Bible Commentaries
Hebrews 13

Verses 1-9

ARGUMENT 18

This paragraph, including Hebrews 12:18-29, is the grand Apollonian climax exhibitory of the threefold gospel, i,e., conviction, regeneration, and sanctification.

18-21. These four verses describe the memorable scene when God Almighty descended on Mount Sinai in densely black clouds, roaring tornadoes, terrific lightnings, appalling thunder-bolts, stentorian thunderclaps and paroxysmal earthquakes, striking paralyzing affright and horrible trepidation into all the people, so they trembled, quaked, screamed and fled from the scene, beseeching Moses to stand between them and the awful God of Sinai. This indescribable scene emblematizes the gospel of conviction, when the fire-baptized preacher, fearless of men and devils, takes Mount Sinai for his pulpit, trusting God to supply the lightning, thunder, tempest and earthquake, while he uncaps hell and shakes the people over the seething, burning, unfathomable billows, with a strong hand and a fearless heart. This explains the historic fact that the apostles raised a row, provoked persecution, and received bleeding backs and broken beads wherever they went. The Sinai Gospel, indispensable to conviction, is the great deficiency of the present age. In popular pulpits it is considered discourteous to speak of hell and damnation, and intolerable to preach on it. A cultured clergyman, in a city pulpit, found it necessary in the process of his discourse to say “hell.” He said it so softly that a lot of money-loving merchants present thought he said “sell” some Universalists in his audience thought he said, “all’s well,” while an old saint in the amen corner actually certified that the man said “hell.” While the Sinai Gospel is dead and forgotten in the popular churches, so the members actually go to perdition at race-horse speed without any serious trouble in the way of conscientious compunction, it is a lamentable fact that it is fearfully deficient in the holiness movement. Consequently, the people are professing in platoons, while possession is like the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end. Internal superficiality is the greatest enemy of the holiness work. Sanctification is impossible without regeneration, and regeneration without conviction, while the Sinai Gospel is God’s artillery for conviction. I am an old revivalist. In the vigor of my manhood I delighted to go into the very hotbed of Satan’s kingdom, take Sinai for my pulpit, trust God for thunder, lightning and earthquakes, stand like a messenger from heaven and preach the terrors of the violated law, the blackness of sin, the horrors of hell and the doom of the damned for days and weeks and see conviction settle down on all the people like a nightmare from the regions of woe, hope take her flight and despair on raven wing hover around the doomed people till they would fall on all sides, crying for mercy. Then I would open the altar and at least half of the whole congregation would pile into it. I have frequently seen meetings like it is said of heaven, “Congregations ne’er break up and Sabbaths have no end,” the slain of the Lord, unable to stand on their feet, lying prostrate till the next meeting, so there was really no adjournment. Scenes of this kind were accompanied by sky-blue conversions and sun-burst sanctifications. We have great need of an overhauling and a reformation in the holiness movement, and a return to first principles, less we retrogress so far as to run into formalistic manipulation and routine profession, like the dead churches, taking mentalities for spiritualities. I find people in my travels professing sanctification who satisfy me upon spiritual diagnosis that they are not only unsanctified but ignorant of regeneration, the trouble consisting in the fact that they have never had a spiritual conviction. Consequently all their professions have been intellectual, formalistic and perfunctory, their own immortal spirit all the time dead in the sepulcher of sin. The soul abides in an interior citadel, surrounded by the mind, which must be interpenetrated in order to reach the immortal spirit, the man himself. While human words can reach the man, convince the judgment, influence the will and stir the emotions, all of which is right, proper and necessary in the plan of salvation, God’s lightning flashing from Sinai’s melting summit is necessary to interpenetrate materiality, mentality and reach the immortal spirit on its throne in the center of the soul. While the awful thunders of Sinai must wake up the sleeping sinner, the smashing, convulsing earthquakes of God’s convicting Spirit alone can shake him from his sandy foundations. God help us all to study and preach the Sinai Gospel, till we see the wicked fall like dead men, as I have so often seen, especially in my early evangelistic ministry. While the Sinai Gospel, when faithfully preached, brings conviction, it is equally true that the Calvary Gospel, when faithfully preached, invariably brings conversions. Our Savior warned us not to cast our pearls before swine. O, how we have need to heed this warning. Preaching God’s pardoning love to impenitent sinners is casting your pearls before the swine and calculated not only to harden them in their wicked courses, till they will go on from bad to worse, congratulating themselves, “God loves me too well to send me to hell.”

