Dual Panel1Woe betide you, destroyer, yourself undestroyed, betrayer still unbetrayed! After all your destroying, you will be destroyed; after all your betrayals, you yourself will be betrayed.
2LORD, show us your favour; our hope is in you. Uphold us every morning, save us when troubles come.
3At the crack of thunder peoples flee, nations are scattered at your roar;
4they are stripped of spoil as if stripped by young locusts, like a swarm of locusts folk swarm over it.
5The LORD is supreme, for he dwells on high; he has filled Zion with justice and righteousness.
6Her strength will be in your unchanging stability, her deliverance in wisdom and knowledge; her treasure is the fear of the LORD.
7Listen, how the valiant cry out aloud for help, and envoys sent to sue for peace weep bitterly!
8The highways are deserted, no one travels the roads. Covenants are broken, treaties are flouted; no one is held of any account.
9The land is parched and wilting, Lebanon is eroded and crumbling; Sharon has become like a desert, Bashan and Carmel are stripped bare.
10Now I shall arise, says the LORD; now I shall exalt myself, now lift myself up.
11You will conceive chaff, and bring forth stubble; a wind like fire will devour you.
12Whole nations will be heaps of white ash, or like thorns cut down and set on fire.
13You dwellers afar off, hear what I have done; acknowledge my might, you that are near at hand.
14Sinners in Zion quake with terror, the godless are seized with trembling; they ask, “Can any of us live with a devouring fire? Can any of us live in perpetual flames?”
15The person who behaves uprightly and speaks the truth, who scorns to enrich himself by extortion, who keeps his hands clean from bribery, who stops his ears against talk of murder and closes his eyes against looking at evil --
16he it is who will dwell on the heights, his refuge a fastness in the cliffs, his food assured and water never failing him.
17Your eyes will see a king in his splendour and look on a land stretching into the distance.
18You will call to mind what once you feared: “Where then is he that reckoned, where is he that weighed, where is he that counted the treasures?”
19You will no longer see that barbarous people, that people whose language was so obscure, whose stuttering speech you could not comprehend.
20Look to Zion, city of our sacred feasts, let your eyes rest on Jerusalem, a secure abode, a tent that will never be moved, whose pegs will never be pulled up, whose ropes will none of them be snapped.
21There we have the LORD in all his majesty in a place of rivers and broad streams; but no galleys will be rowed there, no stately ships sail by.
22The LORD is our judge, the LORD our lawgiver, the LORD our king -- he it is who will save us.
23(It may be said, “Your rigging is slack; it will not hold the mast firm in its socket, nor can it spread the sails.”) Then the blind will have a full share of the spoil and the lame will take part in the pillage.
24No one dwelling there will say, “I am sick”; the sins of the people who live there will be pardoned.