The
following message was delivered at
I have made
every effort to ensure that an accurate transcription of the original tape was
made. Please note that at times sentence
structure may appear to vary from accepted English conventions. This is due primarily to the techniques
involved in preaching and the obvious choices I had to make in placing the
correct punctuation in the article.
It is my
intent and prayer that the Holy Spirit will use this transcription to
strengthen and encourage the true Church of Jesus Christ.
God’s Loving Discipline
(Part 1)
Copyright
1998
by
John
F. MacArthur, Jr.
All
rights reserved.
Recently, it seems as though there have been many
difficult tragedies that have occurred in our church family. It wasn’t but a few weeks ago, we were with a
young couple in our church, the Kneadnogles (sp.),
who are dear friends to our family, and they lost their precious little Steven,
just a little newborn baby, they put down at
People
have asked me numerous times, in dealing with all of these things, “Why do you
think the Lord is letting this happen?”
People asked me that when I recently went though an illness, “What is
the Lord trying to say to you? What is
the Lord trying to teach you? Do you
really understand what the purposes of God are in this?” In fact, somebody asked me that on the
telephone just two days ago. We have had
a number of funerals in our congregation, as some of you know who have attended
them, families have been bereaved . . . Life is full of those difficulties.
This
morning we had Elders’ prayer for dear Bud Busby—been a part of our church for
many, many years; in fact, he was here before I came and he’s still here. He’s having surgery in a week; they’re going
to remove part of his esophagus where they found cancer—they’ve radiated that
and now they’re going to go in and take that section out.
The
questions always comes up: “Why do bad things happen
to God’s people? Isn’t being a Christian
some kind of an insulation? Shouldn’t we expect that if God is on our
side, those kinds of things aren’t going to happen in our lives? What is God’s purpose in all of that and why
is it happening and how are we to view that?”
Those are very important questions.
People
asked me that when, a few years ago, Patricia broke her neck and they told me
she didn’t have much of a chance to live.
People were saying, “What do you think the Lord is going to teach you
through this?” Well, we all face that in
life. That’s just the way it is. “Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly
upward,” the Bible says, “As sure as sparks go up off of fire, trouble’s going
to come.” We all understand that. We know that the longer we live, the more of that
we accumulate. It’s very important for
us to get a perspective on that and answer the question: what is God
doing?
So,
I want to do that this morning and in order to do that, I want you to open your
Bible to Hebrews, chapter 12. I want to
go to the Word of God this morning, Hebrews, chapter 12, and to what must be
for many Christians a very familiar portion of Scripture that speaks directly
to this issue, I think. Now, I confess
to you that the passage is so important and the issue is so important that I
can’t cover it all this morning. I’m
going to give you an introduction this morning and I think it will be a very
helpful one—I trust it will be—and then next week, we’ll look more tightly to
the text itself.
I
want to read the text to you and it really begins in verse 5. Hebrews, chapter 12, verse 5, and the writer of
Hebrews says this, “And have you forgotten the exhortation which is addressed
to you as sons: My son, do not regard lightly the discipline,” or the training
or the chastening, “of the Lord, nor faint when you’re reproved by Him; for
those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He
receives. It is for discipline or
chastening that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is
there whom his father does not discipline?
If you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then
you are illegitimate children and not sons.
Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respected
them; shall we not much rather be subject to the
Father of spirits,” that’s God, “and live?
For they disciplined us for a short time, as seemed best to them, but He
disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness. All discipline for the moment seems not to be
joyful, but sorrowful; yet, to the those who have been
trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.”
Now,
this is really very foundational for us to understand the issues of life. Since life is filled with trouble, this
passage answers what is a very profound and important question: “Why do bad
things happen to God’s people?” Now, let
me get a little bit of a running start here.
This book is addressed to Hebrews—that is, to Jews—a community of Jews
that constituted a church. They had come
to understand the gospel—the Messiah had come and had died and risen from the dead—they had believed that and the church
began. No sooner did the church began, than persecution followed.
After
all, they came out of a Jewish background: they would have been “unsynagogued,” they would have been put out of their synagogue, they would have been alienated from family,
alienated from friends. If they were
employed by Jewish employers, they would have lost their jobs. They might have lost the normal issues of
life in terms of where you go and what you buy and who you interact with, because
if those were Jewish contexts, they would have been isolated. They might even of
suffered some other forms of persecution and alienation.
So,
these people in this community of Jewish believers are starting to feel the
heat of what it
means to identify with Jesus Christ and the writer of Hebrews wants to put a
perspective on that—he wants them to understand that there’s a process going on
here and it’s not one that should surprise them—it’s really an age old
process. In fact, back in chapter 11, he
talked about heroes of faith.
