The Daily Audio Bible

39 ‘Son of man, you must tell my message to Gog to warn him. Say to him, “This is what the Almighty Lord says: Listen! I am your enemy, Gog, prince of Meshech and Tubal. ² I will turn you around and I will pull you along. I will bring you from the far away places in the north to attack the mountains of Israel. ³ Then I will knock your bow out of your left hand. I will cause your arrows to fall out of your right hand. ⁴ You will fall to the ground on Israel's mountains. You, your soldiers and the people who are with you will all die there. Vultures and wild animals will eat your dead bodies. ⁵ Your bodies will lie in the fields. I, the Almighty Lord, have said that this will happen.

⁶ I will send fires to burn in Magog. They will burn the people who live safely in towns on the coast of the sea. Then they will know that I am the Lord.

⁷ My people, Israel will know that my name is holy. No longer will I let them say bad things about me. And the nations round you will know that I, the Lord am the holy God in Israel. ⁸ I promise that I will cause this to happen. You can be sure that this day will come, says the Lord God.

I told you that this day would come.

⁹ Then those who live in Israel's towns will go out. They will pick up the weapons and they will burn them. They will burn the small and large shields, the heavy sticks, the throwing sticks and the sharp pointed sticks (swords). They will use them to make their fires. They will have enough wood for seven years of fires. ¹⁰ They will not have to go into the fields or forests to find wood. They will take away the things from those who took their things, says the Lord God.

¹¹ They will bury Gog in the valley east of the sea. They will bury Gog and all his armies there. So men will not be able to walk through this valley. They will call it the valley of Hamon Gog (Gog's army).

¹² Israel's people will need seven months to bury all the dead bodies. Then the land will be clean. ¹³ All the people in the country will bury the dead bodies. They will always remember that day, the day that I won the fight. They will give me glory, says the Lord God.

¹⁴ They will choose some men to clean the land. They will travel through all the country. Other men will bury the dead bodies that remain on the ground. They will begin to do this at the end of the seven months. ¹⁵ The men who walk through the country will find dead men's bones. They will put a sign by each one. Then the men who bury the bodies will bury them in the valley of Hamon Gog. ¹⁶ (A town called Hamonah is also there.) That is how they will make the land clean.”

¹⁷ Son of man, this is what the Lord God says: Shout to all kinds of birds and wild animals, “Come here from all the country to eat the meal that I have prepared for you. It is a great sacrifice on Israel's mountains. There you will eat meat and you will drink blood. ¹⁸ You will eat the meat of great men and you will drink the blood of kings. You will eat them like the fat sheep, cows and animals from Bashan that you eat. ¹⁹ At this sacrifice, you will eat so much fat that you cannot eat any more. You will drink so much blood that you become drunk. ²⁰ I will give you horses and their riders to eat. I will give you great men and many kinds of soldiers to eat,” says the Lord God.

²¹ I will show my glory to all the nations. They will see that I can punish people. And they will know that I decide how and when to punish them. ²² From that time and for all the time after that, Israel's people will know that I am the Lord their God. ²³ And the nations will know that I sent Israel's people away from their country. They will know that I punished my people because of their sin. They had not been faithful to me so I turned away from them. I let their enemies take them and kill them with swords. ²⁴ I punished them because they had not kept themselves clean from sin. I hid myself from them because they had done so many evil things.’

²⁵ So this is what the Lord God says. ‘Now I will bring back Jacob (Israel) from the countries where his people are prisoners. I will be kind to all Israel's people. And I will make them see that I am holy. ²⁶ They will forget that they were ashamed. They will forget that they failed to keep their promises to me. That was when they lived in a safe country. In that country, nobody made them afraid. ²⁷ I will bring them back from the lands where their enemies took them. The nations will see what I have done. So all the nations will know that I am holy. ²⁸ Then Israel will know that I am the Lord their God. I sent my people away to far countries. But I will bring them all back to their own country. I will not leave any behind. ²⁹ No longer will I turn away from them. I will pour my Spirit over Israel's people, says the Lord God.’

