that you were at that time separate from Messiah, alienated from the commonwealth of Yisra'el, and strangers from the covenants of the promise, having no hope and without God in the world.
In that day the LORD made a covenant with Avram, saying, *To your seed I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Perat:
But Zerubbavel, and Yeshua, and the rest of the heads of fathers' [houses] of Yisra'el, said to them, You have nothing to do with us in building a house to our God; but we ourselves together will build to the LORD, the God of Yisra'el, as king Koresh the king of Paras has commanded us.
For the LORD will have compassion on Ya`akov, and will yet choose Yisra'el, and set them in their own land. The foreigner will join himself with them, and they will unite with the house of Ya`akov.
This is what the LORD, the King of Yisra'el, and his Redeemer, the LORD of Armies, says: *I am the first, and I am the last; and besides me there is no God.
Assemble yourselves and come; draw near together, you who have escaped from the nations: they have no knowledge who carry the wood of their engraved image, and pray to a god that can't save.
You hope of Yisra'el, the Savior of it in the time of trouble, why should you be as a foreigner in the land, and as a wayfaring man who turns aside to stay for a night?
LORD, the hope of Yisra'el, all who forsake you shall be disappointed. Those who depart from me shall be written in the earth, because they have forsaken the LORD, the spring of living waters.
My hand shall be against the prophets who see false visions, and who divine lies: they shall not be in the council of my people, neither shall they be written in the writing of the house of Yisra'el, neither shall they enter into Eretz-Yisra'el; and you shall know that I am the Lord GOD.
Moreover I will make a covenant of shalom with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them; and I will place them, and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary in the midst of them forevermore.
It shall happen, that you shall divide it by lot for an inheritance to you and to the strangers who sojourn among you, who shall father children among you; and they shall be to you as the native-born among the children of Yisra'el; they shall have inheritance with you among the tribes of Yisra'el.
For the children of Yisra'el shall abide many days without king, and without prince, and without sacrifice, and without sacred stone, and without efod or idols.
All the wave offerings of the holy things, which the children of Yisra'el offer to the LORD, have I given you, and your sons and your daughters with you, as a portion forever: it is a covenant of salt forever before the LORD to you and to your seed with you.
You are the children of the prophets, and of the covenant which God made with our fathers, saying to Avraham, 'In your seed will all the families of the earth be blessed.'
being darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardening of their hearts;
that by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we may have a strong encouragement, who have fled for refuge to take hold of the hope set before us.
But now he has obtained a more excellent ministry, by so much as he is also the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted on better promises.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Yeshua the Messiah, who according to his great mercy became our father again to a living hope through the resurrection of Yeshua the Messiah from the dead,
But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts; and always be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks you a reason concerning the hope that is in you, with humility and fear: