8. If you are not punished, as all his children are, it means you are not real children, but bastards.
9. In the case of our human fathers, they punished us and we respected them. How much more, then, should we submit to our spiritual Father and live!
10. Our human fathers punished us for a short time, as it seemed right to them; but God does it for our own good, so that we may share his holiness.
11. When we are punished, it seems to us at the time something to make us sad, not glad. Later, however, those who have been disciplined by such punishment reap the peaceful reward of a righteous life.
12. Lift up your tired hands, then, and strengthen your trembling knees!
13. Keep walking on straight paths, so that the lame foot may not be disabled, but instead be healed.
14. Try to be at peace with everyone, and try to live a holy life, because no one will see the Lord without it.
15. Guard against turning back from the grace of God. Let no one become like a bitter plant that grows up and causes many troubles with its poison.
16. Let no one become immoral or unspiritual like Esau, who for a single meal sold his rights as the elder son.
17. Afterwards, you know, he wanted to receive his father's blessing; but he was turned away, because he could not find any way to change what he had done, even though in tears he looked for it.
18. You have not come, as the people of Israel came, to what you can feel, to Mount Sinai with its blazing fire, the darkness and the gloom, the storm,
19. the blast of a trumpet, and the sound of a voice. When the people heard the voice, they begged not to hear another word,
20. because they could not bear the order which said, “If even an animal touches the mountain, it must be stoned to death.”