“Your own evil instructs you, and your backslidings reprove you. Know therefore and see that it is evil and bitter that you have forsaken יהוה your Elohim, and that My fear is not in you,” declares the Master יהוה of hosts.
“For My people have done two evils: they have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, to hew out for themselves cisterns, cracked cisterns, which do not hold water.
Alas, sinning nation, a people loaded with crookedness, a seed of evil-doers, sons acting corruptly! They have forsaken יהוה, they have provoked the Set-apart One of Yisra’ĕ
“As for you, my son Shelomoh, know the Elohim of your father, and serve Him with a perfect heart and with a pleasing life, for יהוה searches all hearts and understands all the intent of the thoughts. If you do seek Him, He is found by you; but if you forsake Him, He rejects you forever.
“He found him in a wilderness, And in a wasted, howling desert. He encompassed him, He made him understand, He watched over him as the apple of His eye.
And when you say in your heart, “Why has this come upon me?” It is because of your great crookedness that your skirts have been uncovered, your heels made bare.
“Because they have forsaken Me and have profaned this place, and have burned incense in it to other mighty ones whom neither they, their fathers, nor the sovereigns of Yehuḏ
because of their evil which they have done to provoke Me, by going to burn incense by serving other mighty ones whom they did not know, they nor you nor your fathers.
transgressing, and being untrue to יהוה, and turning away from our Elohim, speaking oppression and apostasy, conceiving and pondering words of falsehood from the heart.