ² It is senseless for you to work so hard from early morning until late at night, fearing you will starve to death; for God wants his loved ones to get their proper rest.

³ Children are a gift from God; they are his reward. ⁴ Children born to a young man are like sharp arrows to defend him.

⁵ Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them. That man shall have the help he needs when arguing with his enemies.^[a]

¹¹ And all the people standing there and the witnesses replied, “We are witnesses. May the Lord make this woman, who has now come into your home, as fertile as Rachel and Leah, from whom all the nation of Israel descended! May you be a great and successful man in Bethlehem, ¹² and may the descendants the Lord will give you from this young woman be as numerous and honorable as those of our ancestor Perez, the son of Tamar and Judah.”

¹³ So Boaz married Ruth, and when he slept with her, the Lord gave her a son.

¹⁴ And the women of the city said to Naomi, “Bless the Lord who has given you this little grandson; may he be famous in Israel. ¹⁵ May he restore your youth and take care of you in your old age; for he is the son of your daughter-in-law who loves you so much, and who has been kinder to you than seven sons!”

^16-17 Naomi took care of the baby, and the neighbor women said, “Now at last Naomi has a son again!”

And they named him Obed. He was the father of Jesse and grandfather of King David.

¹⁵ Christ came with this new agreement so that all who are invited may come and have forever all the wonders God has promised them. For Christ died to rescue them from the penalty of the sins they had committed while still under that old system.

¹⁶ Now, if someone dies and leaves a will—a list of things to be given away to certain people when he dies—no one gets anything until it is proved that the person who wrote the will is dead. ¹⁷ The will goes into effect only after the death of the person who wrote it. While he is still alive no one can use it to get any of those things he has promised them.

¹⁸ That is why blood was sprinkled as proof of Christ’s death^[a] before even the first agreement could go into effect. ¹⁹ For after Moses had given the people all of God’s laws, he took the blood of calves and goats, along with water, and sprinkled the blood over the book of God’s laws and over all the people, using branches of hyssop bushes and scarlet wool to sprinkle with. ²⁰ Then he said, “This is the blood that marks the beginning of the agreement between you and God, the agreement God commanded me to make with you.” ²¹ And in the same way he sprinkled blood on the sacred tent and on whatever instruments were used for worship. ²² In fact we can say that under the old agreement almost everything was cleansed by sprinkling it with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.

²³ That is why the sacred tent down here on earth and everything in it—all copied from things in heaven—all had to be made pure by Moses in this way, by being sprinkled with the blood of animals. But the real things in heaven, of which these down here are copies, were made pure with far more precious offerings.

²⁴ For Christ has entered into heaven itself to appear now before God as our Friend. It was not in the earthly place of worship that he did this, for that was merely a copy of the real temple in heaven.