Let Us Go Forth Therefore Unto Him Without the Camp

A woman told me she is not worried about the money. She is worried about the dinner.

There is an annual thing in her industry. Everybody who matters goes. She has been going for eleven years and about a third of her work comes out of the conversations in the bar afterward, and she knows the room the way you know a place you have belonged to.

And she has made a decision about something she is not going to do any more, and she is fairly sure that inside two years she will not be on the list.

Nobody will strike her off. There is no list to be struck off. She will simply not be one of the people anybody thinks of, and that will happen quietly, and by the time she notices it will already have happened.

She said the thing that frightens her is not being poorer. It is being outside.

There is an instruction in Hebrews about being outside that is one of the strangest sentences in the New Testament, and it names what is out there.

The instruction and the reason attached to it

Here is the verse, and the one before it supplies the ground.

Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered without the gate. Let us go forth therefore unto him without the camp, bearing his reproach. (Hebrews 13:12-13, King James Version)

Let us go forth therefore unto him.

The instruction is not go out. It is go out unto him, and the difference is the whole verse. The going out is described as a movement toward a location where somebody already is.

Without the camp is a phrase about exclusion. The camp was where everything was: the people, the worship, the belonging, the safety. Outside it was where the refuse went and where the unclean were sent.

And the sentence says that is where He is, and that a person going there is not going into an absence. They are going to a place with somebody already in it.

You are being sent toward somebody rather than away from everybody. Hebrews 13:13 says let us go forth therefore unto him without the camp, and it is the Holy Spirit, John 14:16 given as another Comforter to abide with you for ever, who is named for the company in a place that looks empty.

What the next sentence does with belonging

Read what comes immediately after, because it reframes the whole question of a room.

For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come. (Hebrews 13:14)

No continuing city. The writer takes the idea of a permanent belonging place and removes it, not only for the person going outside, but for everybody, including the people still comfortably inside.

Which is a strange comfort and a real one. The room she is afraid of losing was always temporary. That industry dinner will change, the people in it will move on, and in fifteen years half of the names will have gone somewhere else.

He is not saying belonging does not matter. He is saying no room on earth is the continuing one, and therefore the loss of one is a loss of a temporary thing rather than of a permanent one.

You are not losing a permanent thing, because Scripture says nobody has one here. Hebrews 13:14 says here have we no continuing city and applies it to everybody. It is the same Spirit, Ephesians 1:14 called the earnest of our inheritance, who is named as the deposit on the one that is coming.

Peter describes exactly what it feels like

There is a verse in Peter that is remarkably specific about the social mechanics of this.

Wherein they think it strange that ye run not with them to the same excess of riot, speaking evil of you. (1 Peter 4:4)

They think it strange. That is the sensation. Not hostility. Strangeness. People cannot work out what a person is doing and it makes them slightly uncomfortable, and discomfort is what quietly removes somebody from a list.

Speaking evil of you in that context is closer to talking about somebody than to slander. It is the conversation that happens in a room after a person leaves it, which is the conversation my friend is actually afraid of.

Peter does not tell them it will not happen. He tells them what it is, which is a kindness, because a person who expects it can survive it and a person blindsided by it usually cannot.

You are being told in advance what it is going to feel like. 1 Peter 4:4 names the thinking it strange and the talking rather than promising it will not occur. It is the Spirit of God, John 15:26 who shall testify of me, who is named as the one testifying while a person is being discussed.

And if the outside has begun to press on you in a way that is bigger than a guest list, say it out loud to a person: a counselor, a pastor you trust, or a friend who has been outside something themselves. Losing a room you have belonged to for eleven years is a real grief and it should not be carried as though it were nothing.

Jesus names the cost without softening it

And He says the underlying reason, which is not about the industry at all.

If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. (John 15:19)

I have chosen you out of. The out of is not incidental; it is in the verb.

He does not present this as a misunderstanding that better conduct would fix. He presents it as the predictable result of a change in category, and He says it to people who were about to lose considerably more than a dinner.

And He says something else in Matthew that is worth having beside it, because it is honest about scale:

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. (Matthew 10:37)

That is not a verse about industry events. It is a verse that puts the cost at the highest possible level so that nobody signs up thinking it is small.

You are inside a change of category rather than a failure of diplomacy. John 15:19 says I have chosen you out of the world with the out of in the verb, and it is His Spirit, Romans 8:16 bearing witness that we are the children of God, who confirms a category that a guest list cannot revoke.