Tuesday, 20 Iyar 5784 / May 28, 2024
Day 514 Readings
Torah: Parshat Bechukotai, 3rd Portion Vayikra (Leviticus) 26:10-26:46
10 You shall eat old store long kept, and you shall clear out the old to make way for the new. 11 I will make my dwelling[a] among you, and my soul shall not abhor you. 12 And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people. 13 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that you should not be their slaves. And I have broken the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect.
Punishment for Disobedience
14 “But if you will not listen to me and will not do all these commandments, 15 if you spurn my statutes, and if your soul abhors my rules, so that you will not do all my commandments, but break my covenant, 16 then I will do this to you: I will visit you with panic, with wasting disease and fever that consume the eyes and make the heart ache. And you shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it. 17 I will set my face against you, and you shall be struck down before your enemies. Those who hate you shall rule over you, and you shall flee when none pursues you. 18 And if in spite of this you will not listen to me, then I will discipline you again sevenfold for your sins, 19 and I will break the pride of your power, and I will make your heavens like iron and your earth like bronze. 20 And your strength shall be spent in vain, for your land shall not yield its increase, and the trees of the land shall not yield their fruit.
21 “Then if you walk contrary to me and will not listen to me, I will continue striking you, sevenfold for your sins. 22 And I will let loose the wild beasts against you, which shall bereave you of your children and destroy your livestock and make you few in number, so that your roads shall be deserted.
23 “And if by this discipline you are not turned to me but walk contrary to me, 24 then I also will walk contrary to you, and I myself will strike you sevenfold for your sins. 25 And I will bring a sword upon you, that shall execute vengeance for the covenant. And if you gather within your cities, I will send pestilence among you, and you shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy. 26 When I break your supply[b] of bread, ten women shall bake your bread in a single oven and shall dole out your bread again by weight, and you shall eat and not be satisfied.
27 “But if in spite of this you will not listen to me, but walk contrary to me, 28 then I will walk contrary to you in fury, and I myself will discipline you sevenfold for your sins. 29 You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters. 30 And I will destroy your high places and cut down your incense altars and cast your dead bodies upon the dead bodies of your idols, and my soul will abhor you. 31 And I will lay your cities waste and will make your sanctuaries desolate, and I will not smell your pleasing aromas. 32 And I myself will devastate the land, so that your enemies who settle in it shall be appalled at it. 33 And I will scatter you among the nations, and I will unsheathe the sword after you, and your land shall be a desolation, and your cities shall be a waste.
34 “Then the land shall enjoy[c] its Sabbaths as long as it lies desolate, while you are in your enemies' land; then the land shall rest, and enjoy its Sabbaths. 35 As long as it lies desolate it shall have rest, the rest that it did not have on your Sabbaths when you were dwelling in it. 36 And as for those of you who are left, I will send faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies. The sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues. 37 They shall stumble over one another, as if to escape a sword, though none pursues. And you shall have no power to stand before your enemies. 38 And you shall perish among the nations, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up. 39 And those of you who are left shall rot away in your enemies' lands because of their iniquity, and also because of the iniquities of their fathers they shall rot away like them.
40 “But if they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers in their treachery that they committed against me, and also in walking contrary to me, 41 so that I walked contrary to them and brought them into the land of their enemies—if then their uncircumcised heart is humbled and they make amends for their iniquity, 42 then I will remember my covenant with Jacob, and I will remember my covenant with Isaac and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land. 43 But the land shall be abandoned by them and enjoy its Sabbaths while it lies desolate without them, and they shall make amends for their iniquity, because they spurned my rules and their soul abhorred my statutes. 44 Yet for all that, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not spurn them, neither will I abhor them so as to destroy them utterly and break my covenant with them, for I am the Lord their God. 45 But I will for their sake remember the covenant with their forefathers, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, that I might be their God: I am the Lord.”
46 These are the statutes and rules and laws that the Lord made between himself and the people of Israel through Moses on Mount Sinai.
BIBLE Study Together
Isaiah 33
English Standard Version
O Lord, Be Gracious to Us
1 Ah, you destroyer, who yourself have not been destroyed, you traitor, whom none has betrayed!When you have ceased to destroy, you will be destroyed; and when you have finished betraying, they will betray you.
2 O Lord, be gracious to us; we wait for you. Be our arm every morning, our salvation in the time of trouble.
3 At the tumultuous noise peoples flee; when you lift yourself up, nations are scattered,4 and your spoil is gathered as the caterpillar gathers; as locusts leap, it is leapt upon.
5 The Lord is exalted, for he dwells on high; he will fill Zion with justice and righteousness,
6 and he will be the stability of your times, abundance of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge; the fear of the Lord is Zion's[a] treasure.
7 Behold, their heroes cry in the streets; the envoys of peace weep bitterly.8 The highways lie waste; the traveler ceases.Covenants are broken; cities[b] are despised; there is no regard for man.9 The land mourns and languishes; Lebanon is confounded and withers away;Sharon is like a desert, and Bashan and Carmel shake off their leaves.
10 “Now I will arise,” says the Lord, “now I will lift myself up; now I will be exalted.
