And as for you, my son Solomon, know the God of your father, and serve him with a perfect heart and a willing mind. For the Lord searches all hearts, and understands the thoughts of all minds. If you seek him, you will find him. But if you abandon him, he will cast you aside for eternity.
And he went out to meet Asa, and he said to him: "Listen to me, Asa and all of Judah and Benjamin. The Lord is with you, because you have been with him. If you seek him, you will find him. But if you abandon him, he will abandon you.
Woe to a sinful nation, a people burdened by iniquity, a wicked offspring, accursed children. They have abandoned the Lord. They have blasphemed the Holy One of Israel. They been taken away backwards.
sinning and lying against the Lord. And we have turned away, not so as to go after our God, and so that we were speaking calumny and transgression. We have conceived, and spoken from the heart, words of falsehood.
But if you say in your heart, 'Why have these things happened to me?' it is because of the greatness of your iniquity that your shame has been uncovered and the soles of your feet have been defiled.
For they have abandoned me, and they have made this place foreign, and they have offered libations in it to foreign gods, whom neither they, nor their fathers, nor the kings of Judah have known. And they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent.
For my people have done two evils. They have forsaken me, the Fountain of living water, and they have dug for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that are unable to hold water.
Your own malice will reprove you, and your own apostasy will rebuke you! But know and perceive this: it is an evil and bitter thing for you to forsake the Lord your God, and to be without my fear within you, says the Lord, the God of hosts.
because of the wickedness which they have done, so that they provoked me to wrath, and because they went to offer sacrifice and worship to strange gods, which neither they, nor you, nor your fathers knew.
All this is for the wickedness of Jacob and for the sins of the house of Israel. What is the wickedness of Jacob? Is it not Samaria? And what is the loftiness of Judah? Is it not Jerusalem?
He discovered him in a desert land, in a place of horror and a vast wilderness. He led him around and taught him, and he guarded him like the pupil of his eye,