Lessons on God the Father:
The Father’s Discipline
I read the other day
yet another story of persecution of Christians by Muslims. This report was out of Pakistan, where Fouzia
Sadiq, a divorced mother of three was beaten, was raped, and was forced to
convert to Islam by her boss—so he could force her into marriage. These sort of reports are unfortunately all
too common in other parts of the world, but what I found most disturbing was
how Fouzia related to God through an ordeal that had to be unbearably
humiliating and painful. She said, “It made me angry that God was blaming
me.” Her boss commits the crimes
against her, but her anger is directed against God the Father. But I am not criticizing her complaint. Her anger against God is really above
criticism; you could even say that her anger against God is Biblical. The Bible is full of stories of God’s people
who are made to suffer and then have some choice words for God. They know that God, if He wanted to, could
stop the suffering, could stop the injustice.
And when He does not, He attracts the anger of suffering people. The most obvious example is Job, who in his
suffering came oh-so-close to blasphemy against God—and may have even crossed
the line. The words of Fouzia even seem
to be a rough translation of the words of Jesus while He was being crucified: “Eli,
eli, lama sabachthani—my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
The problem of
suffering is tied to the kind of world we live in, and the question arises,
“Couldn’t God have made us a better place to live?” Most of us would be happy to offer God some
suggestions: “Just give us a world
without violence and war! Give us a
world without diseases. Give us a world
that is always fair. Give us a world
without pain and suffering!” Without a
doubt, even we could design a world that is more pleasant and comfortable to
live in. And surely God could do even
better than we can. But it is made clear
in the Bible that God’s purpose for creating the world was not to give us a
safe and pleasant environment where all of us are well treated. If it were, He plainly failed to achieve
it! Leave it to Yogi Berra to come up
with this gem: “If the world was perfect, it wouldn’t be.”
Rather, God created
the world to be a place of education, a place where lessons might be learned. Some call it the “vale of soul-making.” A vale is a poetic word for valley—we are
down in the lower regions—and this expression is found among the classical
poets like Shelly and Keats. Nicholas
Wolterstorff writes: “In the valley of suffering, despair and bitterness
are brewed. But there also character is
made. The valley of suffering is the
vale of soul-making.” And what
exactly is the curriculum down here in God’s schoolhouse? Some would call it morality. God set up the world to be a place where
people could learn the difference between right and wrong. I don’t have a problem with that, so long as
we understand that morality is all about relationships. This world, complete with all of its
hardships and injustices, provides the best opportunity to develop the best
relationships with other people.
Morality is about good and evil.
That’s fine, as long as we understand that what is good is what makes
for the highest quality of relationships.
Love is good, respect is good, faithfulness is good, honesty and
sincerity are good—they all enhance and strengthen relationships. And we should understand that evil is
anything that is destructive to relationships:
selfishness, greed, exploitation, dishonesty, etc.
For the world to be
the kind of place that provides this education, it needs have four
characteristics:
1. It needs to be a place where evil is
possible. To have
the ability to choose between good and evil is a supreme privilege from
God. The love given from the heart’s
choice is far superior, but granting that opens the door to the possibility of
evil. It is not good that evil exists;
but it is good that the possibility exists.
2. The world needs to be a place where humans
can act upon one another.
They not only need to be able to act in loving and beneficial ways, but
we need to have the opportunity to be the agents of evil. We need to understand that our thoughts and actions
have consequences for other people, and we need to see our individual
responsibility toward others for the choices we make. God could have created a world in which the
bullets from guns turn into cotton balls or bubbles, so that no one ever gets
hurt. He did not. He made the world a place where it is real
possibility to be a criminal, a thug, a tyrant, a sinner. But the world is also the place where it is
possible to be a hero, a model citizen, a benefactor, a saint.
3. We need to know that God will hold
ourselves and others responsible in some ultimate sense. One day, the lessons will have all been
taught, and every student will be examined to see if God’s lessons have been
learned. There will be appropriately
extreme rewards and punishments that follow.
4. The world needs to be a place where the
end of life is guaranteed, but uncertain. Because we are mortals, we only have a
limited time to learn what we need to know so as to successfully pass the
judgment of God. And the time we are
given is uncertain. Death could come
later, or it could come sooner than we expect.
That uncertainty is important because it compels us to be diligent
toward learning the lessons of life.
Tomorrow may be too late.
It is against that
background that the Bible teaches us something very important about God’s role
as our educator. God has not put us into
the middle of a world of hardship and suffering, and then walked away closing
the door behind Him, leaving us alone to figure it out for ourselves (that
would be “deism”). The Bible teaches
that God tailors the earthly experience of each one of us to provide the exact
learning experience that each one of us needs, and the Bible has a name for this
educational activity of God. It is
called discipline.
