The Word Abused . . .

“NOT FORSAKING THE ASSEMBLY”

The scriptures are often abused through prooftexting, which means that certain passages are lifted from their contexts and made to apply to conclusions already presumed. This has been horrendously done to Heb. 10:25, which reads in the King James “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.” It is presumed that believers are under absolute and arbitrary obligation to be present at all meetings of their congregation, and this verse is the text to prove it. “Forsaking the assembly” is thus equated with “missing church,” which is often described as one of the necessary five acts of public worship. If one gets to the assembly each time the doors open, we can check off item number one: he has assembled. He is to proceed to the other four. We are told that this is what Heb. 10:25 is talking about.

Parents will impose upon their young children by taking them to several adult-oriented services every week, some of them being at night, forcing the children to sleep or play their way through the hours —lest they “forsake the assembly.” Brethren will leave company at home, people that they might well win to the Lord through tender loving care, in order to be in their pew when the doors open even on a Sunday or Wednesday evening. To do otherwise would be forsaking the assembly. Forsaking, mind you! To miss church now and again, however important one’s mission might be, is to forsake the assembly!

Some of our hard-working brothers and sisters might do the right thing by staying home with their families, by going to bed early, or by visiting grandmother or a neighbor, rather than to be going to church all time. But the System has latched on to Heb. 10:25 as a prooftext, and it is made to mean that “you’ve got to be here” or you are sinning by forsaking the assembly. Brethren will drag themselves to meeting even with splitting headaches (“You’d go to work if you didn’t feel well, wouldn’t you?” has been part of the harangue), so as not to violate what he has been led to believe is a mandate —be there or you are forsaking!

We all occasionally hear of the brother or sister “who has not missed communion” for 30 or 40 or 50 years, not even once. We are to presume that this adds up to lots of Brownie points. Since my immersion at age 16 I have assembled with the saints every Lord’s day save perhaps two or three times that I was hospitalized, but I do not see this as having any particular relevance to Heb. 10:25, and I certainly do not view it as a record of good works. If I had missed, say a 100 times, during those years, for reasons that would be consistent with my Christian profession, I would not conclude that I had violated Heb. 10:25 or forsaken the assembly on all those occasions. I can hear myself saying to a brother afterwards, “We surely did miss being there, but the girl next door went into labor just as we went out to the car, so we had to get her to the hospital.” Or I might say to Ouida as we drive by the park on the way to the assembly, “Look at that child over there wandering about and crying, obviously lost, and in danger of falling into the pond. We’ll just have to stop and help, church or no church.”

But many brethren insist that the assembly “cannot be forsaken” for any reason within one’s control, physical incapacitation being the only excuse. The working man might also be excused for missing Sunday a. m., if he is present for the evening service and breaks bread then, which has given rise to our second serving of the Supper. If the ox is in a ditch or a neighbor is in need, they will just have to wait until after the assembly. You’ll hear brethren say that they would not “forsake the assembly” in order to stop and render aid to victims of a car wreck. They wouldn’t leave the Lord waiting like that! Such illustrates how we abuse the scriptures so as to uphold a System that puts rules before persons, the very thing that Jesus sought to correct in the religion of the Pharisees.

Jesus healed a blind man on the sabbath, according to John 9, and one would suppose that everyone would rejoice in his good fortune. But the Pharisees could think of but one thing: it was done on the sabbath, and according to their interpretation one was not to spit in the manner that Jesus did, so as to make an ointment (one could spit only on a smooth surface), So, they finally abused the man who once was blind because he would not go along with their legalistic ways. Jesus afterwards explained to the man, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind.” When the Pharisees overheard the remark, they asked him if he considered them blind. He replied, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains.”

It is a sobering lesson for those of us who presume to have all the answers about regulations for the Lord’s day. Jesus told the Pharisees that man was not made for the sabbath, as they seemed to think, but that the sabbath was made for man. That means that man’s welfare comes before the sabbath. The sabbath is for his good, but if his good is in some way threatened, then the sabbath may be sacrificed in order to meet that threat. Surely this would also be true of the Lord’s day. Of course the disciple is to gather with the saints at the appointed times, for it is a natural expression of the relationship he sustains with them and the Lord. And it is for his good —his upbuilding and encouragement. But if the welfare of persons is at issue, whether his welfare or someone else’s, he should first take care of the emergency, and then take his place in the assembly. If he occasionally misses a meeting, he is as much in service to God while changing a tire for some stranded old couple than when he sits in the meetinghouse. Heb. 10:25 does not teach that he then and there forsakes the assembly when he elects to render aid in an emergency rather than to be at meeting at the appointed time.

While we are at it, it is just as well that we distinguish between the Lord’s day assembly for the breaking of bread, which we can defend as ordained by the apostles, and other congregational meetings that are of our own creation. Some churches will have two or three, sometimes more, meetings each week in addition to the appointed gathering for the breaking of bread. Many churches will have “gospel meetings” from one to three times a year, which call for nightly attendance for a week or more at a time. It is not unusual for a church’s programs to take 150 evenings a year of a family’s time besides that one assembly each week for the Supper, which most of us will accept as the one God-ordained assembly.

