“So they will be in danger. They will be forced into darkness where they will be defeated. I will bring disaster on them in the year I punish them,” says the Lord.
Give glory to the Lord your God before he brings darkness and before you slip and fall on the dark hills. You hope for light, but he will turn it into thick darkness; he will change it into deep gloom.
“People will run from fear, but they will fall into the pits. Anyone who climbs out of the pits will be caught in the traps. I will bring the year of punishment to Moab,” says the Lord.
Kill all the young men in Babylon; let them be killed like animals. How terrible it will be for them, because the time has come for their defeat; it is time for them to be punished.
They should be ashamed of the terrible way they act, but they are not ashamed at all. They don’t even know how to blush about their sins. So they will fall, along with everyone else. They will be thrown to the ground when I punish them, says the Lord.
Jerusalem says: “Look, Lord, and see to whom you have done this. Women eat their own babies, the children they have cared for. Priests and prophets are killed in the Temple of the Lord.
Even the best of them is like a thornbush; the most honest of them is worse than a prickly plant. The day that your watchmen warned you about has come. Now they will be confused.
Then Jesus said, “The light will be with you for a little longer, so walk while you have the light. Then the darkness will not catch you. If you walk in the darkness, you will not know where you are going.
I will punish those who do wrong; I will repay them. Soon their foot will slip, because their day of trouble is near, and their punishment will come quickly.”
But whoever hates a brother or sister is in darkness, lives in darkness, and does not know where to go, because the darkness has made that person blind.
They are like wild waves of the sea, tossing up their own shameful actions like foam. They are like stars that wander in the sky. A place in the blackest darkness has been kept for them forever.