The
writer of Hebrews sort of gets a running start into the twelfth chapter and he
reminds them about Jewish and even pre-Jewish people, all the way back to the
time of Adam and his son, Abel. He talks
about Abel’s faith and Enoch’s faith and Noah’s faith. And then the Jews began with Abraham:
Abraham’s faith and Sarah’s faith and it keeps coming down, to verse 20, Isaac,
and Jacob, and Joseph, and Moses, and down to even a harlot by the name of Rahab who was a Gentile—and then others among the Jews,
verse 32, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, the prophets . . . .
All
of these are people of faith. This is
sort of like the Hall of Fame here, in chapter 11. All the great heroes of faith: those who
believed God. In every single case where
they believed God, they suffered the condemnation of the world. In every case when they took a position on
the side of God and His truth and His Word and His person, they suffered some
condemnation from the world in various ways.
It’s
all summed up, starting in verse 33, This group of people “conquered kingdoms,
performed acts of righteousness, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions”
(particularly in Daniel’s case), “quenched the power of fire” in other words,
they were burned like the three friends of Daniel, “escaped the edge of the
sword.” They were “made strong” in their
weakness, they “became mighty in war,” they “put armies to flight,” some of
them literally were killed and experienced the resurrection,
they “were tortured.” It says in verse
36, they “experienced mockings, scourgings,
chains, imprisonments,” verse 37, “They were stoned, they “were sawn in half,
they were tempted, they were put to death with the sword: they went about in
sheepskins and goatskins,” apparently wrapped in those kinds of skins, they
would attract, by the scent of those skins, some wild animal, that would then
eat them. “They were destitute,
afflicted, ill-treated.” They “wandered,” verse 38, “in deserts, mountains, caves, holes .
. . .”
Welcome
to the family of faith, folks. Anybody
want to sign up? I mean, that was the
point. When you enter into the family of
God, you are going to receive the condemnation of the world, to one degree or
another. He’s just reminding them of
that. He’s just saying, “Look, this is
kind of how it is.” In chapter 12, verse
1, he says, “Now, we have this great cloud of witnesses, this group of people
I’ve just identified and they are witnessing to the validity of a life of
faith, in spite of its difficulties.”
That brings us down to verse 5 and he identifies what this is. From the standpoint of the world, it’s persecution and from the standpoint of the person who’s
suffering it, it’s pain, but from the standpoint of God, in verse 5, it is
called “the discipline of the Lord.”
He’s
saying to them, “You’re not the only people to go through this. In fact, you’re not the first people to go
through this. This
kind of goes with the territory.”
Some of the people in this congregation, we know from reading the book
of Hebrews, were genuinely converted to Christ, they genuinely embraced Him as
Messiah, they were true Christians, but they were feeling the pressure of this
persecution and alienation, this condemnation by the world that they were
formally a part of, and it was pushing them back toward Judaism, and some of
them were tending to sort of renounce Christ and go back, others of them were
sitting on the fence, sort of teetering on the edge, believing the gospel was
true, but afraid to embrace it for fear of the fact that they too would be
alienated.
The
Lord doesn’t take away the prospect of persecution—the Lord doesn’t say it’s
going to be mitigated somehow—He just defines it: from the world’s view, it’s persecution, from your view, it’s pain, from God’s view
it’s discipline. We want to understand
it from God’s view, don’t we? I mean,
that is the way to understand it. So,
the phrase that I want you to grasp in this text, is
in verse 5, right there kind of in the middle of the verse, “the discipline of
the Lord.” We want to understand the
issues of life from God’s perspective—we want to understand them from His
viewpoint. This is where we learn about
His discipline.
Let
me talk about the word discipline. Do
some of your Bibles say “chastening”?
I’m sure they do. Let me give you
that word—it’s the word “paideia”
[pie-day-a]. It is the word from which
we get, for example, “pedagogy,” which, basically, is a form of educating
children. It’s a word that means “to
educate” and “pedagogy” would be “to educate children.” It’s the word from which we get the medical
term “pediatric.” “Pedo” which is
the original Greek term for “children.”
It
is not a word loaded with negative connotation.
The word “chastening” sounds pretty negative; it almost sounds
viscous. It certainly sounds like a
synonym for punishment, but the actual Greek word “paideia”
is a very broad word and that’s why the translators in the New American
Standard that I’m reading, translated it discipline because it embraces both the
positive and the negative, not just the negative. It’s a broad word, it basically means “to
train children” and training children is a combination—it is a balance of the
positive input, showing them truth and virtue and character, and on the other
hand, giving them enough pain to cause them to be redirected away from things
that are bad for them, things that are wicked, things that are evil, things
that are destructive, so that they associate those things with pain—they
understand there’s a price to pay for those and they don’t want to pay the
price; thus, they avoid it.