The Gospel of Sinai is for impenitent sinners, and should be preached to them till conviction strikes them. The Gospel of Calvary is for all penitent sinners, and should be faithfully preached to them till they are gloriously converted. As a rule, the popular churches are mainly filled up with proud impenitent sinners. What a mistake to preach sanctification to such people! Of course, they trample the jewels of holiness under their carnal feet, and get mad enough to tear one to pieces because he did not give them corn to eat. Such people need the Gospel of Sinai to convict them, so they may see their lost estate and fly for refuge. It is frequently quite different when we preach to the drunkards, harlots, thieves and murderers in the slums. In their case, frequently ruined health, terrible physical suffering, abject poverty, dissipated fortunes and alienated friends have reacted on them with the crushing weight of an avalanche, broken their hearts and blighted all their hopes; meanwhile the Holy Ghost, through these sad and awful calamities, has reached their hearts with a true and genuine conviction. Therefore they are already penitent and ready with gushing gratitude to hear you tell of Jesus, the sinner’s Friend, and the sinner’s Savior dying on the cross to take away their sins, keep them out of hell and lift them up to heaven. In the normal economy of Gospel grace, the sinner is convicted by the thunder and lightnings of Sinai, flies to Cavalry, falls beneath the reeking cross, looks up at the dying Savior, hears Him say, “It is finished.” He now soliloquizes, “What is finished? My salvation? Then what have I to do? Nothing, but take it. I do, by the grace of God, and eternity will be too short for me to serve, praise, honor and adore Thee as I ought, because Thou hast come all the way from heaven down to save this my lost soul.”

22. The New Covenant of entire sanctification was inaugurated on Mount Zion, when Jesus poured down on His disciples the Pentecostal fire. This glorious experience identifies us with the “heavenly Jerusalem,” the Bride of Christ and the mother of God’s children, bringing us into angelic sympathy and fellowship

23. bringing us into the “Church of the firstborn,” of which Jesus is the Head, and the truly sanctified people His body, the spirits of justified people having been made perfect, i.e., converted people who have afterwards been sanctified

24. and to “Jesus, the Mediator of the covenant, and to the blood that speaketh better things than the blood of Abel.” Whereas Moses was the mediator of the Old Covenant, sanctified by the blood of animals, Jesus is the Mediator of the New Covenant sanctified by His own blood. We are all now living in the Mount Zion dispensation, which was inaugurated at Pentecost, to prepare the world for the millennium. It is a deplorable pity for us to go back and live under the dispensation of Moses, following human guides, depending on church rites and legal obedience which have no power to take away sins.

25. Disobedience under the Mosaic dispensation was punished with physical death, adumbrating the sad fate of the soul rejecting the blood of the New Covenant, the baptisms of Pentecost, the glories and victories of full salvation.

26. The memorable scene of Sinai also typified the summary vengeance of the violated law in the cremation of the earth with its aerial environments, in order to the complete, final and total extirpation not only of sin, but of its effects from the created universe.

27. “But this yet once exhibits the removal of things shakable as having been created, in order that things unshakable may remain.” When Satan invaded Eden and captured Adam and Eve, the king and queen of this world, he threw the black banner of this conquest around the globe, polluting all from center to circumference, warp and woof, intrinsical and extrinsical. Therefore this whole world with its contents passed under condemnation and was excommunicated from the celestial empire. When the Son of God espoused the lost cause, satisfying the violated law by paying the penalty, the Holy Ghost was sent into this world to execute the stupendous work of the new creation, anticipatory of earth’s re- annexation to the heavenly universe. Regeneration is the creation of the new life in to human spirit, while sanctification is the elimination of the old creation. Thus the new creation of the soul is consummated in sanctification; that of the body in the resurrection, and that of the mind in glorification. But this is not enough; the whole earth and firmament are contaminated with sin and must pass through the purgatorial fires like the Pentecostal flames, which sanctify the soul. Contemporaneously with the final judgment, this earth with its environments will be subjected to a thorough cremation, consuming not only all sin, but exterminating all the effects of sin from the terrestrial sphere. Then it will be the glorious prerogative of the Holy Ghost, the Executor of the new creation, to renew this earth and environments in the purity, glory, majesty, splendor and immortal beauty peculiar to the unfallen heavenly worlds.

