Hebrews 12.8
Meat
November 2nd 2014
Okay. Welcome.
Let’s pray, sing the word of God set to music, sit in silent reflection and then when we come back pick our verse by verse study up at John 13:18.
PRAYER
MUSIC
SILENCE
Alrightee then, last week, we covered the writers suggesting that his readers and then us look to Christ, amidst their trials and tests of faith, who, as the author and finisher of faith, showed us as the first place finisher (isn’t that an interesting phrase, the FIRST place FINISHER – that’s what the author is saying when he uses author and finisher here) . . . and what He looked like I His race of “patient faith.”
Now, the first verse for today could apply to verses 2-3 (which Ill explain) or it could lead us into the next section of the chapter (which we will read in a second.)
You see in verse 2-3 from last week, as a means to encourage his readers to continue on patiently in their race the author said:
Hebrews 12:2 Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.
3 For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds.
And then he says (in verse 4):
4 Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.
In other words, if you are alive to read this exhortation to continue in patient faith you have not resisted (enemies, world powers, principalities in high places) unto blood, and we might add that he means, “like Christ did, who we just talked about.”
I think this is a valid way to understand verse four.
But my Bible places a paragraph break at verse four, intimating that it is ties to our verses for today. Maybe its both! You decide.
Anyway, this is how we would read four and the rest of our verses for today.
Hebrews 12:4 Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.
5 “And” (that “and” makes us wonder if verse four is referring to what we are about to read and not verses 2-3 – “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:
6 For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.
7 If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?
8 But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons.
Okay back to verse 4.
The writer, having petitioned his readers to consider Christ is now moving on to another method that will enable them to endure – remember that chastening from the Lord is purposeful. So I would suggest that he both continues to speak of Christ and begins to enter this second exhortative suggestion by saying:
4 Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.
“You have not yet been called, in your struggles for Christ to the highest kind of suffering – physical torture and even death.”
So as great as your trials have been your faith could be put to even greater tests.
Shedding your blood.
I watched a Christian muslim get beheaded online a few months ago.
Standing over him was a man in all black holding a sword who was speaking a stream of religious imprecations in Arabic as this Christian kneeled in the dirt at his side.
Then the beheading began.
To my amazement the Christian did not make a sound. Not a sound. I could hear the wind blowing and the noise of the attack but not a word escaped his lips.
I was moved to total tears as I watched this brother of ours resist unto blood – and like the lamb who went before Him in our King, he too was silent.
This is what the writer is saying, and he undoubtedly is still referring to athletic competitions as he has since verse one.
In this case battling in competition to win, to endure, to overcome the opponent.
Now, if we step back and look at the context of this writing and what the writer is attempting to do, we know that he is trying to encourage and bolster up the hearts of the people who were attempting to abandon walking by faith in Christ and to return to following after the Law.
Their faith was being tried, right?
Earlier in our study we defined faith as trusting in the promises of God, in His will and ways over our own.
This is the contextual setting for these readers.
Then, the writer tells them to consider Christ, the first place finisher of the race set before Him.
When was Christ’s greatest temptation to step away from His race? That’s right, in the Garden of Gethsemane, or oil press.
Before these Jewish converts were placed under this enormous pressure by the Jews surrounding them, before they were about ready to burst due to the stress and difficulty, Christ faced a similar situation where He too, wondered if there was another way.
And there in the garden of Gethsemane, He asked the Father if there was some other way, the same way these Jewish converts were considering adopting “another way.”
But Jesus, the author and finisher of faith said, Not my will but thine be done, and went forward to the race set before Him.
And under the pressure of temptation to abandon everything, Luke says that he “sweat as it were, great drops of blood.”
Is it possible that the writer is telling them that they have not gotten to this point yet, as Christ once did? Maybe so.
We also see that when Christ was faced with the Garden temptation to abandon His race that God sent and angel to support Him in that time of trial.
The parallel being that Jesus sent his Apostles (messengers, which in the Greek is angelous – same as angel) to instruct and sustain them.
Additionally, these Jewish converts seemed, at least at this point in time, to be struggling with spiritual temptation – to abandon faith – which is an internal upheaval and distress – as was Christ’s in the garden of Gethsemane internal, causing the sweat as it were great drops of blood.
So again, may be the writer is making an allusion to this here.
Finally, remember the aim of Satan when tempting and trying the Lord prior to going to His passion – it had to be for Him to quit, in essence, to apostatize from the race set before Him, which is the EXACT same temptation these Hebrew converts were being tested and tried with as well!
“give up! Abandon! Turn! Give the palm of surrender!”
