| us pleasant things, prophesy illusions. Leave this way, get off this path, and stop confronting us with the Holy One od Isreal!" Therefore, this is what the Holy One of Isreal says: "Because you have rejected this message, relied on oppression and depended on deceit, this sin will become for you like a high wall, cracked and bulging, that collapses suddenly, in an instant. It will break in pieces like pottery, shattered so mercilessly that among its pieces not a fragment will be found for taking coals from a hearth or scooping water out of a cistern." This is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Isreal, says: "In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it. You said, 'No, we will flee on horses.' Therfore you will flee! You siad. 'We will ride off on swift horses.' Therefore your pursuers will be swift! A thousand will flee at the threat of one; at the threat of five you will all flee away, till you are left like a flagstaff on a mountaintop, like a banner on a hill." Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion. For the Lord is a God of justive. Blessed are all who wait for him! O people of ZIon, who live in Jersalem, you will weep no more. How gracious he will be when you cry for help! As soon as he hears, he will answer you. Although the LOrd gives you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, your teachers will be hidden no more; with your own eyes you will see them. Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you saying, " This is the way; walk in it." Then you will defile your idols overlaid with silver and your images covered with gold; you will throw them ayway like a menstrual cloth and say to them, "Away with you!" He will send you rain for the seed you sow in the ground, and the food that comes day your cattle will graze in broad meadows. The oxen and donkeys that work the soil will eatfodder and mash, spread out with fork and shovel. In the day of great slaughter, when the towers fall, streams of water will flow on every high mountain and every lofty hill. The moon will shine like the sun, and the sunlight will be seven times brighter, like the lightof seven full days, when the Lord binds up bruises of his people and heals the wounds he inflicted. See, the Name of the LOrd comes from afar, with burning anger and dense clouds of smoke; his lips are full of wrath, and his tounge is a consuming fire. HIs breath is like a rushing torrent, rising up to the neck. He shakes the nations in the sieve of destruction; he places in the jaw of the peoples a bit that leads them astray. Nad you will sing as aon the night you celebrate a holy festival; your hearts will rejoice as when people go up with flutes to the mountain of the Lord, to the Rock of Isreal. The Lord wil cause men to hear this majestic voice and will make them see his arm coming down with raging anger and consuming fire, with cloudburst, thunferstorm and hail.The voice of the Lord will shatter Assyria; with his scepter he will stike them down. Every stroke the Lord lays on them with his punishing rod will be to the music of tambourines and harps, as he fights them in battle with the blows of his arm. Topheth has long been prepared; it has been made ready for the King. Its fire pit has been made deep anf wide, with an abundance of fure and wood; the breath of the Lord, like a stream of burning sulfur, sets it ablaze. |