28. “Therefore, receiving an unshakable kingdom, let us have grace through which we may worship God acceptably, with reverence and Godly fear.” Under the wonderful provisions of the New Covenant, providing an uttermost salvation for all of God’s children, there is no reason why we should not worship Him acceptably, like the angels in heaven. The fallen creation, having passed under condemnation. can never render Him any acceptable service, but when the Holy Ghost has wrought in us the new creation and eliminated out of us the old, there is no reason why we should not have constant victory in our souls and perpetual and delectable communion with God.

29. “For truly our God is a consuming fire.” The connection here involves the conclusion that our God consumes all inbred sin and hereditary depravity out of the hearts of His people, who fully consecrate and solidly trust Him for the execution of that great work. It also follows, the logical sequence, that God out of Christ is a consuming fire to the wicked. When the New Covenant was inaugurated on Mount Zion, amid the Pentecostal baptisms, tongues of fire did sit on the heads of the apostles. These tongues were cloven in twain, significant of the Gospel economy. Hence we see that our Gospel is all fire, consisting of two messages, i. e., hell fire, to warn and convict the wicked to flee the wrath to come; and heavenly fire, to sanctify the righteous for the glorified presence of God. This is the condemnation of the popular pulpit. It has no fire. It neither preaches hell fire, to alarm the wicked, nor heavenly fire, to sanctify the Christian. It has a North Pole atmosphere, surrounded by icebergs and glaciers. The gospel that does not burn is Satan’s counterfeit, to hoax the people and lead them to hell. All cold religion is a diabolical delusion. Satan freezes the people in this world and burns them in the world to me. God’s religion is full of fire in this world, but has no fire in the world to come. There is no mention of fire in heaven, because there is nothing there that ought to be destroyed.

1. “Let brotherly love abide.” O, how pertinent this Apostolical exhortation, and how beautiful and amiable the grace of brotherly love! The sable Ethiopian, the almond-eyed Chinaman, the superstitions Esquimau and the Rocky Mountain Comanche, are all my brethren. Entire sanctification is the only grace competent to obey this commandment. It knocks down all sectarian fences and demolishes all race lines.

2. The departure of the angelic grace of Christian hospitality oat of the churches of the present day is the swift harbinger of the awful apostasy now sadly verifying many alarming latter day prophecies. The Old Testament saints were pre-eminent for their hospitality, while the Jerusalem Church actually sold their estates that they might extend hospitality to their brethren providentially detained in the metropolis by the Pentecostal revival. The Arabic children of Abraham relate a notable incident in the life of the patriarch, i.e., one tempestuous night an old man called at his tent soliciting entertainment, which was courteously granted. After supper, when Abraham proceeds with family prayer, his guest peremptorily refuses to worship the God of Israel, being a rigid, conscientious idolater. In vain the father of the faithful preaches, exhorts, prays and importunes; the old idolater is inflexible as rock. Finally, Abraham presents to him the alternative, “Worship my God or leave my tent.” The old man, choosing the latter, is escorted to the door and turned out in the howling storm. Scarcely has Abraham closed the door when God speaks to him: “Abraham, I have borne with that old sinner a hundred years; can not you stand him one night?” Abraham jumps out, exclaiming aloud, “Come back, come back!” The old man returns astonished, and says, “What sort of a man are you, to drive me off and call me back?” “O,” says Abraham, “the God of Israel did chide me because I would not bear with you one night when He has home with you a hundred years.” Then says the old man, “If that is the kind of God you have tell me more about Him.” Abraham labors with his earnest penitent, who is rousingly converted before day.

3. This verse commands us to show kindness to the prisoners, the afflicted and all in distress, which all who walk in the footprints of Jesus are certain faithfully to perform.

4. Apollos here highly commends the divine institution of matrimony, the providential preventive of the awful destroyer of soul and body, i. e., adultery. The eye of God is upon all its subjects in their dismal, brutal and diabolical nocturnal debaucheries. His judgments are swift on their track.

5. “Let your conduct be free from the love of money, being contented with present things; for Himself hath said, ‘I will never, never forsake thee, nor never, never do I leave thee.’” Nothing but entire sanctification can take the love of money out of the human heart and make us perfectly content and satisfied with a cup of water and a crust of bread, and shout in starvation, enjoying a fast for the glory of God.

6. Well has the poet said, “Man wants but little here nor wants that little long.” The King of England, riding along in his gilded vehicle, seeing a ragged boy digging up the briars in the fence corner, halting a moment, said, “Boy, what do you get for your work?” The astonished lad said, “I just get my victuals and clothes.” The King responded, “Go ahead, boy, for I am the King of England, and that is all I get.”

7. Our God is a God of order and organization. The Church in the Bible is described in military phraseology, as a rule. Military law is most exact, rigid and inviolable, punishing the cowardly and disobedient with death. Our religious meetings are the Lord’s battlefields. Though a human leader may err, for the sake of order and uniformity, we had better obey, trusting God to overrule all mistakes for His glory.

8. “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day and forever.”

9. “Be not carried away with divers and strange teachings: for it is good that the heart be established with grace and not with meats.” The whole Bible is but the biography of Christ, the Old Testament that of Christ concealed, and the New that of Christ revealed. Hence all truth is as old as the Bible, and everything new is false. We are here solemnly warned against the fatal mistake of taking materialities instead of spiritualities, i. e., “meats” instead of “grace.” If the church edifice should burn down and the pastor turn over to the devil, how many church members would have any religion left. If the Conference should drop a church out of the work, as a rule they would nearly all backslide in a year. This illustrates the materialism of their religion, and their radical deficiency in grace. Sadly they are following human leaders instead of Christ. How frequently an evangelist has a great revival, but carries away the religion with him when he goes, because the people were converted to him instead of to God. If he would do like Paul, leave out all the eloquence, and give them the thunder and lightning of Sinai, instead of worshipping him they would give him a thrashing. In that case, there would be some hope of their conversion to God.

Verses 10-19

ARGUMENT 19

While the Father so loved this lost world that He gave His only Son, to die a ransom and redeem every son and daughter of Adam’s ruined race from the doom of sin, death, and hell, yet it is a significant fact here unequivocally revealed, that Jesus gave Himself to suffer and die that He may sanctify His people by His blood. Hence we see the double offering, i.e., that of the Father for a wicked world, and that of the Son to sanctify the Church.

10. The altar here is the cross of Calvary on which the Lamb of God bled and died. Allusion is here made to the Levitical priests who fed on the sacrifices offered in the sanctuary.

11. This verse describes the sin-offering, which the priests were not allowed to eat, because the law required them to carry it out beyond the lines of the encampment, and utterly consume it with fire, thus vividly emblematizing God’s method with sin, which is absolute extermination. This sin-offering typifies Christ, whose human life was utterly exterminated without the wall of Jerusalem, for the sins of the whole world. Just as the priests had no right to partake of the sin-offering, so ecclesiastical clergy have no official right to partake of Christ. They have to come, divested of official distinction, low down in the dust like all other sinners, or make their bed in hell. Away with the pompous pretensions of popery, prelacy and priestcraft! It is a hotch-potch of Satan’s lies. hatched in hell for the damnation of them and their deluded votaries. For this reason, doubtless, Christ did not spring from the tribe of Levi, to which all the priests belonged, but from Judah, in which there were no priests. Despite this impassable chasm between Christ and the clergy, yet the official appropriation of the Christhood by the ecclesiastical custodians and conservators has been the heresy of all heresies, blinding the popular mind, ritualizing the churches, plunging them into idolatry and engulfing millions in hell.

12. “Therefore Jesus in order that He might sanctify the people by His own blood suffered without the gate.” This verse reveals the great fact that after the Father had given the Son to die a ransom for a guilty world, the Son spontaneously gave Himself that He may sanctify His people by His own blood. Oh, how prominent in the Bible the two works of grace, i.e., the one to redeem a guilty world, and the other to sanctify the redeemed Church. Why did Jesus die outside the walls of Jerusalem? It was to deliver the world from the heresy of priestcraft and ecclesiasticism, and illustrate His accessibility to the guilty millions of all ages and races. Jesus died not within the pales of the Church where His atonement is appropriated and doled out by an intriguing clergy and carnal officiary, but His expiation of human guilt takes place on Mount Calvary, standing without the wall in the open firmament of this great sin-debauched world, perfectly accessible to every lost soul of all ages and nations. These indisputable facts eternally sweep away all the arrogant claims of popes, bishops, priests, pastors and ecclesiastical officials and church rites. This one thing is certain beyond all defalcation: in the plan of salvation there are only two parties, i. e., the sinner and Christ.

13. “Consequently let us go forth to Him, without the camp, bearing His reproach.” In this we do not see Comeoutism. We certainly should remain in our churches, to shine and shout for Jesus and save others. But in harmony with the pure spirituality of the Bible we are to understand this commandment. If you depend on your preacher and church for salvation, and especially for sanctification, you will never get it. You have to leave church rites, clerical manipulations and human help, and go away alone to Jesus and settle the problem of your regeneration as a sinner and your sanctification as a Christian. Beware how you take the ipse dixit of a man on this momentous question involving for your soul heaven or hell. Be sure you leave all sects, creeds, pastors, evangelists and official boards; go and settle these immortal issues with Jesus only. When God does the work He is certain to notify you. Never rest without the witness of the Spirit to your regeneration as a sinner, and your sanctification as a Christian, as the meridian sun in his noonday glory.

14. This epistle was written but a short time before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, to which here is evidently a prophetical allusion, corroborated by the mournful evanescence of all things temporal.

15. “Therefore through Him let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is the fruit of our lips confessing His name.” Oh, what a positive commandment and fervent exhortation in favor of the incessant testimony, which the holiness people are forever ringing out! The dead churches, like Ananias and Sapphira, keep back a part of the price, i. e., the “fruits of their lips,” and, like them, plunge into spiritual death, toppling into hell. Take warning and learn to obey this command, i. e., “incessantly offering unto God the fruit of your lips,” i. e., everlastingly and eternally with your mouth open, testifying for God.

16. “Do not forget benefaction and fellowship: for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.” So, when you get the clear witness of the Spirit to your regeneration as a sinner and sanctification as a Christian and go on with your mouth open, ringing out your testimony, “incessantly offering unto God the fruit of your lips,” amid all, be sure that you are always doing good, and extending your loving Christian fellowship to all you meet. In that case you have the blessed assurance in this Scripture that God is not simply reconciled to you, but “delighted” with you.

17. This long verse is a fervent exhortation to follow the spiritual leaders whom the Holy Ghost has sent among you, especially in view of the fact that you must meet them before the great white throne, when God will put them on the witness-block to testify in your case. As you desire their testimony to acquit you in that awful hour, be diligent to obey their Godly precept and emulate their saintly example.

18. “Pray for us... wishing to deport ourselves beautifully among all.”

Here Apollos and his evangelistic comrades, fifteen hundred miles beyond the seas in Italy, beseech their consanguinity in Palestine to pray for them that they may move throughout the whole world shining in the beauty of holiness.

