My son, despise not the chastening of the Lord;
Neither be weary of his correction:
For whom the Lord loveth he correcteth;
Even as a father the son in whom he delighteth.
These words from the text for the Apostles exhortation on the Lord’s discipline in Hebrews 12. He has expounded them by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost; so to that precious portion of the word we would turn.
We need not trust our own thoughts, however much we seek to be subject to Scripture, when we have the mind of the Spirit fully revealed.
After having traced the path of faith down through the pages of the Old Testament, the apostle bids us lay aside every weight, everything that would hinder progress; thus enabling us to distance sin whichever would beset our steps, while we run with patient the race before us.
Christ himself is put before the soul as faith’s Author and Perfector. God would have the heart occupied with Him who, His own path of shame and suffering over, is now “set down on the right hand of God.” To “consider Him” is the antidote for weariness and faintness.
He goes on to show that trial and difficulty must not be accounted a strange thing. All are but a part of our discipline. And thereupon hi sites the passage we have now come to in the Book of Proverbs.
The difference of wording results from his quoting from the Septuagint, the Greek version generally in use at that time.
“My son, despise nor doubt the chastening of the Lord,
Nor faint when thou are rebuked of Him.
For whom the Lord loves. He chastens
and scourges every son whom he receiveth.”
In the book of Job a similar word is found, credited to Eliphaz the Temanite, “Behold, happy is the man whom God corrects; Therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty” (Job 5:17).
It was no new truth that the Lord exercised discipline among His saints. In fact, it is because they are His own that He does chasten. This word has not necessarily the sense of “punish” though, unquestionably chastening is often directly retributive. But the primary meaning is discipline.
God is a God of order. His family must be under His discipline.
Therefore the apostle say, “If ye endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons; for what son is hi whom the Father chasteneth not. It is no evidence that the heart of God is not towards me that I am left to suffer affliction. All is but part of that discipline which an all-wise Father sees to be necessary. In fact, if I am not the subject of His disciplinary training, I am not one of His at all! “But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all (that is, all sons) are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons.”
Nor is the Lord’s discipline of the selfish or uncertain nature that ours often is, in regard to our own households.
“We have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection to the Father of spirits, and live?
For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure (or, as seem good to them); but He for our profit, that we might be partakers of His Holiness.”
Not always have earthly parents the direct good of their children in view when they discipline them. How often we may be moved more by the disturbance of our personal comfort than by the sense of the child’s need of correction!
In such a case we chasten after our own pleasure. Our God and Father never so deals with us. He has our profit ever before Him. But though this is so, we are certain to prove that “no chastening for the present seems to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless, afterward it yieldeth, the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby” (Heb. 12:7-11). Thus we have briefly outlined the Scripture teaching as to the Lord’s discipline.
May grace be given to the reader and writer neither to faint beneath the chastening as though some strange thing happened to us, nor yet to despise it, thus ignoring the Lord’s hand in it all; but rather to be exercised thereby, that it may indeed yield in us and in our ways the peaceable fruits of righteousness, and so we shall be partakers of His Holiness. Thus shall we enter into the blessedness of the following verses: