Day 107 reading

Wisdom·Psalm 68:21–29

²¹Surely God will crush the heads of His enemies, the hairy crowns of those who persist in guilty ways. ²²The Lord said, “I will retrieve them from Bashan, I will bring them up from the depths of the sea, ²³that your foot may be dipped in the blood of your foes— the tongues of your dogs in the same.” ²⁴They have seen Your procession, O God— the march of my God and King into the sanctuary. ²⁵The singers lead the way, the musicians follow after, among the maidens playing tambourines. ²⁶Bless God in the great congregation; bless the LORD from the fountain of Israel. ²⁷There is Benjamin, the youngest, ruling them, the princes of Judah in their company, the princes of Zebulun and of Naphtali. ²⁸Summon Your power, O God; show Your strength, O God, which You have exerted on our behalf. ²⁹Because of Your temple at Jerusalem kings will bring You gifts.

New Testament·Luke 12:1–21

¹In the meantime, a crowd of many thousands had gathered, so that they were trampling one another. Jesus began to speak first to His disciples: “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. ²There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, and nothing hidden that will not be made known. ³What you have spoken in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the housetops. ⁴I tell you, My friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. ⁵But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear the One who, after you have been killed, has authority to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear Him! ⁶Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. ⁷And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. ⁸I tell you, everyone who confesses Me before men, the Son of Man will also confess him before the angels of God. ⁹But whoever denies Me before men will be denied before the angels of God. ¹⁰And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. ¹¹When you are brought before synagogues, rulers, and authorities, do not worry about how to defend yourselves or what to say. ¹²For at that time the Holy Spirit will teach you what you should say.” ¹³Someone in the crowd said to Him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” ¹⁴But Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed Me judge or executor between you?” ¹⁵And He said to them, “Watch out! Guard yourselves against every form of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” ¹⁶Then He told them a parable: “The ground of a certain rich man produced an abundance. ¹⁷So he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, since I have nowhere to store my crops?’ ¹⁸Then he said, ‘This is what I will do: I will tear down my barns and will build bigger ones, and there I will store up all my grain and my goods. ¹⁹Then I will say to myself, “You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take it easy. Eat, drink, and be merry!”’ ²⁰But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be required of you. Then who will own what you have accumulated?’ ²¹This is how it will be for anyone who stores up treasure for himself but is not rich toward God.”

Old Testament·Deuteronomy 31–32

¹When Moses had finished speaking these words to all Israel, ²he said to them, “I am now a hundred and twenty years old; I am no longer able to come and go, and the LORD has said to me, ‘You shall not cross the Jordan.’ ³The LORD your God Himself will cross over ahead of you. He will destroy these nations before you, and you will dispossess them. Joshua will cross ahead of you, as the LORD has said. ⁴And the LORD will do to them as He did to Sihon and Og, the kings of the Amorites, when He destroyed them along with their land. ⁵The LORD will deliver them over to you, and you must do to them exactly as I have commanded you. ⁶Be strong and courageous; do not be afraid or terrified of them, for it is the LORD your God who goes with you; He will never leave you nor forsake you.” ⁷Then Moses called for Joshua and said to him in the presence of all Israel, “Be strong and courageous, for you will go with this people into the land that the LORD swore to their fathers to give them, and you shall give it to them as an inheritance. ⁸The LORD Himself goes before you; He will be with you. He will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid or discouraged.” ⁹So Moses wrote down this law and gave it to the priests, the sons of Levi, who carried the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and to all the elders of Israel. ¹⁰Then Moses commanded them, “At the end of every seven years, at the appointed time in the year of remission of debt, during the Feast of Tabernacles, ¹¹when all Israel comes before the LORD your God at the place He will choose, you are to read this law in the hearing of all Israel. ¹²Assemble the people—men, women, children, and the foreigners within your gates—so that they may listen and learn to fear the LORD your God and to follow carefully all the words of this law. ¹³Then their children who do not know the law will listen and learn to fear the LORD your God, as long as you live in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess.” ¹⁴Then the LORD said to Moses, “Behold, the time of your death is near. Call Joshua and present yourselves at the Tent of Meeting, so that I may commission him.” So Moses and Joshua went and presented themselves at the Tent of Meeting. ¹⁵Then the LORD appeared at the tent in a pillar of cloud, and the cloud stood over the entrance to the tent. ¹⁶And the LORD said to Moses, “You will soon rest with your fathers, and these people will rise up and prostitute themselves with the foreign gods of the land they are entering. They will forsake Me and break the covenant I have made with them. ¹⁷On that day My anger will burn against them, and I will abandon them and hide My face from them, so that they will be consumed, and many troubles and afflictions will befall them. On that day they will say, ‘Have not these disasters come upon us because our God is no longer with us?’ ¹⁸And on that day I will surely hide My face because of all the evil they have done by turning to other gods. ¹⁹Now therefore, write down for yourselves this song and teach it to the Israelites; have them recite it, so that it may be a witness for Me against them. ²⁰When I have brought them into the land that I swore to give their fathers, a land flowing with milk and honey, they will eat their fill and prosper. Then they will turn to other gods and worship them, and they will reject Me and break My covenant. ²¹And when many troubles and afflictions have come upon them, this song will testify against them, because it will not be forgotten from the lips of their descendants. For I know their inclination, even before I bring them into the land that I swore to give them.” ²²So that very day Moses wrote down this song and taught it to the Israelites. ²³Then the LORD commissioned Joshua son of Nun and said, “Be strong and courageous, for you will bring the Israelites into the land that I swore to give them, and I will be with you.” ²⁴When Moses had finished writing in a book the words of this law from beginning to end, ²⁵he gave this command to the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of the LORD: ²⁶“Take this Book of the Law and place it beside the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, so that it may remain there as a witness against you. ²⁷For I know how rebellious and stiff-necked you are. If you are already rebelling against the LORD while I am still alive, how much more will you rebel after my death! ²⁸Assemble before me all the elders of your tribes and all your officers so that I may speak these words in their hearing and call heaven and earth to witness against them. ²⁹For I know that after my death you will become utterly corrupt and turn from the path I have commanded you. And in the days to come, disaster will befall you because you will do evil in the sight of the LORD to provoke Him to anger by the work of your hands.” ³⁰Then Moses recited aloud to the whole assembly of Israel the words of this song from beginning to end:

32Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak; hear, O earth, the words of my mouth. ²Let my teaching fall like rain and my speech settle like dew, like gentle rain on new grass, like showers on tender plants. ³For I will proclaim the name of the LORD. Ascribe greatness to our God! ⁴He is the Rock, His work is perfect; all His ways are just. A God of faithfulness without injustice, righteous and upright is He. ⁵His people have acted corruptly toward Him; the spot on them is not that of His children, but of a perverse and crooked generation. ⁶Is this how you repay the LORD, O foolish and senseless people? Is He not your Father and Creator? Has He not made you and established you? ⁷Remember the days of old; consider the years long past. Ask your father, and he will tell you, your elders, and they will inform you. ⁸When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when He divided the sons of man, He set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. ⁹But the LORD’s portion is His people, Jacob His allotted inheritance. ¹⁰He found him in a desert land, in a barren, howling wilderness; He surrounded him, He instructed him, He guarded him as the apple of His eye. ¹¹As an eagle stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, He spread His wings to catch them and carried them on His pinions. ¹²The LORD alone led him, and no foreign god was with him. 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. ¹⁵But Jeshurun grew fat and kicked— becoming fat, bloated, and gorged. He abandoned the God who made him and scorned the Rock of his salvation. ¹⁶They provoked His jealousy with foreign gods; they enraged Him with abominations. ¹⁷They sacrificed to demons, not to God, to gods they had not known, to newly arrived gods, which your fathers did not fear. ¹⁸You ignored the Rock who brought you forth; you forgot the God who gave you birth. ¹⁹When the LORD saw this, He rejected them, provoked to anger by His sons and daughters. ²⁰He said: “I will hide My face from them; I will see what will be their end. For they are a perverse generation— children of unfaithfulness. ²¹They have provoked My jealousy by that which is not God; they have enraged Me with their worthless idols. So I will make them jealous by those who are not a people; I will make them angry by a nation without understanding. ²²For a fire has been kindled by My anger, and it burns to the depths of Sheol; it consumes the earth and its produce, and scorches the foundations of the mountains. ²³I will heap disasters upon them; I will spend My arrows against them. ²⁴They will be wasted from hunger and ravaged by pestilence and bitter plague; I will send the fangs of wild beasts against them, with the venom of vipers that slither in the dust. ²⁵Outside, the sword will take their children, and inside, terror will strike the young man and the young woman, the infant and the gray-haired man. ²⁶I would have said that I would cut them to pieces and blot out their memory from mankind, ²⁷if I had not dreaded the taunt of the enemy, lest their adversaries misunderstand and say: ‘Our own hand has prevailed; it was not the LORD who did all this.’” ²⁸Israel is a nation devoid of counsel, with no understanding among them. ²⁹If only they were wise, they would understand it; they would comprehend their fate. ³⁰How could one man pursue 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, even our enemies concede. ³²But their vine is from the vine of Sodom and from the fields of Gomorrah. Their grapes are poisonous; their clusters are bitter. ³³Their wine is the venom of serpents, the deadly poison of cobras. ³⁴“Have I not stored up these things, sealed up within My vaults? ³⁵Vengeance is Mine; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; for their day of disaster is near, and their doom is coming quickly.” ³⁶For the LORD will vindicate His people and have compassion on His servants when He sees that their strength is gone and no one remains, slave or free. ³⁷He will say: “Where are their gods, the rock in which they took refuge, ³⁸which ate the fat of their sacrifices and drank the wine of their drink offerings? Let them rise up and help you; let them give you shelter! ³⁹See now that I am He; there is no God besides Me. I bring death and I give life; I wound and I heal, and there is no one who can deliver from My hand. ⁴⁰For I lift up My hand to heaven and declare: As surely as I live forever, ⁴¹when I sharpen My flashing sword, and My hand grasps it in judgment, I will take vengeance on My adversaries and repay those who hate Me. ⁴²I will make My arrows drunk with blood, while My sword devours flesh— the blood of the slain and captives, the heads of the enemy leaders.” ⁴³Rejoice, O heavens, with Him, and let all God’s angels worship Him. Rejoice, O nations, with His people; for He will avenge the blood of His children. He will take vengeance on His adversaries and repay those who hate Him; He will cleanse His land and His people. ⁴⁴Then Moses came with Joshua son of Nun and recited all the words of this song in the hearing of the people. ⁴⁵When Moses had finished reciting all these words to all Israel, ⁴⁶he said to them, “Take to heart all these words I testify among you today, so that you may command your children to carefully follow all the words of this law. ⁴⁷For they are not idle words to you, because they are your life, and by them you will live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess.” ⁴⁸On that same day the LORD said to Moses, ⁴⁹“Go up into the Abarim Range to Mount Nebo, in the land of Moab across from Jericho, and view the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites as their own possession. ⁵⁰And there on the mountain that you climb, you will die and be gathered to your people, just as your brother Aaron died on Mount Hor and was gathered to his people. ⁵¹For at the waters of Meribah-kadesh in the Wilderness of Zin, both of you broke faith with Me among the Israelites by failing to treat Me as holy in their presence. ⁵²Although you shall see from a distance the land that I am giving the Israelites, you shall not enter it.”