| 1 | Therefore, holy brethren, sharers with others in a heavenly invitation, fix your thoughts on Jesus, the Apostle and High Priest whose followers we profess to be. |
| 2 | How faithful He was to Him who appointed Him, just as Moses also was faithful in all God's house! |
| 3 | For Jesus has been counted worthy of greater glory than Moses, in so far as he who has built a house has higher honour than the house itself. |
| 4 | For every house has had a builder, and the builder of all things is God. |
| 5 | Moreover, Moses was faithful in all God's house as a servant in delivering the message given him to speak; |
| 6 | but Christ was faithful as a Son having authority over God's house, and we are that house, if we hold firm to the End the boldness and the hope which we boast of as ours. |
| 7 | For this reason--as the Holy Spirit warns us, 'To-day, if you hear His voice, |
| 8 | do not harden your hearts as your forefathers did in the time of the provocation on the day of the temptation in the Desert, |
| 9 | where your forefathers so sorely tried My patience and saw all that I did during forty years. |
| 10 | Therefore I was greatly grieved with that generation, and I said, 'They are ever going astray in heart, and have not learnt to know My paths.' |
| 11 | As I swore in My anger, they shall not be admitted to My rest' -- |
| 12 | see to it, brethren, that there is never in any one of you--as perhaps there may be--a sinful and unbelieving heart, manifesting itself in revolt from the ever-living God. |
| 13 | On the contrary encourage one another, day after day, so long as To-day lasts, so that not one of you may be hardened through the deceitful character of sin. |
| 14 | For we have, all alike, become sharers with Christ, if we really hold our first confidence firm to the End; |
| 15 | seeing that the warning still comes to us, 'To-day, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as your forefathers did in the time of the provocation.' |
| 16 | For who were they that heard, and yet provoked God? Was it not the whole of the people who had come out of Egypt under the leadership of Moses? |
| 17 | And with whom was God so greatly grieved for forty years? Was it not with those who had sinned, and whose dead bodies fell in the Desert? |
| 18 | And to whom did He swear that they should not be admitted to His rest, if it was not to those who were disobedient? |
| 19 | And so we see that it was owing to lack of faith that they could not be admitted. |