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Psalm 66

1  Be joyful in God, all the earth; ♦︎
   sing the glory of his name;
      sing the glory of his praise.
2  Say to God, ‘How awesome are your deeds! ♦︎
   Because of your great strength
      your enemies shall bow before you.
3  ‘All the earth shall worship you, ♦︎
   sing to you, sing praise to your name.’
4  Come now and behold the works of God, ♦︎
   how wonderful he is in his dealings with humankind.
5  He turned the sea into dry land;
      the river they passed through on foot; ♦︎
   there we rejoiced in him.
6  In his might he rules for ever;
      his eyes keep watch over the nations; ♦︎
   let no rebel rise up against him.
7  Bless our God, O you peoples; ♦︎
   make the voice of his praise to be heard,
8  Who holds our souls in life ♦︎
   and suffers not our feet to slip.
9  For you, O God, have proved us; ♦︎
   you have tried us as silver is tried.
10  You brought us into the snare; ♦︎
   you laid heavy burdens upon our backs.
11  You let enemies ride over our heads;
      we went through fire and water; ♦︎
   but you brought us out into a place of liberty.
12  I will come into your house with burnt offerings
      and will pay you my vows, ♦︎
   which my lips uttered
      and my mouth promised when I was in trouble.
13  I will offer you fat burnt sacrifices
      with the smoke of rams; ♦︎
   I will sacrifice oxen and goats.
14  Come and listen, all you who fear God, ♦︎
   and I will tell you what he has done for my soul.
15  I called out to him with my mouth ♦︎
   and his praise was on my tongue.
16  If I had nursed evil in my heart, ♦︎
   the Lord would not have heard me,
17  But in truth God has heard me; ♦︎
   he has heeded the voice of my prayer.
18  Blessed be God, who has not rejected my prayer, ♦︎
   nor withheld his loving mercy from me.

32 For ask now about former ages, long before your own, ever since the day that God created human beings on the earth; ask from one end of heaven to the other: has anything so great as this ever happened or has its like ever been heard of? ³³Has any people ever heard the voice of a god speaking out of a fire, as you have heard, and lived? ³⁴Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by terrifying displays of power, as the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes? ³⁵To you it was shown so that you would acknowledge that the Lord is God; there is no other besides him. ³⁶From heaven he made you hear his voice to discipline you. On earth he showed you his great fire, while you heard his words coming out of the fire. ³⁷And because he loved your ancestors, he chose their descendants after them. He brought you out of Egypt with his own presence, by his great power, ³⁸driving out before you nations greater and mightier than yourselves, to bring you in, giving you their land for a possession, as it is still today. ³⁹So acknowledge today and take to heart that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other. ⁴⁰Keep his statutes and his commandments, which I am commanding you today for your own well-being and that of your descendants after you, so that you may long remain in the land that the Lord your God is giving you for all time.

Jesus and the Beloved Disciple

20 Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them; he was the one who had reclined next to Jesus at the supper and had said, ‘Lord, who is it that is going to betray you?’ ²¹When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, ‘Lord, what about him?’ ²²Jesus said to him, ‘If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!’ ²³So the rumour spread in the community^* that this disciple would not die. Yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die, but, ‘If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?’^*

24 This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true. ²⁵But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.