Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

99 Jehovah is King! Let the nations tremble! He is enthroned between the Guardian Angels. Let the whole earth shake.

² Jehovah sits in majesty in Zion, supreme above all rulers of the earth. ³ Let them reverence your great and holy name.

⁴ This mighty King is determined to give justice. Fairness is the touchstone of everything he does. He gives justice throughout Israel. ⁵ Exalt the Lord our holy God! Bow low before his feet.

⁶ When Moses and Aaron and Samuel, his prophet, cried to him for help, he answered them. ⁷ He spoke to them from the pillar of cloud, and they followed his instructions. ⁸ O Jehovah our God! You answered them and forgave their sins, yet punished them when they went wrong.

⁹ Exalt the Lord our God and worship at his holy mountain in Jerusalem, for he is holy.

⁶ I say it yet again: Jehovah your God is not giving you this good land because you are good, for you are not—you are a wicked, stubborn people.

⁷ “Don’t you remember (oh, never forget it!) how continually angry you made the Lord your God out in the wilderness, from the day you left Egypt until now? For all this time you have constantly rebelled against him.

⁸ “Don’t you remember how angry you made him at Mount Horeb? He was ready to destroy you. ⁹ I was on the mountain at the time, receiving the contract which Jehovah had made with you—the stone tablets with the laws inscribed upon them. I was there for forty days and forty nights, and all that time I ate nothing. I didn’t even take a drink of water. ^10-11 At the end of those forty days and nights the Lord gave me the contract, the tablets on which he had written the commandments he had spoken from the fire-covered mountain while the people had watched below. ¹² He told me to go down quickly because the people I had led out of Egypt had defiled themselves, quickly turning away from the laws of God, and had made an idol from molten metal.

^13-14 “‘Let me alone that I may destroy this evil, stubborn people!’ the Lord told me, ‘and I will blot out their name from under heaven, and I will make a mighty nation of you, mightier and greater than they are.’

10 In Caesarea there lived a Roman army officer, Cornelius, a captain of an Italian regiment. ² He was a godly man, deeply reverent, as was his entire household. He gave generously to charity and was a man of prayer. ³ While wide awake one afternoon he had a vision—it was about three o’clock—and in this vision he saw an angel of God coming toward him.

“Cornelius!” the angel said.

⁴ Cornelius stared at him in terror. “What do you want, sir?” he asked the angel.

And the angel replied, “Your prayers and charities have not gone unnoticed by God! ^5-6 Now send some men to Joppa to find a man named Simon Peter, who is staying with Simon, the tanner, down by the shore, and ask him to come and visit you.”

⁷ As soon as the angel was gone, Cornelius called two of his household servants and a godly soldier, one of his personal bodyguard, ⁸ and told them what had happened and sent them off to Joppa.