Psalm 81

⁷For this is what the Lord says: “Sing with joy for Jacob; shout for the foremost of the nations! Make your praises heard, and say, ‘O Lord, save Your people, the remnant of Israel!’

¹For the choirmaster. A song. A Psalm. Make a joyful noise to God, all the earth!

¹A Psalm of thanksgiving. Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.

²Serve the Lord with gladness; come into His presence with joyful songs.

¹³I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.

¹For the choirmaster. According to Gittith. A Psalm of David. O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth! You have set Your glory above the heavens.

¹¹The Lord of Hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah

¹Hallelujah! Sing to the Lord a new song—His praise in the assembly of the godly.

²Let Israel rejoice in their Maker; let the children of Zion rejoice in their King.

¹⁶Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God.

³with the ten-stringed harp and the melody of the lyre.

²⁰Then Miriam the prophetess, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women followed her with tambourines and dancing.

¹⁹Speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your hearts to the Lord,

²⁶And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

²⁴“Speak to the Israelites and say, ‘On the first day of the seventh month you are to have a day of rest, a sacred assembly announced by trumpet blasts.

²⁵You must not do any regular work, but you are to present a food offering to the Lord.’”

³and you present a food offering to the Lord from the herd or flock to produce a pleasing aroma to the Lord—either a burnt offering or a sacrifice, for a special vow or freewill offering or appointed feast—

⁴Behold, I am about to build a house for the Name of the Lord my God to dedicate to Him for burning fragrant incense before Him, for displaying the showbread continuously, and for making burnt offerings every morning and evening as well as on the Sabbaths, New Moons, and appointed feasts of the Lord our God. This is ordained for Israel forever.

¹Then the Lord said to Moses,

²“Make two trumpets of hammered silver to be used for calling the congregation and for having the camps set out.

¹⁵For seven days you shall celebrate a feast to the Lord your God in the place He will choose, because the Lord your God will bless you in all your produce and in all the work of your hands, so that your joy will be complete.

¹⁴When Judah turned and discovered that the battle was both before and behind them, they cried out to the Lord. Then the priests blew the trumpets,

¹⁵Behold, I am bringing a distant nation against you, O house of Israel,” declares the Lord. “It is an established nation, an ancient nation, a nation whose language you do not know and whose speech you do not understand.

⁴⁹The Lord will bring a nation from afar, from the ends of the earth, to swoop down upon you like an eagle—a nation whose language you will not understand,

¹When Israel departed from Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of foreign tongue,

²¹It is written in the Law: “By strange tongues and foreign lips I will speak to this people, but even then they will not listen to Me, says the Lord.”

²²Tongues, then, are a sign, not for believers, but for unbelievers. Prophecy, however, is for believers, not for unbelievers.

¹¹Indeed, with mocking lips and foreign tongues, He will speak to this people

¹⁵With power You redeemed Your people, the sons of Jacob and Joseph. Selah

⁴For as in the day of Midian You have shattered the yoke of their burden, the bar across their shoulders, and the rod of their oppressor.

²⁷On that day the burden will be lifted from your shoulders, and the yoke from your neck. The yoke will be broken because your neck will be too large.

⁶Therefore tell the Israelites: ‘I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment.

²⁹Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

¹⁴and made their lives bitter with hard labor in brick and mortar, and with all kinds of work in the fields. Every service they imposed was harsh.

¹³Though you lie down among the sheepfolds, the wings of the dove are covered with silver, and her feathers with shimmering gold.”

¹⁹And as the sound of the ram’s horn grew louder and louder, Moses spoke and God answered him in the thunder.

¹³These were the waters of Meribah, where the Israelites quarreled with the Lord, and He showed His holiness among them.

²³After a long time, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned and cried out under their burden of slavery, and their cry for deliverance from bondage ascended to God.

¹⁵Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will honor Me.”

¹⁰As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up and saw the Egyptians marching after them, and they were terrified and cried out to the Lord.

³⁰That day the Lord saved Israel from the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the shore.

³¹When Israel saw the great power that the Lord had exercised over the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord and believed in Him and in His servant Moses.

⁷“Hear, O My people, and I will speak, O Israel, and I will testify against you: I am God, your God.

²⁶saying, “If you will listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God, and do what is right in His eyes, and pay attention to His commands, and keep all His statutes, then I will not bring on you any of the diseases I inflicted on the Egyptians. For I am the Lord who heals you.”

¹¹Truly, truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, and yet you people do not accept our testimony.

¹⁹If you are willing and obedient, you will eat the best of the land.

³Incline your ear and come to Me; listen, so that your soul may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant—My loving devotion promised to David.

⁴Behold, I have made him a witness to the nations, a leader and commander of the peoples.

⁹Even if we accept human testimony, the testimony of God is greater. For this is the testimony that God has given about His Son.

¹²I alone decreed and saved and proclaimed—I, and not some foreign god among you. So you are My witnesses,” declares the Lord, “that I am God.

¹²The Lord alone led him, and no foreign god was with him.

