Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

95 Oh, come, let us sing to the Lord! Give a joyous shout in honor of the Rock of our salvation!

² Come before him with thankful hearts. Let us sing him psalms of praise. ³ For the Lord is a great God, the great King of^[a] all gods. ⁴ He controls the formation of the depths of the earth and the mightiest mountains; all are his. ⁵ He made the sea and formed the land; they too are his. ⁶ Come, kneel before the Lord our Maker, ⁷ for he is our God. We are his sheep, and he is our Shepherd. Oh, that you would hear him calling you today and come to him!

⁸ Don’t harden your hearts as Israel did in the wilderness^[b] at Meribah and Massah. ⁹ For there your fathers doubted me, though they had seen so many of my miracles before. My patience was severely tried by their complaints. ¹⁰ “For forty years I watched them in disgust,” the Lord God says. “They were a nation whose thoughts and heart were far away from me. They refused to accept my laws. ¹¹ Therefore, in mighty wrath I swore that they would never enter the Promised Land, the place of rest I planned for them.”

16 Now they left Elim and journeyed on into the Sihn Desert, between Elim and Mount Sinai, arriving there on the fifteenth day of the second month after leaving Egypt. ² There, too, the people spoke bitterly against Moses and Aaron.

³ “Oh, that we were back in Egypt,” they moaned, “and that the Lord had killed us there! For there we had plenty to eat. But now you have brought us into this wilderness to kill us with starvation.”

⁴ Then the Lord said to Moses, “Look, I’m going to rain down food from heaven for them. Everyone can go out each day and gather as much food as he needs. And I will test them in this, to see whether they will follow my instructions or not. ⁵ Tell them to gather twice as much as usual on the sixth day of each week.”

⁶ Then Moses and Aaron called a meeting of all the people of Israel and told them, “This evening you will realize that it was the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt. ^7-9 In the morning you will see more of his glory; for he has heard your complaints against him (for you aren’t really complaining against us—who are we?). The Lord will give you meat to eat in the evening, and bread in the morning. Come now before Jehovah and hear his reply to your complaints.”

¹⁵ Christ is the exact likeness of the unseen God. He existed before God made anything at all,^[a] and, in fact, ¹⁶ Christ himself is the Creator who made everything in heaven and earth, the things we can see and the things we can’t; the spirit world with its kings and kingdoms, its rulers and authorities; all were made by Christ for his own use and glory. ¹⁷ He was before all else began and it is his power that holds everything together. ¹⁸ He is the Head of the body made up of his people—that is, his Church—which he began; and he is the Leader of all those who arise from the dead,^[b] so that he is first in everything; ¹⁹ for God wanted all of himself to be in his Son.

²⁰ It was through what his Son did that God cleared a path for everything to come to him—all things in heaven and on earth—for Christ’s death on the cross has made peace with God for all by his blood. ²¹ This includes you who were once so far away from God. You were his enemies and hated him and were separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions, yet now he has brought you back as his friends. ²² He has done this through the death on the cross of his own human body, and now as a result Christ has brought you into the very presence of God, and you are standing there before him with nothing left against you—nothing left that he could even chide you for; ²³ the only condition is that you fully believe the Truth, standing in it steadfast and firm, strong in the Lord, convinced of the Good News that Jesus died for you, and never shifting from trusting him to save you. This is the wonderful news that came to each of you and is now spreading all over the world. And I, Paul, have the joy of telling it to others.