Isaiah 1:7-9

The Voice

⁷Your country is a waste.
    Your cities are dead, sooty rubble.
Your farms and fields are consumed,
    everything you worked for destroyed
    by foreign armies as you look on—helplessly.

⁸Zion, our portion of heaven on earth, is no longer protected;
Jerusalem stands like a watchman’s shelter in a vineyard,
Like a hut in a melon field,
like a city assaulted and besieged.

⁹Except for the fraction of us who hang on
by the grace of the Eternal, Commander of heavenly armies,
We’d be destroyed and deserted
like Sodom and Gomorrah, utterly done in.^[a]