Hank's Bible Study Resources

The lion does not chase the flock.

He does not roar into the middle of the herd and try to take down a strong ram in the open. That is not how lions hunt. He moves along the edges. He watches. He waits for the one that wanders. A young ewe lagging behind. An old ram who cannot keep up. A lamb that strayed from the milling, bleating mass. He picks his target carefully. He moves when the target is alone.

Peter knew this image. He had been the wandering one.

He had walked on the water and then sank. He had sworn he would die with the Lord and then denied Him three times before the rooster crowed. He had been the one Jesus took aside on the beach after the resurrection, the one to whom Jesus put the same question three times, the one who walked away from that breakfast a different man. Peter knew, in his own bones, what it cost to wander. He had been picked off once. He had felt the teeth.

So when he sat down to write his first letter, the warning he gave the church carried the weight of his own story. “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. Resist him, steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same sufferings are experienced by your brotherhood in the world” (1 Peter 5:8-9 NKJV).

Read that again. Slowly.

The devil is not described here as a soldier. He is not described as a king. He is not even described primarily as a deceiver, though Scripture calls him that too. Peter says he is a lion. Roaming. Watching. Seeking whom he may devour. The Greek for “devour” is καταπίνω (katapino), to swallow down, to gulp, to consume completely. The lion is not interested in wounding you. He is interested in eating you.

And he is selective. He chooses. He picks. Whom he may devour. He is looking for the one who has wandered, the one who is alone, the one who has drifted from the brotherhood. He does not move on the line. He moves on the stray.

Peter names the devil with a second word. ἀντίδικος (antidikos, G476), “adversary.” But the Greek is not just any opposer. It is legal language. Anti (against) and dike (justice or lawsuit). The antidikos is the opponent in a courtroom. The prosecutor. The one who stands across from you with a list of your sins and waits for the judge to rule.

The devil is not just a hungry predator. He is a prosecutor with an appetite. He will take you to court if he can, and he will eat you if he must, and he is watching for any sign that you have walked away from the people God gave you.

Then Peter gives the command. γρηγορεῖτε (gregoreite, G1127). Be vigilant. Stay awake. The same verb Jesus used in Gethsemane when He asked Peter and James and John to watch with Him while He prayed. The same word. Watch. Stay alert. Keep your eyes open.

Peter remembered that night in the garden. He had failed to watch. He had fallen asleep when the Lord asked him to stay awake. And now, decades later, an old man writing to scattered churches, he uses the same Greek verb Jesus used over him and presses it onto the whole church.

Watch. All of you. Together. The lion is hunting, and he is hunting the one who has wandered.

This is where the whole series lands.

We started in Ephesians 6 with the armor, and we noticed what was missing. There was no rear-facing weapon. The kit was built to face forward, and the soldier’s blind side was exposed. Then we noticed the plural. Every command in the armor passage was given to a group, not a man. Stete. Y’all stand. The Greek had been telling us all along that the kit was communal.

Then we walked through the back-to-back battles of Scripture. Joab and Abishai outside Rabbah, fighting two armies in two directions. Jonathan and his armor-bearer climbing the cliff together, the named one and the unnamed one. Moses on the hill with Aaron and Hur holding up his hands, the warrior in the valley and the intercessor with the steady hands. Then Jesus, sending the twelve out two by two, and the seventy, two by two, establishing the pattern the early church would follow for the rest of its life.

And now we land here. The lion. The wanderer. The warning Peter wrote with his own scarred memory under it.

The pattern is not optional. The pattern is the design.

The lone Christian is the exposed Christian. Not because faith is insufficient. Not because the Lord cannot reach the wanderer. He can, and He often does, and Peter is proof of it. But the wanderer is the one the lion goes for. The wanderer is the one whose back is the blind side. The wanderer is the one who has stepped out of the line and forgotten that the kit was made for a line.

So put down your romanticism about solo faith. Put down the lie that you are stronger when you do this alone. Put down the American idea that the mature Christian is the self-sufficient Christian, that needing your brothers and sisters is a sign of weakness instead of a sign of design. The wisdom of Solomon already answered all of that, three thousand years before any of us were born.

“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up his companion. But woe to him who is alone when he falls, for he has no one to help him up. Again, if two lie down together, they will keep warm; but how can one be warm alone? Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him. And a threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 NKJV).

The Hebrew word for “companion” is chaver (חָבֵר, H2270). Friend. Associate. The one bound to you. The same root as the modern Hebrew word for friend, and it carries the weight of a tied-together life. Two chaverim are not just two people who like each other. They are two people who have been bound, on purpose, into a single fight.

And then Solomon ends with the image that holds it all. Chut hameshulash (חוּט הַמְשֻׁלָּשׁ, H2339 and H8027). The threefold cord. Two strands are stronger than one. But three strands woven together are not quickly broken.

You. The brother on your right. The Lord who binds you both together.

A threefold cord. Not quickly broken.

So here is the work. Three concrete moves you can make this week.

1. Name the person who has your back, and tell them you see them. Pick up the phone. Send the text. Drive to the house. Look them in the eye and tell them, in your own words, what their walking-with you has cost them and what it has meant to you. Most of us assume the people who cover us know what they are to us. They do not. Tell them.

2. If you cannot name a person, ask the Lord to bring one, and then start showing up where brothers and sisters gather. The Lord does not bring partners to the Christian who never leaves the house. He brings partners to the Christian who is around other Christians. Get in a small group. Get in a discipleship class. Get in a midweek prayer meeting. The Lord will give you a partner. But you have to be in the line.

3. Then turn around. Look at who is fighting alone in your sight line. The friend who has been quiet too long. The brother who used to be at church and is not anymore. The sister carrying something heavy by herself. The neighbor whose marriage you know is in trouble. Cover them. Walk up to them this week and say, in some version of your own words, here I am with you, according to your heart. Be the partner you wish someone had been for you in your own hardest season.

The lion is hunting. The line is forming. The Lord is binding His people together into cords not quickly broken.

You do not get to do this alone. You were never supposed to. The whole shape of the Bible, from the back-to-back battle outside Rabbah to the two-by-two pattern of the seventy, is the Lord telling His people what they keep forgetting.

The armor stands. But the soldier stands with someone.