Therefore, our God, hear the prayer and the petitions of Your servant. Show Your favor to Your desolate sanctuary for the Lord’s sake.

Listen, my God, and hear. Open Your eyes and see our desolations and the city called by Your name. For we are not presenting our petitions before You based on our righteous acts, but based on Your abundant compassion.

Lord, hear! Lord, forgive! Lord, listen and act! My God, for Your own sake, do not delay, because Your city and Your people are called by Your name.

After some years they will form an alliance, and the daughter of the king of the South will go to the king of the North to seal the agreement. She will not retain power, and his strength will not endure. She will be given up, together with her entourage, her father, and the one who supported her during those times.

In the place of the king of the South, one from her family will rise up, come against the army, and enter the fortress of the king of the North. He will take action against them and triumph.

She conceived again and gave birth to a daughter, and the Lord said to him:

Name her No Compassion,
for I will no longer have compassion
on the house of Israel.
I will certainly take them away.

Rebuke your mother; rebuke her.
For she is not My wife and I am not her husband.
Let her remove the promiscuous look from her face
and her adultery from between her breasts.

Otherwise, I will strip her naked
and expose her as she was on the day of her birth.
I will make her like a desert
and like a parched land,
and I will let her die of thirst.

I will have no compassion on her children
because they are the children of promiscuity.

Therefore, this is what I will do:
I will block her way with thorns;
I will enclose her with a wall,
so that she cannot find her paths.

She will pursue her lovers but not catch them;
she will seek them but not find them.
Then she will think,
“I will go back to my former husband,
for then it was better for me than now.”

She does not recognize
that it is I who gave her the grain,
the new wine, and the oil.
I lavished silver and gold on her,
which they used for Baal.

Therefore, I will take back My grain in its time
and My new wine in its season;
I will take away My wool and linen,
which were to cover her nakedness.

Now I will expose her shame
in the sight of her lovers,
and no one will rescue her from My hands.

I will put an end to all her celebrations:
her feasts, New Moons, and Sabbaths—
all her festivals.

I will devastate her vines and fig trees.
She thinks that these are her wages
that her lovers have given her.
I will turn them into a thicket,
and the wild animals will eat them.

And I will punish her for the days of the Baals
when she burned incense to them,
put on her rings and jewelry,
and went after her lovers,
but forgot Me.
This is the Lord’s declaration.

Therefore, I am going to persuade her,
lead her to the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.

There I will give her vineyards back to her
and make the Valley of Achor
into a gateway of hope.
There she will respond as she did
in the days of her youth,
as in the day she came out of the land of Egypt.

For I will remove the names of the Baals
from her mouth;
they will no longer be remembered by their names.

I will sow her in the land for Myself,
and I will have compassion
on No Compassion;
I will say to Not My People:
You are My people,
and he will say, “You are My God.”

So I bought her for 15 shekels of silver and five bushels of barley.

I said to her, “You must live with me many days. Don’t be promiscuous or belong to any man, and I will act the same way toward you.”

Hear the word of the Lord, people of Israel,
for the Lord has a case
against the inhabitants of the land:
There is no truth, no faithful love,
and no knowledge of God in the land!

Hear this, priests!
Pay attention, house of Israel!
Listen, royal house!
For the judgment applies to you
because you have been a snare at Mizpah
and a net spread out on Tabor.

Foreigners consume his strength,
but he does not notice.
Even his hair is streaked with gray,
but he does not notice.

Even though they hire lovers among the nations,
I will now round them up,
and they will begin to decrease in number
under the burden of the king and leaders.

Ephraim is a well-trained calf
that loves to thresh,
but I will place a yoke on her fine neck.
I will harness Ephraim;
Judah will plow;
Jacob will do the final plowing.

I will attack them
like a bear robbed of her cubs
and tear open the rib cage over their hearts.
I will devour them there like a lioness,
like a wild beast that would rip them open.

Samaria will bear her guilt
because she has rebelled against her God.
They will fall by the sword;
their little ones will be dashed to pieces,
and their pregnant women ripped open.

Hear this, you elders;
listen, all you inhabitants of the land.
Has anything like this ever happened in your days
or in the days of your ancestors?