See how it all comes together? It gives us more insight to why the writer petitions his reader to consider Christ who had been where they are, and overcame.
At this point, having established that suffering was certainly present and allowed by God in the life of both them and His Only begotten Son, he introduces yet another angel that they have to consider – what God is doing and why in allowing such suffering in the lives of those He loves. So he says (verse 5-6):
5 “And . . .” ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children, (which says) “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.”
The writer cites Proverbs 3:11-12, which is the King James says:
Proverbs 3:11-12 “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.”
So the quote is fairly close as most quotes from the Old to the New are rarely verbatim.
Apparently, the writer is attempting to illustrate a certain principle all people who believe in God wonder about –
“Why is He allowing me to suffer?”
I mean, it’s pretty easy to believe and trust in God when we are comfy and blessed and without an enemy or care, right? When we are the apple of His eye and He is rewarding us, “easy peasy Taiwaneasy.”
But what about when we are being disciplined, and corrected, and challenged, and tested, and when we do not get our way, or when everything seems to be against us and is falling apart.
The Hebrew word for chastised of the Lord means to be disciplined of Him.
In the Greek the word is Pah hedee and it means to be tutored, as in educated, trained which often means by implication “disciplinary correction.”
And therefore, in our estimation, discomfort and even suffering – but for a purpose.
But anyone who has entered into a living relationship with the true and living God knows – at some point in time or another – that he allows us, that He wants us to be uncomfortable as he trains us.
Here the writer is trying to show that their afflictions were designed (or better put, “allowed to happen”) (on the part of God) to produce something good from them in the end that would be beneficial to their existences . . . and so they ought to bear them with patience.
In fact, the writer points out, such disciplines are proof that God is our father!
The way the verse is written the writer seems to be asking, “Have you forgotten this fact? That they had once known that as Children of God He, as their father, has always had this purview in mind relative to His children, His sons and daughters?
So don’t “despise the chastening of the Lord.”
Now this is an interesting line.
When I read it in the King James I think it is saying, don’t get angry at the chastening of the Lord.” That’s not the best way to understand it.
The word translated “despise” as in “don’t despise the chastening of the Lord,” is NOT used anywhere else in the New Testament.
It’s “oli–goree-ous.”
“Oligos” means something “puny or small” and “Ora” means “care.”
Literally, “Do not regard it as a small matter, or as a trivial thing”—oligwrei
What is interesting is that in proverbs, where the passage is taken from, the Hebrew word does NOT mean with little care, but means, do not get angry.
Bottom-line – the Old Testament meaning of the verse and the New Testament meaning are different.
What can we attribute this to?
Improper definitions of word used?
Improper translation from old to new?
A change in the way believers (because this was written to believers) would react to chastening in the New Testament verses the way people in the Old would respond to it?
I don’t know.
But I am inclined to believe that this last reason . . . is the reason.
See, one of the effects of the presence of the Law is anger.
Romans 4:15 says “the law worketh wrath.”
Why so?
We do all we can, we labor to be perfect, we strive to please God and we err in one point and we might find ourselves at odds with Him – even if we just made a mistake.
That would help create anger in some people, wouldn’t it?
It’s like children in a family with parents with extremely high expectations but rarely are they ever pleased.
So the child tries and tries and tries to do their best to meet those high expectations, but accidently fail or let up in just one area and are disciplined for it, the result may be wrath or anger.
So when Solomon wrote:
“My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him”
He meant, don’t get angry when God tutors you.
But this is not how the writer of Hebrews used the passage. Because he used a word that that means “don’t treat His tutoring or discipleship with “little care.”
This is fascinating and full of all manner of potential implications. But instead of taking about those why do we suppose the reaction to God’s chastisement could be one of “little care” under the dispensation of grace rather than anger, which was the warning for those under the law?
Could it be that believers under grace might have the tendency to not take his discipline too seriously due to the fact that He loves us unconditionally and we have all been saved by His unmerited gift?
To me this seems like the natural reaction among some believers.
We have been saved, and God steps in to discipline and teach us but we misinterpret the gift of salvation with His desire to discipleship us and the result might be we take his painful tutoring lightly? As if it is not really important.
It’s really an interesting situation because if we are saved by grace and that is it – nothing else matters and nothing else is expected – then why would any of us give any attention to being painfully disciple and trained by Him?
What’s the point?
But if (or since) God wants more than to just redeem us, but desires all who are His to bear fruit, He does disciple, He does purge and prune and chastise – and it’s not for His own good but – listen – for ours.
