Deuteronomy 28:15-29:28
15 “But it shall be, if you do not obey the voice of the Lord your God to keep and do all His commandments I command you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you: 16 Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the country. 17 Cursed shall be your storehouses and your reserves. 18 Cursed shall be the fruit of your womb and the produce of your land, and the herds of your oxen and the flocks of your sheep. 19 Cursed shall you be when you go out, and cursed shall you be when you come in.
20 “The Lord will send on you poverty, hunger, and consumption in all you set your hand to do, until He destroys you and lays you waste quickly, because of your evil habits in which you forsook Me. 21 The Lord will make death cling to you, until He consumes you from the land to which you are going as an inheritance. 22 The Lord will strike you with perplexity, fever, shivering, irritation, murder, blight, and mildew; these things shall pursue you until you perish. 23 The heaven over your head shall be brass, and the earth under you shall be iron. 24 May the Lord give dust as the rain of your land; and from heaven dirt shall come down on you until it wears you out and destroys you.
25 “May the Lord give you over to slaughter before your enemies; you shall go out one way against them, and flee seven ways before them; and you shall be in dispersion among all the kingdoms of the earth. 26 Your carcasses shall be food for all the birds of heaven and the beasts of the earth, and no one shall frighten them away. 27 The Lord will strike you with the sores of Egypt on the buttocks, with furious itching and scratching from which you cannot be healed. 28 The Lord will strike you with madness, blindness, and confusion of mind. 29 You shall grope at noonday as a blind man gropes in darkness; you shall not prosper in your ways; you shall be only oppressed and plundered all your days, and no one shall help you.
30 “You shall take a wife, but a different man shall have her; you shall build a house, but you shall not dwell in it; you shall plant a vineyard, but shall not gather its grapes. 31 Your young bull shall be slaughtered before you, but you shall not eat of it; your donkey shall be violently taken away from before you, and shall not be restored to you; your sheep shall be given to your enemies, and you shall have no one to help you. 32 Your sons and your daughters shall be given to a different nation, and your eyes shall look and fail with longing for them all day long; and there shall be no strength in your hand. 33 A nation whom you have not known shall eat the fruit of your land and the produce of your labor, and you shall be oppressed and crushed all the days. 34 So you shall be driven mad because of the sight which your eyes see. 35 The Lord will strike you in the knees and on the legs with severe sores which cannot be healed, and from the sole of your foot to the top of your head.
36 “The Lord will bring you and the rulers whom you set over you to a nation neither you nor your fathers knew, and there you shall serve different gods of wood and stone. 37 There you shall become an obscure saying, a proverb, and a tale among all nations where the Lord will bring you.
38 “You shall carry much seed out to the field but gather little in, for the locust shall consume it. 39 You shall plant vineyards and tend them, but you shall neither drink of the wine nor enjoy it; for the worm shall eat it. 40 You shall have olive trees throughout all your borders, but you shall not anoint yourself with the oil; for your olives shall drop off. 41 You shall beget sons and daughters, but they shall not be yours; for they shall go into captivity. 42 Blight shall consume all your trees and the produce of your land. 43 The resident alien among you shall rise higher and higher above you, and you shall come down lower and lower. 44 He shall lend to you, but you shall not lend to him; he shall be the head, and you shall be the tail.
45 “Moreover all these curses shall come upon and pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed and wasted, because you did not obey the voice of the Lord your God, to keep His commandments and ordinances which He commanded you. 46 So they shall be upon you as signs and wonders, and among your seed forever. 47 Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joy and a good heart, for the abundance of everything; 48 therefore, you shall serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you in hunger, in thirst, in nakedness, and in need of everything; and He will put a yoke of iron on your neck until He destroys you. 49 The Lord will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flies, a nation whose language you will not understand, 50 a nation ruthless in appearance which does not respect the elderly, nor is merciful to the young. 51 They shall eat the offspring of your cattle and the produce of your land; so as not to leave you grain, wine, or olive oil, or the herds of your oxen, or the flocks of your sheep, until they destroy you 52 and wipe you out in all your cities, until your high and fortified walls in which you trust come down throughout all your land; and He will afflict you in all your cities the Lord your God gave you.
53 “You shall eat the offspring of your womb, the flesh of your sons and your daughters the Lord your God gave you, in the distress and desperate straits in which your enemy shall distress you. 54 The tender and very refined man among you will turn a grudging eye toward his brother, toward the wife of his bosom, and toward the rest of his children whom he leaves behind, 55 so as not to give any of them the flesh of his children whom he will eat, because he has nothing left in your siege and desperate straits in which your enemies shall distress you in all your cities. 56 The tender and delicate woman among you, who would not venture to set the sole of her foot on the ground because of her delicateness and sensitivity, will turn a grudging eye toward the husband in her bosom, and upon her son and daughter, 57 and toward her placenta which came out from between her thighs and her child whom she might bear; for she will eat these secretly for lack of everything in the siege and desperate straits in which your enemy shall distress you in all your cities.
