At the beginning ¹  of the year the Syrian army attacked ²  Joash ³  and invaded Judah and Jerusalem. They wiped out all the leaders of the people and sent all the plunder they gathered to the king of Damascus.

At the beginning of the year King Nebuchadnezzar ordered him to be brought ¹  to Babylon, along with the valuable items in the Lord’s temple. In his place he made his relative ²  Zedekiah king over Judah and Jerusalem.

God has made everything fit beautifully ¹  in its appropriate time, but ²  he has also placed ignorance ³  in the human heart ⁴  so that ⁵  people ⁶  cannot discover what God has ordained, ⁷  from the beginning to the end ⁸  of their lives. ⁹ 

Do you not know? Do you not hear? Has it not been told to you since the very beginning? Have you not understood from the time the earth’s foundations were made?

At the beginning of your requests a message went out, and I have come to convey it to you, for you are of great value in God’s sight. ¹  Therefore consider the message and understand the vision: ² 

The sovereign Lord showed me this: I saw ¹  him making locusts just as the crops planted late ²  were beginning to sprout. (The crops planted late sprout after the royal harvest. ³ )

For nation will rise up in arms ¹  against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and there will be famines. ²  These are but the beginning of birth pains.

But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus had already known from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) ¹ 

But I have told you these things ¹  so that when their time ²  comes, you will remember that I told you about them. ³  “I did not tell you these things from the beginning because I was with you. ⁴ 

And as you Philippians know, at the beginning of my gospel ministry, when I left Macedonia, no church shared with me in this matter of giving and receiving except you alone.

He is the head of the body, the church, as well as the beginning, the firstborn ¹  from among the dead, so that he himself may become first in all things. ² 

But we ought to thank God always for you, brothers and sisters ¹  loved by the Lord, because God chose you from the beginning ²  for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and faith in the truth.

For though you should in fact be teachers by this time, ¹  you need someone to teach you the beginning elements of God’s utterances. ²  You have gone back to needing ³  milk, not ⁴  solid food.

Without father, without mother, without genealogy, he has neither beginning of days nor end of life but is like the son of God, and he remains a priest for all time.

This is what we proclaim to you: ¹  what was from the beginning, ²  what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and our hands have touched (concerning the word of life –

Dear friends, I am not writing a new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning. ¹  The old commandment is the word that you have already ²  heard.

I am writing to you, fathers, that ¹  you have known him who has been from the beginning. I am writing to you, young people, that ²  you have conquered the evil one. ³ 

The one who practices sin is of the devil, ¹  because the devil has been sinning ²  from the beginning. For this purpose ³  the Son of God was revealed: to destroy ⁴  the works of the devil.

But now ¹  I ask you, lady (not as if I were ²  writing a new commandment ³  to you, but the one ⁴  we have had from the beginning), ⁵  that ⁶  we love one another.

(Now this is love: that we walk ¹  according to his commandments.) This is the commandment, just as you have heard from the beginning; thus ²  you should walk in it. ³