19. How naturally do we all sigh to behold again the beautiful green hills and sunny skies of our native land. Here Apollos and his comrades ask their kindred at Jerusalem to pray that they may once more see the Holy City. I trow that prayer was never answered. The storms of war and death, which so soon deluged the Holy Land with blood, and whitened it with bones, were too nigh to admit the reasonable probability that these brethren would be likely to get back from Italy, and make an evangelistic tour in Palestine, as the R man armies not only destroyed the city, but slew a million of Jews by sword, pestilence and famine, selling a million more into slavery, and driving the scathed and peeled remnant out of the country to roam among the Gentiles. The Emperor Adrian even went so far as to make it a penalty of death for Jews in other countries to be found traveling with their faces toward Jerusalem. Such was his devotion to the Roman gods and his implacable hatred to the Jewish and Christian religion that he did his utmost to obliterate their memory from the earth. He even cast away the name “Jerusalem,” having the city rebuilt by the Gentiles under the name “Elia Capitolina,” which name it retained two hundred years, meanwhile “Jerusalem” was slumbering in oblivion. When the Emperor Constantine and his mother, Queen Helena, were converted to Christianity, A.D. 325, they came to Jerusalem, hunted up the sacred places, had the city rebuilt in splendor and beauty, restoring the good old name, “Jerusalem,” which it has ever retained.

Verses 20-25

ARGUMENT 20

20, 21. “And the God of peace, who raised up from the dead our Lord Jesus Christ, the great Shepherd of the sheep, make you perfect through the blood of the everlasting Covenant in every good thing to do His will, doing among us that which is well-pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.” This grand, glorious and beautiful benediction, which ought frequently to ring out from our pulpits, has been so marred in the English translation as to be almost unintelligible, reading as if God raised up Christ through His own blood. The blood had been shed and left on Mount Calvary. God raised Him up by His own omnipotence, by which He created all worlds and holds up the Universe. The transcendent climax of this wonderful Hebrew letter from beginning to end is Christian perfection. Apollos proves it by twenty unanswerable arguments. Infinitely alien from Babylonian theologians, who everywhere teach that we reach this perfection by growth, Apollos does not so much as use the word in the entire book. Hence the ridiculous preposterosity in the advocacy of the growth theory. This wonderful benediction furnishes us the key to unlock the mystery and solve the problem. “The God of peace who raised up from the dead our Lord Jesus Christ make you perfect through the blood of the everlasting Covenant.” Hence we see this perfection is the work of Christ, wrought in the heart by His own blood. Human depravity is a blood trouble, hence hereditary and incurable, save by divine intervention. Since it is a blood trouble, like all hereditary diseases nothing but blood can heal it. If the leper could get rid of all of his blood, every drop of which is full of leprosy, and receive a new supply of pure blood, his leprosy would forever depart. This is the wonderful gracious economy. Salvation is purely the work of God. Jesus alone can make you perfect. His blood is the only elixir competent to expurgate your blood from the malady of original sin. The Greek “ katartisai,” make perfect, is in the aorist tense, which means “instantaneity,” forever sweeping away the possible conception of gradualism. Hence you see in this wonderful benediction the clear and unequivocal exegesis of the great perfection problem, constituting the climax of this wonderful book. God makes you perfect through the blood of the everlasting Covenant. This perfection eliminates all sin out of you, forever removing every hindrance to your joyful obedience to His blessed and holy will, preparing you to live in the Lord’s prayer, “Thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven.”

22. Apollos exhorts his Palestinian brethren to see that this letter receives a general reading circulation and exposition among all the saints of his beloved consanguinity.

23. The faithful Timothy is the honored bearer of this valuable message, with whose eyes Apollos actually feels that he will be permitted to see his kindred once more in the flesh.

24. This verse simply contains their mutual Christian salutations from Italy to Palestine et visa versa.

25. “Grace be with you all.” While the benediction in Hebrews 13:20-21 is grand for its prolixity and glorious for its wonderful concentration of vital saving truth, this final benediction is beautiful and convenient for its brevity. The benedictory monotony in the popular churches is much to be regretted. We seldom have a benediction but that of Paul at the conclusion of his second Corinthian letter. There is no apology for this injudicious and unedifying monotony in the benedictory service of our pulpits, since the Holy Ghost has supplied us with a beautiful variety in the different letters through His inspired writers. The Hebrew epistle gives us these two, the one pre-eminent for its prolixity and epitome of truth, and the other for its brevity.