Historical

1 Long ago God spoke in many different ways to our fathers through the prophets, in visions, dreams, and even face to face,^[a] telling them little by little about his plans.

² But now in these days he has spoken to us through his Son to whom he has given everything and through whom he made the world and everything there is.

³ God’s Son shines out with God’s glory, and all that God’s Son is and does marks him as God. He regulates the universe by the mighty power of his command. He is the one who died to cleanse us and clear our record of all sin, and then sat down in highest honor beside the great God of heaven.

⁴ Thus he became far greater than the angels, as proved by the fact that his name “Son of God,” which was passed on to him from his Father, is far greater than the names and titles of the angels. ^5-6 For God never said to any angel, “You are my Son, and today I have given you the honor that goes with that name.”^[b] But God said it about Jesus. Another time he said, “I am his Father and he is my Son.” And still another time—when his firstborn Son came to earth—God said, “Let all the angels of God worship him.”

⁷ God speaks of his angels as messengers swift as the wind and as servants made of flaming fire; ⁸ but of his Son he says, “Your Kingdom, O God, will last forever and ever; its commands are always just and right. ⁹ You love right and hate wrong; so God, even your God, has poured out more gladness upon you than on anyone else.”

¹⁰ God also called him “Lord” when he said, “Lord, in the beginning you made the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. ¹¹ They will disappear into nothingness, but you will remain forever. They will become worn out like old clothes, ¹² and some day you will fold them up and replace them. But you yourself will never change, and your years will never end.”

¹³ And did God ever say to an angel, as he does to his Son, “Sit here beside me in honor until I crush all your enemies beneath your feet”?

¹⁴ No, for the angels are only spirit-messengers sent out to help and care for those who are to receive his salvation.

2 So we must listen very carefully to the truths we have heard, or we may drift away from them. ² For since the messages from angels have always proved true and people have always been punished for disobeying them, ³ what makes us think that we can escape if we are indifferent to this great salvation announced by the Lord Jesus himself and passed on to us by those who heard him speak?

⁴ God always has shown us that these messages are true by signs and wonders and various miracles and by giving certain special abilities from the Holy Spirit to those who believe; yes, God has assigned such gifts to each of us.

⁵ And the future world we are talking about will not be controlled by angels. ⁶ No, for in the book of Psalms David says to God, “What is mere man that you are so concerned about him? And who is this Son of Man you honor so highly? ⁷ For though you made him lower than the angels for a little while, now you have crowned him with glory and honor. ⁸ And you have put him in complete charge of everything there is. Nothing is left out.”

We have not yet seen all of this take place, ⁹ but we do see Jesus—who for a while was a little lower than the angels—crowned now by God with glory and honor because he suffered death for us. Yes, because of God’s great kindness, Jesus tasted death for everyone in all the world.

¹⁰ And it was right and proper that God, who made everything for his own glory, should allow Jesus to suffer, for in doing this he was bringing vast multitudes of God’s people to heaven; for his suffering made Jesus a perfect Leader, one fit to bring them into their salvation.

¹¹ We who have been made holy by Jesus, now have the same Father he has. That is why Jesus is not ashamed to call us his brothers. ¹² For he says in the book of Psalms, “I will talk to my brothers about God my Father, and together we will sing his praises.” ¹³ At another time he said, “I will put my trust in God along with my brothers.” And at still another time, “See, here am I and the children God gave me.”

¹⁴ Since we, God’s children, are human beings—made of flesh and blood—he became flesh and blood too by being born in human form; for only as a human being could he die and in dying break the power of the devil who had the power of death. ¹⁵ Only in that way could he deliver those who through fear of death have been living all their lives as slaves to constant dread.

¹⁶ We all know he did not come as an angel but as a human being—yes, a Jew. ¹⁷ And it was necessary for Jesus to be like us, his brothers, so that he could be our merciful and faithful High Priest before God, a Priest who would be both merciful to us and faithful to God in dealing with the sins of the people. ¹⁸ For since he himself has now been through suffering and temptation, he knows what it is like when we suffer and are tempted, and he is wonderfully able to help us.

3 Therefore, dear brothers whom God has set apart for himself—you who are chosen for heaven—I want you to think now about this Jesus who is God’s Messenger and the High Priest of our faith.