A vision of the temple

40 In the 25th year that we had been prisoners in Babylon, the Lord took hold of me with great power. It happened on the tenth day of the first month of the year. It was 14 years since Babylonian soldiers had destroyed the city of Jerusalem. In a vision, the Lord took me there. ² In the vision, he took me to the land of Israel. He put me on a very high mountain. When I looked towards the south, I saw a group of buildings that looked like a city. ³ The Lord took me there. Then I saw a man who shone brightly like bronze. He was standing at the entrance of a building. He held a linen rope and a stick in his hand. He used them to measure things. ⁴ The man said to me, ‘Son of man, watch and listen carefully to me. Remember everything that I will show you. God has brought you here so that I can show these things to you. Tell Israel's people about everything that you see.’

The east gate

⁵ I saw a wall all the way round the place where the temple was. The stick in the man's hand was 3 metres long. He used it to measure the wall. The wall was 3 metres wide and 3 metres high.

⁶ Then he went to the gate on the east side. He climbed its steps and he measured the size of the entrance. It was 3 metres deep. ⁷ Beyond this was a passage with three rooms on each side. They were rooms for the guards. Each of these rooms was 3 metres long and 3 metres wide. The walls between the rooms were 2½ metres thick. Beyond them was a passage that was 3 metres long. This went to an entrance room to the yard of the temple. ⁸ The man measured the entrance room at the end of the passage. ⁹ It was 4 metres long. It had pillars that were 1 metre thick. It was the nearest part of the gate to the temple. ¹⁰ The three rooms on each side of the passage at the east gate were all the same size. The walls that were between each room were also the same size.

¹¹ Then the man measured the passage that went through the gate's entrance. The passage was 6½ metres wide. The gate's entrance itself was 5 metres wide. ¹² There was a low wall in front of the rooms on each side of the passage. It was ½ metre high. The rooms were 3 metres square. ¹³ The man also measured between the back wall of one room and the back wall of the room opposite. It was 12½ metres from one wall to the other wall, across the passage. ¹⁴ The entrance room had pillars on the outside that were 30 metres high. The yard was all around three sides of the room. ¹⁵ The passage was 25 metres long, from the gate at the front to the entrance room into the yard. ¹⁶ The rooms for the guards all had small windows in their outside walls. The walls between the rooms also had small windows. The entrance room to the yard also had windows of the same kind. Men had cut pictures of palm trees on the inside walls of the passage.^[a]

The outside yard

¹⁷ The man took me through the entrance gate into the outside yard of the temple. I saw 30 rooms there, all along the wall of the yard. A path of flat stones was in front of the rooms. ¹⁸ The path went all around the yard and it covered the space between the gates. It was called the lower path.

¹⁹ The man measured across the outside yard. He measured from the lower gate to the higher gate that went into the inside yard. The man measured 50 metres between the two gates.

The north gate

²⁰ Then the man measured the gate on the north side of the outside yard. ²¹ He measured the three rooms on each side of the passage and the walls between them. He also measured the entrance room itself. They all measured the same as those in the east gate. The whole entrance was 25 metres long and it was 12½ metres wide. ²² The entrance room, the windows and the pictures of palm trees were the same as those in the east gate. Seven steps went up to the north gate. The entrance room into the yard was at the end of the passage. ²³ Opposite this gate, across the yard, was the gate to the inside yard. It was the same as on the east side. The man measured 50 metres between the two gates.

The south gate

²⁴ Next, the man took me to the south side of the yard. I saw another gate there. The man measured the walls and the rooms in that entrance. They were the same size as the other walls and rooms. ²⁵ The rooms in this entrance had windows that were the same as those in the other entrances. The whole entrance was 25 metres long and it was 12½ metres wide. ²⁶ Seven steps went up to it. The entrance room to the yard was at the end of the passage. There were pictures of palm trees on the inside walls of the passage. ²⁷ The inside yard of the temple also had a gate on the south side. The man measured 50 metres between the two gates.

