Jesus and Moses
3 Well then, my brothers and sisters: you are God’s holy ones, and you share the call from heaven. So think carefully about Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession of faith. 2 He was faithful to the one who appointed him, just as Moses was faithful in all God’s house. 3 He deserves much more glory than Moses, you see, just as the one who builds a house deserves more glory than the house. 4 For every house is built by someone, but the one who builds all things is God. 5 And ‘Moses was faithful, as a servant, in all his house’, thereby bearing witness to the things that were yet to be spoken of; 6 but the Messiah is over God’s house as a son. What is that house? It’s us – those of us who hold on tightly to the free delight and confidence of our hope.
Today’s the Time to Listen!
7 So listen to what the holy spirit says:
Today, if you hear his voice,
8 don’t make your hearts hard, as in the great bitterness,
like the day in the desert when they faced the test,
9 when your fathers put me to the test, and challenged me,
and saw my works 10 for forty years.
And so I was angry with that generation,
and said, ‘They are always straying in their hearts,
they do not know my ways.’ 11 As I swore
in my anger, ‘They’ll never enter my rest.’
12 Take care, my dear family, that none of you should possess an evil and unbelieving heart, leading you to withdraw from the living God. 13 But encourage one another every day, as long as it’s called ‘Today’, so that none of you may become hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
Hold on Tight!
14 We share the life of the Messiah, you see, only if we keep a firm, tight grip on our original confidence, right through to the end. 15 That’s what it means when it says, ‘Today, if you hear his voice, don’t make your hearts hard, as in the great bitterness.’
16 Who was it, after all, who heard and then became bitter? It was all those who went out of Egypt under Moses, wasn’t it? 17 And who was it that God was angry with for forty years? It was those who sinned, wasn’t it – those whose bodies fell in the desert? 18 And to whom did God swear that they would never enter his rest? Wasn’t it the people who didn’t believe? 19 So we can see that it was their unbelief that prevented them from entering.