12 Arise,(A) Lord! Lift up your hand,(B) O God.
    Do not forget the helpless.(C)
13 Why does the wicked man revile God?(D)
    Why does he say to himself,
    “He won’t call me to account”?(E)
14 But you, God, see the trouble(F) of the afflicted;
    you consider their grief and take it in hand.
The victims commit themselves to you;(G)
    you are the helper(H) of the fatherless.
15 Break the arm of the wicked man;(I)
    call the evildoer to account for his wickedness
    that would not otherwise be found out.

16 The Lord is King for ever and ever;(J)
    the nations(K) will perish from his land.
17 You, Lord, hear the desire of the afflicted;(L)
    you encourage them, and you listen to their cry,(M)
18 defending the fatherless(N) and the oppressed,(O)
    so that mere earthly mortals
    will never again strike terror.

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The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart(A) and a good conscience(B) and a sincere faith.(C) Some have departed from these and have turned to meaningless talk. They want to be teachers(D) of the law, but they do not know what they are talking about or what they so confidently affirm.(E)

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Warning Against Unbelief

So, as the Holy Spirit says:(A)

“Today, if you hear his voice,
    do not harden your hearts(B)
as you did in the rebellion,
    during the time of testing in the wilderness,
where your ancestors tested and tried me,
    though for forty years they saw what I did.(C)
10 That is why I was angry with that generation;
    I said, ‘Their hearts are always going astray,
    and they have not known my ways.’
11 So I declared on oath in my anger,(D)
    ‘They shall never enter my rest.’ (E)[a](F)

12 See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.(G) 13 But encourage one another daily,(H) as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.(I) 14 We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold(J) our original conviction firmly to the very end.(K) 15 As has just been said:

“Today, if you hear his voice,
    do not harden your hearts
    as you did in the rebellion.”[b](L)

16 Who were they who heard and rebelled? Were they not all those Moses led out of Egypt?(M) 17 And with whom was he angry for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies perished in the wilderness?(N) 18 And to whom did God swear that they would never enter his rest(O) if not to those who disobeyed?(P) 19 So we see that they were not able to enter, because of their unbelief.(Q)

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Footnotes

  1. Hebrews 3:11 Psalm 95:7-11
  2. Hebrews 3:15 Psalm 95:7,8

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