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5  Your love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens ♦︎
   and your faithfulness to the clouds.
6  Your righteousness stands like the strong mountains,
      your justice like the great deep; ♦︎
   you, Lord, shall save both man and beast.
7  How precious is your loving mercy, O God! ♦︎
   All mortal flesh shall take refuge
      under the shadow of your wings.
8  They shall be satisfied with the abundance of your house; ♦︎
   they shall drink from the river of your delights.
9  For with you is the well of life ♦︎
   and in your light shall we see light.
10  O continue your loving-kindness to those who know you ♦︎
   and your righteousness to those who are true of heart.

¹⁹ I thought
   how I would set you among my children,
and give you a pleasant land,
   the most beautiful heritage of all the nations.
And I thought you would call me, My Father,
   and would not turn from following me.
²⁰ Instead, as a faithless wife leaves her husband,
   so you have been faithless to me, O house of Israel,

says the Lord.

²¹ A voice on the bare heights^* is heard,
   the plaintive weeping of Israel’s children,
because they have perverted their way,
   they have forgotten the Lord their God:
²² Return, O faithless children,
   I will heal your faithlessness.

‘Here we come to you;
   for you are the Lord our God.
²³ Truly the hills are^* a delusion,
   the orgies on the mountains.
Truly in the Lord our God
   is the salvation of Israel.

24 ‘But from our youth the shameful thing has devoured all for which our ancestors had laboured, their flocks and their herds, their sons and their daughters. ²⁵Let us lie down in our shame, and let our dishonour cover us; for we have sinned against the Lord our God, we and our ancestors, from our youth even to this day; and we have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God.’

Directions concerning Marriage

7Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: ‘It is well for a man not to touch a woman.’ ²But because of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. ³The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. ⁴For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. ⁵Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time, to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. ⁶This I say by way of concession, not of command. ⁷I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has a particular gift from God, one having one kind and another a different kind.