What we read in
Hebrews chapter 12 is built on the previous chapter. Hebrews 11 is the catalog of the heroes of
faith. The book is written to people who
are about to give up on Christianity.
They are experiencing hardship and humiliation, and they are getting
wobbly in the knees. So the author sets
before them all these people from earlier in the Bible who went through
experiences that were just as bad, if not worse (11:32-40). Remember Fouzia
Sadiq? These are people who went through
what that poor Christian did, and they came through all of that with their
faith intact. Their knees did not
buckle. Yes, many of them complained against
God, just like she did, but they never stopped believing.
Well, these heroes of
faith are now watching us as we go through the same schooling that they
received (12:1). And while they watch us, the writer tells us
who to watch. We are to keep our eyes on
Jesus (v. 2). God became flesh and actually experienced
all of the hard edges of this world that we have to live in. Jesus walked that path, from start to finish,
to show us how it’s done. He has shown
is that even if the path of suffering goes through crucifixion, that path
ultimately will take us to the throne of God.
He is “the author and perfecter of
our faith.” It seems that the
teacher has shared the learning experience with us (5:8): ”Although He was a Son, He learned obedience
from the things which He suffered.”
Listen, everything you and I suffer down here is meant to teach us a
valuable lesson that eventually will bring us to a good place.
But listen to the
warning of vs. 3-6. You will be tempted to become a drop-out; you
will be tempted to quit school; you will be tempted to say, “this is just too hard—I don’t need
this!” Jesus went all the way
through. Are you going to quit? You complain against God and say that He is
blaming you as though you deserve bad treatment. But, says the writer, “In your struggle against sin, you haven’t lost even a drop of
blood!” Jesus did. Notice how he says that as if to say, “even if you had lost blood, there’s no way
you could call that unreasonable, could you?” Jesus demonstrated His love for you by being
nailed to a Cross. You’ve received His
love, His grace, His forgiveness. After
all that, you wouldn’t hold back from losing blood for Him, would you? You wouldn’t consider that unreasonable,
would you? I mean, if you really love
Jesus the way you say you do, if you really love Him in a way that is willing
to reciprocate and pay Him back a responsible measure of love. That’s not at all unreasonable, is it?
Look at vs. 7-13. These verses teach us that by allowing us to
suffer through hardship, God is really playing the part of a Father. Human fathers do that, and we may not like
it, but eventually we have to acknowledge that giving us hard lessons
ultimately was beneficial. Those tough
lessons, as much as we hated it at the time, we have to admit that they shaped
us, and grew us up, and saved us from childish ways—because we know that we
would still be childish if we had never been disciplined, if we never had a
Father who loved us enough to discipline us.
Each of us knows
where we are disappointing God and need to grow up. You should pray to Him about that. For example, you may realize that you are
impatient with people. God will answer
that. But you won’t wake up the next
morning and exclaim, “Wow—I feel all different! I just feel really patient!” That’s not the way it works! More likely, if you pray to God to give you
patience, He may put you behind a traffic snarl that goes on for miles,
surrounded by rude drivers full of rage and beeping their horns, while you are
late for work, or for your wedding. That’s
how a God of discipline teaches patience in His vale of soul-making!
And remember that
earlier we said that all of our learning experience under God’s discipline is
focused on our relationships? Look at v. 14.
It’s all about relationships, about pursuing peace (successful
relationships) with all people. And you
might be tempted to think that relationships with people are one thing, but
holiness before God is a totally different thing. This verse and many others teach that we have
no holiness before God if our relationships fail to grow, and deepen, and
mature. Paul David Tripp (a Baptist preacher)
writes: “We forget that God’s primary goal is not changing our situations or
relationships so that we can be happy, but changing us through our situations and
relationships so that we will be holy.”
Finally, vs. 15-17 give another warning. Discipline may generate two different
responses. It is usually a humiliating
and painful experience. One person may
respond with acceptance, and with humility, and thus will actually benefit from
discipline. But another may respond with
resentment, and with bitterness, and thus will remain immature. Esau was like that. He made a mistake and was filled with anger
and bitterness. He wanted to reclaim
what he had lost, but was unwilling to humble himself. Lots of tears of regret, but no repentance, no
fundamental change of character or way of life.
Esau was rejected because he would not accept discipline. And we are warned that we will be rejected to
if that is our response to God.
Before it’s too late,
learn from the Father’s discipline!
Appreciate what you have
before it becomes what you had!