But, the word “paideia” or “chastening” or
“discipline”. . . I suppose we could sum it up by saying, “refers to whatever efforts
are made toward children to cultivate their soul.” That would involve teaching them truth and
virtue. That would involve correcting
mistakes and curbing passions. That’s
what the word basically means: whatever effort is made toward children to
cultivate their soul, and that would involve teaching them truth and virtue,
correcting mistakes and curbing passions.
It would have a positive aspect and a negative aspect. It would include instruction and it would
include punishment. It includes all of
that.
It
does not have the idea only of punishment.
It does not have the idea only of corrective measures which are designed
to eliminate evil in the life and encourage what is good. It has also
the idea of instruction with what is right.
It is the full-orbed term parents should use in the process of rearing
their children. A loving parent
disciplines, trains, rears his child, both to love what is right and to hate
what is evil.
Now,
the Lord is doing this in our lives. The
writer of Hebrews is saying, “You have to look at all of this from God’s
perspective and see it as training. I
mean, it would be not unlike any kind of rigorous training: training for those
people who have to do rigorous tasks in the military, training for those who
have to do rigorous tasks in an athletic endeavor, training for those who have
to do rigorous tasks such as going into space—we’ve all been aware of that this
week. Any of those kinds of things
involve positive input and also warnings of what would violate and become destructive. That’s how training is—it’s a positive and
negative balance.
Now,
in the training that the Lord brings into our lives, there are several reasons
that he does that. I had three when I
got here this morning, I thought of another one in the early service and I’m
going to include it. That’s always kind
of fun, you know, when it just kind of pops in there. But, I want to show you four reasons why the
discipline of the Lord occurs in your life as a Christian.
Now,
before I look at those four reasons, I want to make a sort of a very clear
distinction here. There must be a sharp
distinction made between divine punishment and divine discipline, all
right?—between divine punishment and divine discipline. Let me say this as clearly as I can: God’s
people can never be punished for their sins in the full sense—in the judicial
sense—because God has already punished Christ fully for our sins. Right? “He bore his own body our sins on the
cross.” “God made Him who knew no sin,
to be sin for us.” He paid the penalty
in full and therefore, Romans 8:1 says that we are under no condemnation and
never will be.
So,
when they’re talking about divine punishment or divine chastening or divine
discipline, we’re not talking about that judicial punishment of our sins which
relates to our salvation. We’re talking
about a discipline and a chastening and a punishment that relates to our
sanctification. God has already punished
Christ for all our sins, which takes care of our eternity. But, God has to punish us for our sins here
in time in this world to conform us more and more to holiness and
righteousness, which is to bring us into greater blessing and usefulness. Those are two things you have to keep
distinct. The blood of Jesus Christ, His
Son, has cleansed us from all sin in the judicial sense—our sins are paid for;
they are completely covered and neither the justice of God (because it’s
already been fully satisfied by Christ
So,
when you are chastened and when you punished by God for sins in this life, it
is not because Jesus somehow didn’t
Now,
let’s look at four reasons why the discipline of the Lord happens in our lives.
I
want to tell you before we go into this, this is a
very personal thing for the most part, a very personal thing. That is to say, I can’t look at you and say,
“Oh! I know why the Lord’s doing that to
you,” unless I know something flagrant about you and I’ll point that out. But, in many cases, this is something you
have to deal with in your own heart and sometimes, while certainly not clear to
everybody around you, it may not even be too clear to you as we’ll see.
But,
these are the reasons that we have to work through in understanding the
discipline of the Lord. Reasons:
1. Retribution
We
use the word “retribution”—it means “punishment.” The first reason the Lord would discipline
you, like the father would discipline a child, is because you’ve sinned and sin
is bad for you. Sin harms you; sin can
devastate your life. It can render you
useless in the service of God; it can forfeit God’s blessing—takes away your
joy, your peace; it produces shame, guilt, worry, fear, anxiety, and a loving
father doesn’t want you to have that. As a loving father punishes a child, not to hurt the child, but to
help the child. He punishes the
child not to produce long-term pain, but short-term pain and long-term
correction.
