Children Receive Discipline
CHILDREN RECEIVE DISCIPLINE
HEBREWS 12:4-10
Like a father disciplining his children so they might grow up strong and mature, so God uses our sufferings to mold us.
It is one of the facts of life that we do not like suffering. Nobody does. But it is also one of the facts of the Christian life that suffering has been transformed by the sufferings of Christ. When we look at the cross, we see that suffering can be meaningful and that it can accomplish great good. No one who has experienced in their own soul the saving benefits of the sufferings of Christ can ever look on suffering in the same way again. This is not to say that we simply speak the words “the cross” and all our problems concerning suffering vanish. They do not. But the cross means that they must be viewed in a new light. They cannot be seen now simply as misfortunes that a God who does not greatly care allows to afflict us. The cross shows us that God cares passionately for us and our best good. And since God is all-powerful, he must see meaning in the sufferings that come to us. Otherwise he would not allow them to come. In a number of places in the New Testament various aspects of the problem of suffering are brought out.
Here the thought that is emphasized is that the sufferings of Christians are evidence of their status in the heavenly family. They mark Christians out as children, as those for whom God cares and cares enough to discipline. Many today thoughtlessly maintain that suffering is evidence that there is no God, or that if there is one, then he is a God who does not care about his people. The writer draws exactly the opposite conclusion. After pointing out that his readers should not exaggerate the problem, for they had not yet suffered “to the point of shedding your blood” (as Christ did), he goes on to the important point that children are disciplined.
A father may not worry overmuch about people with whom he has no close connection, but he is very concerned indeed for the children he loves. The very fact that God allows Christians to undergo trials is evidence that he is acting as a father and that he loves them. He treats them as children and disciplines them for their profit (12:10). Their sufferings are evidence, not that he does not care for them, but that he does, not that he regards them as outsiders, but that he sees them as sons.