Word of God

Wherefore (as the Holy Ghost saith,

To day if ye will hear his voice,

Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness:

When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works forty years.

Wherefore I was grieved with that generation, and said, They do alway err in their heart; and they have not known my ways.

So I sware in my wrath, They shall not enter into my rest.)

Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God. But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence stedfast unto the end;

— Hebrews 7–14


To day if ye will hear his voice,

Harden not your heart, as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness:

When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my work.

Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said, It is a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known my ways:

Unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest.

— Psalm 95:7–11

For Paul, the Holy Ghost did not speak differently in David’s time than in his own. The later revelation fulfilled, not superseded, the earlier. Christianity embraces Judaism.

The vision of coherence and connectedness that gave rise to biblical cross-references can plausibly be credited with one of the greatest social transformations of all time: the 19th-century abolition of slavery. The movement to ban first the slave trade and then slavery itself in the British Empire came from Quakers and other religious-minded men and women who understood the link between Exodus and Corinthians to mean that they were morally obliged to repeat the work of Moses as long as any individual people were enslaved, that every individual — not only one or another group of people — had been promised liberation by God. The slaves themselves, in their campaign for freedom, found in this connection both a promise of deliverance and an unanswerable rebuke to the slaveholders, who so manifestly failed to practice the religion they professed. To accept slavery was to sign up with Pharaoh. To fight against it was to obey the same imperatives that Moses obeyed.
— Edward Mendelson, The Word & the Web