Grieve like a young woman dressed in sackcloth,
mourning for the husband of her youth.

Gather the people;
sanctify the congregation;
assemble the aged;
gather the children,
even those nursing at the breast.
Let the groom leave his bedroom,
and the bride her honeymoon chamber.

He is here:
the One who forms the mountains,
creates the wind,
and reveals His thoughts to man,
the One who makes the dawn out of darkness
and strides on the heights of the earth.
Yahweh, the God of Hosts, is His name.

She has fallen;
Virgin Israel will never rise again.
She lies abandoned on her land,
with no one to raise her up.

Amaziah the priest of Bethel sent word to Jeroboam king of Israel, saying, “Amos has conspired against you right here in the house of Israel. The land cannot endure all his words,

Now hear the word of the Lord. You say:

Do not prophesy against Israel;
do not preach against the house of Isaac.

Hear this, you who trample on the needy
and do away with the poor of the land,

Hear this! The days are coming—
this is the declaration of the Lord God—
when I will send a famine through the land:
not a famine of bread or a thirst for water,
but of hearing the words of the Lord.

Hear this! The days are coming—
this is the Lord’s declaration—
when the plowman will overtake the reaper
and the one who treads grapes,
the sower of seed.
The mountains will drip with sweet wine,
and all the hills will flow with it.

The vision of Obadiah.

This is what the Lord God has said about Edom:

We have heard a message from the Lord;
a messenger has been sent among the nations:
“Rise up, and let us go to war against her.”

Therefore, I will make Samaria
a heap of ruins in the countryside,
a planting area for a vineyard.
I will roll her stones into the valley
and expose her foundations.

All her carved images will be smashed to pieces;
all her wages will be burned in the fire,
and I will destroy all her idols.
Since she collected the wages of a prostitute,
they will be used again for a prostitute.

For her wound is incurable
and has reached even Judah;
it has approached the gate of my people,
as far as Jerusalem.

Shave yourselves bald and cut off your hair
in sorrow for your precious children;
make yourselves as bald as an eagle,
for they have been taken from you into exile.

Her leaders issue rulings for a bribe,
her priests teach for payment,
and her prophets practice divination for money.
Yet they lean on the Lord, saying,
“Isn’t the Lord among us?
No disaster will overtake us.”

Many nations have now assembled against you;
they say, “Let her be defiled,
and let us feast our eyes on Zion.”

Now listen to what the Lord is saying:

Rise, plead your case before the mountains,
and let the hills hear your voice.

The best of them is like a brier;
the most upright is worse than a hedge of thorns.
The day of your watchmen,
the day of your punishment, is coming;
at this time their panic is here.

Surely a son considers his father a fool,
a daughter opposes her mother,
and a daughter-in-law is against her mother-in-law;
a man’s enemies are the men of his own household.

But I will look to the Lord;
I will wait for the God of my salvation.
My God will hear me.

Then my enemy will see,
and she will be covered with shame,
the one who said to me,
“Where is the Lord your God?”
My eyes will look at her in triumph;
at that time she will be trampled
like mud in the streets.

Beauty is stripped,
she is carried away;
her ladies-in-waiting moan
like the sound of doves,
and beat their breasts.

Nineveh has been like a pool of water
from her first days,
but they are fleeing.
“Stop! Stop!” they cry,
but no one turns back.

Because of the continual prostitution of the prostitute,
the attractive mistress of sorcery,
who betrays nations by her prostitution
and clans by her witchcraft,

Then all who see you will recoil from you, saying,
“Nineveh is devastated;
who will show sympathy to her?”
Where can I find anyone to comfort you?

Are you better than Thebes
that sat along the Nile
with water surrounding her,
whose rampart was the sea,
the river her wall?

Cush and Egypt were her endless source of strength;
Put and Libya were among her allies.

Yet she became an exile;
she went into captivity.
Her children were also dashed to pieces
at the head of every street.
They cast lots for her dignitaries,
and all her nobles were bound in chains.

There is no remedy for your injury;
your wound is severe.
All who hear the news about you
will clap their hands because of you,
for who has not experienced
your constant cruelty?

Look at the nations and observe—
be utterly astounded!
For something is taking place in your days
that you will not believe
when you hear about it.

This is the self-assured city
that lives in security,
that thinks to herself:
I exist, and there is no one else.
What a desolation she has become,
a place for wild animals to lie down!
Everyone who passes by her
jeers and shakes his fist.

She has not obeyed;
she has not accepted discipline.
She has not trusted in Yahweh;
she has not drawn near to her God.

The princes within her are roaring lions;
her judges are wolves of the night,
which leave nothing for the morning.

Her prophets are reckless—
treacherous men.
Her priests profane the sanctuary;
they do violence to instruction.

The righteous Lord is in her;
He does no wrong.
He applies His justice morning by morning;
He does not fail at dawn,
yet the one who does wrong knows no shame.

I thought: You will certainly fear Me
and accept correction.
Then her dwelling place
would not be cut off
based on all that I had allocated to her.
However, they became more corrupt
in all their actions.

I will gather those who have been driven
from the appointed festivals;
they will be a tribute from you
and a reproach on her.

“This is what the Lord of Hosts says: If you walk in My ways and keep My instructions, you will both rule My house and take care of My courts; I will also grant you access among these who are standing here.

“This is Wickedness,” he said. He shoved her down into the basket and pushed the lead weight over its opening.

You are to tell him: This is what the Lord of Hosts says: Here is a man whose name is Branch; He will branch out from His place and build the Lord’s temple.

But they refused to pay attention and turned a stubborn shoulder; they closed their ears so they could not hear.

“The Lord of Hosts says this: I am extremely jealous for Zion; I am jealous for her with great wrath.”

The Lord of Hosts says this: “Let your hands be strong, you who now hear these words that the prophets spoke when the foundations were laid for the rebuilding of the temple, the house of the Lord of Hosts.

Listen! The Lord will impoverish her
and cast her wealth into the sea;
she herself will be consumed by fire.

Ashkelon will see it and be afraid;
Gaza too, and will writhe in great pain,
as will Ekron, for her hope will fail.
There will cease to be a king in Gaza,
and Ashkelon will become uninhabited.

On that day I will make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all the peoples; all who try to lift it will injure themselves severely when all the nations of the earth gather against her.

Yet you ask, “For what reason?” Because the Lord has been a witness between you and the wife of your youth. You have acted treacherously against her, though she was your marriage partner and your wife by covenant.

So her husband Joseph, being a righteous man, and not wanting to disgrace her publicly, decided to divorce her secretly.

But after he had considered these things, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because what has been conceived in her is by the Holy Spirit.

When Joseph got up from sleeping, he did as the Lord’s angel had commanded him. He married her

but did not know her intimately until she gave birth to a son. And he named Him Jesus.

A voice was heard in Ramah,
weeping, and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children;
and she refused to be consoled,
because they were no more.

John himself had a camel-hair garment with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey.

But I tell you, everyone who looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

“It was also said, Whoever divorces his wife must give her a written notice of divorce.

But I tell you, everyone who divorces his wife, except in a case of sexual immorality, causes her to commit adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

Neither should you swear by your head, because you cannot make a single hair white or black.

If that’s how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, won’t He do much more for you—you of little faith?

So He touched her hand, and the fever left her. Then she got up and began to serve Him.

Suddenly they shouted, “What do You have to do with us, Son of God? Have You come here to torment us before the time?”

As He was telling them these things, suddenly one of the leaders came and knelt down before Him, saying, “My daughter is near death, but come and lay Your hand on her, and she will live.”

But Jesus turned and saw her. “Have courage, daughter,” He said. “Your faith has made you well.” And the woman was made well from that moment.

But when the crowd had been put outside, He went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up.

But when they hand you over, don’t worry about how or what you should speak. For you will be given what to say at that hour,

What I tell you in the dark, speak in the light. What you hear in a whisper, proclaim on the housetops.

For I came to turn

a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;

Jesus replied to them, “Go and report to John what you hear and see:

the blind see, the lame walk, those with skin diseases are healed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor are told the good news.

The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”