So couriers ran throughout all Israel and Judah with letters from the king and his officials, as the king had commanded, which read: “Sons of Israel, return to the Lord of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel that He might turn again to the remnant of you who have escaped from the king of Assyria.
When He gives quietness, who then can make trouble? And when He hides His face, who then can behold Him, whether it is done against a nation or against a man only?
Many people shall go and say, “Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, and He will teach us of His ways, and we will walk in His paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
You shall defile also your graven images overlaid with silver, and your molded images ornamented with gold. You shall scatter them as an impure thing, and say to them, “Be gone!”
Moreover the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days, in the day that the Lord binds up the breach of His people and heals the wound from His blow.
Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; and let him return to the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.
For I will restore health to you, and I will heal you of your wounds, says the Lord, because they called you an outcast, saying, “This is Zion whom no man cares for.”
They come to fight with the Chaldeans, but it is to fill them with the dead bodies of men whom I have slain in My anger and in My fury, all for whose wickedness I have hidden My face from this city.
In those days and at that time, says the Lord, the Israelites will come, they and the Judahites together. They will go along weeping as they go, and seek the Lord their God.
They will ask for the way to Zion with their faces in its direction. They will come that they may join themselves to the Lord in a perpetual covenant that will not be forgotten.
Afterward the Israelites will return and seek the Lord their God and David their king. They will come in fear to the Lord and to His goodness in the latter days.
If the priest comes in and examines it and sees the disease has not spread in the house after the house was plastered, then the priest shall pronounce the house clean, because the disease is healed.
See now that I, even I, am He, and there is no god besides Me; I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal; there is no one who can deliver out of My hand.
Samuel spoke to all the house of Israel, saying, “If you are returning to the Lord with all your heart, then put away the foreign gods and Ashtoreths from your midst. And make firm your hearts unto the Lord, and serve Him only. Then He will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines.”