Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

128 Blessings on all who reverence and trust the Lord—on all who obey him!

² Their reward shall be prosperity and happiness. ³ Your wife shall be contented in your home. And look at all those children! There they sit around the dinner table as vigorous and healthy as young olive trees. ⁴ That is God’s reward to those who reverence and trust him.

⁵ May the Lord continually bless you with heaven’s blessings^[a] as well as with human joys. ⁶ May you live to enjoy your grandchildren! And may God bless Israel!

4 When all the people were safely across, the Lord said to Joshua, ^2-3 “Tell the twelve men chosen for a special task, one from each tribe, each to take a stone from where the priests are standing in the middle of the Jordan, and to carry them out and pile them up as a monument at the place where you camp tonight.”

⁴ So Joshua summoned the twelve men ⁵ and told them, “Go out into the middle of the Jordan where the Ark is. Each of you is to carry out a stone on your shoulder—twelve stones in all, one for each of the twelve tribes. ⁶ We will use them to build a monument so that in the future, when your children ask, ‘What is this monument for?’ ⁷ you can tell them, ‘It is to remind us that the Jordan River stopped flowing when the Ark of God went across!’ The monument will be a permanent reminder to the people of Israel of this amazing miracle.”

⁸ So the men did as Joshua told them. They took twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan River—one for each tribe, just as the Lord had commanded Joshua. They carried them to the place where they were camped for the night and constructed a monument there. ⁹ Joshua also built another monument of twelve stones in the middle of the river, at the place where the priests were standing; and it is there to this day. ¹⁰ The priests who were carrying the Ark stood in the middle of the river until all these instructions of the Lord, which had been given to Joshua by Moses, had been carried out. Meanwhile, the people had hurried across the riverbed, ¹¹ and when everyone was over, the people watched the priests carry the Ark up out of the riverbed.

^12-13 The troops of Reuben, Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh—fully armed as Moses had instructed, and forty thousand strong—led the other tribes of the Lord’s army across to the plains of Jericho.

¹⁴ It was a tremendous day for Joshua! The Lord made him great in the eyes of all the people of Israel, and they revered him as much as they had Moses and respected him deeply all the rest of his life. ^15-16 For it was Joshua who, at the Lord’s command, issued the orders to the priests carrying the Ark.

“Come up from the riverbed,” the Lord now told him to command them.

¹⁷ So Joshua issued the order. ¹⁸ And as soon as the priests came out, the water poured down again as usual and overflowed the banks of the river as before! ¹⁹ This miracle occurred on the 25th of March.^[a] That day the entire nation crossed the Jordan River and camped in Gilgal at the eastern edge of the city of Jericho; ²⁰ and there the twelve stones from the Jordan were piled up as a monument.

²¹ Then Joshua explained again the purpose of the stones: “In the future,” he said, “when your children ask you why these stones are here and what they mean, ²² you are to tell them that these stones are a reminder of this amazing miracle—that the nation of Israel crossed the Jordan River on dry ground! ²³ Tell them how the Lord our God dried up the river right before our eyes and then kept it dry until we were all across! It is the same thing the Lord did forty years ago^[b] at the Red Sea! ²⁴ He did this so that all the nations of the earth will realize that Jehovah is the mighty God, and so that all of you will worship him forever.”

¹³ And we will never stop thanking God for this: that when we preached to you, you didn’t think of the words we spoke as being just our own, but you accepted what we said as the very Word of God—which, of course, it was—and it changed your lives when you believed it.

¹⁴ And then, dear brothers, you suffered what the churches in Judea did, persecution from your own countrymen, just as they suffered from their own people, the Jews. ¹⁵ After they had killed their own prophets, they even executed the Lord Jesus; and now they have brutally persecuted us and driven us out. They are against both God and man, ¹⁶ trying to keep us from preaching to the Gentiles for fear some might be saved; and so their sins continue to grow. But the anger of God has caught up with them at last.

¹⁷ Dear brothers, after we left you and had been away from you but a very little while (though our hearts never left you), we tried hard to come back to see you once more. ¹⁸ We wanted very much to come, and I, Paul, tried again and again, but Satan stopped us. ¹⁹ For what is it we live for, that gives us hope and joy and is our proud reward and crown? It is you! Yes, you will bring us much joy as we stand together before our Lord Jesus Christ when he comes back again. ²⁰ For you are our trophy and joy.