Our Gathering Together

This note is interpretation, not translation. It reads one verse from Hebrews, the one usually quoted as “do not forsake the assembling of yourselves together”, in its own Greek and its own paragraph, and then sets it beside this book, which was written to be read aloud to gathered assemblies. Every text is quoted; the one step that is a reading is marked as the note’s.

The verse. From the Greek: “not abandoning our own gathering together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near” (Hebrews 10:25). Three of its words carry it.

Abandoning. The verb is enkataleipō, to leave someone behind, to desert. It is a heavy word and the New Testament uses it ten times. It is Jesus’ cry on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34). It is Paul at the end: “Demas deserted me, having loved this present age”, and “at my first defence no one stood by me, but all deserted me; may it not be counted against them” (2 Timothy 4:10, 16). And Hebrews uses it once more, of God: “He Himself has said, I will never leave you, nor will I ever forsake you” (13:5), which is His word to Israel and to Joshua, “the LORD your God goes with you; He will not let you go and will not forsake you” (Deuteronomy 31:6; Joshua 1:5, where the Greek translation has the same verb). So the warning is not about missing a meeting. It is about walking out on the others, as Demas walked out on Paul, when God has sworn never to walk out on you.

Gathering together. The noun is episynagōgē, and it is used only twice in the New Testament: here, and in 2 Thessalonians 2:1, “concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus the Anointed and our gathering together to Him”. Its verb, episynagō, is used of crowds and of eagles, and three times it is His: at His coming “He will send His messengers with a great trumpet, and they will gather together His chosen from the four winds” (Matthew 24:31; Mark 13:27), and over the city, “how often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing” (Matthew 23:37; Luke 13:34). Paul tells it from the other side: “the Lord Himself will come down from the sky … and the dead in the Anointed will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them … and so we will always be with the Lord. So encourage one another with these words” (1 Thessalonians 4:16–18). John says what the cross was for: Jesus would die “not for the nation only, but to gather into one the scattered children of God” (John 11:52). And the psalm has God call it: “gather to me my faithful ones, who cut my covenant over sacrifice” (Psalm 50:5). So the word Hebrews chose for believers meeting now is the word for the great gathering when He comes. This note reads that as intended: the meeting now is a small form of the gathering then, which is why the verse ends on “the Day”. How close this is: the shared word is certain and rare; that the writer meant the link is the reading.

Encouraging. The verb is parakaleō, to call someone alongside: to urge, to comfort, to strengthen. It is the verb behind Paraklētos, the name Jesus gives the Spirit (John 14:16, 26). Paul’s two sentences on His coming each end with it: “encourage one another with these words” (1 Thessalonians 4:18); “encourage one another and build each other up, just as you are doing” (5:11). Hebrews had already said it with a clock on it: “encourage one another every day, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you is hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (3:13).

The paragraph it sits in. Hebrews 10:19–25 is one sentence, and it is built on what He has done before it says a word about what we do. “Since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way He opened for us through the curtain, that is, His flesh, and a great priest over the house of God” (10:19–21), then three “let us”: “let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of trust” (10:22); “let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful” (10:23); “let us consider one another, to stir each other up to love and good works” (10:24); and then the verse, not abandoning the gathering. So the gathering is not a work that earns access. The access is already settled by His blood; the gathering is what people who have it do toward each other. “Stir up” is paroxysmos, used one other time, for the sharp quarrel between Paul and Barnabas (Acts 15:39): the heat people spend arguing, Hebrews says, spend provoking each other to love.

Why some were leaving. The chapter says. These readers had been made a public spectacle with insults and pressure, had stood by others who were treated so, had sympathised with prisoners, and had accepted the seizure of their property with joy (10:32–34). Meeting openly cost something, and some had made a habit of staying away. The writer’s answer is the coming: “for yet a very little while, the One who is coming will come and will not delay; but my righteous one will live by trust, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him. But we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who trust to the saving of the soul” (10:37–39). That is the Greek translation of Habakkuk 2:3–4, with “a very little while”, mikron hoson hoson, from Isaiah 26:20.

“As you see the Day drawing near.” The verb is engizō, to come near, the word of “the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matthew 4:17). Hebrews does not say which day these readers could already see coming. Some read it as His return, which 10:37 names; others as the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70, which a Hebrew audience was close to. The text does not decide, and the instruction holds either way: the nearer it gets, the more they need each other. This book says the same thing with the same root at its opening and its close: “the time is near”, ho kairos engys (1:3; 22:10).

In this book. Revelation is written to gathered people from its first verse. “Happy is the one who reads this out loud, and happy are those who hear” (1:3): one reader and many hearers, which is an assembly. It is sent “to the seven assemblies” (1:11), every letter ends “listen to what the Spirit is saying to the assemblies”, and the last use of the word is Jesus’ own: “I, Jesus, sent my messenger to testify to you about these things for the assemblies” (22:16). The book’s word for them is ekklēsia, twenty times. It keeps the gathering words for the other side. Synagōgē is used twice, both of “the gathering that belongs to the accuser” (2:9; 3:9); and the verb synagō five times, every one a gathering against God: the kings of the whole world gathered for the war of the great day (16:14, 16:16; 19:19), Gog and Magog gathered for war (20:8), and the birds gathered for God’s great supper (19:17). The nations are gathered by spirits that work signs (16:14); God’s people are gathered by Him, and the book shows them already together: “a crowd so large that nobody could count it … standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb” (7:9), and at the end, “Look — God’s tent is with people, and he will live with them. They will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them” (21:3). Jesus put it in one sentence: “where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the middle of them” (Matthew 18:20); and this book’s first picture of Him is exactly that, walking in the middle of the seven lampstands, which are the seven assemblies (1:13, 1:20).

What the verse does not say. It does not name a building, a day of the week, a form of service or how often. The first believers met daily, in the temple courts and in houses (Acts 2:42, 46), and James calls a believers’ meeting a synagōgē (James 2:2). It does not make meeting a condition of being saved: 10:19–23 has the access settled by His blood before the gathering is mentioned, and 13:5 has God refusing ever to abandon His own. What it does say is plain: do not desert each other, keep calling each other alongside, and do it more, not less, as the Day comes closer.