A DAILY PSALM

Psalm 83

 

O God, don't sit idly by, silent and inactive!

Don't you hear the tumult of your enemies? Don't you see what your arrogant enemies are doing?

They devise crafty schemes against your people, laying plans against your precious ones.

"Come," they say, "let us wipe out Israel as a nation. We will destroy the very memory of its existence."

This was their unanimous decision. They signed a treaty as allies against you--

these Edomites and Ishmaelites, Moabites and Hagrites,

Gebalites, Ammonites, and Amalekites, and people from Philistia and Tyre.

Assyria has joined them, too, and is allied with the descendants of Lot.

Do to them as you did to the Midianites or as you did to Sisera and Jabin at the Kishon River.

They were destroyed at Endor, and their decaying corpses fertilized the soil.

Let their mighty nobles die as Oreb and Zeeb did. Let all their princes die like Zebah and Zalmunna,

for they said, "Let us seize for our own use these pasturelands of God!"

O my God, blow them away like whirling dust, like chaff before the wind!

As a fire roars through a forest and as a flame sets mountains ablaze,

chase them with your fierce storms; terrify them with your tempests.

Utterly disgrace them until they submit to your name, O LORD.

Let them be ashamed and terrified forever. Make them failures in everything they do,

until they learn that you alone are called the LORD, that you alone are the Most High, supreme over all the earth.

 

 

 

Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright ©1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.