4 In your struggle against sin, you have not yet
resisted to the point of shedding your blood. 5 And have you completely
forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses
his son? It says,
“My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline,
and do not
lose heart when he rebukes you,
6 because the Lord disciplines the one he loves,
and he
chastens everyone he accepts as his son.”[a]
7 Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as
his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? 8 If you
are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline—then you are not
legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. 9 Moreover, we have all had
human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more
should we submit to the Father of spirits and live! 10 They disciplined us for
a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, in
order that we may share in his holiness. 11 No discipline seems pleasant at the
time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness
and peace for those who have been trained by it.
Dig Deeper
I was absolutely stunned. I was in my fourth year of college and had
begun to truly take my studies seriously.
I was giving every class my best effort and really had finally gained a
good perspective and my need to work hard in my classes and how that was going
to relate to my success in life after college.
In response to that, I was getting excellent grades, something that I
could not always say during my first two years of college, or as I have come to
know them, “the lazy years.” I had just
completed a paper that I had worked quite hard on and thought it was a pretty
good effort. But when my paper came back
from the professor it was marked with a “B”.
I could not believe it.
Especially when I began to see the grades that my friends around me got. Several friends, whose papers I had read,
received “A’s” for doing much less work than I had done. And to be quite frank, at the time I didn’t
think their papers were as good as mine and neither did they. So I simply could not understand why I had
been given the grade that I had.
My initial reaction was to feel that obviously my
professor did not like me. She had
always seemed to grade me a little lower than my peers and I had shaken it off
but this felt too far. I felt that it
had become apparent now and out in the light that she just preferred others in
the class over me and I became convinced that she actually did not want me to
succeed. So, being the calm and
collected young fellow that I was at the time, I balled the paper up and whilst
staring at her the entire time, I walked over, demonstratively threw the paper
in the trash, and stormed out of the class.
Later that night the professor called me to apologize,
but not for the reason that I thought (despite the fact that I should have been
the one apologizing). She was not
apologizing for having a grudge against me and grading me down. She apologized for not explaining herself
sooner. She went on to tell me that she
had indeed been grading my papers at a different standard from my peers but
that it was because she saw great potential in me. She wanted to help make me a better writer
and researcher by grading my work at a graduate level rather than as the
under-graduate student that I was. Now,
the fairness of that decision is not for me to discuss here, but the point is
that what I thought was her lack of interest or affection towards me was
actually the opposite. She was trying to
train me and make me stronger and better.
Certainly with all that the community of Christians in
Rome (if our theory that Hebrews was written to the church in Rome is correct),
we could easily understand if they were tempted to grow weary and start to
think that perhaps God didn’t care about or love them. Why else would he allow them to be constantly
thrown into prisons, have their property confiscated, lose their positions in
society, be ostracized, and see so many of their number walk away? Surely they had been taught that the world
had persecuted Jesus and it would do the same to his people, but the strength
of that conviction had grown fuzzy over the years. The realities and harshness of their life in
Christ had begun to wear them down.
This is one of the reasons that they needed to keep
their eyes fixed on Jesus. Jesus was, of
course, the perfect Son of God but he also knows what it’s like. He can serve as an example for those that are
going through trials because he has been there.
He faced up to the worst persecution that Satan and the world can offer
and he remained faithful to the will of God.
He had suffered trials and persecution at the hands of sinful people
just as they had. They could draw strength
and encouragement from the fact that he had endured faithfully and the outcome
was positive. Yes, Jesus suffered but
there was no question that he was God’s beloved son. Not only could they identify with Jesus’
suffering, they could also take heart in the fact that, although severe, there
struggles were not on the level of what Jesus endured. They had yet to shed their own blood and die,
although the author doesn’t remove the possibility that that might take place
one day.
In verses 5-6 the author quotes from Proverbs 3 and
offers a mild rebuke for them in the process.
Had they forgotten the comforting and encouraging rebuke from the
Proverbs? Had they failed to apply that
principle to their lives when they most needed it? The Lord disciplines those he loves and
considers as his children. That was true
of Jesus, whom we have already been told in 5:8, learned the fullness of being
obedient to God’s will only by enduring through suffering (not in the sense of
learning something that he did not know but in the sense of experiencing
something that can only be fully experienced through a specific element—thus,
Jesus could only discover complete obedience as a human to doing God’s will by
doing so through suffering). Their
suffering was not a sign of God’s displeasure or lack of concern. Rather they should understand that God was
allowing them to be trained to bring them to full maturity (James 1:2-3). God was treating them as any loving father
would.
If you were to go a public place and see a child running
completely amok and the adult that was accompanying them doing nothing about
it, you might start to wonder if the parent was an abysmally poor parent, or
perhaps he was not the child’s father at all.
This is why Proverbs 13:24 urges us to remember that the one who
neglects discipline does not truly love their child in the full sense of the
word. Fathers who care about their
children, their own lives, and society at large will discipline and train their
children. They will allow difficult circumstances
and obstacles to come into the life of their child so that they can learn to
overcome those things.
The proper response to hardship is not to see it as
punishment or abandonment, but to see at as the loving actions of a loving
Father. The Lord does not directly
discipline and train those that are not his children. Knowing that God has a purpose in the trials
that we go through are what change sheer grief into pure joy in the same way
that knowing that an incredibly challenging workout is making us stronger and
more fit changes the experience from a torturous one to something that we can
enjoy in a strange sort of way. It is
the knowledge of the purpose of the pain that changes everything.
Even human fathers that everyone respects know that they
must bring or allow hardship into their children’s lives. God is the ultimate Father and he certainly
knows that. The reality is that children
who never suffer loss, hardship, or trial become incredibly lazy, spoiled, and
immature. As God’s children we might be
tempted to desire that nothing but blessing and goodness come into our lives
(and some have made a great deal of money and fame for themselves claiming that
this is what God wants for us too), but we have to realize just how truly
counter-productive and dangerous spiritually that would actually be. If we never faced trial how would we
grow? Growth is born through adversity. Our goal as Christians is not to “make it to
heaven” and avoid the most amount of struggle that we possibly can in the
process. Our goal as a Christian is to
become like Christ. That takes growth,
training, and discipline and those things can only come through trial,
struggle, and persecution.
It is through the fire that we will learn Christ-like
obedience. That is why Hebrews asserts
that God trains us for our own good.
It’s not because he is inattentive.
It’s quite the opposite, in fact.
God trains us in “order that we may share in his holiness.” When we go through hardships and struggles,
perhaps rather than asking “why, God,” we should ask what God is trying to
teach us. God knows what we need to go
through and learn and when the storms come (the storms that we create for
ourselves through sin and disobedience are another matter entirely) we can be
comforted with the knowledge that God knows that the refinement that we will
receive from that trial is better for us than if we went through no trial at
all.
Now that doesn’t mean that we can simply change our mindset
and suddenly everything will become rose pedals and ginger snaps. Trials are still hard, and challenging, and
painful. They will test our faith, our
resolve, and our endurance. That’s the
whole point. It is only when we are weak
and persevere that we gain strength.
These times of discipline will not be pleasant, but we can count them as
joy, as James 1 says, because we know that God is at work. The trial is not bigger than God. The pain is not bigger than the lesson. And nothing is bigger than God’s love for his
sons and daughters.
Devotional Thought
What struggles or trials are you going through in your
life right now? Have been tempted to be
angry at God for allowing them and wonder why he would do such a thing? Or have you taken some time to contemplate
what might be trying to teach you through these circumstances?
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