11 You conceive chaff; you give birth to stubble; your breath is a fire that will consume you.
12 And the peoples will be as if burned to lime, like thorns cut down, that are burned in the fire.”
13 Hear, you who are far off, what I have done; and you who are near, acknowledge my might.
14 The sinners in Zion are afraid; trembling has seized the godless: “Who among us can dwell with the consuming fire? Who among us can dwell with everlasting burnings?”
15 He who walks righteously and speaks uprightly, who despises the gain of oppressions, who shakes his hands, lest they hold a bribe, who stops his ears from hearing of bloodshed and shuts his eyes from looking on evil,
16 he will dwell on the heights; his place of defense will be the fortresses of rocks; his bread will be given him; his water will be sure.
17 Your eyes will behold the king in his beauty; they will see a land that stretches afar.
18 Your heart will muse on the terror: “Where is he who counted, where is he who weighed the tribute? Where is he who counted the towers?” 19 You will see no more the insolent people, the people of an obscure speech that you cannot comprehend, stammering in a tongue that you cannot understand.20 Behold Zion, the city of our appointed feasts! Your eyes will see Jerusalem, an untroubled habitation, an immovable tent,whose stakes will never be plucked up, nor will any of its cords be broken. 21 But there the Lord in majesty will be for us a place of broad rivers and streams, where no galley with oars can go, nor majestic ship can pass.
22 For the Lord is our judge; the Lord is our lawgiver; the Lord is our king; he will save us.
23 Your cords hang loose; they cannot hold the mast firm in its place or keep the sail spread out.Then prey and spoil in abundance will be divided; even the lame will take the prey.24 And no inhabitant will say, “I am sick”; the people who dwell there will be forgiven their iniquity.
ESV Readings
Scripture
Psalms 146
English Standard Version
Put Not Your Trust in Princes
1 Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, O my soul!
2 I will praise the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.
3 Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.4 When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish.
5 Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God,6 who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them,who keeps faith forever;7 who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry.
The Lord sets the prisoners free;8 the Lord opens the eyes of the blind.The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous.9 The Lord watches over the sojourners; he upholds the widow and the fatherless, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.
10 The Lord will reign forever, your God, O Zion, to all generations. Praise the Lord!
Numbers 32
Joel 1
English Standard Version
1 The word of the Lord that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel:
An Invasion of Locusts
2 Hear this, you elders; give ear, all inhabitants of the land!Has such a thing happened in your days, or in the days of your fathers?3 Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children to another generation.
4 What the cutting locust left, the swarming locust has eaten.What the swarming locust left, the hopping locust has eaten,and what the hopping locust left, the destroying locust has eaten.
5 Awake, you drunkards, and weep, and wail, all you drinkers of wine,because of the sweet wine, for it is cut off from your mouth.6 For a nation has come up against my land, powerful and beyond number;its teeth are lions' teeth, and it has the fangs of a lioness.7 It has laid waste my vine and splintered my fig tree;it has stripped off their bark and thrown it down; their branches are made white.
8 Lament like a virgin[a] wearing sackcloth for the bridegroom of her youth.9 The grain offering and the drink offering are cut off from the house of the Lord.The priests mourn, the ministers of the Lord.10 The fields are destroyed, the ground mourns,because the grain is destroyed, the wine dries up, the oil languishes.
11 Be ashamed,[b] O tillers of the soil; wail, O vinedressers,for the wheat and the barley, because the harvest of the field has perished.12 The vine dries up; the fig tree languishes.Pomegranate, palm, and apple, all the trees of the field are dried up,and gladness dries up from the children of man.
A Call to Repentance
13 Put on sackcloth and lament, O priests; wail, O ministers of the altar.Go in, pass the night in sackcloth, O ministers of my God!Because grain offering and drink offering are withheld from the house of your God.
14 Consecrate a fast; call a solemn assembly. Gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the landto the house of the Lord your God, and cry out to the Lord.
15 Alas for the day! For the day of the Lord is near, and as destruction from the Almighty[c] it comes.16 Is not the food cut off before our eyes,joy and gladness from the house of our God?
17 The seed shrivels under the clods;[d] the storehouses are desolate; the granaries are torn down because the grain has dried up.18 How the beasts groan! The herds of cattle are perplexed because there is no pasture for them; even the flocks of sheep suffer.[e]
19 To you, O Lord, I call. For fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness, and flame has burned all the trees of the field. 20 Even the beasts of the field pant for you because the water brooks are dried up, and fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness.
1 Timothy 3
English Standard Version
Qualifications for Overseers
1 The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. 2 Therefore an overseer[a] must be above reproach, the husband of one wife,[b] sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3 not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. 4 He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, 5 for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church? 6 He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. 7 Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil.
Qualifications for Deacons
8 Deacons likewise must be dignified, not double-tongued,[c] not addicted to much wine, not greedy for dishonest gain. 9 They must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience. 10 And let them also be tested first; then let them serve as deacons if they prove themselves blameless. 11 Their wives likewise[d] must be dignified, not slanderers, but sober-minded, faithful in all things. 12 Let deacons each be the husband of one wife, managing their children and their own households well. 13 For those who serve well as deacons gain a good standing for themselves and also great confidence in the faith that is in Christ Jesus.
The Mystery of Godliness
14 I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these things to you so that, 15 if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth. 16 Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness:
He[e] was manifested in the flesh, vindicated[f] by the Spirit,[g] seen by angels,proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.