She said to them, “Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me.
For the arrows of the Almighty are in me; my spirit drinks their poison; the terrors of God are arrayed against me.
For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath; he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long. He has made my flesh and my skin waste away; he has broken my bones; he has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation;
I calmed myself until morning; like a lion he breaks all my bones; from day to night you bring me to an end.
Afflicted and close to death from my youth up, I suffer your terrors; I am helpless.
For all the day long I have been stricken and rebuked every morning.
know then that God has put me in the wrong and closed his net about me.
“Behold, blessed is the one whom God reproves; therefore despise not the discipline of the Almighty.
“Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty?
I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty, but by my name the Lord I did not make myself known to them.
May God Almighty grant you mercy before the man, and may he send back your other brother and Benjamin. And as for me, if I am bereaved of my children, I am bereaved.”
When Abram was ninety-nine years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless,
And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
Unless otherwise indicated, all content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License. All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Copyright ©2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Contact me: openbibleinfo (at) gmail.com.