² For Jesus was faithful to God who appointed him High Priest, just as Moses also faithfully served in God’s house. ³ But Jesus has far more glory than Moses, just as a man who builds a fine house gets more praise than his house does. ⁴ And many people can build houses, but only God made everything.

⁵ Well, Moses did a fine job working in God’s house, but he was only a servant; and his work was mostly to illustrate and suggest those things that would happen later on. ⁶ But Christ, God’s faithful Son, is in complete charge of God’s house. And we Christians are God’s house—he lives in us!—if we keep up our courage firm to the end, and our joy and our trust in the Lord.

^7-8 And since Christ is so much superior, the Holy Spirit warns us to listen to him, to be careful to hear his voice today and not let our hearts become set against him, as the people of Israel did. They steeled themselves against his love and complained against him in the desert while he was testing them. ⁹ But God was patient with them forty years, though they tried his patience sorely; he kept right on doing his mighty miracles for them to see. ¹⁰ “But,” God says, “I was very angry with them, for their hearts were always looking somewhere else instead of up to me, and they never found the paths I wanted them to follow.”

¹¹ Then God, full of this anger against them, bound himself with an oath that he would never let them come to his place of rest.

¹² Beware then of your own hearts, dear brothers, lest you find that they, too, are evil and unbelieving and are leading you away from the living God. ¹³ Speak to each other about these things every day while there is still time so that none of you will become hardened against God, being blinded by the glamor^[c] of sin. ¹⁴ For if we are faithful to the end, trusting God just as we did when we first became Christians, we will share in all that belongs to Christ.

¹⁵ But now is the time. Never forget the warning, “Today if you hear God’s voice speaking to you, do not harden your hearts against him, as the people of Israel did when they rebelled against him in the desert.”

¹⁶ And who were those people I speak of, who heard God’s voice speaking to them but then rebelled against him? They were the ones who came out of Egypt with Moses their leader. ¹⁷ And who was it who made God angry for all those forty years? These same people who sinned and as a result died in the wilderness. ¹⁸ And to whom was God speaking when he swore with an oath that they could never go into the land he had promised his people? He was speaking to all those who disobeyed him. ¹⁹ And why couldn’t they go in? Because they didn’t trust him.

4 Although God’s promise still stands—his promise that all may enter his place of rest—we ought to tremble with fear because some of you may be on the verge of failing to get there after all. ² For this wonderful news—the message that God wants to save us—has been given to us just as it was to those who lived in the time of Moses. But it didn’t do them any good because they didn’t believe it. They didn’t mix it with faith. ³ For only we who believe God can enter into his place of rest. He has said, “I have sworn in my anger that those who don’t believe me will never get in,” even though he has been ready and waiting for them since the world began.

⁴ We know he is ready and waiting because it is written that God rested on the seventh day of creation, having finished all that he had planned to make.

⁵ Even so they didn’t get in, for God finally said, “They shall never enter my rest.” ⁶ Yet the promise remains and some get in—but not those who had the first chance, for they disobeyed God and failed to enter.

⁷ But he has set another time for coming in, and that time is now. He announced this through King David long years after man’s first failure to enter, saying in the words already quoted, “Today when you hear him calling, do not harden your hearts against him.”

⁸ This new place of rest he is talking about does not mean the land of Israel that Joshua led them into. If that were what God meant, he would not have spoken long afterwards about “today” being the time to get in. ⁹ So there is a full complete rest still waiting for the people of God. ¹⁰ Christ has already entered there. He is resting from his work, just as God did after the creation. ¹¹ Let us do our best to go into that place of rest, too, being careful not to disobey God as the children of Israel did, thus failing to get in.

¹² For whatever God says to us is full of living power: it is sharper than the sharpest dagger, cutting swift and deep into our innermost thoughts and desires with all their parts, exposing us for what we really are. ¹³ He knows about everyone, everywhere. Everything about us is bare and wide open to the all-seeing eyes of our living God; nothing can be hidden from him to whom we must explain all that we have done.

¹⁴ But Jesus the Son of God is our great High Priest who has gone to heaven itself to help us; therefore let us never stop trusting him. ¹⁵ This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses since he had the same temptations we do, though he never once gave way to them and sinned. ¹⁶ So let us come boldly to the very throne of God and stay there to receive his mercy and to find grace to help us in our times of need.