So,
God punishes sin in the life of a believer for positive purposes. We have sinned and we need to be dealt
with—that’s one of the reasons we get disciplined. Frankly, when you’re going to work your way
through these things, struggles are going on in your life, maybe you’ve been
told you have cancer, you have a disease, maybe you’re struggling in your marriage,
maybe you’re fighting off the pain of a partner who left you—maybe left you
with a child, maybe your marriage partner had an affair with somebody, maybe
you were planning to marry somebody and she turned away from you and you’re in
the forlorn situation of having unrequited love, maybe you’re struggling with a
death in a family,…I don’t know what it is…all of those kinds of things and you
start to take at, “Why is this happening to me?”
You
start with this: “Look into my own heart, look into my own life—is there sin
there? Could this be a corrective in my
life? Could it be the loving Father is
trying to show such consequence in my life as a result of my sin pattern that I
need to correct that?”
Now,
that was the case with David—remember the great king
of
The
story, of course, is known to everybody.
He worked out a way in which he could get that woman, came together with
that woman—actually, she became pregnant as a result
of that union. So, he committed
adultery, violated his own marriage—his own vows to his own wife—violated the
nation, violated his rule as a king, and more than that, he worked it out so
her husband [Uriah], who was one of his most dedicated soldiers, fighting a
battle on the behalf of great king David, would be put in a place in the battle
where he would be compromised, left alone to the will of the enemy. Uriah became the victim of the plotting of
David so that he was actually killed in battle.
David was responsible not only for adultery, but murder.
Then,
the floodgates of chastening opened up.
The Bible says about David the most amazing thing. God said to David, “The sword will never
leave your house—never. You’re going to
need to learn that you can’t conduct yourself like that and expect no
consequence. There will be consequences
to that behavior that will go on through your life.”
The
first consequence that came immediately was, the baby died. The child of Bathsheba died. You remember David bemoaned that and in his
sorrow, he made a pensive statement. He
said, “He cannot come to me, but I shall go to him,” which was full of
hope. He knew that little baby—that
little innocent life—was in the presence of God. That was a little bit of God’s grace
extended, of course, to him, even though that was an illegitimate child. God does take care of all little ones. But, David mourned the loss of that baby.
As
if that wasn’t bad enough, coup after coup after coup came against David and
the sword never really went out of his house.
The worst of all the coups was the one led by his own
son, Absalom. Absalom tried to overthrow
his father and take his throne. Absalom,
eventually, was riding fast through the forest and killed himself when he ran
into a tree, and, as you know, he was hanged there. David cried, “Oh, Absalom! Absalom,
my son, my son, my son!”
David
suffered the terrible pangs of guilt. It
says in Psalm 32 that David said, “My life juices are dried up.” It affected his blood flow; it affected his
saliva; it affected his nervous system.
His whole body convulsed in the anxiety produced by the guilt, and the
shame, and the sorrow of his sin. His
tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth and as long as he didn’t confess his
sin, he suffered through all that agony—his whole body ached from head to
toe.
Finally,
he burst forth in confession. Psalm 51,
he writes a similar psalm and cries out to God against whom he has sinned, in
penitence. He got the message; he really
got the message. He became a faithful
and a righteous man; he became the friend of God. He wrote more psalms than anybody else. He became the sweet singer of
That’s
where, whenever something happens in your life, that’s where you have to
start. I mean, that’s the right place to
start. Isn’t it? Take that self-examination: “Is there some
sin in my life?” Remember Job? I mean, talk about having it tough! Job is a very wealthy man—one of the
wealthiest men in the east—he lived during the time of the patriarchs, time of
Genesis. Job may be the first Bible book
in terms of writing. It may be even have
been written before the Pentateuch—Genesis.
Talking about men in the patriarchal times—one of them was Job. Very wealthy: lots of land, lots of crops,
lots of animals, and lots of children and one wife.
And
all of a sudden, everything goes. He
loses it all. He loses absolutely
everything. He loses all his crops, he
loses all his animals, he loses all his children. The only thing left is his wife and she is
just cantankerous and adds to his pain.
He lost it all and then, he lost his health. He’s sitting in a pile of ashes, scraping
scabs off with a broken piece of pottery, to sort of relieve his misery.
The
question comes to his mind—this is a man of faith; this is a man who believes
in the true and living God; this is a man who has served God with his whole
heart; this is a man who has been absolutely obedient and faithful; this is the
good man—this is the best of men at the time.
How do you know that? Because in
Job 1 and 2, Satan went to heaven and Satan says to God, “Look, God. You don’t have anybody who’s faithful to you
if you don’t give them all kinds of riches.
If you don’t bless them and pour out all this stuff on them, they’re
going to curse you.” And He says,
“That’s not true.” God says, “No, it
isn’t and I’ll show you. There’s
Job—he’s a man of faith; he’s a righteous man; he’s very wealthy. I’ll let you go and take away everything he
has but his life and his faith will not
fail.”