58 “If you do not carefully observe all the words of this law written in this book, to fear this glorious and awesome name, the Lord your God, 59 then the Lord will bring upon you and your seed extraordinary plagues—great and marvelous plagues—and evil and chronic diseases. 60 Moreover He will bring back on you all the evil pain of Egypt of which you were in dread, and they shall cling to you. 61 Also every sickness and every plague not written in this book of the law will the Lord bring upon you, until He destroys you. 62 You shall be left few in number, whereas you were as the stars of heaven in multitude, because you would not obey the voice of the Lord your God.
63 “Thus it shall be, in the manner the Lord rejoiced over you to do you good and multiply you, so the Lord will rejoice over you to destroy you and bring you to nothing; and you shall be taken from off the land you go to inherit. 64 Then the Lord your God will scatter you among all the nations, from one end of the earth to the other, and there you shall serve different gods of wood and stone, which neither you nor your fathers knew. 65 But even among those nations He shall give you no rest, nor shall the sole of your foot have a resting place; but there the Lord will give you a trembling heart, failing eyes, and anguish of soul. 66 Your Life shall hang before your eyes; and you shall fear day and night, and you will not believe in your Life. 67 In the morning you shall say, ‘Oh, that it were evening!’ And at evening you shall say, ‘Oh, that it were morning!’ because of the fear which terrifies your heart, and because of the sight your eyes see. 68 Then the Lord will take you back to Egypt in ships, by the way of which I said to you, ‘You shall never see it again.’ There you shall be offered for sale to your enemies as male and female servants, but no one will buy you.”
69 These are the words of the covenant the Lord commanded Moses to establish with the sons of Israel in the land of Moab, besides the covenant which He made with them in Horeb.
The Covenant in Moab
1 Now Moses called all the children of Israel and said to them, “You saw all the Lord did before you in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land— 2 the great trials your eyes saw, the signs, and those great wonders. 3 Yet the Lord your God has not given you a heart to perceive and eyes to see and ears to hear, to this very day. 4 He also led you forty years in the desert. Your clothes did not grow old on you, and your sandals did not wear out on your feet. 5 You did not eat bread, nor did you drink wine or strong drink, that you may know He is the Lord your God. 6 Then you came to this place; and Sihon king of Heshbon and Og king of Bashan came out against us in war, and we struck them. 7 We took their land, and gave it as an inheritance to Reuben, to Gad, and to half the tribe of Manasseh. 8 Therefore heed all the words of this covenant, to do them, that you may understand all these things you are doing.
9 “All of you stand today before the Lord your God: your chiefs, your elders, your judges and your teachers, all the men of Israel, 10 your wives and your offspring and the resident alien in your camp, from the one who cuts your wood to the one who draws your water, 11 that you may enter into the covenant of the Lord your God and into His oath the Lord your God makes with you today, 12 that He may establish you today as a people for Himself and be God to you, in the manner He told you, and in the manner He swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 13 I make this covenant and this oath, not with you alone, 14 but with those with us here today before the Lord your God, as well as with those not with us here today 15 (for you know we dwelt in the land of Egypt, and came through the nations you passed by; 16 and you saw their abominations and idols among them—wood, stone, silver, and gold).
17 “Surely there is not among you man, woman, family, or tribe whose mind turns away today from the Lord our God, to go and serve the gods of these nations? And surely there is not among you a root bearing gall and bitterness? 18 So it shall be, if one should hear the words of this curse and flatter himself in his heart, saying, ‘May holy things happen for me, even though I go in the wanderings of my heart’ —lest the sinner destroy the sinless along with him— 19 God will not be merciful to him; for then the anger of the Lord and His jealousy will burn against that man, and every curse written in this book will cling to him, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven.
20 “So the Lord will separate him from all the children of Israel for evils, according to all the curses of the covenant written in this book of this law. 21 They will say, that is, the coming generation of your sons who rise up after you, and the foreigner who comes from a far land, and they see the plagues of that land and its diseases which the Lord sent upon it, 22 ‘The whole land will be brimstone and burning salt; it will not be sown, nor will it bear, nor will any grass grow there, like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim, which the Lord overthrew in His anger and His wrath.’ 23 They and all the nations will say, ‘Why has the Lord done so to this land? What does the heat of this great anger mean?’ 24 Then they will say, ‘Because they forsook the covenant of the Lord God of their fathers, which He made with their fathers when He brought them out of the land of Egypt; 25 for they went and served different gods and worshiped them, which they did not know, nor had He allotted to them. 26 Then the Lord was aroused in anger against that land, to bring on it all the curses written in the book of this law; 27 and the Lord uprooted them from their land in anger, in wrath, and in great indignation and cast them into another land, as it is this day.’ 28 The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.
