Jesus Our Apostle and High Priest

¹Therefore, holy brothers, who share in the heavenly calling, set your focus on Jesus, the apostle and high priest whom we confess.

²He was faithful to the One who appointed Him, just as Moses was faithful in all God’s house.

³For Jesus has been counted worthy of greater glory than Moses, just as the builder of a house has greater honor than the house itself.

⁴And every house is built by someone, but God is the builder of everything.

⁵Now Moses was faithful as a servant in all God’s house,testifying to what would be spoken later.

⁶But Christ is faithful as the Son over God’s house. And we are His house, if we hold firmlyto our confidence and the hope of which we boast.

Do Not Harden Your Hearts

⁷Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says:“Today, if you hear His voice,

⁸do not harden your hearts,as you did in the rebellion,in the day of testing in the wilderness,

⁹where your fathers tested and tried Me,and for forty years saw My works.

¹⁰Therefore I was angry with that generation,and I said,‘Their hearts are always going astray,and they have not known My ways.’

¹¹So I swore on oath in My anger,‘They shall never enter My rest.’”

The Peril of Unbelief

¹²See to it, brothers, that none of you has a wicked heart of unbelief that turns away from the living God.

¹³But exhort one another daily, as long as it is called today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.

¹⁴We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly to the end the assurance we had at first.

¹⁵As it has been said:“Today, if you hear His voice,do not harden your hearts,as you did in the rebellion.”

¹⁶For who were the ones who heard and rebelled? Were they not all those Moses led out of Egypt?

¹⁷And with whom was God angry for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness?

¹⁸And to whom did He swear that they would never enter His rest? Was it not to those who disobeyed?

¹⁹So we see that it was because of their unbelief that they were unable to enter.

The Council at Jerusalem

¹Fourteen years later I went up again to Jerusalem, accompanied by Barnabas. I took Titus along also.

²I went in response to a revelation and set before them the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles. But I spoke privately to those recognized as leaders, for fear that I was running or had already run in vain.

³Yet not even Titus, who was with me, was compelled to be circumcised, even though he was a Greek.

⁴This issue arose because some false brothers had come in under false pretenses to spy on our freedom in Christ Jesus, in order to enslave us.

⁵We did not give in to them for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

⁶But as for the highly esteemed—whatever they were makes no difference to me; God does not show favoritism—those leaders added nothing to me.

⁷On the contrary, they saw that I had been entrusted to preach the gospel to the uncircumcised, just as Peter had been to the circumcised.

⁸For the One who was at work in Peter’s apostleship to the circumcised was also at work in my apostleship to the Gentiles.

⁹And recognizing the grace that I had been given, James, Cephas,and John—those reputed to be pillars—gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, so that we should go to the Gentiles, and they to the circumcised.

¹⁰They only asked us to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do.

Paul Confronts Cephas

¹¹When Cephas came to Antioch, however, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned.

¹²For before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself, for fear of those in the circumcision group.

¹³The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray.

¹⁴When I saw that they were not walking in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in front of them all, “If you, who are a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?”

¹⁵We who are Jews by birth and not Gentile “sinners”

¹⁶know that a man is not justified by works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have believed in Christ Jesus, that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.

¹⁷But if, while we seek to be justified in Christ, we ourselves are found to be sinners, does that make Christ a minister of sin? Certainly not!

¹⁸If I rebuild what I have already torn down, I prove myself to be a lawbreaker.

¹⁹For through the law I died to the law so that I might live to God.

²⁰I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.

²¹I do not set aside the grace of God. For if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.

The Uproar in Thessalonica

¹When they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a Jewish synagogue.

²As was his custom, Paul went into the synagogue, and on three Sabbaths he reasoned with them from the Scriptures,

³explaining and proving that the Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead. “This Jesus I am proclaiming to you is the Christ,” he declared.

⁴Some of the Jews were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, along with a large number of God-fearing Greeks and quite a few leading women.

⁵The Jews, however, became jealous. So they brought in some troublemakers from the marketplace, formed a mob, and sent the city into an uproar. They raided Jason’s house in search of Paul and Silas, hoping to bring them out to the people.

⁶But when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some other brothers before the city officials, shouting, “These men who have turned the world upside down have now come here,

⁷and Jason has welcomed them into his home. They are all defying Caesar’s decrees, saying that there is another king, named Jesus!”

⁸On hearing this, the crowd and city officials were greatly disturbed.

⁹And they collected bond from Jason and the others and then released them.

The Character of the Bereans

¹⁰As soon as night had fallen, the brothers sent Paul and Silas away to Berea. On arriving there, they went into the Jewish synagogue.

¹¹Now the Bereans were more noble-minded than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if these teachings were true.

¹²As a result, many of them believed, along with quite a few prominent Greek women and men.

¹³But when the Jews from Thessalonica learned that Paul was also proclaiming the word of God in Berea, they went there themselves to incite and agitate the crowds.

¹⁴The brothers immediately sent Paul to the coast, but Silas and Timothy remained in Berea.

¹⁵Those who escorted Paul brought him to Athens and then returned with instructions for Silas and Timothy to join him as soon as possible.

Paul in Athens

¹⁶While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply disturbed in his spirit to see that the city was full of idols.

¹⁷So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and God-fearing Gentiles, and in the marketplace with those he met each day.

¹⁸Some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also began to debate with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others said, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was proclaiming the good news of Jesus and the resurrection.

¹⁹So they took Paul and brought him to the Areopagus,where they asked him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting?

²⁰For you are bringing some strange notions to our ears, and we want to know what they mean.”

²¹Now all the Athenians and foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing more than hearing and articulating new ideas.

Paul’s Address in the Areopagus

²²Then Paul stood up in the meetingof the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious.

²³For as I walked around and examined your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription:TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.Therefore what you worship as something unknown, I now proclaim to you.

²⁴The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples made by human hands.

²⁵Nor is He served by human hands, as if He needed anything, because He Himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.

²⁶From one manHe made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands.

²⁷God intended that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us.

²⁸‘For in Him we live and move and have our being.’As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are His offspring.’

²⁹Therefore, being offspring of God, we should not think that the Divine Being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by man’s skill and imagination.

³⁰Although God overlooked the ignorance of earlier times, He now commands all people everywhere to repent.

³¹For He has set a day when He will judge the world with justice by the Man He has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising Him from the dead.”

³²When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some began to mock him, but others said, “We want to hear you again on this topic.”

³³At that, Paul left the Areopagus.

³⁴But somejoined him and believed, including Dionysius the Areopagite, a woman named Damaris, and others who were with them.

Do Not Harden Your Hearts

¹Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD;let us shout to the Rock of our salvation!

²Let us enter His presence with thanksgiving;let us make a joyful noise to Him in song.

³For the LORD is a great God,a great King above all gods.

⁴In His hand are the depths of the earth,and the mountain peaks belong to Him.

⁵The sea is His, for He made it,and His hands formed the dry land.

⁶O come, let us worship and bow down;let us kneel before the LORD our Maker.

⁷For He is our God,and we are the people of His pasture,the sheep under His care.Today, if you hear His voice,

⁸do not harden your heartsas you did at Meribah,in the day at Massah in the wilderness,

⁹where your fathers tested and tried Me,though they had seen My work.

¹⁰For forty years I was angry with that generation,and I said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray,and they have not known My ways.”

¹¹So I swore on oath in My anger,“They shall never enter My rest.”