The ploy in al1 this is that if the elders have decided on such meetings, then they too are a “must” —God ordained perhaps —and the brethren are obligated to attend all such meetings at the peril of violating Heb. 10:25. So it is rather common for the ones who attend on Sunday a. m. to be put down for not being there at the other occasions —and the changes are you’ll hear Heb. 10:25 quoted. When in all probability Heb. 10:25 isn’t even talking about the main gathering on Lord’s day, but more on that later.

Our holy Wednesday night is our own idea, and perhaps a good one, especial1y if it is made an evening of serious study together rather than one more instance where brethren become spectators for still another sermon. Heaven help us! “Gospel meetings” for the most part ineffective since they attract only those already members, many of whom would not be there themselves if they were not kept frightened by Heb. 10:25. That isn’t the scriptural way to evangelize anyhow. Since when are believers to badger folk into “going to church” so as to hear the gospel? The believer himself will tel1 the sinner about Jesus, and once he too becomes a believer he will be taken to the assembly and introduced.

Our folk are kept so busy “going to church” that they hardly have time to serve the Lord. When I suggest to our leaders that we discard the Sunday evening service and make it an evening of visitation or studies in various homes, so as to extend our outreach, I am told that the brethren won’t do that. So we go right on corralling them once more, imposing still more sermons on them, which no one pays much attention to. While we should assemble to worship and scatter to preach, we are always assembling and never scattering.

It is a common scene in our churches on a Sunday or Wednesday evening to see a young couple gathering up their sleepy children fol1owing one more boring experience. The mother has one child in her arms, the father another one across his shoulder, while the six-year-old is tugged out the aisle on his daddy’s hand, yawning every step of the way —the child that is! That is the closing scene. The opening scene is the parents trying to keep the kids quiet and out of each other’s hair. Final1y that blessed moment comes when they fall asleep. It is al1 a rather oppressive scene. But then there is Heb. 10:25.

It would be liberating if some gracious shepherd of the flock could say to such families: “These Sunday and Wednesday evening gatherings are for the convenience of some of our people, but with your little ones it might not be the case with you. Why don’t you have your own church with them at home? Read some stories to them that they would enjoy together, and then put them to bed early. Then you two might have an hour or so of quiet together and be better ready for work the next day.” But to say such, which of course makes all the sense in the world, he has to become free from the assault of Heb. 10:25. You can’t advise a family to “forsake the assembly,” even if it would be a blessing to them!

On any of our holy Wednesdays in an urban area like Dal1as there are thousands of brethren making their way to still another nightly assembly. If their cars had a halo about them and it must be something like that and if one watched from a helicopter, he would see these hundreds of cars streaking down the freeways and streets of Dallas to our scores of buildings. After an hour or so they would all streak back, the halos gracing all parts of the city, even to the outlying suburbs. It is a vast project of sermon-listening, or, at best, a period of Bible study. Every Wednesday this goes on, year in and year out. Some brethren have logged upwards of 2,000 holy Wednesdays, with hardly a miss, and if that doesn’t score up those Brownie points, pray tell me what would.

Dallas is a city of hundreds of hospitals and nursing homes. And thousands of shutins, many of whom are our own folk. And tens of thousands of lonely souls, people hardly ever cal1ed on by anybody, many of them are completely “unchurched.” Suppose we look down from the helicopter one holy Wednesday night and see these haloed cars behaving erratically. Instead of the usual route to the meetinghouses they peel out of the traffic and stop at hospitals, nursing homes, jails, orphanages, private homes, and retirement villages. Some read to the blind, some write letters for the aged, some frolic with kids at a park, some babysit for a working mother that has no other free night, some sit with the sick, some listen to troubled youth at halfway houses, some engage in Bible study with a neighbor.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? That would be the Body of Christ at work, out among the people where the Body should be, just as Jesus was. But what about the Wednesday evening assembly that the elders have made holy by presbyterial fiat. The Dallas saints would be “forsaking the assembly” while out serving the Lord like that!

What then is the real import of Heb. 10:25? As with most of the New Covenant scriptures, Hebrews arose out of a contingency, the circumstance being the possible apostasy of the Hebrew disciples in Jerusalem or Rome, or maybe Caesarea or Antioch. They were in danger of “an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God” (3:12). After being enlightened and having tasted the heavenly gift and having become partakers of the Holy Spirit, they were in peril of committing apostasy and crucifying the Son of God afresh (6:5-6). They had suffered persecution for their faith, even by being publicly exposed, but their faith was now wavering and they were about to throw it all away (10:32-35). They may have been exiles due to the persecution, but, in any case, they longed for the security that temple ritual afforded, and they were tempted to go back to that old system, giving up their freedom in Jesus. The writer is urging them to be faithful, so he is suggesting some practical ways to accomplish this, along with all the weightier theological stuff he feeds them.

