Have you ever encountered a so-called “Lone Wolf Christian?
Some people think they can worship God all by themselves without assembling together with other like-minded believers. The mere concept of worshiping God apart from communal worship is contrary to sound Biblical teaching.
While it is true that each of us must have a personal encounter via the Holy Spirit with Jesus, he never said after you are saved go into your house, hole up, and become an antisocial hermit.
When we get saved, we become part of the household of God. We join with an innumerable company of believers. Both are terms the Bible uses to describe God’s Church.
God designed us to be social creatures by nature. We are told this from the very beginning in Genesis, when God, reflecting on his creation, says, “It is not good for man to be alone.”
So, God created man a helpmate—the woman—and together they became a small social unit of “one flesh” called husband and wife.
To further strengthen this social bond, Adam and Eve are told have a big family to fill the earth. Even during Noah’s time when God judged that mankind start over, he still saved Noah’s family unit and told them to multiply.
Next, we come to Abraham, to whom God said he would make “a father of many nations.” Abraham had a grandson named Jacob whom God gave the new name of Israel whose descendants became a “great nation,” which is a society of people.
Even during Israel’s bondage in Egypt, when a King arose which did not know Israel’s son Joseph, God still preserved his chosen people, despite “Pharaoh” killing off the infants because of his worldly pride. Providentially, God still kept the social structure of Israel because “God’s chosen people” repentantly cried out for help. In answer to their cry God raised up Moses to deliver and preserve Israel.
Even in the midst of God delivering Israel from “bondage,” many unbelievers lamented for slaveries security under Egyptian rule. They complained that at least in slavery they could be fed by the government of Egypt. Because of unbelief, God judged that Israel should wander in the desert until that unbelieving generation died out. After which Joshua took over for Moses and led true Israel, as it were, into the promised land.
These unbelievers in Moses time where not unlike Esau, who sold his birthright for “one morsel of meat” to satisfy his flesh for the moment. All of this is very important Old Testament teaching and as usual, there is more to the story.
To find out what light the New Testament sheds on these events, you need to read the entirety of Hebrews, but we must join Paul in Hebrews 12, as in explicit detail he warns the New Testament Hebrew converts what I must briefly summarize as: They had best be reverent because they are treading on Holy Ground.
Furthermore, Paul tells the Hebrews they are not living in the past when this “Holy Ground” was a mere shadow symbolized by the Ten Commandment received by Moses. After which, upon seeing Moses, the people shook in fear and couldn’t look upon his face, because he had been in the presence of the living Word.
Rather these New Testament Hebrews like us are standing on this side of Christ’s Church.
We are at the true mountain of God, the mount Zion, the Holy City, New Jerusalem. I like the way John puts it in Revelation 21:1: “And I, John, saw the holy city new Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”
To paraphrase John and Paul, we, as they, are standing on this side of so great a cloud of witnesses to the majesty of Christ’s fulfillment as the sacrificial lamb of God, prophesied before the foundation of the world. How shall we escape, if we neglect, as Esau or Apostate Israel did, “so great a salvation”?
We cannot escape, we are without excuse, we have all the clues, plus the fulfillment of the clues as evidenced by the resurrection. All that brings me to this charge given by Paul to the Hebrews, but fully applicable to all of us today: Hebrews 10:25: “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.”
The providence of God has designed His-story in such a way that secular history will repeat itself if we make the same mistakes the Bible details. What came to disobedient Israel will come to a disobedient church today. It does not matter if we are a lone wolf Christian running from the truth, or a group of professing Christians afraid of what principalities and powers or the rulers of darkness are throwing at us. You see, one thing always remains constant—and that one thing is God.
I am very privileged to have this platform and I hope the Word referenced and quoted within this article will exhort all of us to seek out the old path and not think God is leading us in some new worship direction.
Hebrews 13:8: Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day and for ever. KJV