And if this is the case, then we have to admit that God has reasons for His children to truly grow in the faith, and to produce fruits of great love (in and through Him who is the vine) and we need to shift from any rhetoric that basks in saving grace while excluding chastisement as a means to improve us in our love.
I think it is really, super (“verily, verily”) important that we pause to examine several factors relative to what we experience in this life.
As a man of faith I am lead to believe that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”
And we do not fall to the temptation to take any lesson or trial or experience or loss we are forced to face lightly, or with little care.
These things are coming from GOD for heaven’s sake. We have to assume that whatever the chastisement is it carries some really important weight relative to our person and soul and eternal futures – if we let it.
This has been an especially important lesson for me to reflect upon. I have a tendency to be cavalier about trials. I tend to do this as a defense against the fact that I may be wrong or on the wrong track. And so I have been more often than not guilty of treating God’s chastisements with little care.
Over the past year I have watched a few people pass from this life to the next.
In every case, some taken abruptly, some over decades, some over the course of several weeks, I’ve forgotten, at times, what God might be doing in and through these people as they struggle to reach the other side.
Fifteen years ago I wrote a play called, “Jack Kevorkian, please.” It dealt with this very issue and so the ethics behind life and suffering were not new to my brain.
In one situation I was at a hospital where a sister was in utter agony. She was thrashing about, and beating the air with her fists.
I said at the time to Cassidy, who was with me, “I think something needs to be done here. I think I should just put a pillow over her face and put an end to this. It’s horrible! It’s ungodly!”
Of course I didn’t, but these were my thoughts at the time and in the face of her battle.
I came back to the hospital that night. Much to my surprise our sister was sitting up in bed with a tray of food on her lap, laughing, smiling, and completely relaxed.
She happened to have had some grandchildren with her and was expressing her love to them as I walked in.
“Don’t treat the education of our God with little care.”
It’s easy to do – in our day of rational humanism. But He is God, He is in control. And all things can and will be used by him for our benefit . . . if we let them.
Additionally, and just to round out our discussion on this concept, the word here that is rendered “chastening” in the King James (some translations use “training” and others “discipline” others “correction”) comes from the Greek word “paideia”
And from what I can tell this word does not ever mean PUNISHMENT though the corrections can seem punishing.
But there are other words in the Greek for real punishment (like Kolasis) but paideia is not one of them. Instead it is tied to teaching (even coaching) and refers to the nature of true discipline that comes by love (not punishment).
The verb relates to the training up of a child – and when it is speaking of God doing the correcting it is NEVER to hurt – it is always to help (even though it might hurt).
Get the difference.
When a good parent is teaching and training a child they employ all the instruction, counsel, discipline, and correction that is necessary to bring the child up properly.
When a good coach is attempting to train an athlete properly they will appeal to all sorts of methods and approaches to remove the bad and replace it with the good. Same premise.
We often see this word used in scripture by being related to correcting faults.
But the aim is never to punishment but to correct and fix and rehabilitate. God is the great fixer, the great rehabilitator.
And while under-going the correction is awkward, and uncomfortable, and painstaking – the better good – our good – is at its root.
A simple illustration – excuse the personal relation but . . .
When I swam in college (for that school located down in happy valley) the coaching staff, after some video work, discovered that I was inhibiting my speed by twisting my body (really curving my spine) when I would breath.
In other words every time I took a breath my body would go into the shape of a parenthesis, and the drag was slowing me down.
It was determined that the way to correct this and streamline my body out in the water was to force me to breathe on the other side – something in all my years of swimming I had never done.
Honestly this was right up there with someone who has always thrown right having to then learn to throw left – in college athletics no less.
For me it was like learning to swim all over again whenever I took a breath. Over time it felt punishing – especially when it caused me to go slower rather than faster (at first) and I found myself at the back of the heap after every interval instead of maintaining some competitiveness.
Humiliation set in. Then discouragement. Then questioning the abilities of the coaching staff. Naturally throughout all of this there was the nagging temptation that said, “quit – give up.” And that was exacerbated by the task masters standing over my every lap making sure I didn’t cheat.
In the end the practice paid off as my speed and place on the team improved, but along the way the instruction was tough to bear, with the discipline demanded seeming to be punitive in some of the more difficult moments, and a waste of time in others.
Today, when I look back, I realize that I while I was a good swimmer and could compete at the college level . . . I certainly wasn’t world class and the change of my breathing didn’t do much to really alter the course of my swimming career or the team standings.
But what it did do, in my character, was teach me to overcome challenge and to face change after years of establishing a practice that was not good. IT taught me endurance, the ability to work through difficulty, and to resist giving up when everything seems futile.
