Isaiah 49:17

⁵For as a young man marries a virgin, so your sons will marry you. As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so your God will rejoice over you.

¹³Have you forgotten the LORD your Maker, who stretched out the heavens, and laid the foundations of the earth? Do you live in fear continually all day because of the fury of the oppressor, when he prepares to destroy? Where is the fury of the oppressor?

²²Your Lord GOD, your God who pleads the cause of his people, says, “Behold, I have taken out of your hand the cup of staggering, even the bowl of the cup of my wrath. You will not drink it any more. ²³I will put it into the hand of those who afflict you, who have said to your soul, ‘Bow down, that we may walk over you;’ and you have laid your back as the ground, like a street to those who walk over.”

²⁴“‘“There will no longer be a pricking brier to the house of Israel, nor a hurting thorn of any that are around them that scorned them. Then they will know that I am the Lord GOD.”

⁴Then the king said to me, “What is your request?” So I prayed to the God of heaven.

⁵I said to the king, “If it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor in your sight, I ask that you would send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers’ tombs, that I may build it.”

⁶The king said to me (the queen was also sitting by him), “How long will your journey be? When will you return?” So it pleased the king to send me, and I set a time for him.

⁷Moreover I said to the king, “If it pleases the king, let letters be given me to the governors beyond the River, that they may let me pass through until I come to Judah; ⁸and a letter to Asaph the keeper of the king’s forest, that he may give me timber to make beams for the gates of the citadel by the temple, for the wall of the city, and for the house that I will occupy.” The king granted my requests, because of the good hand of my God on me.

⁹Then I came to the governors beyond the River, and gave them the king’s letters. Now the king had sent captains of the army and horsemen with me.

¹⁸There is no one to guide her among all the sons to whom she has given birth; and there is no one who takes her by the hand among all the sons whom she has brought up. ¹⁹These two things have happened to you— who will grieve with you?— desolation and destruction, and famine and the sword. How can I comfort you? ²⁰Your sons have fainted. They lie at the head of all the streets, like an antelope in a net. They are full of the LORD’s wrath, the rebuke of your God.

⁵Then the heads of fathers’ households of Judah and Benjamin, the priests and the Levites, all whose spirit God had stirred to go up, rose up to build the LORD’s house which is in Jerusalem.

¹⁹“For, as for your waste and your desolate places, and your land that has been destroyed, surely now that land will be too small for the inhabitants, and those who swallowed you up will be far away.

⁶I will send him against a profane nation, and against the people who anger me I will give him a command to take the plunder and to take the prey, and to tread them down like the mire of the streets.

¹⁷Then I said to them, “You see the bad situation that we are in, how Jerusalem lies waste, and its gates are burned with fire. Come, let’s build up the wall of Jerusalem, that we won’t be disgraced.”