A Word in Season: Chastening (Hebrews 12:5–6)

The Suffering and Discouragement of God’s Children

Seasons of suffering are difficult for God's children. Some of them may seem to be very short and sharp and sudden, but they strike us and knock us flat. Others of them seem to drag on for a long season, and the sustained pressure drives us down until we feel like we have been crushed into the dust.

It may be that the people who are looking in don't see those things, that it's not a particularly public experience but intensely private, or it may be that it's evident to all that we're going through a particularly difficult time.

It may be that to some what we're going through seems like a relatively light affliction, but we may feel ourselves, because of our constitution or our private circumstances, that it is almost more than we can bear.

We can become profoundly wearied and discouraged because of this experience. We can even begin to become bitter and resentful, and perhaps to wonder whether or not God really loves us, really cares about us, and whether we are, after all, even his true children.

Hebrews 12 and the Fatherly Discipline of the Lord

In Hebrews chapter 12, the writer of that letter has some exhortations for the people of God. He reminds them, first of all, that they need to think about the Lord Christ in his sufferings, and how he, in the face of the brutalities that he faced from his enemies, his battle against sin, endured to the very end.

And that's an example for God's people to run with endurance the race that is set before us. But he then goes on, in verse 5 of that chapter, to tell these Christians that they have forgotten the exhortation which speaks to you as to sons.

There's a particular word from God for God's children. There's a reminder to them that they have not taken to heart. The writer wants the whole church there to understand that this is true of each one of them.

And when he's quoting from the book of the Proverbs, he uses that singular, my son, because this is true for each one individually in accordance with God's great wisdom. Do not despise the chastening of the Lord.

Don't become resentful and bitter and try and shake it off, nor be discouraged when you are rebuked by him. Don't let this experience drag you down or drive you down so that you become resentful in your heart or despondent in your spirit.

The Love of God Revealed in Chastening

Why? For whom the Lord loves, he chastens and scourges every son whom he receives. Now, for many of us, that's largely an alien concept in our society. The idea that love would in any way cause discomfort or distress, the idea that a painful experience could be anything other than bitterly negative, the idea that you could ever consider suffering to be a positive experience is just not something that many today are willing to consider.

For too many of us, we think that perhaps if God loved us, he would only ever shower us with favours and goodnesses in accordance with our own estimation of what is pleasant and happy making. And it's very much in keeping with what is sometimes called the prosperity gospel, that if God loves me, he's going to shower the most wonderful pleasures of this world upon me.

But the Bible tells us that whom the Lord loves, he chastens. God wants to form the image of his son in us. And because he loves us, he deals with us faithfully as a father with his son. That means that he's not going to ignore the remaining sin in us, he's not just going to dismiss the fact that we continue to disobey him, even though we are his sons.

Rather, God loves us enough to keep working in us and even to bring particular pains and sorrows to us in order that we might become yet more holy and show ourselves to be the sons of God. So let us not be discouraged when we are rebuked, but remember that whom the Lord loves, he chastens.

And let that be one of our sweetest consolations.