The One Year Bible TLB (196 page)
Read The One Year Bible TLB Online
Authors: Tyndale
My son, how I will rejoice if you become a man of common sense. Yes, my heart will thrill to your thoughtful, wise words.
September 17O Lord, I will honor and praise your name, for you are my God; you do such wonderful things! You planned them long ago, and now you have accomplished them, just as you said!
2
You turn mighty cities into heaps of ruins. The strongest forts are turned to rubble. Beautiful palaces in distant lands disappear and will never be rebuilt.
3
Therefore strong nations will shake with fear before you; ruthless nations will obey and glorify your name.
4
But to the poor, O Lord, you are a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat, a shelter from merciless men who are like a driving rain that melts down an earthen wall.
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As a hot, dry land is cooled by clouds, you will cool the pride of ruthless nations.
6
Here on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, the Lord Almighty will spread a wondrous feast for everyone around the world—a delicious feast of good food, with clear, well-aged wine and choice beef.
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At that time he will remove the cloud of gloom, the pall of death that hangs over the earth;
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he will swallow up death forever. The Lord God will wipe away all tears and take away forever all insults and mockery against his land and people. The Lord has spoken—he will surely do it!
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In that day the people will proclaim, “This is our God in whom we trust, for whom we waited. Now at last he is here.” What a day of rejoicing!
10
For the Lord’s good hand will rest upon Jerusalem, and Moab will be crushed as straw beneath his feet and left to rot.
11
God will push them down just as a swimmer pushes down the water with his hands. He will end their pride and all their evil works.
12
The high walls of Moab will be demolished and brought to dust.
26:
1
Listen to them singing! In that day the whole land of Judah will sing this song:
“Our city is strong! We are surrounded by the walls of his salvation!”
2
Open the gates to everyone, for all may enter in who love the Lord.
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He will keep in perfect peace all those who trust in him, whose thoughts turn often to the Lord!
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Trust in the Lord God always, for in the Lord Jehovah is your everlasting strength.
5
He humbles the proud and brings the haughty city to the dust; its walls come crashing down.
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He presents it to the poor and needy for their use.
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But for good men the path is not uphill and rough! God does not give them a rough and treacherous path, but smooths the road before them.
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O Lord, we love to do your will! Our hearts’ desire is to glorify your name.
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All night long I search for you; earnestly I seek for God; for only when you come in judgment on the earth to punish it will people turn away from wickedness and do what is right.
10
Your kindness to the wicked doesn’t make them good; they keep on doing wrong and take no notice of your majesty.
11
They do not listen when you threaten; they will not look to see your upraised fist. Show them how much you love your people. Perhaps then they will be ashamed! Yes, let them be burned up by the fire reserved for your enemies.
12
Lord, grant us peace; for all we have and are has come from you.
13
O Lord our God, once we worshiped other gods; but now we worship you alone.
14
Those we served before are dead and gone; never again will they return. You came against them and destroyed them, and they are long forgotten.
15
O praise the Lord! He has made our nation very great. He has widened the boundaries of our land!
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Lord, in their distress they sought for you. When your punishment was on them, they poured forth a whispered prayer.
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How we missed your presence, Lord! We suffered as a woman giving birth who cries and writhes in pain.
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We too have writhed in agony, but all to no avail. No deliverance has come from all our efforts.
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Yet we have this assurance: Those who belong to God shall live again. Their bodies shall rise again! Those who dwell in the dust shall awake and sing for joy! For God’s light of life will fall like dew upon them!
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Go home, my people, and lock the doors! Hide for a little while until the Lord’s wrath against your enemies has passed.
21
Look! The Lord is coming from the heavens to punish the people of the earth for their sins. The earth will no longer hide the murderers. The guilty will be found.
27:
1
In that day the Lord will take his terrible, swift sword and punish leviathan, the swiftly moving serpent, the coiling, writhing serpent, the dragon of the sea.
2
In that day of Israel’s freedom
*
let this anthem be their song:
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Israel
*
is my vineyard; I, the Lord, will tend the fruitful vines; every day I’ll water them, and day and night I’ll watch to keep all enemies away.
4-5
My anger against Israel is gone. If I find thorns and briars bothering her, I will burn them up, unless these enemies of mine surrender and beg for peace and my protection.
6
The time will come when Israel will take root and bud and blossom and fill the whole earth with her fruit!
7-8
Has God punished Israel as much as he has punished her enemies? No, for he has devastated her enemies,
*
while he has punished Israel but a little, exiling her far from her own land as though blown away in a storm from the east.
9
And why did God do it? It was to purge away
*
her sins, to rid her of all her idol altars and her idols. They will never be worshiped again.
10
Her walled cities will be silent and empty, houses abandoned, streets grown up with grass, cows grazing through the city munching on twigs and branches.
11
My people are like the dead branches of a tree, broken off and used to burn beneath the pots. They are a foolish nation, a witless, stupid people, for they turn away from God. Therefore, he who made them will not have pity on them or show them his mercy.
