Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

84 Unto the end, for the sons of Core, a psalm.

² Lord, thou hast blessed thy land: thou hast turned away the captivity of Jacob.

³ Thou hast forgiven the iniquity of thy people: thou hast covered all their sins.

⁴ Thou hast mitigated all thy anger: thou hast turned away from the wrath of thy indignation.

⁵ Convert us, O God our saviour: and turn off thy anger from us.

⁶ Wilt thou be angry with us for ever: or wilt thou extend thy wrath from generation to generation?

⁷ Thou wilt turn, O God, and bring us to life: and thy people shall rejoice in thee.

⁸ shew us, O Lord, thy mercy; and grant us thy salvation.

⁹ I will hear what the Lord God will speak in me: for he will speak peace unto his people: And unto his saints: and unto them that are converted to the heart.

¹⁰ Surely his salvation is near to them that fear him: that glory may dwell in our land.

¹¹ Mercy and truth have met each other: justice and peace have kissed.

¹² Truth is sprung out of the earth: and justice hath looked down from heaven.

¹³ For the Lord will give goodness: and our earth shall yield her fruit.

¹⁴ Justice shall walk before him: and shall set his steps in the way.

29 Now Ezechias began to reign, when he was five and twenty years old, and he reigned nine and twenty years in Jerusalem: the name of his mother was Abia, the daughter of Zacharias.

² And he did that which was pleasing in the sight of the Lord, according to all that David his father had done.

³ In the first year and month of his reign he opened the doors of the house of the Lord, and repaired them.

⁴ And he brought the priests and the Levites, and assembled them in the east street.

⁵ And he said to them: Hear me, ye Levites, and be sanctified, purify the house of the Lord the God of your fathers, and take away all filth out of the sanctuary.

⁶ Our fathers have sinned and done evil in the sight of the Lord God, forsaking him: they have turned away their faces from the tabernacle of the Lord, and turned their backs.

⁷ They have shut up the doors that were in tile porch, and put out the lamps. and have not burnt incense, nor offered holocausts in the sanctuary of the God of Israel.

⁸ Therefore the wrath of the Lord hath been stirred up against Juda and Jerusalem, and he hath delivered them to trouble, and to destruction, and to be hissed at, as you see with your eyes.

⁹ Behold, our fathers are fallen by the sword, our sons, and our daughters, and wives are led away captives for this wickedness.

¹⁰ Now therefore I have a mind that we make a covenant with the Lord the God of Israel, and he will turn away the wrath of his indignation from us.

¹¹ My sons, be not negligent: the Lord hath chosen you to stand before him, and to minister to him, and to worship him, and to burn incense to him.

¹⁶ And the priests went into the temple of the Lord to sanctify it, and brought out all the uncleanness that they found within to the entrance of the house of the Lord, and the Levites took it away, and carried it out abroad to the torrent Cedron.

¹⁷ And they began to cleanse on the first day of the first month, and on the eighth day of the same month they came into the porch of the temple of the Lord, and they purified the temple in eight days, and on the sixteenth day of the same month they finished what they had begun.

¹⁸ And they went is to king Ezechias, and said to him: We have sanctified all the house of the Lord, and the altar of holocaust, and the vessels thereof, and the table of proposition with all its vessels,

¹⁹ And all the furniture of the temple, which king Achaz in his reign had defiled, after his transgression; and behold they are all set forth before the altar of the Lord.

²³ It is necessary therefore that the patterns of heavenly things should be cleansed with these: but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.

²⁴ For Jesus is not entered into the holies made with hands, the patterns of the true: but into heaven itself, that he may appear now in the presence of God for us.

²⁵ Nor yet that he should offer himself often, as the high priest entereth into the holies, every year with the blood of others:

²⁶ For then he ought to have suffered often from the beginning of the world: but now once at the end of ages, he hath appeared for the destruction of sin, by the sacrifice of himself.

²⁷ And as it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment:

²⁸ So also Christ was offered once to exhaust the sins of many; the second time he shall appear without sin to them that expect him unto salvation.