Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

99 The LORD reigns! Let the people tremble. He sits between the Cherubims. Let the Earth be moved!

² The LORD is great in Zion; and He is high above all the people.

³ They shall praise Your great and fearful Name (It is Holy).

⁴ Also, the King’s power loves judgment. You establish equity. You have executed judgment and justice in Jacob.

⁵ Exalt the LORD our God and bow down before His footstool. He is Holy.

⁶ Moses and Aaron were among His Priests, and Samuel among such as call upon His Name. These called upon the LORD and He heard them.

⁷ He spoke to them in the cloudy pillar. They kept His testimonies, the Law which He gave them.

⁸ You heard them, O LORD our God. You were a favorable God to them, though You took vengeance for their evil deeds.

⁹ Exalt the LORD our God and bow down before His Holy Mountain; for the LORD our God is Holy. A Psalm of praise

¹¹ And Elkanah went to Ramah, to his house, and the child ministered to the LORD before Eli the Priest.

¹² Now the sons of Eli were wicked men and did not know the LORD.

¹³ For the Priests’ custom toward the people was this: when any man offered sacrifice, the Priest’s boy came with a three-toothed fleshhook in his hand while the flesh was boiling,

¹⁴ and thrust it into the kettle or into the caldron or into the pan, or into the pot. All that the fleshhook would bring up the Priest took for himself. Thus they did to all the Israelites who came there to Shiloh.

¹⁵ Yea, before they burnt the fat, the Priest’s boy came and said to the man who offered, “Give me flesh to roast for the Priest. For he will not have boiled flesh from you, but raw.”

¹⁶ And if any man said to him, “Let them burn the fat according to the custom, then take as much as your heart desires,” then he would answer, “No, but you shall give it now. And if you will not, I will take it by force.”

¹⁷ Therefore, the sin of the young men was very great before the LORD; for men abhorred the Offering of the LORD.

¹⁹ You will then say to me: “Why does He still find fault? For who has resisted His will?”

²⁰ But who are you, O man, to contradict God? Shall the thing formed say to Him Who formed it, “Why have you made me this way”?

²¹ Does not indeed the potter have authority over the clay to make, from the same lump, one vessel unto honor and another unto dishonor?

²² What if God – though willing to show His wrath, and to make His power known - endured with much patience the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction?

²³ That in so doing, He might declare the riches of His Glory upon the vessels of mercy, which He has prepared unto Glory -

²⁴ even we whom He has called - not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles.

²⁵ As He also says in Hosea: “I will call them ‘My people’ who were not my people; and her ‘Beloved’ who was not beloved.

²⁶ “And it shall be in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people’. There they shall be called ‘The sons of the living God’.”

²⁷ Also, Isaiah cries concerning Israel: “Though the number of the sons of Israel were as the sand of the sea, the remnant shall be saved.

²⁸ “For He will finish the work and cut it short in righteousness, because the Lord will make a short work upon the Earth.”

²⁹ And as Isaiah said before: “Except that the Lord of hosts had left us a seed, we had been made as Sodom, and had been like Gomorrah.”