Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)
A Prayer for Protection[a]
44 With our own ears we have heard it, O God—
our ancestors have told us about it,
about the great things you did in their time,
in the days of long ago:
2 how you yourself drove out the heathen
and established your people in their land;
how you punished the other nations
and caused your own to prosper.
3 Your people did not conquer the land with their swords;
they did not win it by their own power;
it was by your power and your strength,
by the assurance of your presence,
which showed that you loved them.
4 You are my king and my God;
you give[b] victory to your people,
5 and by your power we defeat our enemies.
6 I do not trust in my bow
or in my sword to save me;
7 but you have saved us from our enemies
and defeated those who hate us.
8 We will always praise you
and give thanks to you forever.
9 But now you have rejected us and let us be defeated;
you no longer march out with our armies.
10 You made us run from our enemies,
and they took for themselves what was ours.
11 You allowed us to be slaughtered like sheep;
you scattered us in foreign countries.
12 You sold your own people for a small price
as though they had little value.[c]
13 Our neighbors see what you did to us,
and they mock us and laugh at us.
14 You have made us a joke among the nations;
they shake their heads at us in scorn.
15 I am always in disgrace;
I am covered with shame
16 from hearing the sneers and insults
of my enemies and those who hate me.
17 All this has happened to us,
even though we have not forgotten you
or broken the covenant you made with us.
18 We have not been disloyal to you;
we have not disobeyed your commands.
19 Yet you left us helpless among wild animals;
you abandoned us in deepest darkness.
20 If we had stopped worshiping our God
and prayed to a foreign god,
21 you would surely have discovered it,
because you know our secret thoughts.
22 (A)But it is on your account that we are being killed all the time,
that we are treated like sheep to be slaughtered.
23 Wake up, Lord! Why are you asleep?
Rouse yourself Don't reject us forever!
24 Why are you hiding from us?
Don't forget our suffering and trouble!
25 We fall crushed to the ground;
we lie defeated in the dust.
26 Come to our aid!
Because of your constant love save us!
The People's Insincere Repentance
6 The people say, “Let's return to the Lord! He has hurt us, but he will be sure to heal us; he has wounded us, but he will bandage our wounds, won't he? 2 In two or three days he will revive us, and we will live in his presence. 3 Let us try to know the Lord. He will come to us as surely as the day dawns, as surely as the spring rains fall upon the earth.”
4 But the Lord says, “Israel and Judah, what am I going to do with you? Your love for me disappears as quickly as morning mist; it is like dew, that vanishes early in the day. 5 That is why I have sent my prophets to you with my message of judgment and destruction. What I want from you is plain and clear: 6 (A)I want your constant love, not your animal sacrifices. I would rather have my people know me than burn offerings to me.
7 “But as soon as they entered the land at Adam,[a] they broke the covenant I had made with them. 8 Gilead is a city full of evil people and murderers. 9 The priests are like a gang of robbers who wait in ambush for someone. Even on the road to the holy place at Shechem they commit murder. And they do all this evil deliberately! 10 I have seen a horrible thing in Israel: my people have defiled themselves by worshiping idols.
Israel and the Gospel
30 So we say that the Gentiles, who were not trying to put themselves right with God, were put right with him through faith; 31 while God's people, who were seeking a law that would put them right with God, did not find it. 32 And why not? Because they did not depend on faith but on what they did. And so they stumbled over the “stumbling stone” 33 (A)that the scripture speaks of:
“Look, I place in Zion a stone
that will make people stumble,
a rock that will make them fall.
But whoever believes in him will not be disappointed.”
10 My friends, how I wish with all my heart that my own people might be saved! How I pray to God for them! 2 I can assure you that they are deeply devoted to God; but their devotion is not based on true knowledge. 3 They have not known the way in which God puts people right with himself, and instead, they have tried to set up their own way; and so they did not submit themselves to God's way of putting people right. 4 For Christ has brought the Law to an end, so that everyone who believes is put right with God.
Good News Translation® (Today’s English Version, Second Edition) © 1992 American Bible Society. All rights reserved. For more information about GNT, visit www.bibles.com and www.gnt.bible.