⁵For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as there are many so-called gods and lords),

⁶yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we exist. And there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we exist.

¹¹Judah has broken faith; an abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem. For Judah has profaned the Lord’s beloved sanctuary by marrying the daughter of a foreign god.

¹⁴Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you.

³You shall have no other gods before Me.

⁴You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in the heavens above, on the earth below, or in the waters beneath.

⁷If you remain in Me and My words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.

²“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

⁹For He satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things.

³⁷On the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stood up and called out in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink.

⁶And He told me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give freely from the spring of the water of life.

¹⁹of the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

²⁰Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us,

²³but this is what I commanded them: Obey Me, and I will be your God, and you will be My people. You must walk in all the ways I have commanded you, so that it may go well with you.

²⁴Yet they did not listen or incline their ear, but they followed the stubborn inclinations of their own evil hearts. They went backward and not forward.

¹⁸You ignored the Rock who brought you forth; you forgot the God who gave you birth.

¹¹Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they are not gods at all.) But My people have exchanged their Glory for useless idols.

¹²Be stunned by this, O heavens; be shocked and utterly appalled,” declares the Lord.

¹Now when the people saw that Moses was delayed in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this Moses who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him!”

¹¹But they refused to pay attention and turned a stubborn shoulder; they stopped up their ears from hearing.

³⁰They accepted none of my counsel; they despised all my reproof.

²⁴Yet they did not listen or incline their ear, but they followed the stubborn inclinations of their own evil hearts. They went backward and not forward.

²⁴Therefore God gave them over in the desires of their hearts to impurity for the dishonoring of their bodies with one another.

¹“Woe to the rebellious children,” declares the Lord, “to those who carry out a plan that is not Mine, who form an alliance, but against My will, heaping up sin upon sin.

⁴²But God turned away from them and gave them over to the worship of the host of heaven, as it is written in the book of the prophets: ‘Did you bring Me sacrifices and offerings forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel?

⁹The coming of the lawless one will be accompanied by the working of Satan, with every kind of power, sign, and false wonder,

¹⁰and with every wicked deception directed against those who are perishing, because they refused the love of the truth that would have saved them.

¹⁶In past generations, He let all nations go their own way.

²⁹If only they had such a heart to fear Me and keep all My commandments always, so that it might be well with them and with their children forever.

¹⁸If only you had paid attention to My commandments, your peace would have been like a river, and your righteousness like waves of the sea.

¹²And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God by walking in all His ways, to love Him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul,

¹³and to keep the commandments and statutes of the Lord that I am giving you this day for your own good?

⁴¹As Jesus approached Jerusalem and saw the city, He wept over it

⁴²and said, “If only you had known on this day what would bring you peace! But now it is hidden from your eyes.

³⁷O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those sent to her, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were unwilling!

²⁰So the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and He said, “Because this nation has transgressed the covenant I laid down for their fathers and has not heeded My voice,

²¹I will no longer drive out before them any of the nations Joshua left when he died.

⁸I will cut off the ruler of Ashdod and the one who wields the scepter in Ashkelon. I will turn My hand against Ekron, and the remnant of the Philistines will perish,” says the Lord God.

¹³know for sure that the Lord your God will no longer drive out these nations before you. Instead, they will become for you a snare and a trap, a scourge in your sides and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from this good land that the Lord your God has given you.

⁹Only do not rebel against the Lord, and do not be afraid of the people of the land, for they will be like bread for us. Their protection has been removed, and the Lord is with us. Do not be afraid of them!”

³He subdues nations beneath us, and peoples under our feet.

⁴⁵Then the Amalekites and Canaanites who lived in that part of the hill country came down, attacked them, and routed them all the way to Hormah.

¹⁰But those who hate Him He repays to their faces with destruction; He will not hesitate to repay to his face the one who hates Him.

³Because Your loving devotion is better than life, my lips will glorify You.

⁷because the mind of the flesh is hostile to God: It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so.

³⁰slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant, and boastful. They invent new forms of evil; they disobey their parents.

²⁰But Judah will be inhabited forever, and Jerusalem from generation to generation.

⁵You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on their children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me,

¹³He made him ride on the heights of the land and fed him the produce of the field. He nourished him with honey from the rock and oil from the flinty crag,

¹⁴with curds from the herd and milk from the flock, with the fat of lambs, with rams from Bashan, and goats, with the choicest grains of wheat. From the juice of the finest grapes you drank the wine.

¹⁴He makes peace at your borders; He fills you with the finest wheat.

²⁵Then all the troops entered the forest, and there was honey on the ground.

²⁶And when they entered the forest and saw the flowing honey, not one of them put his hand to his mouth, because they feared the oath.

²⁴The threshing floors will be full of grain, and the vats will overflow with new wine and oil.

¹⁸Before sunset on the seventh day, the men of the city said to Samson: “What is sweeter than honey? And what is stronger than a lion?” So he said to them: “If you had not plowed with my heifer, you would not have solved my riddle!”

⁶when my steps were bathed in cream and the rock poured out for me streams of oil!