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1 Therefore, my Christian friends, you who, all alike, have received the call from heaven, fix your attention on Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our religion. 2 See how faithful he was to the God who appointed him, as Moses was in the whole house of God. 3 He has been deemed worthy of far higher honor than Moses, just as the founder of the house is held in greater regard than the house itself. 4 For every house has its founder, and the founder of the universe is God. 5 While the faithful service of Moses in the whole house of God was that of a servant, whose duty was to bear testimony to a message still to come, 6 the faithfulness of Christ was that of a son set over the house of God. And we are his house – if only we retain, unshaken to the end, the courage and confidence inspired by our hope.
7 Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says –
‘If today you hear God’s voice,
8 harden not your hearts, as when Israel provoked me
on the day when they tried my patience in the desert,
9 Where your ancestors tried my forbearance,
and saw my mighty deeds for forty years.
10 Therefore I was sorely vexed with that generation,
and I said – “Their hearts are always straying;
they have never learned my ways”;
11 While in my wrath I swore –
“They will never enter upon my rest.” ’
12 Be careful, friends, that there is never found in anyone of you a wicked and faithless heart, shown by that person separating themselves from the living God. 13 Rather encourage one another daily – while there is a today – to prevent anyone among you from being hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. 14 For we now all share in the Christ, if indeed we retain, unshaken to the end, the confidence that we had at the first. 15 To use the words of scripture –
‘If today you hear God’s voice,
harden not your hearts, as when Israel provoked me.’
16 Who were they who heard God speak and yet provoked him? Were not they all those who left Egypt under the leadership of Moses? 17 And with whom was it that God was sorely vexed for forty years? Was not it with those who had sinned, and who fell dead in the desert? 18 And who were they to whom God swore that they should not enter upon his rest, if not those who had proved faithless? 19 We see, then, that they failed to enter upon it because of their want of faith.