12
Yet the time will come when the Lord will gather them together one by one like hand-picked grain, selecting them here and there from his great threshing floor that reaches all the way from the Euphrates River to the Egyptian boundary.
13
In that day the great trumpet will be blown, and many about to perish among their enemies, Assyria and Egypt, will be rescued and brought back to Jerusalem to worship the Lord in his holy mountain.
28:
1
Woe to the city of Samaria, surrounded by her rich valley—Samaria, the pride and delight of the drunkards of Israel! Woe to her fading beauty, the crowning glory of a nation of men lying drunk in the streets!
2
For the Lord will send a mighty army (the Assyrians) against you; like a mighty hailstorm he will burst upon you and dash you to the ground.
3
The proud city of Samaria—yes, the joy and delight of the drunkards of Israel—will be hurled to the ground and trampled beneath the enemies’ feet.
4
Once glorious, her fading beauty surrounded by a fertile valley will suddenly be gone, greedily snatched away as an early fig is hungrily snatched and gobbled up!
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Then at last the Lord Almighty himself will be their crowning glory, the diadem of beauty to his people who are left.
6
He will give a longing for justice to your judges and great courage to your soldiers who are battling to the last before your gates.
7
But Jerusalem is now led by drunks! Her priests and prophets reel and stagger, making stupid errors and mistakes.
8
Their tables are covered with vomit; filth is everywhere.
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“Who does Isaiah think he is,” the people say, “to speak to us like this! Are we little children, barely old enough to talk?
10
He tells us everything over and over again, a line at a time and in such simple words!”
11
But they won’t listen; the only language they can understand is punishment! So God will punish them by sending against them foreigners who speak strange gibberish! Only then will they listen to him!
12
They could have rest in their own land if they would obey him, if they were kind and good. He told them that, but they wouldn’t listen to him.
13
So the Lord will spell it out for them again, repeating it over and over in simple words whenever he can; yet over this simple, straightforward message they will stumble and fall and be broken, trapped and captured.
Yes, and those who depend on the Jewish laws to save them are under God’s curse, for the Scriptures point out very clearly, “Cursed is everyone who at any time breaks a single one of these laws that are written in God’s Book of the Law.”
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Consequently, it is clear that no one can ever win God’s favor by trying to keep the Jewish laws because God has said that the only way we can be right in his sight is by faith. As the prophet Habakkuk says it, “The man who finds life will find it through trusting God.”
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How different from this way of faith is the way of law, which says that a man is saved by obeying every law of God, without one slip.
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But Christ has bought us out from under the doom of that impossible system by taking the curse for our wrongdoing upon himself. For it is written in the Scripture, “Anyone who is hanged on a tree is cursed” (as Jesus was hung upon a wooden cross
*
).
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Now God can bless the Gentiles, too, with this same blessing he promised to Abraham; and all of us as Christians can have the promised Holy Spirit through this faith.
15
Dear brothers, even in everyday life a promise made by one man to another, if it is written down and signed, cannot be changed. He cannot decide afterward to do something else instead.
16
Now, God gave some promises to Abraham and his Child. And notice that it doesn’t say the promises were to his
children,
as it would if all his sons—all the Jews—were being spoken of, but to his
Child—
and that, of course, means Christ.
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Here’s what I am trying to say: God’s promise to save through faith—and God wrote this promise down and signed it—could not be canceled or changed four hundred and thirty years later when God gave the Ten Commandments.
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If
obeying those laws
could save us, then it is obvious that this would be a different way of gaining God’s favor than Abraham’s way, for he simply accepted God’s promise.
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Well then, why were the laws given? They were added after the promise was given, to show men how guilty they are of breaking God’s laws. But this system of law was to last only until the coming of Christ, the Child to whom God’s promise was made. (And there is this further difference. God gave his laws to angels to give to Moses, who then gave them to the people;
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but when God gave his promise to Abraham, he did it by himself alone, without angels or Moses as go-betweens.)
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Well then, are God’s laws and God’s promises against each other? Of course not! If we could be saved by his laws, then God would not have had to give us a different way to get out of the grip of sin—for the Scriptures insist we are all its prisoners. The only way out is through faith in Jesus Christ; the way of escape is open to all who believe him.
O God, listen to me! Hear my prayer!
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For wherever I am, though far away at the ends of the earth, I will cry to you for help. When my heart is faint and overwhelmed, lead me to the mighty, towering Rock of safety.
3
For you are my refuge, a high tower where my enemies can never reach me.
4
I shall live forever in your tabernacle; oh, to be safe beneath the shelter of your wings!
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For you have heard my vows, O God, to praise
*
you every day, and you have given me the blessings you reserve for those who reverence your name.
6
You will give me
*
added years of life, as rich and full as those of many generations, all packed into one.
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And I shall live before the Lord forever. Oh, send your loving-kindness and truth to guard and watch over me,
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and I will praise your name continually, fulfilling my vow of praising you each day.