Old/New Testament

146 Praise the Lord! Yes, really praise him! ² I will praise him as long as I live, yes, even with my dying breath.

³ Don’t look to men for help; their greatest leaders fail; ⁴ for every man must die. His breathing stops, life ends, and in a moment all he planned for himself is ended. ⁵ But happy is the man who has the God of Jacob as his helper, whose hope is in the Lord his God— ⁶ the God who made both earth and heaven, the seas and everything in them. He is the God who keeps every promise, ⁷ who gives justice to the poor and oppressed and food to the hungry. He frees the prisoners ⁸ and opens the eyes of the blind; he lifts the burdens from those bent down beneath their loads. For the Lord loves good men. ⁹ He protects the immigrants and cares for the orphans and widows. But he turns topsy-turvy the plans of the wicked.

¹⁰ The Lord will reign forever. O Jerusalem,^[a] your God is King in every generation! Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!

147 Hallelujah! Yes, praise the Lord! How good it is to sing his praises! How delightful, and how right!

² He is rebuilding Jerusalem and bringing back the exiles. ³ He heals the brokenhearted, binding up their wounds. ⁴ He counts the stars and calls them all by name. ⁵ How great he is! His power is absolute! His understanding is unlimited. ⁶ The Lord supports the humble, but brings the wicked into the dust.

⁷ Sing out your thanks to him; sing praises to our God, accompanied by harps. ⁸ He covers the heavens with clouds, sends down the showers, and makes the green grass grow in mountain pastures. ⁹ He feeds the wild animals, and the young ravens cry to him for food. ¹⁰ The speed of a horse is nothing to him. How puny in his sight is the strength of a man. ¹¹ But his joy is in those who reverence him, those who expect him to be loving and kind.

¹² Praise him, O Jerusalem! Praise your God, O Zion! ¹³ For he has fortified your gates against all enemies and blessed your children. ¹⁴ He sends peace across your nation and fills your barns with plenty of the finest wheat. ¹⁵ He sends his orders to the world. How swiftly his word flies. ¹⁶ He sends the snow in all its lovely whiteness, scatters the frost upon the ground, ¹⁷ and hurls the hail upon the earth. Who can stand before his freezing cold? ¹⁸ But then he calls for warmer weather, and the spring winds blow and all the river ice is broken. ¹⁹ He has made known his laws and ceremonies of worship to Israel— ²⁰ something he has not done with any other nation; they have not known his commands.

Hallelujah! Yes, praise the Lord!

15 Now let me remind you, brothers, of what the Gospel really is, for it has not changed—it is the same Good News I preached to you before. You welcomed it then and still do now, for your faith is squarely built upon this wonderful message; ² and it is this Good News that saves you if you still firmly believe it, unless of course you never really believed it in the first place.

³ I passed on to you right from the first what had been told to me, that Christ died for our sins just as the Scriptures said he would, ⁴ and that he was buried, and that three days afterwards he arose from the grave just as the prophets foretold. ⁵ He was seen by Peter and later by the rest of “the Twelve.”^{[a] 6} After that he was seen by more than five hundred Christian brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died by now. ⁷ Then James saw him, and later all the apostles. ⁸ Last of all I saw him too, long after the others, as though I had been born almost too late for this. ⁹ For I am the least worthy of all the apostles, and I shouldn’t even be called an apostle at all after the way I treated the church of God.

¹⁰ But whatever I am now it is all because God poured out such kindness and grace upon me—and not without results: for I have worked harder than all the other apostles, yet actually I wasn’t doing it, but God working in me, to bless me. ¹¹ It makes no difference who worked the hardest, I or they; the important thing is that we preached the Gospel to you and you believed it.

¹² But tell me this! Since you believe what we preach, that Christ rose from the dead, why are some of you saying that dead people will never come back to life again? ¹³ For if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ must still be dead. ¹⁴ And if he is still dead, then all our preaching is useless and your trust in God is empty, worthless, hopeless; ¹⁵ and we apostles are all liars because we have said that God raised Christ from the grave, and of course that isn’t true if the dead do not come back to life again. ¹⁶ If they don’t, then Christ is still dead, ¹⁷ and you are very foolish to keep on trusting God to save you, and you are still under condemnation for your sins; ¹⁸ in that case, all Christians who have died are lost! ¹⁹ And if being a Christian is of value to us only now in this life, we are the most miserable of creatures.

²⁰ But the fact is that Christ did actually rise from the dead and has become the first of millions^[b] who will come back to life again someday.

²¹ Death came into the world because of what one man (Adam) did, and it is because of what this other man (Christ) has done that now there is the resurrection from the dead. ²² Everyone dies because all of us are related to Adam, being members of his sinful race, and wherever there is sin, death results. But all who are related to Christ will rise again. ²³ Each, however, in his own turn: Christ rose first; then when Christ comes back, all his people will become alive again.

²⁴ After that the end will come when he will turn the Kingdom over to God the Father, having put down all enemies of every kind. ²⁵ For Christ will be King until he has defeated all his enemies, ²⁶ including the last enemy—death. This too must be defeated and ended. ²⁷ For the rule and authority over all things has been given to Christ by his Father; except, of course, Christ does not rule over the Father himself, who gave him this power to rule. ²⁸ When Christ has finally won the battle against all his enemies, then he, the Son of God, will put himself also under his Father’s orders, so that God who has given him the victory over everything else will be utterly supreme.