The LORD says, "Shout as loud as you can! Tell my people Israel about their sins!

to proclaim this message to everyone in Jerusalem. "I remember how faithful you were when you were young, how you loved me when we were first married; you followed me through the desert, through a land that had not been planted.

The LORD told me to say, "Kings of Judah and people of Jerusalem, listen to what I, the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, have to say. I am going to bring such a disaster on this place that everyone who hears about it will be stunned.

"Are you ready to pass sentence on them, mortal man? Then do so. Remind them of the disgusting things their ancestors did.

Righteous men will condemn them on the charge of adultery and murder, because they practice adultery and their hands are stained with blood."

"Jerusalem, Jerusalem! You kill the prophets and stone the messengers God has sent you! How many times I wanted to put my arms around all your people, just as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would not let me!

From now on, I tell you, you will never see me again until you say, 'God bless him who comes in the name of the Lord.' "

"How stubborn you are!" Stephen went on to say. "How heathen your hearts, how deaf you are to God's message! You are just like your ancestors: you too have always resisted the Holy Spirit!

You are the ones who received God's law, that was handed down by angels---yet you have not obeyed it!"

No longer, then, do we judge anyone by human standards. Even if at one time we judged Christ according to human standards, we no longer do so.

The LORD says, "Do you think I sent my people away like a man who divorces his wife? Where, then, are the papers of divorce? Do you think I sold you into captivity like a man who sells his children as slaves? No, you went away captive because of your sins; you were sent away because of your crimes.

When Josiah was king, the LORD said to me, "Have you seen what Israel, that unfaithful woman, has done? She has turned away from me, and on every high hill and under every green tree she has acted like a prostitute.

Judah also saw that I divorced Israel and sent her away because she had turned from me and had become a prostitute. But Judah, Israel's unfaithful sister, was not afraid. She too became a prostitute

When the LORD first spoke to Israel through Hosea, he said to Hosea, "Go and get married; your wife will be unfaithful, and your children will be just like her. In the same way my people have left me and become unfaithful."

The LORD says, "If a man divorces his wife, and she leaves him and becomes another man's wife, he cannot take her back again. This would completely defile the land. But, Israel, you have had many lovers, and now you want to return to me!

and was not at all ashamed. She defiled the land, and she committed adultery by worshiping stones and trees.

Only admit that you are guilty and that you have rebelled against the LORD, your God. Confess that under every green tree you have given your love to foreign gods and that you have not obeyed my commands. I, the LORD, have spoken.

"Then you took the sons and the daughters you had borne me and offered them as sacrifices to idols. Wasn't it bad enough to be unfaithful to me,

You dragged your beauty through the mud. You offered yourself to everyone who came by, and you were more of a prostitute every day.

And I said to myself that they were using as a prostitute a woman worn out by adultery.