One thing they were to do was to meet frequently and encourage one another, which is an effective maneuver whether you are a part of a team selling Fuller brushes or a commando squad preparing for a raid. Every coach or platoon leader knows the importance of mutual encouragement. So the writer of Hebrews is instructing this Jewish community to “exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (3:13). By this time they really should have been teachers, but still they had to be taught the first principles of God’s word (6:12), and the writer was hopeful that in their frequent gatherings they would be able to teach and encourage each other in the faith so as not to surrender what they had gained in Christ.

This is the context of Heb. 10:25 . Beginning with verse 19, the writer is urging upon them the confidence that the blood of Jesus provides. Since Jesus is the believer’s high priest “let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith” (verses 21-22) and “hold fast the confession of our hope, for he who promised is faithful” (verse 23). In verse 24 he tells them they are to “stir up one another to love and good works,” and in verse 25 he says this is to be done in their meetings together—“not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” (RSV)

The situation is made the more dramatic by the impending crisis of the coming of the Roman army and the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. The meetings are especially needful in that they will bolster the faith and strengthen the will of those who have great hardship to bear. And so he says, “so much the more as you see the Day drawing nigh,” that is, the day of destruction of city and temple as foretold by the Lord. Some see this as the Day of Judgement, which is not likely.

The writer’s thinking is clear enough: meetings and mutual sharing go together. If they don’t keep up their meetings, they will not encourage each other as much. “Not neglecting to meet together” stands over against “but encourage one another.” There is no reference to what we sometimes call corporate worship or to the Lord’s day assembly as such. It may have included this, but it is not likely. If a missionary to the Orient, back home on furlough, should hear that some of his converts were about to slip back to their pagan ways, and he had learned that they grew great strength by being together in each other’s homes for study and prayer, he might well urge them by letter: “Remember how encouraging those house meetings are to you, and don’t neglect them.” He might write this without even thinking about the Lord’s day assembly, and if I were making a guess, in view of what is said in Hebrews, I would say that Heb. 10:25 is referring to all those little gatherings wherein those Christian Jews buoyed each other up, quite apart from the Lord’s day, even if we suppose that they had grown sufficiently to be observing Sunday instead of, or in addition to, their old Jewish Sabbath, which we do not know.

In any event, it is rather odd that in our time we use a passage that is calculated to provide for mutual edification, virtually browbeating folks with it, so that they “go to church” as spectators, seldom sharing with each other, but listening once again to the preacher. Heb. 10:25 is urging those kinds of meetings where we “stir one another up to love and good works,” but we use the passage to keep people at church all time so they will have less occasion to do the good works that they might otherwise be encouraged to do.

The practice of “sharing sessions” was by no means new for the Jews, for it reaches back at least as far as the Babylonian exile, where, separated from their ritual, they turned to mutual ministry. Mal. 3:16 refers to such meetings: “Those who feared the Lord spoke with one another; the Lord heeded and heard them, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the Lord and thought on his name.”

For our time the best application of Heb. 10:25 seems to be the prayer groups and house churches where folk are getting a lot of encouragement, some of them actually saved from, apostasy by such gatherings. Any of us might urge such ones, who might otherwise give up their faith: “Keep on with those meetings, encouraging one another, and doq’t neglect them.” That would be in the spirit of Heb. 10:25.

As for the Lord’s day assembly, as well as other meetings a congregation decides to have, it goes without saying that every member should respond responsibly to them all. This he will do because he is a disciple of Jesus. The very meaning of the Body of Christ implies this. Either he will be at the meetings or he will be doing something equally responsible for Jesus’ sake. During exam week the teachers and the kids may be unduly pressed for time. Physicians may be on call, just as trouble-shooting electricians might be. The point is that if one loves Jesus, he is going to be loving him whatever the’ assignment is at the time. Except for very unusual circumstances, we’ll all gather on Lord’s day to break bread with each other and the Lord. The “extra meetings” we’ll want to attend because we love each other, if for no other reason. But it will be a soft sell. If brethren are not there, we will assume that they are doing something else for Jesus that may be even more important. We certainly will not assault each other with Heb. 10:25, which has no relevance to such situations.

As for the brother who has “quit church” and no longer seems to love Jesus or his fellow disciples, I can’t see that the writer of Heb. 10:25 has the likes of such ones in mind at all in what he says. But it might in some way be made to apply to such. But the problem with such fallen brethren is not that they have “forsaken the assembly,” but that they no longer love the Lord. Such ones need a lot more than having prooftexts thrown at them.

As for those who insist that the church has ample time to gather on Sunday and Wednesday evenings, as well as other occasions, and still have time to go out and do the Lord’s work, I have no quarrel with them. I would only hope that such meetings would be mutually edifying and calculated to cultivate Body ministry. I am only asking that we not make them a matter of divine fiat, and abuse Heb. 10:25 in doing so. - the Editor