Home > Reading > Daily Reading – September 22, 2018

Deuteronomy 32:15–35 (ESV)

15  “But Jeshurun grew fat, and kicked;
you grew fat, stout, and sleek;
then he forsook God who made him
and scoffed at the Rock of his salvation.
16  They stirred him to jealousy with strange gods;
with abominations they provoked him to anger.
17  They sacrificed to demons that were no gods,
to gods they had never known,
to new gods that had come recently,
whom your fathers had never dreaded.
18  You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you,
and you forgot the God who gave you birth.
19  “The Lord saw it and spurned them,
because of the provocation of his sons and his daughters.
20  And he said, ‘I will hide my face from them;
I will see what their end will be,
for they are a perverse generation,
children in whom is no faithfulness.
21  They have made me jealous with what is no god;
they have provoked me to anger with their idols.
So I will make them jealous with those who are no people;
I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation.
22  For a fire is kindled by my anger,
and it burns to the depths of Sheol,
devours the earth and its increase,
and sets on fire the foundations of the mountains.
23  “ ‘And I will heap disasters upon them;
I will spend my arrows on them;
24  they shall be wasted with hunger,
and devoured by plague
and poisonous pestilence;
I will send the teeth of beasts against them,
with the venom of things that crawl in the dust.
25  Outdoors the sword shall bereave,
and indoors terror,
for young man and woman alike,
the nursing child with the man of gray hairs.
26  I would have said, “I will cut them to pieces;
I will wipe them from human memory,”
27  had I not feared provocation by the enemy,
lest their adversaries should misunderstand,
lest they should say, “Our hand is triumphant,
it was not the Lord who did all this.” ’
28  “For they are a nation void of counsel,
and there is no understanding in them.
29  If they were wise, they would understand this;
they would discern their latter end!
30  How could one have chased a thousand,
and two have put ten thousand to flight,
unless their Rock had sold them,
and the Lord had given them up?
31  For their rock is not as our Rock;
our enemies are by themselves.
32  For their vine comes from the vine of Sodom
and from the fields of Gomorrah;
their grapes are grapes of poison;
their clusters are bitter;
33  their wine is the poison of serpents
and the cruel venom of asps.
34  “ ‘Is not this laid up in store with me,
sealed up in my treasuries?
35  Vengeance is mine, and recompense,
for the time when their foot shall slip;
for the day of their calamity is at hand,
and their doom comes swiftly.’

Psalm 81 (ESV)

Oh, That My People Would Listen to Me

81 To the choirmaster: according to The Gittith. Of Asaph.

Sing aloud to God our strength;
shout for joy to the God of Jacob!

Raise a song; sound the tambourine,
the sweet lyre with the harp.

Blow the trumpet at the new moon,
at the full moon, on our feast day.

For it is a statute for Israel,
a rule of the God of Jacob.

He made it a decree in Joseph
when he went out over the land of Egypt.
I hear a language I had not known:

“I relieved your shoulder of the burden;
your hands were freed from the basket.

In distress you called, and I delivered you;
I answered you in the secret place of thunder;
I tested you at the waters of Meribah. Selah

Hear, O my people, while I admonish you!
O Israel, if you would but listen to me!

There shall be no strange god among you;
you shall not bow down to a foreign god.

10  I am the Lord your God,
who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.
Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.

11  “But my people did not listen to my voice;
Israel would not submit to me.

12  So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts,
to follow their own counsels.

13  Oh, that my people would listen to me,
that Israel would walk in my ways!

14  I would soon subdue their enemies
and turn my hand against their foes.

15  Those who hate the Lord would cringe toward him,
and their fate would last forever.

16  But he would feed you with the finest of the wheat,
and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.”

Luke 6:12–19 (ESV)

The Twelve Apostles

12 In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God. 13 And when day came, he called his disciples and chose from them twelve, whom he named apostles: 14 Simon, whom he named Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James and John, and Philip, and Bartholomew, 15 and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon who was called the Zealot, 16 and Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.

Jesus Ministers to a Great Multitude

17 And he came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon, 18 who came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases. And those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. 19 And all the crowd sought to touch him, for power came out from him and healed them all.

Here we might add what Luther said in 1528 in his Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis … “So we must say that Matthew and Mark have placed after the New Supper what took place after the old Supper and is to be located there. For they were not greatly concerned about the order but were satisfied if they wrote history and truth. Luke, however, who wrote after them, states that the reason for his writing was that many others had written such accounts without regard to the order of events, and that he, therefore, had resolved to write them in proper order.” (47–48)

–Johann Michael Reu, Luther on the Scriptures

This daily Bible reading guide, Reading the Word of God, was conceived and prepared as a result of the ongoing discussions between representatives of three church bodies: Lutheran Church—Canada (LCC), The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) and the North American Lutheran Church (NALC). The following individuals have represented their church bodies and approved this introduction and the reading guide: LCC: President Robert Bugbee; NALC: Bishop John Bradosky, Revs. Mark Chavez, James Nestingen, and David Wendel; LCMS: Revs. Albert Collver, Joel Lehenbauer, John Pless, and Larry Vogel.

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