Well,
Job didn’t know that. Job never read the
first two chapters of the book that
So,
the first thing he does is look at his heart.
He does a self-examination; he comes out and he
says, “Look, God, I think everything’s O.K.
I’ve confessed my sin and I’m working through the issues in my
life. I want to serve you. I love you.
I’m trying to be a good man and an obedient man, and I don’t know of any
sin in my life that I’m hanging onto, God.
I think everything’s O.K.,” and he’s sort of scratching his head. So, some of his friends come over and they
feel so sorry for the guy—the guy’s absolutely in desperation—and it says, “For
seven days they did nothing but sit in silence.” His friends—three friends—just sat there in
dead silence, just commiserating, just sympathizing, just probably going, “Oh .
. . just, um . . . .”
At
the end of seven days, they broke their silence and as soon as they opened
their mouth, all wisdom left. The first
thing they said was, “Oh, Job. You’ve
got a lot of sin in your life. We know, we’ve got a good theology.
Our theology is that if you’ve got problems, you’ve got sin.” Well, sometimes . . . Job said, “No, I
don’t.” They said, “Well, you’d better
check again.” So, his friends add to his
pain because they keep accusing him of something that isn’t true. So, literally, they ran that man through
weeks of personal inventory and they came up with nothing. It wasn’t that he was sinless—it was that he
wasn’t holding out some sin. He was
willingly yielding his life to the Lord.
He wasn’t like David: David did inventory and he knew he sinned.
When
a believer is smarting under the rod, you might have to say, “I brought this
upon myself. God is correcting me in
love—He’s not smiting me in wrath—He’s correcting me in love.” That’s where you start: retribution. David knew it the rest of his life; it never
went away. But, don’t get stuck there. When you do that inventory, you’ve got to
move on; let’s go to a second reason why God disciplines us.
2. Prevention
You
know, as a father, obviously dealing with the children that we raised, Patricia
and I were concerned about retribution.
We didn’t spare the rod; we spanked the children and punished the
children when we thought it was appropriate for their well-being. But, we were also very concerned about
prevention. That is to say, we wanted to
build some laws around our children to protect them from what could potentially
harm them. We wanted to wall them
off. There were certain things we didn’t
allow them to do; there were certain places we didn’t allow them to go; there
were certain people we didn’t allow them to fellowship with.
The
children would see that as a hardship.
Did you ever have your children say, “Why not? Everybody else is.” Boy, I heard that one. “Ah, come on, Dad! So-and-so’s going to do it, so-and-so’s going
to do it—why can’t I do it?” I mean,
even down to never stepping off a curb—because we live on a busy street and it
was just preventative care and protection of the children to say, “Don’t ever
step off that curb.” Occasionally, when
they’re little and stepped off the curb, they got spanked. So, you could see them run full speed and
just come to a grinding halt when they hit a curb. It was almost like this was—you know, they
would know—they were truly liberated in life when they were old enough to step
off a curb. You know, that was sort of
like the adult right of passage.
Well,
you do that because you care, right? You
do that because you love your children and that’s preventative. The apostle
Was
that for sin? In 2 Corinthians 12, verse
7,
God
brings things into our lives to prevent us from the sin of pride. You get to feeling self-sufficient, you get
to feeling almost omnipotent: able to control everything in your world, and God
will bring something into your life just to humble you—just to prevent you from
being overly proud.
After
all,
I
think sometimes you’ve got to go there.
After you’ve looked at the retribution issue, you’ve got to look at the
prevention issue and you’ve got to ask yourself, “Is the Lord just trying to
make me remember that I don’t have another breath unless he gives it to
me? Do I need to be reminded of the fact
that I’m not in control of my life, I’m not the master of my fate, I’m not the
captain of my destiny, I don’t call the shots—it’s God who gives me the right
to live; in Him, I live and move and have my being? Do I need to be reminded that in the truth, I
am nothing and, as
I
really do believe God brings those strictures into our live—God brings discipline
and difficulty into our lives, and trouble and trauma, to keep us from feeling
that prideful sort of invincibility that we can easily gain. He wants to make us feel dependent on Him. He wants to protect us. I think the Lord sometimes just brings in discipline
to wall us off from something we might otherwise have done that would have been
against His will. Who knows what ways He
protects His children—who knows? He
knows; we don’t know.
3. Education
There’s
a third purpose in God’s discipline, not unlike the human father, and that’s
education. Retribution is one,
prevention is two, and education is three.
