2 Esdras 5:40-42

New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

⁴⁰ He said to me, “Just as you cannot do one of the things that were mentioned, so you cannot discover my judgment or the goal of the love that I have promised to my people.”^(A)

Why Successive Generations Have Been Created

⁴¹ I said, “Yet, O Lord, you have charge of those who are alive at the end, but what will those do who lived before me, or we ourselves, or those who come after us?”

⁴² He said to me, “I shall liken my judgment to a circle;^[a] just as for those who are last there is no slowness, so for those who are first there is no haste.”