Hebrews 3

J.B. Phillips New Testament

Moses was a faithful servant: Christ a faithful son

3 ^1-6 So then, my brothers in holiness who share the highest of all callings, I want you to think of the messenger and High Priest of the faith we hold, Christ Jesus. See him as faithful to the charge God gave him, and compare him with Moses who also faithfully discharged his duty in the household of God. For this man has been considered worthy of greater honour than Moses, just as the founder of a house may be truly said to have more honour than the house itself. Every house is founded by someone, but the founder of everything is God himself. Moses was certainly faithful in all his duties in God’s household, but he was faithful as a servant and his work was only a foreshadowing of the truth that would be known later. But Christ was faithful as a loyal son in the household of the founder, his own Father. And we are members of this household if we maintain our trust and joyful hope steadfast to the end.

Let us be on guard that unbelief does not creep in

^7-11 We ought to take note of these words in which the Holy Spirit says: ‘Today, if you will hear his voice, do not harden your hearts in the rebellion, in the day of trial in the wilderness, where your fathers tested me, proved me, and saw my works for forty years. Therefore I was angry with that generation, and said they always go astray in their heart, and they have not known my ways. So I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest’.

^12-15 You should therefore be most careful, my brothers, that there should not be in any of you that wickedness of heart which refuses to trust, and deserts the cause of the living God. Help each other to stand firm in the faith every day, while it is still called “today”, and beware that none of you becomes deaf and blind to God through the delusive glamour of sin. For we continue to share in all that Christ has for us so long as we steadily maintain until the end the trust with which we began. These words are still being said for our ears to hear: ‘Today, if you will hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion’.

^16-18 For who was it who heard the Word of God and yet provoked his indignation? Was is not all who were rescued from slavery in Egypt under the leadership of Moses? And who was it with whom God was displeased for forty long years? Was it not those who, after all their hearing of God’s Word, fell into sin, and left their bones in the desert? And to whom did God swear that they should never enter his rest? Was it not these very men who refused to trust him?

¹⁹ Yes, it is all too plain that it was refusal to trust God that prevented these men from entering his rest.