How can I say this in a way that you’ll understand it? I really believe that if you don’t suffer in
the vicissitudes of life, you’re not going to experience God. There are tremendous lessons to be learned. You can read the Bible and it says certain
things, you know, that, “…when you go through the valley of the shadow of
death,” you know, “I’ll be the good Shepherd and I’ll be there,” and that’s all
fine. That’s words on paper and we
believe them in our minds, but it’s not until you got through the valley of the
shadow of death that that’s personalized.
Right?
If you’ve been in the valley and death has cast it’s
shadow over you and you come through and out the other side, into the sunlight,
you can read the twenty-third psalm and it’s not just words on a page. All of a sudden, it grips your heart because
you’ve been there.
If
you say that the Bible says, “My God should supply all your needs according to
His riches, in Christ Jesus,” and you’re like William Carey and you’re sitting
out in India and you’ve got a sick wife and you’ve got three little sick boys
and you’re sitting in India with nothing to eat and no money and you’re
pleading with God to provide the next meal and God sustains you and you never
miss a meal in 35 years of missionary work and somebody says to you, “My God
shall supply all your needs,”—is that theology or is that experience?
If
you never have that experience, then that theology never grips your soul. When you go in and you find your little baby
has died of crib death and that precious little treasure is blue and you know
the life is gone, then you’re going to find whether God is able, aren’t
you? Then you’re going to find out
whether God can give you peace that passes all understanding—peace for which
there is no human explanation.
Whether
God can turn your sorrow into joy, whether God is enough—if you ask a couple
that has never had that experience, “Do you think God is sufficient?” they’ll
smile and say, “The Bible says he’s sufficient; I believe He’s
sufficient.” You ask the couple that
lost the baby, “Is God sufficient?” and they say, “The Bible says that and I
have experienced His sufficiency.” One
of the reasons that God takes us through these issues in life is so that we may
experience His sufficiency.
The
illustration of that is back to our friend Job.
Job is down here on earth and everything has gone wrong. His friends give him such stupid advice and
he can’t get any advice out of anybody that’s worth anything. His wife just says, “Curse God and die.” That’s no help. They’re telling him he’s the problem; she’s
telling him God’s the problem. No
answer. God never tells him what went
on; he never knows—he never knew until he got to heaven. He didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t know why it was happening.
But,
you know what? He lost everything—all
his children—everything. He lost
everything and eventually, he lost all his friends because they got sick of
telling him stuff that he didn’t listen to.
He was absolutely all alone; everybody was on the other side: his wife,
his friends—everybody! He was absolutely
alone and he never knew why this stuff was happening to him. And, you know, I just remind you—that it’s
not up to you to know why it’s happening—it’s up to you to know who it is that
cares enough about you to be doing it.
We may never know why in
every case. Oh, you may, if you go
through the retribution and you see a sin in your life—it may be prevention—but
you may not know all of that because you may not know what the Lord is
preventing since it’s prevented—you may not know.
But,
what did Job learn? There was never a
time when God said, “By the way, Job, I’ll tell you what’s going on. I had this conversation with Satan and I’m
doing this to make a point to him.” He
never told Job that. Never. Finally, in the end, do you know what He does
say to Job? “Shut up, Job. Don’t ask any more questions. Who are you?
Who are you? Were you around when
I created the world? Who are you? Just be quiet. Don’t say anything.” Job apologizes for his questionings.
And
then—this is the cap—at the end of the book, at the end of the story of Job,
which is so incredible, Job says this—and here’s the great lesson of the book of
Job—Job looks at God and he says, “I don’t know any more now than I knew when
it started, except I know this: I had heard of You with the hearing of my
ears,” there wasn’t any written Scripture at the time. He says, “I heard about You, God. Who You are was told
to me. What You
were like was told to me. I heard that You were the true and the living God, the Creator of heaven
and earth and all that is in them. I
heard about You, that You were a God of righteousness,
that You were a God of mercy and justice and all those things. I heard of that with the hearing of my
ear.” Then he says this: “But, now, my eye sees You.”
What
happened to Job? A
personal, private education. He
was tutored by God. Is God able to
sustain a man when he loses everything he has?
Job will give you an answer.
What’s his answer? “Yes.” Is God able to allow you to overcome the bad
advice of your friends and misdiagnosis of your problem? “Yes.”
Is God enough when you’re sitting there with a terribly painful
excruciating disease that goes on and on and on without relief? Is God enough—is there still a place for
peace and joy and trust and confidence in your heart? And Job’s answer is, “Yes,” and he never,
ever would have known that if he hadn’t experienced it. In the end, he says, “I repent in dust and
ashes. God, forgive me for ever
questioning.”
You
know what he was saying? “I didn’t like
the trip, but the end is worth the trip.
