OEBcth - Hebrews - 3

3:1  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.

3:2  See how faithful he was to the God who appointed him, as Moses was in the whole house of God.

3:3  He has been deemed worthy of far higher honour than Moses, just as the founder of the house is held in greater regard than the house itself.

3:4  For every house has its founder, and the founder of the universe is God.

3:5  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,

3:6  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.

3:7  Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says — ‘If today you hear God’s voice,

3:8  harden not your hearts, as when Israel provoked me On the day when they tried my patience in the desert,

3:9  Where your ancestors tried my forbearance, And saw my mighty deeds for forty years.

3:10  Therefore I was sorely vexed with that generation, And I said — “Their hearts are always straying; They have never learned my ways”;

3:11  While in my wrath I swore — “They will never enter upon my rest.”’

3:12  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.

3:13  Rather encourage one another daily — while there is a ‘Today’ — to prevent anyone among you from being hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.

3:14  For we now all share in the Christ, if indeed we retain, unshaken to the end, the confidence that we had at the first.

3:15  To use the words of scripture — ‘If today you hear God’s voice, Harden not your hearts, as when Israel provoked me.’

3:16  Who were they who heard God speak and yet provoked him? Were not they all those who left Egypt under the leadership of Moses?

3:17  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?

3:18  And who were they to whom God swore that they should not enter upon his rest, if not those who had proved faithless?

3:19  We see, then, that they failed to enter upon it because of their want of faith.