Psalm 62
1 A psalm by David, when he was in the desert of Judea.
2 O God, my God, I rise early to be with You;
My soul thirsts for You.
How often my flesh thirsts for You
In a desolate, impassable, and waterless land.
3 So in the holy place I appear before You,
To see Your power and Your glory.
4 Because Your mercy is better than life,
My lips shall praise You.
5 Thus I will bless You in my life;
I will lift up my hands in Your name.
6 May my soul be filled, as if with marrow and fatness,
And my mouth shall sing praise to You with lips filled with rejoicing.
7 If I remembered You on my bed,
I meditated on You at daybreak;
8 For You are my helper,
And in the shelter of Your wings I will greatly rejoice.
9 My soul follows close behind You;
Your right hand takes hold of me.
10 But they seek for my soul in vain;
They shall go into the lowest parts of the earth.
11 They shall be given over to the edge of the sword;
They shall be a portion for foxes.
12 But the king shall be glad in God;
All who swear by Him shall be praised,
For the mouth that speaks unrighteous things is stopped.
Proverbs 12:26–31
26 The hand of the chosen shall prevail easily,
But the deceitful shall be for captivity.
27 A fearful word troubles the heart of a righteous man,
But a good message makes him glad.
28 A righteous arbiter shall be his own friend,
But the decisions of the ungodly are unreasonable.
29 Evil things shall pursue sinners,
And the way of the ungodly will lead them astray.
30 A deceitful man will not gain his prey,
But a pure man is a precious possession.
31 In the ways of righteousness there is life,
But the ways of remembering wrongs are unto death.
Mark 12:1–27
1 Then He began to speak to them in parables: “A man planted a vineyard and set a hedge around it, dug a place for the wine vat and built a tower. And he leased it to vinedressers and went into a far country.
2 “Now at vintage-time he sent a servant to the vinedressers, that he might receive some of the fruit of the vineyard from the vinedressers.
3 “And they took him and beat him and sent him away empty-handed.
4 “Again he sent them another servant, and at him they threw stones, wounded him in the head, and sent him away shamefully treated.
5 “And again he sent another, and him they killed; and many others, beating some and killing some.
6 “Therefore still having one son, his beloved, he also sent him to them last, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’
7 “But those vinedressers said among themselves, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’
8 “So they took him and killed him and cast him out of the vineyard.
9 “Therefore what will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the vinedressers, and give the vineyard to others.
10 “Have you not even read this Scripture:
‘The stone which the builders rejected
Has become the chief cornerstone.
11 This was the Lord’s doing,
And it is marvelous in our eyes’? ”
12 And they sought to lay hands on Him, but feared the multitude, for they knew He had spoken the parable against them. So they left Him and went away.
The Pharisees: Is It Lawful to Pay Taxes to Caesar?
13 Then they sent to Him some of the Pharisees and the Herodians, to catch Him in His words.
14 When they had come, they said to Him, “Teacher, we know that You are true, and care about no one; for You do not regard the person of men, but teach the way of God in truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?
15 “Shall we pay, or shall we not pay?” But He, knowing their hypocrisy, said to them, “Why do you test Me? Bring Me a denarius that I may see it.”
16 So they brought it. And He said to them, “Whose image and inscription is this?” They said to Him, “Caesar’s.”
17 And Jesus answered and said to them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” And they marveled at Him.
The Sadducees: What About the Resurrection?
18 Then some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Him; and they asked Him, saying:
19 “Teacher, Moses wrote to us that if a man’s brother dies, and leaves his wife behind, and leaves no children, his brother should take his wife and raise up offspring for his brother.
20 “Now there were seven brothers. The first took a wife; and dying, he left no offspring.
21 “And the second took her, and he died; nor did he leave any offspring. And the third likewise.
22 “So the seven had her and left no offspring. Last of all the woman died also.
23 “Therefore, in the resurrection, when they rise, whose wife will she be? For all seven had her as wife.”
24 Jesus answered and said to them, “Are you not therefore mistaken, because you do not know the Scriptures nor the power of God?
25 “For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.
26 “But concerning the dead, that they rise, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the burning bush passage, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’?
27 “He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. You are therefore greatly mistaken.”