Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

(By David for praise.)

The Lord Is Kind and Merciful

Turn to the Lord

1 ^(A) I am the prophet Zechariah, the son of Berechiah and the grandson of Iddo.

In the eighth month of the second year that Darius was king of Persia,^[a] the Lord told me to say:

^2-3 Israel, I, the Lord All-Powerful, was very angry with your ancestors. But if you people will return to me, I will turn and help you. ⁴ Don't be stubborn like your ancestors. They were warned by the earlier prophets^[b] to give up their evil and turn back to me, but they paid no attention.

⁵ Where are your ancestors now? Not even prophets live forever. ⁶ But my warnings and my words spoken by the prophets caught up with your ancestors. So they turned back to me and said, “Lord All-Powerful, you have punished us for our sins, just as you had planned.”

First Vision: Horses and Riders

^7-8 (B) On the twenty-fourth day of Shebat,^[c] which was the eleventh month of that same year,^[d] the Lord spoke to me in a vision during the night: In a valley among myrtle trees,^[e] I saw someone on a red horse, with riders on red, brown, and white horses behind him. ⁹ An angel was there to explain things to me, and I asked, “Sir, who are these riders?”

“I'll tell you,” the angel answered.

¹⁰ At once, the man standing among the myrtle trees said, “These are the ones the Lord has sent to find out what's happening on earth.”

¹¹ Then the riders spoke to the Lord's angel, who was standing among the myrtle trees, and they said, “We have gone everywhere and have discovered that the whole world is at peace.”

¹² At this, the angel said, “Lord All-Powerful, for 70 years you have been angry with Jerusalem and the towns of Judah. When are you ever going to have mercy on them?”

¹³ The Lord's answer was kind and comforting. ¹⁴ So the angel told me to announce:

I, the Lord All-Powerful, am very protective of Jerusalem. ¹⁵ For a while I was angry at the nations, but now I am furious, because they have made things worse for Jerusalem and are not the least bit concerned. ¹⁶ And so, I will have pity on Jerusalem. The city will be completely rebuilt, and my temple will stand again. ¹⁷ I also promise that my towns will prosper—Jerusalem will once again be my chosen city, and I will comfort the people of Zion.

²² The crowd listened until Paul said this. Then they started shouting, “Get rid of this man! He doesn't deserve to live.” ²³ They kept shouting. They waved their clothes around and threw dust into the air.

Paul and the Roman Army Commander

²⁴ The Roman commander ordered Paul to be taken into the fortress and beaten with a whip. He did this to find out why the people were screaming at Paul.

²⁵ While the soldiers were tying Paul up to be beaten, he asked the officer standing there, “Is it legal to beat a Roman citizen before he has been tried in court?”

²⁶ When the officer heard this, he went to the commander and said, “What are you doing? This man is a Roman citizen!”

²⁷ The commander went to Paul and asked, “Tell me, are you a Roman citizen?”

“Yes,” Paul answered.

²⁸ The commander then said, “I paid a lot of money to become a Roman citizen.”^[a]

But Paul replied, “I was born a Roman citizen.”

²⁹ The men who were about to beat and question Paul quickly backed off. And the commander himself was frightened when he realized that he had put a Roman citizen in chains.

Paul Is Tried by the Council

³⁰ The next day the commander wanted to know the real reason why the Jewish leaders had brought charges against Paul. So he had Paul's chains removed, and he ordered the chief priests and the whole council to meet. Then he had Paul led in and made him stand in front of them.

23 Paul looked straight at the council members and said, “My friends, to this day I have served God with a clear conscience!”

² Then Ananias the high priest ordered the men standing beside Paul to hit him on the mouth. ^3 (A) Paul turned to the high priest and said, “You whitewashed wall!^[b] God will hit you. You sit there to judge me by the Law of Moses. But at the same time you order men to break the Law by hitting me.”

⁴ The men standing beside Paul asked, “Don't you know you are insulting God's high priest?”

^5 (B) Paul replied, “Oh! I didn't know he was the high priest. The Scriptures do tell us not to speak evil about a leader of our people.”

^6 (C) When Paul saw that some of the council members were Sadducees and others were Pharisees, he shouted, “My friends, I am a Pharisee and the son of a Pharisee. I am on trial simply because I believe that the dead will be raised to life.”

⁷ As soon as Paul said this, the Pharisees and the Sadducees got into a big argument, and the council members started taking sides. ^8 (D) The Sadducees do not believe in angels or spirits or that the dead will rise to life. But the Pharisees believe in all of these, ⁹ and so there was a lot of shouting. Some of the teachers of the Law of Moses were Pharisees. Finally, they became angry and said, “We don't find anything wrong with this man. Maybe a spirit or an angel really did speak to him.”

¹⁰ The argument became fierce, and the commander was afraid that Paul would be pulled apart. So he ordered the soldiers to go in and rescue Paul. Then they took him back into the fortress.

¹¹ That night the Lord stood beside Paul and said, “Don't worry! Just as you have told others about me in Jerusalem, you must also tell about me in Rome.”