"Let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12.28-29).
These words come from what is, in my estimation, a rather lengthy sermon to a stressed body of believers in Rome. Here I am relying on William Lane’s helpful little commentary, Hebrews: A Call to Commitment. By “lengthy,” it would take me around 58 minutes to preach this sermon; I’m a slow speaker (around 115 words/min., and never mind how I know this). And by “stressed,” it would seem throughout Hebrews that the audience has experienced more than their fair share of suffering. Take, for instance, this:
“...recall the former days when, after you were enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion on those in prison, and you joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one” (Hebrews 10.32-34).
There is a reason why they needed to “fix their eyes on Jesus” (NIV) and to “consider Him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself.” There is a reason why they needed to reflect on Christians who had been tortured, flogged, imprisoned, stoned, sawn in two, and otherwise persecuted (Hebrews 11.26-37). They needed this encouragement so that they might not “grow weary or fainthearted” as they struggled right up to the point of bleeding for Jesus (Heb. 12.2-4).
In the sermon the preacher addresses a fragile body of believers that knew something about suffering. About hiding. And about struggling to worship together in a climate hostile to Christianity.
My family missed worshipping with you on Sunday. Like you, the time away from the worshiping body of Covenant Presbyterian Church was strange and painful. But this should be the case, shouldn’t it? As believers we rightly cling to the promise “when you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present” (1 Corinthians 5.4) and “where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them” (Matthew 18.20). Like the original recipients of Hebrews, we also know that the setting of togetherness is where we learn, fellowship, pray, magnify, share, break bread, rejoice, sing, and give thanks (Acts 2.42-46; Ephesians 5.19-20).
Struggling as a community of believers in first century Rome there were surely times when worshiping together was accompanied by fear and danger. And it is not a stretch to imagine that there were times when worshiping together was altogether impossible. The preacher says to them “let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Hebrews 10.25).
Now, here the preacher here is not referring to the believers’ collapse under forces of persecution, the timidity of heart amidst fear and blood. The preacher is referring to willful and needless abandonment (Kistemaker, BNTC, 292), to a deliberate and persistent forsaking of the church community (P. T. O’Brien, PNTC, 370). Spurgeon called it a neglect of the church body “for the most frivolous excuses” (SC, 295). Calvin suspected a stubborn Jewish renunciation of Gentiles, contrary to gospel unity in the church (240). The neglect of community was not a byproduct of struggle against persecution that was an almost constant companion to the church in Rome. Rather, the neglect was an apathetic retreat from the life of the church body (see Hebrews 2.1–3; 3.7–15; 4.1; 5.11–14). It was the hard-heartedness of testing the God of rescue by deserting the God of rescue (Psalm 95.8-9).
As you consider your church family not gathering together for Sunday morning worship on March 15 and March 22, please do not think that your leaders are deserting the Word of God, or leading the body to forsake the body. This is the warning of Hebrews 10.25 and this is not applicable to our situation. Nor should you think that your leaders have fallen in love with this present world, which is Paul’s charge to Demas, one of the most famous deserters of the New Testament (2 Timothy 4.10).
I would like for you to listen to how Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman describe the rationale of suspending worship at Capitol Hill Baptist Church (Washington D. C.), even in light of this very text from Hebrews 10. In this discussion, “On when the church can’t gather,” he weighs the last time his church suspended corporate worship, which was during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, in which he refers to one published response from Presbyterian minister, Francis Grimke. I would like for you to be encouraged by the fact that our desire is God-honoring and God-obeying care for our church community which includes a temporary pause to our corporate gathering that is miles away from forsaking or abandoning or deserting Jesus or the worship of His church. After all, we are so "grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken (Hebrews 12.28).”
