Sunday, September 22, 2019

Deuteronomy 32:15–35

¹⁵Jeshurun grew fat and kicked; filled with food, he became heavy and sleek. He abandoned the God who made him and rejected the Rock his Savior.

¹⁶They made him jealous with their foreign gods and angered him with their detestable idols.

¹⁷They sacrificed to demons, which are not God-- gods they had not known, gods that recently appeared, gods your fathers did not fear.

¹⁸You deserted the Rock, who fathered you; you forgot the God who gave you birth.

¹⁹The LORD saw this and rejected them because he was angered by his sons and daughters.

²⁰"I will hide my face from them," he said, "and see what their end will be; for they are a perverse generation, children who are unfaithful.

²¹They made me jealous by what is no god and angered me with their worthless idols. I will make them envious by those who are not a people; I will make them angry by a nation that has no understanding.

²²For a fire has been kindled by my wrath, one that burns to the realm of death below. It will devour the earth and its harvests and set afire the foundations of the mountains.

²³"I will heap calamities upon them and spend my arrows against them.

²⁴I will send wasting famine against them, consuming pestilence and deadly plague; I will send against them the fangs of wild beasts, the venom of vipers that glide in the dust.

²⁵In the street the sword will make them childless; in their homes terror will reign. Young men and young women will perish, infants and gray-haired men.

²⁶I said I would scatter them and blot out their memory from mankind, ²⁷but I dreaded the taunt of the enemy, lest the adversary misunderstand and say, 'Our hand has triumphed; the LORD has not done all this.' "

²⁸They are a nation without sense, there is no discernment in them.

²⁹If only they were wise and would understand this and discern what their end will be!

³⁰How could one man chase a thousand, or two put ten thousand to flight, unless their Rock had sold them, unless the LORD had given them up?

³¹For their rock is not like our Rock, as even our enemies concede.

³²Their vine comes from the vine of Sodom and from the fields of Gomorrah. Their grapes are filled with poison, and their clusters with bitterness.

³³Their wine is the venom of serpents, the deadly poison of cobras.

³⁴"Have I not kept this in reserve and sealed it in my vaults? ³⁵It is mine to avenge; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them."

Psalm 81

¹For the director of music. According to [gittith.] Of Asaph. Sing for joy to God our strength; shout aloud to the God of Jacob! ²Begin the music, strike the tambourine, play the melodious harp and lyre. ³Sound the ram's horn at the New Moon, and when the moon is full, on the day of our Feast; ⁴this is a decree for Israel, an ordinance of the God of Jacob. ⁵He established it as a statute for Joseph when he went out against Egypt, where we heard a language we did not understand. ⁶He says, "I removed the burden from their shoulders; their hands were set free from the basket. ⁷In your distress you called and I rescued you, I answered you out of a thundercloud; I tested you at the waters of Meribah. [Selah] ⁸"Hear, O my people, and I will warn you-- if you would but listen to me, O Israel! ⁹You shall have no foreign god among you; you shall not bow down to an alien god. ¹⁰I am the LORD your God, who brought you up out of Egypt. Open wide your mouth and I will fill it. ¹¹"But my people would not listen to me; Israel would not submit to me. ¹²So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts to follow their own devices. ¹³"If my people would but listen to me, if Israel would follow my ways, ¹⁴how quickly would I subdue their enemies and turn my hand against their foes! ¹⁵Those who hate the LORD would cringe before him, and their punishment would last forever. ¹⁶But you would be fed with the finest of wheat; with honey from the rock I would satisfy you."

Luke 6:12–19

¹²One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God. ¹³When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles: ¹⁴Simon (whom he named Peter), his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, ¹⁵Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called the Zealot, ¹⁶Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.

¹⁷He went down with them and stood on a level place. A large crowd of his disciples was there and a great number of people from all over Judea, from Jerusalem, and from the coast of Tyre and Sidon, ¹⁸who had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases. Those troubled by evil spirits were cured, ¹⁹and the people all tried to touch him, because power was coming from him and healing them all.