Evening Prayer: Friday 30 May 2025

40. How often the people disobeyed God in the wilderness *
and offended in the desert!

41. Again and again they tempted God *
and provoked the Holy One of Israel.

42. They did not remember the power of God *
in the day when the Lord ransomed them from the enemy;

43. how God wrought signs in Egypt *
and omens in the field of Zoan,

44. turning their rivers into blood, *
so that they could not drink of their streams;

45. sending swarms of flies among them, which ate them up, *
and frogs, which destroyed them;

46. giving their crops to the caterpillar, *
the fruit of their toil to the locust;

47. killing their vines with hail *
and their sycamores with frost;

48. delivering their cattle to hailstones *
and their livestock to hot thunderbolts.

49. God poured out upon them blazing anger: *
fury, indignation and distress, a troop of destroying angels.

50. Giving full rein to anger, God did not spare their souls from death, *
but delivered their lives to the plague,

51. striking down all the firstborn of Egypt, *
the flower of youth in the dwellings of Ham.

52. God led this people like sheep *
and guided them in the wilderness like a flock.

53. The Lord led them to safety, and they were not afraid; *
but the sea overwhelmed their enemies.

54. God brought them to the holy land, *
the mountain the strong hand of God had won.



55. God drove out the Canaanites before them and apportioned an inheritance to them by lot, *
making the tribes of Israel to dwell in their tents.

56. But they tested and defied the Most High *
and did not keep the commandments.

57. They turned away and were disloyal like their ancestors; *
they were undependable like a warped bow.

58. They grieved God with their hill-altars *
and provoked displeasure with their idols.

59. Hearing this, God was angry *
and utterly rejected Israel;

60. forsaking the shrine at Shiloh, *
the tabernacle where God had lived among this people;

61. delivering the ark into captivity, *
the glory of God into the adversary’s hand;

62. giving this people to the sword *
and becoming angry against the very inheritance of God.

63. The fire consumed their young men; *
there were no wedding songs for their young women.

64. Their priests fell by the sword, *
and their widows made no lamentation.

65. Then the Lord woke as though from sleep, *
like a warrior refreshed with wine,

66. striking the enemies of God on the backside *
and putting them to perpetual shame.

67. God rejected the tent of Joseph *
and did not choose the tribe of Ephraim;

68. choosing instead the tribe of Judah *
and Mount Zion, beloved by God,

69. where a sanctuary was built like the heights of heaven, *
like the everlasting earth.

70. God chose David as a servant *
and took him away from the sheepfolds,

71. bringing him from following the ewes, *
to be a shepherd over Jacob God’s people and over the inheritance of Israel.

72. So David shepherded them with a faithful and true heart *
and guided them with the skillfulness of God’s hands.