The end is worth the exercise. In
this sense, I now know God personally.
You ask me, ‘Can God sustain you in the losses of life? Can God sustain you when your children
die? Can God sustain you when your wife
turns against you? Can God sustain you
when you lose everything, including your friends? Can God sustain you when you’ve become
embarrassed, when you’ve become a laughing stock, when you’re mortified to even
be seen by anybody because of the horrors of your condition? Can God sustain you through that?’” Answer: “I now see You, God, in a way I
never, ever knew you before,” and that’s what we said earlier, isn’t it? If you don’t go through those times, you
don’t know God can sustain you.
He
also had a new sympathy for others, Job did.
That’s
part of the discipline of the Lord: you know He’s there, you know He’s
able. That’s part of the training that
He wants to do in your life. Job is an
illustration of that as
I
told you I’ve been reading this biography of William Carey, which has
captivated my mind. I’m thinking about
going to
So,
he works for years and years and years and translates the Bible into Sanskrit
and then out of Sanskrit into all these languages. Then he decides that if he’s going to get the
Word of God out, he has to build a printing operation. So, they get a printer named Marshman (sp.) from
Inside
the building are many of the original translation sheets that he’s worked
on—his original translation work—it’s all in there and one night a fire comes
and burns the entire thing to the ground.
All the letters of lead melt and all his life’s work, the original
copies of all of that, are gone forever—irreplaceable.
Now,
what are you going to do in a reaction to that?
It’s like a Job experience, isn’t it?
You know what they did? They all
got together and they praised God because they were about to see God put
Himself on display. You ask William
Carey, “Why did that happen?” and he’ll just say, “I don’t know. Maybe God had a conversation with Satan and
he’s trying to prove the point again. I
don’t know.” He doesn’t know. To the end, he didn’t know why—who would know
why that happened? Why would God who could prevent such a
thing allow such a thing?
But,
in the end, it worked out to the furtherance of things. When they began to put it all back together
again, within a year, it was at full operation and they were printing Bibles
and sending them everywhere—every missionary who’s ever gone anyplace in the
world over there is dependent upon those guys’ work. It worked around William Carey, but all I
know is they all got together and had a praise service because they were about
to see the hand of their God on display.
They saw God do things that, if they hadn’t had the fire, they never
would have seen him do which was a tremendous education in knowing their
God.
4. Anticipation
This
is the one I just thought of this morning, but it’s important—anticipation,
anticipation. I think you’ll understand
this: sometimes the Lord brings discipline into our lives just to loosen us up
from the planet and to increase our anticipation of heaven. You know, the more you go through in this
life, the sweeter heaven becomes? I
wrote a book on heaven—no teenager bought it.
Teenagers aren’t ready to go to heaven.
They want to get married and they want to do their thing; but, us older
folk, we bought it. We’re ready. You know who buys a book on heaven? People who are ill, anticipating heaven,
people who are older and really understand that heaven isn’t down here and
they’re anxious to go, and people who have people they love already there.
That
was John, in Revelation. He’s the
illustration of anticipation. He’s
preaching the gospel and they throw him out of the church, they take him on a
ship and they haul him over to a place called
He
was there suffering—it was a great suffering.
When he was there, things weren’t going well. It was in the mid-90’s
of the first century: the church was floundering and weak. There were seven churches in
And,
in chapter four, what does the Lord do?
He speaks from heaven and He says, “Come up here, John. I want to show you what you have to look forward
to.” Any persecuted group of believers
understands that; certainly the Hebrews would have. That’s anticipation. You know, at the end of the book of
Revelation, after God unfolds all this stuff that’s true of heaven and all
that’s going to come out of heaven onto this earth in the end of the age—John,
at the end of the book of Revelation, sums everything up. Jesus says, “I’m coming quickly.” What’s John’s response? “Amen.
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. Get me out of here.”
I
think as you go through life and you accumulate all the struggles and the
vicissitudes and the issues and the sorrows and pains of life, heaven becomes
all the sweeter. Doesn’t it? We, according to Romans 8, “…wait for the
redemption of the body.” 1 Corinthians
15, “We long for this perishable to put on imperishable, for this mortal to put
on immortality for death,” or this dying process, “to be swallowed up by
life.” That’s anticipation.
Conclusion
So,
when bad things happen to good people, it may be retribution, it may be
prevention, it may be education—it may have no other purpose than to get you
where Job was, to be able to say, “God, I knew about You intellectually, but
now, I know You intimately and personally.
I knew about You—print on a page in a Bible,
and now I know you because you’ve touched my life intimately in the process of
this sorrow.” And, it may be
anticipation. It may be just to loosen
you up down here. It may be just to get
your feet off the ground a little bit and have you to anticipate the glory which
is to come.