¹⁸ Someone may say, ‘You believe in God, but I do good things to help people.’ Then I would say, ‘You cannot show me that you believe in God if you do not do good things. I do good things, and that shows that I really believe in God.’ ¹⁹ You believe that there is only one God. That is good! But even the demons believe that! And it makes them very afraid.

²⁰ You fool! If someone's faith does not lead them to do good things, it is not worth anything. You should know that! ²¹ Think about our ancestor Abraham. He offered his son Isaac on the altar as a gift to God.^[a] Because he did that good thing, God accepted him as right with himself. ²² Abraham believed in God, and he did what God asked him to do. So you can see that both of these were necessary. When he did this good thing, he showed that he believed in God completely. ²³ The Bible tells us what happened. It says, ‘Abraham believed God. As a result, God accepted Abraham as right with him.’^[b] God also called Abraham his friend.

²⁴ So you see how God accepts someone as right with himself. That person must not only believe in God. He must also do good things to show that he has faith.

²⁵ It was the same with Rahab, long ago. She was a prostitute. She helped some of God's people who came to her house. She kept them safe from their enemies and she sent them away again by a different road.^[c] Because she did those good things, God accepted her as right with himself. ²⁶ If our bodies have no spirit, they are dead. In the same way, if our faith does not lead us to do good things, it is dead.

Be careful how you speak

3 My Christian friends, not many of you should become teachers. We people who teach God's message must be very careful. When God judges everybody, he will demand more from us than from other people.^{[d] 2} We all make many mistakes. So, if someone never says anything that is bad, that person is completely good. It shows that he has authority over his whole body. ³ For example, think about how we make a horse go the right way. We put a small bit of metal in its mouth so that we can turn it. Then we can cause the horse's whole body to go where we want it to go. ⁴ Also, think about ships that sail on the sea. They are very large. Strong winds push them with great power. But we fix a piece of wood at the back of the ship. With this small piece of wood, the master can cause the ship to go anywhere that he wants it to go. ⁵ In the same way, our tongue is a very small part of our body. But it speaks as if it is very great.

Think about this. A very small fire can cause even a big forest to burn completely. ⁶ A person's tongue is like a fire. It has the power of everything in the world that is wrong. It is a small part of the body but it can spoil the whole person. Like a fire, it can destroy all of a person's life. It is a fire that comes from the fire of hell itself.

⁷ Remember this: People can cause all kinds of things to do what they want them to do. They have done this with wild animals, birds, snakes and things that live in the sea. ⁸ But no person can rule his tongue. It continues to say bad things. It is like a bad poison that can cause death. ⁹ We use our tongue to praise the Lord God who is our Father. But then we use it to curse other people. That is wrong, because God made those people to be like himself. ¹⁰ This shows that we use the same mouth to praise and also to curse. My Christian friends, we should not do this. ¹¹ Salty water and sweet water never come from the same spring. ¹² A fig tree cannot give olives, my friends. A vine for grapes cannot give figs. And a salty spring cannot give sweet water.

How to be wise

¹³ Do some of you think that you are wise? Do you think that you are clever? If so, show that you are wise by the way that you live. Be kind to other people. Do things that are good. That is what it means to be wise. ¹⁴ But if you live in a bad way, do not think that you are wise. Are you jealous of other people so that you hate them? Do you want to make yourself important? If you live like that, do not say that you are great and wise. You are not saying what is true. ¹⁵ You are not being wise in the way that God wants you to be wise. Instead, you are thinking like people who do not know God. Your thoughts do not come from God's Spirit. They come from demons. ¹⁶ If you are jealous of other people and you want to make yourself important, that will cause trouble. People will argue and fight against one another. They will do all kinds of bad things. ¹⁷ But if God makes you really wise, you will live in a completely good way. That is the most important thing. Also, you will live in a way that brings peace. You will be kind to other people so that they become your friends. You will listen to them and not argue. You will forgive them and do many good things to help them. You will not choose between people. And you will not be a hypocrite.

¹⁸ Those who bring peace to other people help them to live together in peace. As a result, people choose to do what is right and good.

God is good, so thank him^[a]