Now therefore, I pray You, if I have found favor in Your sight, show me now Your way, that I may know You, and that I may find favor in Your sight. Consider too that this nation is Your people.”
The king said to Zadok, “Take the ark of God back to the city. If I have found favor in the eyes of the Lord, He will bring me back and allow me to see both it and its resting place.
The Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows.
Why should the Egyptians speak, saying, ‘With evil intent He brought them out, to kill them in the mountains and to destroy them from the face of the earth’? Turn from Your fierce wrath and relent of this harm against Your people.
He said, “If now I have found favor in Your sight, O Lord, let my Lord, I pray, go among us, for we are a stiff-necked people. Pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for your inheritance.”
And afterward Moses and Aaron went in and said to Pharaoh, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Let My people go, that they may hold a feast to Me in the wilderness.’ ”
O Lord, why have You made us to err from Your ways and hardened our heart from fearing You? Return for Your servants’ sake, the tribes of Your inheritance.
Between the temple porch and the altar, let the priests, ministers of the Lord, weep and say, “Have pity upon Your people, and do not make Your inheritance a disgrace, a mockery among the nations. Why should they say among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?’ ”
I prayed therefore to the Lord, and said, “O Lord God, do not destroy Your people, Your inheritance, which You have redeemed through Your greatness, which You have brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand.