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 honour 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.