Hebrews 12:4-6

THE DIVINE DISCIPLINE OF LIFE

‘Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin. And ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of Him: for whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.’

Hebrews 12:4

We have in the passage a conception of the Divine discipline of life, and that conception may be summed up in three words which represent three aspects of the Divine discipline.

I. First, then, the Divine discipline refutes.—The passage quoted from the Book of Proverbs tells the Christian to avoid two extremes when he is under the discipline of God. On the one hand, when he is plunged into the bitter sea of pain and sorrow he is not to try and shake off the salt drops with a laugh of contempt. ‘Despise not thou the chastening of the Lord.’ Nor, on the other hand, is he, as the words of the Divine original seem to mean, to turn away, sick and loathing, from God’s terrible proof. For the word ‘rebuke’—‘faint when thou art rebuked of Him’—it is not so much rebuke or reproof as it is refutation.

II. God’s discipline is an education.—In the verses between the fifth and the eleventh, the same word, whether implying the process or the realised result, is used eight times over. There is an important difference between the word ‘teaching’ and the word ‘education.’ The word rendered ‘teaching’ in the New Testament generally means a single lesson on an isolated subject.

III. God’s discipline corrects.—‘Scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.’ There are two of these great correctives in the experience of human life, and in a few years all of us must meet one or the other—sorrow and pain. And, as a great German once wrote, without sorrow no man is ennobled.

—Archbishop Alexander.

Illustration

‘The most finely organised amongst men have the most delicately strung nerves, and they suffer most. The Chinese robber who is being slowly starved to death day by day laughs loudly through the bars of his movable prison at the people who surround him. It has been said, and sometimes said by deep thinkers, that physically speaking the two thieves upon the Cross suffered more pain than our Blessed Lord did. They forget the exquisite organism of that humanity, of that body which was prepared for its purpose. As Christ was the Man of Sorrows so He was the Man of Suffering, and as no sorrow was like His sorrow, so no sufferings were like His sufferings. The only explanation is this: not the natural life, not the physical life, but the spiritual life is the highest thing in the sight of God.’