The Message Bible MSG
English Standard Version ESV
1 God! God! I am running to you for dear life; the chase is wild.
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O Lord my God, in you do I take refuge; save me from all my pursuers and deliver me,
2 If they catch me, I'm finished: ripped to shreds by foes fierce as lions, dragged into the forest and left unlooked for, unremembered.
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lest like a lion they tear my soul apart, rending it in pieces, with none to deliver.
3 God, if I've done what they say -
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O Lord my God, if I have done this, if there is wrong in my hands,
4 betrayed my friends, ripped off my enemies - If my hands are really that dirty,
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if I have repaid my friend with evil or plundered my enemy without cause,
5 let them get me, walk all over me, leave me flat on my face in the dirt.
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let the enemy pursue my soul and overtake it, and let him trample my life to the ground and lay my glory in the dust. Selah
6 Stand up, God; pit your holy fury against my furious enemies.
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Arise, O Lord, in your anger; lift yourself up against the fury of my enemies; awake for me; you have appointed a judgment.
7 My accusers have packed the courtroom; it's judgment time.
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Let the assembly of the peoples be gathered about you; over it return on high.
8 Take your place on the bench, reach for your gavel, throw out the false charges against me. I'm ready, confident in your verdict: "Innocent."
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The Lord judges the peoples; judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness and according to the integrity that is in me.
9 Close the book on Evil, God, but publish your mandate for us. You get us ready for life: you probe for our soft spots, you knock off our rough edges.
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Oh, let the evil of the wicked come to an end, and may you establish the righteous—you who test the minds and hearts, O righteous God!
10 And I'm feeling so fit, so safe: made right, kept right.
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My shield is with God, who saves the upright in heart.
11 God in solemn honor does things right, but his nerves are sandpapered raw. Nobody gets by with anything.
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God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day.
12 God is already in action - Sword honed on his whetstone, bow strung, arrow on the string,
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If a man does not repent, God will whet his sword; he has bent and readied his bow;
13 Lethal weapons in hand, each arrow a flaming missile.
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he has prepared for him his deadly weapons, making his arrows fiery shafts.
14 Look at that guy! He had sex with sin, he's pregnant with evil. Oh, look! He's having the baby - a Lie-Baby!
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Behold, the wicked man conceives evil and is pregnant with mischief and gives birth to lies.
15 See that man shoveling day after day, digging, then concealing, his man-trap down that lonely stretch of road? Go back and look again - you'll see him in it headfirst, legs waving in the breeze.
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He makes a pit, digging it out, and falls into the hole that he has made.
16 That's what happens: mischief backfires; violence boomerangs.
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His mischief returns upon his own head, and on his own skull his violence descends.
17 I'm thanking God, who makes things right. I'm singing the fame of heaven-high God.
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I will give to the Lord the thanks due to his righteousness, and I will sing praise to the name of the Lord, the Most High.