Isaiah

58 Call at the top of your voice, do not hold in, lift your voice like a ram-horn, and tell my people of their crimes and the house of Jacob of their sins. 2 And they resort to me day by day and like to know my courses; like a nation that had done the right thing and not deserted its God’s law, they ask me for judgments for the right, they like to feel that God is near. 3* “How was it we fasted and you did not see it, we denied ourselves the gratification of appetites and you did not know it?” Here on your fast day you engage in business and drive all your hands; 4 here you fast wrangling and tussling and striking with lawless fist—you do not fast at present to make your voice heard on high. 5 Is the fast that I choose like this, a day for men to deny themselves the gratification of appetites? is it to bend one’s head over like a rush and make a bed of a sackcloth and ashes? will you call this a fast, and a day acceptable to Jehovah? 6 Would not this be a fast I would choose: to open up unlawful durance and undo the ties of yoke-bows, and let men held on trumped-up charges go free and snap the bows of every yoke? 7** would it not be to share your piece of bread with a hungry man and take homeless wretches into your house, when you see a naked man to cover him and not be unregardful of your flesh and blood? 8* Then your light would break like the dawn and your wounds would quickly grow whole, and the rightness of your cause would go before you and Jehovah’s glory would bring up your rear; 9* then you would call and Jehovah would answer, you would shout and he would say “Here I am.” If you eliminate crooked dealing, pointing fingers, and talking up villainy, 10 and feel for yourself the appetite of the starving man and feed up famished appetites, then your light will rise in the darkness and your murkiest gloom be like noon sunshine, 11* and Jehovah will guide you always and feed you your own appetite among dry stones and brace your bones, and you will be like a well-moistened garden and like a water-spring whose water never disappoints; 12** and sites lying waste from of old will be built up by you, on foundations of generations far back you shall erect walls; and you shall be called fencer-up of breaches, restorer of paths for settlement. 13 If you turn back your feet from sabbath, the doing of your business on my holy day, and call the sabbath a treat, Jehovah’s sacred time glorious, and glorify it so as not to do your own ways nor engage in your business, 14 then you shall have Jehovah to treat you, and I will mount you on earth’s heights and feed you with your father Jacob’s inheritance; for it is Jehovah’s mouth that has spoken.