Who are Israelites: who have the place of sons, and the glory, and the agreements with God, and the giving of the law, and the worship, and the hope offered by God:
In that day the Lord made an agreement with Abram, and said, To your seed have I given this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates:
And I will make between me and you and your seed after you through all generations, an eternal agreement to be a God to you and to your seed after you.
So that the priests were not able to keep their places to do their work because of the cloud, for the house of the Lord was full of the glory of the Lord.
Give ear to me, O family of Jacob, and all the rest of the people of Israel, who have been supported by me from their birth, and have been my care from their earliest days:
And after working the earth of it with a spade, he took away its stones, and put in it a very special vine; and he put up a watchtower in the middle of it, hollowing out in the rock a place for the grape-crushing; and he was hoping that it would give the best grapes, but it gave common grapes.
The sun will not be your light by day, and the moon will no longer be bright for you by night: but the Lord will be to you an eternal light, and your God your glory.
Is Ephraim my dear son? is he the child of my delight? for whenever I say things against him, I still keep him in my memory: so my heart is troubled for him; I will certainly have mercy on him, says the Lord.
But this is the agreement which I will make with the people of Israel after those days, says the Lord; I will put my law in their inner parts, writing it in their hearts; and I will be their God, and they will be my people.
They will come with weeping, and going before them I will be their guide: guiding them by streams of water in a straight way where there is no falling: for I am a father to Israel, and Ephraim is the first of my sons.
Like the bow in the cloud on a day of rain, so was the light shining round him. And this is what the glory of the Lord was like. And when I saw it I went down on my face, and the voice of one talking came to my ears.
And when Moses went into the Tent of meeting to have talk with him, then the Voice came to his ears from over the cover which was on the ark of witness, from between the two winged ones. And he had talk with him.
Give ear to another story. A master of a house made a vine garden, and put a wall round it, and made a place for crushing out the wine, and made a tower, and let it out to field-workers, and went into another country.
Now to Abraham were the undertakings given, and to his seed. He says not, And to seeds, as of a great number; but as of one, he says, And to your seed, which is Christ.
That you were at that time without Christ, being cut off from any part in Israel's rights as a nation, having no part in God's agreement, having no hope, and without God in the world.
These are the words of the agreement which Moses was ordered by the Lord to make with the children of Israel in the land of Moab, in addition to the agreement which he made with them in Horeb.
And the Lord said to Moses, Now you are going to rest with your fathers; and this people will be false to me, uniting themselves to the strange gods of the land where they are going; they will be turned away from me and will not keep the agreement I have made with them.
For you are a holy people to the Lord your God: marked out by the Lord your God to be his special people out of all the nations on the face of the earth.