Hebrews 13

Wesley: brotherly love is explained in the following verses—hospitality, care for prisoners, honor of marriage, contentment.

Listen here for a pastoral command for the whole household: love among brethren is to continue, not cool. The exhortation assumes hearers who must keep loving; do not invent a church that loves by decree alone while ignoring the concrete duties that follow.

Calvin: probably aimed at secret hatred threatening to rend churches, yet needful generally—nothing flows away so easily as love. Brotherly love is the household of faith’s mutual bond under adoption; we cannot be Christians without being brethren.

Continue implies love already shown. Adoption binds the family; haughty self-regard lets love drain away.

Wesley: some—Abraham and Lot—entertained angels unawares. An unknown guest even now may be of more worth than he appears, and may have angels attending unseen.

Arminians hear open-handed welcome as love’s next step. Hospitality is for strangers who may yet prove messengers of God; grace trains the church to receive without calculating return.

Calvin: not so much rich display as entertaining the miserable and needy—many were fugitives for Christ’s name. Abraham and Lot, habitually hospitable, entertained angels without knowing; God proved hospitality especially acceptable. Rare as angel visits are, Christ Himself is received when we receive the poor in His name.

Hospitality is gospel mercy to Christ’s displaced ones. The reward motif drives care, not curiosity about angels.

Wesley: remember—in prayers and by help—them in bonds as bound with them, members one of another; and them that suffer as yourselves also in the body and liable to the same.

The passage carries solidarity that prays and helps. Shared bodily vulnerability moves compassion toward the imprisoned and mistreated; love continues by entering their place in imagination and deed.

Calvin: nothing gives more genuine compassion than putting ourselves in the place of those in distress—think of the bound as though bound with them. “In the body” he applies to the body of the Church: as members of the same body, feel in common for each other’s evils, that nothing be disunited.

Remembrance is ecclesial sympathy. The body’s unity forbids forgetting sufferers as if they were outsiders.

Wesley: marriage is honourable in or for all sorts—clergy as well as laity—though Romanists teach otherwise. The bed undefiled—consistent with the highest purity—though some “spiritual” writers call it licensed whoredom. Whoremongers and adulterers God will judge, though they often escape men’s sentence.

Arminian readers join the Reformers against forbidding marriage and against defiling the bed. Honor and purity are for all; judgment is God’s, not a soft option.

Calvin: marriage set against fornication as God’s remedy; honourable in all—no order prohibited from what God allowed mankind. The bed undefiled warns the married that not everything is lawful—use must be moderate and chaste. God will punish fornicators and adulterers who violate His holy institution.

Marriage is honourable, not a grudging concession. Judgment on sexual immorality stands; superstition that bars clergy from marriage is already answered here.

Wesley: He—God—hath said, I will in no way leave thee nor forsake thee—to all believers, in saying it to Jacob, Joshua, and Solomon.

Arminians hear the promise held out to believers who may take it and rest: contentment grows where God’s nearness is trusted. Love of money is cast out by a living hold on “in no way leave.”

Calvin: cure covetousness by contentment with present things—true contempt of money when we acquiesce in the lot the Lord has given. The source of covetousness is mistrust; whosoever has fixed in his heart that he will never be forsaken by the Lord will not be immoderately solicitous, depending on God’s providence. Faith alone quiets the mind.

The promise plucks the evil by the root. God’s pledged presence frees from avarice; contentment is trust in providence, not stoic shrug.

Wesley points to Psalm 118:6. From the promise of v. 5 the church may boldly say the Lord is helper—fear of man loosens its grip.

Classical Arminians hear confidence as the fitting answer of faith: because He will not forsake, we may speak this psalm as our own. Helper is present aid for those who trust Him amid human threats.

Calvin: from the common doctrine that the Lord will never be wanting, he infers Psalm 118—we have power to overcome fear when assured of God’s help. As long as we have such a Helper there is no cause to fear; depraved desires lose their importunity when faith quiets the mind.

Confident confession is faith’s fruit under the promise. Man’s power is relativized by the Lord’s help to those who trust Him.