You
say, how do I know all those things? Well, where did I get them all? Where’d I get all that? Where does the story of David come from? The story of Job come
from? The story of
In
Hebrews 12, verse 5, he says if you don’t take suffering this way, if you don’t
accept the fact that God is disciplining you—he says this, “You have forgotten
the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons.” He says, “Look, have you forgotten the
exhortation?” and what is the exhortation?
He says it. “My son, do not
regard lightly the discipline of the Lord nor faint when you are reproved by
Him.” Where did he get that? Proverbs 3:11. He wants the reader to remember the words of
Proverbs 3:11. “Have you forgotten what
the Bible says?” he says.
If
you want to view your troubles from God’s viewpoint, you’ve got to look at
Scripture. If you look at your trouble
from the standpoint of the world around you, you can say, “Well, it’s
persecution,” or, “it’s germs,” or, “it was that accident—that car hit me and
that person did it to me,” or whatever.
If you look at it from your own viewpoint (“It’s my pain, it’s my sorrow”),
if you want to see it from God’s viewpoint you go to the Scripture. So, he says, “Look, you’ve got to go back,
because you have forgotten what the Scripture said. The Scripture said that you’re going to be
disciplined, don’t think of it lightly and don’t faint when it comes because
God is at work.
Notice—this
is so wonderful—the writer’s appeal is to the Word of God and the Bible is the
final authority; it’s the court of appeal for every issue. When you want instruction and you want to
understand life and you want to understand its good and bad elements, you go to
the Word of God. There’s a verse I love
in Romans,
Do you want to be able to endure through your suffering? Do you want to be able to have comfort through your suffering and maintain your hope?—Through the Scriptures! So, you turn to the Scripture for hope, you turn to the Scripture for endurance. You turn to the Scripture for comfort because the Scripture speaks.
Look
at verse 5. “It is addressed to you, as sons.” I don’t know if you view the Bible that way;
I don’t view the Bible as a sort of a book just thrown down here for whoever. I really
read this book in a very personal way—I hope you do. I see this book as
God’s gift to me. I see this book as
addressed to me as His son, as His child; it speaks to me. It’s for me, so that I can interpret the
issues of life.
And,
he says to these Jewish believers—he says, “You’ve forgotten the
Scripture. Go back and you’ll find
there: endurance, you’ll find there: comfort, [and] you’ll find there: hope,
because you’ll find there: instruction, as we’ve given you this morning, about
what God is doing through this. It’s all
for your good and your glory, ultimately, in eternity.
Well,
that’s the introduction. Next Sunday,
we’ll get into the message. Pray with
me.
Prayer:
Father, how wonderful it is to have a rock to stand on, an anchor for
our souls, in your truth. We just
grieve over those people who go through all the sufferings of life: just losing
people in death, and in accidents, and suffering the trauma of broken love, and
lost children, and divorce, and the devastating results of sin . . . all the
sadness and all the sorrow that fills the world, and they just have nowhere to
go—they have nowhere to turn. It’s just
a mystery, it’s just darkness, it’s just pain. Sometimes, they strike out in vengeance
trying to somehow alleviate the suffering, but it just doesn’t come. And then, Lord, we just grieve over such
people and we can only pray that they would come to the knowledge of truth, to
know you.
We
thank you, Lord, that we know you and, when we see things happening, we don’t
see them from a human viewpoint—not someone else’s and not ours—we look at them
from Your viewpoint. So, we embrace the
suffering of life, we embrace the pain of life, for its retributive effect on
us as it chastens our sins and brings us pain that causes us to want to avoid
any of that in the future, it drives us back toward righteousness. We thank You for that suffering in our lives
that prevents us from being proud and self-sufficient and self-confident, for
that part which educates us in the personal dimension as You come to us in our
pain and You provide all we need and You sustain us and we know You in
personal, intimate ways that we would never know apart from that. We thank you for the way in which our
suffering causes our hearts to reach out to the glory which is to come—the
wonders of heaven, to know that we will live there with no sorrow, no
suffering, no tears, no crying, and no death forever in fullness of joy in Your
presence. How we long for that. Lord, we are but unworthy sinners who have been
graced with this blessing of being Your children and
receiving Your loving discipline. Thank
You for it. We know You
bring it out of love for all the right reasons to accomplish Your purpose in
our life, that which will produce in us the greatest usefulness to You and the
greatest joy and fulfillment for us.
Just as we do our own children, You bring us
discipline out of love and we thank You.
In Christ’s name, Amen.
Transcribed by:
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