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Psalm 84

1  How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts! ♦︎
   My soul has a desire and longing to enter the courts of the Lord;
      my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God.
2  The sparrow has found her a house
      and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young: ♦︎
   at your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.
3  Blessed are they who dwell in your house: ♦︎
   they will always be praising you.
4  Blessed are those whose strength is in you, ♦︎
   in whose heart are the highways to Zion,
5  Who going through the barren valley find there a spring, ♦︎
   and the early rains will clothe it with blessing.
6  They will go from strength to strength ♦︎
   and appear before God in Zion.
7  O Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer; ♦︎
   listen, O God of Jacob.
8  Behold our defender, O God, ♦︎
   and look upon the face of your anointed.
9  For one day in your courts ♦︎
   is better than a thousand.
10  I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God ♦︎
   than dwell in the tents of ungodliness.
11  For the Lord God is both sun and shield;
      he will give grace and glory; ♦︎
   no good thing shall the Lord withhold
      from those who walk with integrity.
12  O Lord God of hosts, ♦︎
   blessed are those who put their trust in you.

Reign of Hezekiah

29Hezekiah began to reign when he was twenty-five years old; he reigned for twenty-nine years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Abijah daughter of Zechariah. ²He did what was right in the sight of the Lord, just as his ancestor David had done.

The Temple Cleansed

3 In the first year of his reign, in the first month, he opened the doors of the house of the Lord and repaired them. ⁴He brought in the priests and the Levites and assembled them in the square on the east. ⁵He said to them, ‘Listen to me, Levites! Sanctify yourselves, and sanctify the house of the Lord, the God of your ancestors, and carry out the filth from the holy place. ⁶For our ancestors have been unfaithful and have done what was evil in the sight of the Lord our God; they have forsaken him, and have turned away their faces from the dwelling of the Lord, and turned their backs. ⁷They also shut the doors of the vestibule and put out the lamps, and have not offered incense or made burnt-offerings in the holy place to the God of Israel. ⁸Therefore the wrath of the Lord came upon Judah and Jerusalem, and he has made them an object of horror, of astonishment, and of hissing, as you see with your own eyes. ⁹Our fathers have fallen by the sword and our sons and our daughters and our wives are in captivity for this. ¹⁰Now it is in my heart to make a covenant with the Lord, the God of Israel, so that his fierce anger may turn away from us. ¹¹My sons, do not now be negligent, for the Lord has chosen you to stand in his presence to minister to him, and to be his ministers and make offerings to him.’ ¹⁶The priests went into the inner part of the house of the Lord to cleanse it, and they brought out all the unclean things that they found in the temple of the Lord into the court of the house of the Lord; and the Levites took them and carried them out to the Wadi Kidron. ¹⁷They began to sanctify on the first day of the first month, and on the eighth day of the month they came to the vestibule of the Lord; then for eight days they sanctified the house of the Lord, and on the sixteenth day of the first month they finished. ¹⁸Then they went inside to King Hezekiah and said, ‘We have cleansed all the house of the Lord, the altar of burnt-offering and all its utensils, and the table for the rows of bread and all its utensils. ¹⁹All the utensils that King Ahaz repudiated during his reign when he was faithless, we have made ready and sanctified; see, they are in front of the altar of the Lord.’

Christ’s Sacrifice Takes Away Sin

23 Thus it was necessary for the sketches of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves need better sacrifices than these. ²⁴For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made by human hands, a mere copy of the true one, but he entered into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. ²⁵Nor was it to offer himself again and again, as the high priest enters the Holy Place year after year with blood that is not his own; ²⁶for then he would have had to suffer again and again since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself. ²⁷And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgement, ²⁸so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.