5 ^1-3 The Jewish high priest is merely a man like anyone else, but he is chosen to speak for all other men in their dealings with God. He presents their gifts to God and offers to him the blood of animals that are sacrificed to cover the sins of the people and his own sins too. And because he is a man, he can deal gently with other men, though they are foolish and ignorant, for he, too, is surrounded with the same temptations and understands their problems very well.

⁴ Another thing to remember is that no one can be a high priest just because he wants to be. He has to be called by God for this work in the same way God chose Aaron.

⁵ That is why Christ did not elect himself to the honor of being High Priest; no, he was chosen by God. God said to him, “My Son, today I have honored you.”^{[d] 6} And another time God said to him, “You have been chosen to be a priest forever, with the same rank as Melchizedek.”

⁷ Yet while Christ was here on earth he pleaded with God, praying with tears and agony of soul to the only one who would save him from premature^[e] death. And God heard his prayers because of his strong desire to obey God at all times.

⁸ And even though Jesus was God’s Son, he had to learn from experience what it was like to obey when obeying meant suffering. ⁹ It was after he had proved himself perfect in this experience that Jesus became the Giver of eternal salvation to all those who obey him. ¹⁰ For remember that God has chosen him to be a High Priest with the same rank as Melchizedek.

¹¹ There is much more I would like to say along these lines, but you don’t seem to listen, so it’s hard to make you understand.

^12-13 You have been Christians a long time now, and you ought to be teaching others, but instead you have dropped back to the place where you need someone to teach you all over again the very first principles in God’s Word. You are like babies who can drink only milk, not old enough for solid food. And when a person is still living on milk it shows he isn’t very far along in the Christian life, and doesn’t know much about the difference between right and wrong. He is still a baby Christian! ¹⁴ You will never be able to eat solid spiritual food and understand the deeper things of God’s Word until you become better Christians and learn right from wrong by practicing doing right.

6 Let us stop going over the same old ground again and again, always teaching those first lessons about Christ. Let us go on instead to other things and become mature in our understanding, as strong Christians ought to be. Surely we don’t need to speak further about the foolishness of trying to be saved by being good, or about the necessity of faith in God; ² you don’t need further instruction about baptism and spiritual gifts^[f] and the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment.

³ The Lord willing, we will go on now to other things.

⁴ There is no use trying to bring you back to the Lord again if you have once understood the Good News and tasted for yourself the good things of heaven and shared in the Holy Spirit, ⁵ and know how good the Word of God is, and felt the mighty powers of the world to come, ⁶ and then have turned against God. You cannot bring yourself to repent again if you have nailed the Son of God to the cross again by rejecting him, holding him up to mocking and to public shame.

⁷ When a farmer’s land has had many showers upon it and good crops come up, that land has experienced God’s blessing upon it. ⁸ But if it keeps on having crops of thistles and thorns, the land is considered no good and is ready for condemnation and burning off.

⁹ Dear friends, even though I am talking like this I really don’t believe that what I am saying applies to you. I am confident you are producing the good fruit that comes along with your salvation. ¹⁰ For God is not unfair. How can he forget your hard work for him, or forget the way you used to show your love for him—and still do—by helping his children? ¹¹ And we are anxious that you keep right on loving others as long as life lasts, so that you will get your full reward.

¹² Then, knowing what lies ahead for you, you won’t become bored with being a Christian nor become spiritually dull and indifferent, but you will be anxious to follow the example of those who receive all that God has promised them because of their strong faith and patience.

¹³ For instance, there was God’s promise to Abraham: God took an oath in his own name, since there was no one greater to swear by, ¹⁴ that he would bless Abraham again and again, and give him a son and make him the father of a great nation of people. ¹⁵ Then Abraham waited patiently until finally God gave him a son, Isaac, just as he had promised.

¹⁶ When a man takes an oath, he is calling upon someone greater than himself to force him to do what he has promised or to punish him if he later refuses to do it; the oath ends all argument about it. ¹⁷ God also bound himself with an oath, so that those he promised to help would be perfectly sure and never need to wonder whether he might change his plans.

¹⁸ He has given us both his promise and his oath, two things we can completely count on, for it is impossible for God to tell a lie. Now all those who flee to him to save them can take new courage when they hear such assurances from God; now they can know without doubt that he will give them the salvation he has promised them.

¹⁹ This certain hope of being saved is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls, connecting us with God himself behind the sacred curtains of heaven, ²⁰ where Christ has gone ahead to plead for us from his position as our High Priest,^[g] with the honor and rank of Melchizedek.