In other words the torture didn’t really matter that much to swimming – but it did to other areas of my life.
I would guess that when God is ferretting out from a person, let’s say their natural or learned tendency to gossip, it may seem like a minor (but painful) adjustment to their lives but in the end, it is as purposeful as removing from a vegetable garden.
In my opinion this is the meaning or idea that the writer is bringing to the table in mentioning this.
God is not afflicting us for the fun of it. He sees that something is off, something is slowing us down, or making us weak, SOMETHING is inhibiting us from bearing fruit of love, so He will allow affliction if such things can be fixed and improved upon by or through it.
Speaking of his relationship with David, God said in 2nd Samuel 7:14-15:
“I will be his father, and he shall be my son. If he commit iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men, and with the stripes of the children of men, but,” He adds, “but my mercy shall not depart away from him.”
In David’s case we can see that God used men to chastise him. All over the place. But God’s mercy, as He said, “never departed from him.”
In Psalm 89:30-33, the Lord says:
30 “If his children forsake my law, and walk not in my judgments;
31 If they break my statutes, and keep not my commandments;
32 Then will I visit their transgression with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes.
33 Nevertheless my loving-kindness will I not utterly take from him, nor suffer my faithfulness to fail.”
We have the same promise. True instruction, but His faithfulness.
So don’t despise it or faint under it, we are told, discipline has its purposes – especially when it is administered by God.
Then the writer adds:
“For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.”
This is also a quote from Proverbs 3.
Doesn’t the Lord love all. Of course. And I would suggest He chastens all.
But by His foreknowledge God has His children, His Sons and Daughters, and I would suggest we can apply this to them specifically.
My friend and I, when I was LDS, used to wonder about why God allows men like Mick Jagger to be blessed with all the things of the world, and to never really seem to suffer punishment from God in spite of all his worldly antics and petitions for sin and sex and the like.
According to this God, failing to chastise Jagger, doesn’t love him.
It’s really an interesting premise because we speak of love – God is love. And we speak of this love being unconditionally applied.
This being said, we have to know that God loves Jagger. But Jagger is not a son. The parallel here that the writer makes is that any loving parent will discipline his child, and that God disciplines His.
Does He love those who are not His? Certainly. And He is working all means and ways to counter their will where in the end He can reconcile them to Him in some form or another.
But there is a vast difference between the children of this world and the sons and daughters of God. As big a difference as dark and light.
And as a means to rid his children of the dark, he purges and disciplines those He loves AS CHILDREN.
John the Beloved says something interesting in 1st John 3:1. Listen to it carefully:
“Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not.”
In the case of God literally being our father with us becoming Sons, there is a love disposed that is NOT poured out on others.
Paradoxically, in this world, that love is often experienced as discipline and chastisement, which is truly God’s favor being heaped on an individual but is not the favor most in the world would prefer.
Quite frankly, even in the church we do not always see the chastisement of the Lord on a person as a good thing – which is unfortunate.
But what is the purpose? To prepare a person for eternity as a Child of God, a child who will dwell in the light.
I mean the parallels are abundant in our world – purified metals, tempered steel, etc. all being chastised as a means to make them stronger, ready for action, to do what they were created to do.
The imagery is continued by the writer in verse 7:
7 If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?
The King James presents this in an awkward manner in my opinion because it makes it sound as if the way we endure dictates how God is dealing with us.
Not the case.
The meaning is “The suffering that you are going through and enduring are for your discipline and are happening because God is dealing with you as His Son.”
Then he says:
8 But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons.
So the illustration the writer is using is pretty clear. Let’s wrap today up by sort of fleshing them out and seeing how they apply and relate to us.
Historically speaking, a father is the disciplinarian in the home. Over the world, the disciplinarian is God.
A father in the neighborhood, while concerned with the behavior and direction of the neighborhood boys may try and help in directing them but has to at some point let them go.
But with His own son he will devote the time and attention – patiently but relentlessly – to help the child grow.
At the opposite end, a bastard child, historically speaking, is a child who is essentially fatherless, and is therefore left without support, or direction – is left to their own devices.
So, the writer seems to say, rejoice that you have a father (GOD) who cares so much for you present and eternal well being that He is right on hand, taking you and your ways to task, and bringing you through trials as a means to make you stronger, and more effective at producing fruit.
So with every affliction we face, as believers, we ought to view it properly – GOD HIMSELF is engaged with us as our Father.
He is watchful and cognizant and has us under discipline. This ought to be a sign that evidences His utter love and devotion to our person and not as something we are experiencing because He is angry with us, or disappointed, or punishing – it’s because He actually cares and has our best interests at heart.
