At your parties with your wine, harps, drums, flutes, and other musical instruments, you don’t see what the Lord has done. You don’t notice what his hands have made.
People did not think it was important to have a true knowledge of God. So God left them and allowed them to have their own worthless thinking. And so they do what they should not do.
There are things about God that people cannot see—his eternal power and all that makes him God. But since the beginning of the world, those things have been easy for people to understand. They are made clear in what God has made. So people have no excuse for the evil they do.
A wise person understands these things, and a smart person should learn them. The Lord’s ways are right. Good people will live by them. Sinners will die by them.
Israel, my bride, I will rebuild you. You will be a country again. You will pick up your tambourines again. You will dance with all the other people who are having fun.
The Lord is God. He made the skies and the earth. He put the earth in its place. He did not want the earth to be empty when he made it. He created it to be lived on. “I am the Lord. There is no other God.
“May the clouds in the skies above pour goodness on the earth like rain. May the earth open up to let salvation grow. And may goodness grow with that salvation, which I, the Lord, created.
Look up to the skies. Who created all those stars? Who created all those “armies” in the sky? Who knows every star by name? He is very strong and powerful, so not one of these stars is lost.
If you live right and obey all my commands as David did, I will be with you and make your family a family of kings, just as I did for David. And you will have Israel as your kingdom.
“You, Lord All-Powerful, the God of Israel, have shown things to me. You said, ‘I will make your family great.’ That is why I, your servant, decided to pray this prayer to you.
There is no power that can defeat the people of Jacob. There is no magic that can stop the Israelites. People will say this about Jacob and the Israelites: ‘Look at the great things God did!’