Psalm 66

¹Make a joyful noise to God, all the earth;

²sing the glory of his name; give to him glorious praise.

³Say to God, “How awesome are your deeds! Because of your great power, your enemies cringe before you.

⁴All the earth worships you; they sing praises to you, sing praises to your name.” Selah

⁵Come and see what God has done: he is awesome in his deeds among mortals.

⁶He turned the sea into dry land; they passed through the river on foot. There we rejoiced in him,

⁷who rules by his might forever, whose eyes keep watch on the nations— let the rebellious not exalt themselves. Selah

⁸Bless our God, O peoples, let the sound of his praise be heard,

⁹who has kept us among the living, and has not let our feet slip.

¹⁰For you, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried.

¹¹You brought us into the net; you laid burdens on our backs;

¹²you let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water; yet you have brought us out to a spacious place.

¹³I will come into your house with burnt offerings; I will pay you my vows,

¹⁴those that my lips uttered and my mouth promised when I was in trouble.

¹⁵I will offer to you burnt offerings of fatlings, with the smoke of the sacrifice of rams; I will make an offering of bulls and goats. Selah

¹⁶Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell what he has done for me.

¹⁷I cried aloud to him, and he was extolled with my tongue.

¹⁸If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.

¹⁹But truly God has listened; he has given heed to the words of my prayer.

²⁰Blessed be God, because he has not rejected my prayer or removed his steadfast love from me.

8Now the main point in what we are saying is this: we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens, ²a minister in the sanctuary and the true tent that the Lord, and not any mortal, has set up. ³For every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices; hence it is necessary for this priest also to have something to offer. ⁴Now if he were on earth, he would not be a priest at all, since there are priests who offer gifts according to the law. ⁵They offer worship in a sanctuary that is a sketch and shadow of the heavenly one; for Moses, when he was about to erect the tent, was warned, “See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.”

⁶But Jesus has now obtained a more excellent ministry, and to that degree he is the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted through better promises. ⁷For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no need to look for a second one. ⁸God finds fault with them when he says: “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah; ⁹not like the covenant that I made with their ancestors, on the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt; for they did not continue in my covenant, and so I had no concern for them, says the Lord. ¹⁰This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. ¹¹And they shall not teach one another or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. ¹²For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.” ¹³In speaking of “a new covenant,” he has made the first one obsolete. And what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear.