Clough Proverbs Lesson 25
Proverbs 3:11-12 expanded in Hebrews 12 continued –
Hebrews 12:3-13
Turn to Hebrews
12, we’ll continue with the expansion in the New Testament of the truth of
Proverbs 3. In the 3rd
chapter of Proverbs the point is made over and over that divine wisdom is
always personal; this is in direct conflict with the usual image of
Christianity, that it is a dead relationship with a status set of moral
codes. And because Proverbs is
interested in correcting any such false image it deals with the problem on a
personal basis and shows that primarily all wisdom in
Therefore, last
week we began a short parenthetic trip out away from the leading concept of
Proverbs 3 over into Hebrews 12 because the author of Hebrews, whoever he is,
was an excellent student of the Old Testament and he must counsel Hebrew
Christians who are suffering persecution in his day and to do so he calls their
minds to the content of Proverbs 3. And
he uses Proverbs 3:11-12 and expands these into almost a whole chapter. So we are dealing with Hebrews 12:1-13 and
last week we dealt with the first two verses of Hebrews 12, the exhortation to
the successful us of the faith technique in the middle of adversity. Here in verses 1-2 the author is saying that
we must have our eyes focused on the person of Christ. And when the faith technique is used in the
middle of an adverse situation we might label it as occupation with Christ, for
that precisely is what is indicated in the these first two verses, that if we
would get our sites upon the humanity of Christ and watch how He did it, so to
speak, then we could also do it.
Beginning in verse 3-11 we take up the exhortation; verses 1-2 is the
exhortation proper, now beginning at Hebrews 12:3 we have the motivation behind
the exhortation. This follows the same
format as in the Old Testament, you always have an exhortation, then you have
reasons for the exhortation.
Hebrews 12:3, “For
consider Him that endured such contradiction of sinners against Himself, lest
ye be wearied and faint in your minds.
[4] You have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin. [5] And you have forgotten the exhortation
that speaks unto you as unto children [sons],” and then he proceeds to quote
Proverbs
So it says,
“consider over and over and over and over again” you Hebrew Christians that are
suffering great adversity, from personal disruption to your family unit to
physical problems and so forth, you people must consider over and over and over
and over and over “Him.” Now who is
Him? “Him” is Jesus Christ and Jesus
Christ particularly in His humanity.
Jesus Christ was God; Jesus Christ was man, united in one person
forever, that’s the doctrine of the hypostatic union. But in this particular phrase the humanity of
Christ is emphasized because the tendency in that generation, as well as in our
own, is for believers to go away with a false picture of the deity of
Christ. They see that Jesus Christ is
both God and Jesus Christ is man; because Jesus Christ is God therefore Jesus
Christ had an easy time—false deduction.
The answer truly from the Scriptures is that Jesus Christ as man
suffered more than believers and since Jesus Christ suffered more than
believers that means that Jesus Christ is a model. And this is why in the beginning of verse 2
it says, “Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith,” the
beginning and the end. Jesus Christ
started it, so to speak, He’s the base of it, and Jesus Christ is the 100% pure
model of how to do it. And so this is
why we are to consider Him over and over.
Consider Christ as a man, faced with an impossible task. In three years this man will begin a movement
that will never die out from history, a movement that will change people’s
lives forever, a movement that will spread throughout the Roman world within
one generation, such that it will be considered an official problem, an
official subversive sect of the Imperial Roman government. One man in three years launches this kind of
a movement, and He must do so and provide the reality behind the movement by a
perfect life. Jesus Christ accomplished
this through the faith-rest technique.
If this is the
case, then the author argues that by looking at Christ we too should be able to
mimic Him. Why? Because we have what is called in the Bible
the new nature or we are made over in the new man. That means at the point of regeneration when
you receive Christ as Savior, certain things happen to you. God the Father does certain things, God the
Son does certain things, God the Holy Spirit does certain things. Of the things which God the Holy Spirit does,
He regenerates, indwells, baptizes, seals, gives at least one spiritual gift
and begins the process of intercession.
Of these six things one of these is regeneration. The Holy Spirit regenerates or puts into the
person a new nature. This is a reality,
this is something that is not just psychological, it includes psychological of
course but it is something that is a real existing entity that is now built
into the person. A person who has truly
accepted Christ is a different person by position and this, whatever it is on
the inside that has been changed, is officially known as regeneration;
something has been created anew, the Holy Spirit has done that. But what is it that comes out of this? The new nature; the new nature is the result
of regeneration.
But the Bible
doesn’t leave us with sheer mysticism, it doesn’t say hey, you’ve got a new
nature, now act that way. There’s only
one problem; how can you spot the new nature.
In other words, the Bible doesn’t operate on emotions; the Bible doesn’t
leave it up to us to say what the new nature is going to be like. The Bible gives us a model by which we can
test what is of the new nature and what is not of the new nature and the test
is the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus
Christ actually operating in history manifested the new man. Jesus Christ, operating as true humanity,
showed forth this new man and this new nature, so that in the post-Christ
epistles, that is after Christ died, after He disappeared from the historic
scene and left believers with a new nature, they would be able to tell the new
nature by how well it conforms to the model, that is, the life of Christ. That is why we have four Gospels that gives
us the life of Jesus Christ.
This is why we are
to consider over and over Him; this is the way we know what is of the new
nature. Now watch how this differs from
a lot of the emotional claptrap that is going on in Christian circles today
where we have people faking it, going to all sorts of weird meetings where we
hold hands and ask the Holy Spirit to baptize us. You don’t have to do that because the Holy
Spirit baptizes you at the point of salvation; there is no such thing as a post
salvation baptism of the Holy Spirit, and we get involved in all sorts of these
emotional things where everybody prays for somebody’s leg to be lengthened by
1/100th of an inch; somebody else prays for somebody to be healed or
something. Healing is a bona fide
request under certain situations, not in these situations. So we have these groups that operate and what
they’re trying to do is get spiritual life, what they call spiritual life. Well, they’re getting spiritual life but it
doesn’t happen to be the Spirit of the New Testament, and in the New Testament
the life that is desired and wanted is a life that can be objectively measured
by external standards and those external standards are given in the four Gospels,
the life of Christ. So this is why in
this verse we don’t have the following verse; you don’t see at verse 3: For
folks, we know that you’re under great pressure so what you want to do is get
together and say Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus and say this about 45
times as fast as you can, until you get hyperventilated or something and faint,
have some sort of an ecstatic experience.
That is not what
the counsel is and I want you to notice this in all seriousness. This man is facing believers who will shortly
be martyred for their faith. These
believers are going to go through hell because of their allegiance with Jesus
Christ and I want you to notice very carefully, no such advice is ever give,
seek the baptism, speak in tongues or go through any sort of emotional
experience. What is it? It is consider over and over and over and
over and over the person of Jesus Christ, that is what. How do you “consider?” By conjuring up in your mind all by your
lonesome some sort of a pet view of Christ?
No! You consider Christ by going
to the New Testament documents and by studying them over and over and over and
over and over. In other words, by
consider Christ, by considering a New Testament document that pictures
Christ. You cannot picture Christ apart
from the New Testament documents.
Otherwise you create your own Christ.
“Now consider
Christ that has endured such contradiction of sinners against Himself,” now the
word “endured” is very interesting. You
would think it would be past tense; that would be very simple for the writer to
simply say well, keep on considering Jesus Christ who endured those things in
the past, and that would be true. But
the writer doesn’t leave this verb in the past tense, he puts it in the perfect
tense and the perfect tense looks back to a point in time with results that
continue through the present. And the
believers are here and he says now I want you to look at Jesus Christ in the
New Testament documents. In other words,
here’s Christ’s life, here’s the death, here’s the resurrection, here’s His
ministry and I want you to look at the life of Christ and the contradiction
that He endured against Himself all during that time interval, but he puts the
verb in the perfect which means the results of what you see in the New
Testament documents persist down through history unto the present moment. What does this mean? By putting this verb in the perfect tense the
writer intends to convey that these readers have in time a present tense
relationship with Christ. Christ is
seated at the Father’s right hand and so therefore we have a Christ who is
seated at the Father’s right hand today, at this hour, and the One who exists
at this hour at the Father’s right hand is the One that went through those
things which you see in the historic documents.
So by putting the
verb “endure” in the perfect tense he changes the whole perspective of the
discussion. If he had just left it in
the past it would simply be well, read your Bibles—if he had left it in the
past. But he didn’t leave it in the
past; he put this verb into the perfect tense and by putting it into the
perfect tense he relates the Bible, which speaks of something occurred in past
time with the historic Christ that exists in the present moment. And so now he says you the One who is at this
hour at the Father’s right hand, with whom you have a deep personal
relationship. “Consider Him” and look
backwards in time to that time long ago when He experienced all this
contradiction.
Why does he tie
the two together? Because over and over
he’s going to make this claim, that Jesus Christ went through the race, He
finished the race and now He’s rewarded.
And He always connects the past race with the presently enjoyed reward. It’s as though Jesus Christ has gone through
it first for us; He made it and the argument is that if He made it anybody can
make it. Now at first glance that
doesn’t sound too flattering to Christ, but it is a true statement; if Jesus
made it anybody can make it. Why? Because Jesus Christ had to face greater
trials than any believer and if He had to face greater trials and in His
humanity, through the doctrine of impeccability and the doctrine of the kenosis
which means He voluntarily gave up the independent use of His divine
attributes, because of these docs we know that Jesus Christ now is in a
position of enjoyment based strictly upon His humanity.
“Consider Him that
endured such contradiction of sinners against Himself,” what is the
“contradiction of sinners against Himself?”
The “contradiction of sinners against Himself” is the attack that Christ
faced because the sinners ridiculed the faith technique. Turn to Psalm 22;
there’s a special kind of contradiction of sinners against Himself that is
intended by this reference. Psalm 22 is
one of the great Messianic psalms of the Old Testament, written 1000 years
before Christ, this psalm predicts how Christ shall die; this psalm predicts
what the people will say at the foot of the cross; this psalm predicts what it
was that led Christ to the cross, all many, many centuries before the
historical event actually occurred.
Therefore in Psalm
22:1 you read those familiar words, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken
Me?” That’s what Christ said on the cross and of course David wrote the psalm
1000 years before it because he was inspired by the Holy Spirit to look forward
in time to that point. But in verses 3-5
we have the “contradiction of sinners against Himself.” Here are the words of Christ. “But Thou art holy, O Thou that inhabitest
the praises of Israel. [4] Our fathers
trusted in Thee; they trusted and Thou delivered them; [5] They cried unto
Thee, and were delivered; they trusted in Thee, and were not confounded.” So in word after word, phrase after phrase,
clause after clause in verses 3, 4 and 5, they are just piled up, over and
over, David does, he piles all these things up and he says look, all the
evidence is that when a believer exercises the faith technique God always
answers; He never abandons him, that is, all the evidence seems to fit until we
come to the humanity of Christ.
And then we pass
to Psalm 22:6, “But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised by
the people. [7] All they that see Me
laugh Me to scorn, they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying, [8] He
trusted in the LORD that He would deliver Him; let Him deliver Him, seeing He
delights in Him.” And the point that is
made in verse 7-8 is that Jesus Christ in His humanity on the cross is trusting
100%; He has 100% faith in the Father and Jesus Christ in His humanity becomes
the first person in history to be abandoned by God while He is still
believing. And the people around Christ,
that are standing around the cross actually historically said that, well, you
trusted in God, you had perfect faith in God, now look where it got you, it got
you nailed to a wooden cross, how do you like that for your faith? That’s what always happens, you see, to
people who believe. And of course this
is actually Satan speaking through the crowd as this crowd looks up to the
cross and they begin to ridicule the faith technique because if they can
ridicule the faith technique then they can discredit the God who has made the
promises. In other words, what they’re
saying is that God doesn’t answer and all during the hours of darkness when
Christ was bearing the sins of the world, your sins as well as everyone else,
when He was bearing your sins on the cross and was going through Hell,
constantly on the outside, you trusted
in God and look where it got you, you trusted in God and look where it got you;
you trusted in God and look where it got you, He left you all alone and you
still trust and isn’t that unjust and all the rest of it.
So this is the
“contradiction of sinners against Himself.”
The argument is that Jesus Christ alone will face this; no believer will
ever be called upon to perfectly trust the Lord and watch the Father abandon
him while he is trusting; no believer is ever called to do this. And this is why if you’ll turn back to
Hebrews 12, having this background in mind, we can understand this phrase,
“contradiction of sinners against Himself.
“For consider Him that endured,” has endured, “such contradiction of
sinners against Himself,” if you’re taking notes just put Psalm 22 because
there’s an exposition of what that phrase means, “lest you be wearied and faint
in your minds.”
In other words,
the point is that these believers, they too are going to have to use the faith
technique and they too will receive ridicule.
They will probably receive that thing that is usually thrown into your
face; well the Bible says that God helps those who help themselves. I never let that go by that I don’t say would
you give me the chapter and verse please, I’ve been looking for 15 years to
find where that is located in Scripture so if you could be so kind as to give
me the reference. And obviously you won’t ever find the reference because it’s
not there. That is a reference, probably from Satan’s bible but not from the
Lord’s. God does not help those who help
themselves, it’s precisely the opposite.
God helps those who are the helpless.
And so that verse is a beautiful capsule summary of human
viewpoint. But this is what the believer
faces when he tries to go operating on the faith technique; I’m going to trust
the Lord for this thing—oh, God helps those who help themselves. It’s the same kind of thing.
So in order to
break that the writer is saying you just go back to the person of Christ and
you look what He was doing for you on the cross and you watch “the contradiction
of sinners” that He endured next time someone throws that in your face, so just
relax and use the faith technique.
“…lest,” negative purpose, because if you don’t this is what is going to
happen to you. And the implication here
is that this will happen to you automatically if you don’t use the faith
technique in the middle of adversity. See, this is one of the great powerful
motivations for using the faith technique in the middle of pressure. “…lest you become wearied and faint in your
minds.” The word “wearied” is a word
that is in a participle form and it amplifies fainting. So here we have soul fainting and the Bible
speaks of this. Now normally when
physiologically a person faints it’s because of pain or some other reason that
affects the blood supply to the brain and so forth. And what actually happens under fainting is
that you become partially anesthetized.
Actually you don’t experience pain and so forth, it’s the body’s way of
handling shock often times; it’s a way of dispensing with the pressure of the
moment. And so it is as though your soul
has a similar system and it’s when your mind can faint.
And this is what
happens to believers when they are faced with a problem that is too great for
them to solve and they have operated on a human viewpoint basis. So here we have believer and so far he’s
gotten away with human viewpoint all the way.
Every little situation, every problem that comes up, he’s going to
handle it his way, independently of God.
And so that works for a while and then finally God says okay, now I’m
going to put that problem right in front of your path; now let’s see what you
do with that one. And so since this
particular believer has so much ingrained human viewpoint and he is so used to
handling his problems this way, what happens?
He responds the way he always did.
Only one problem, this time he can’t go through the problem, he just
bounces around here and so he bounces around for a while and then finally he
gives up and that’s what’s called “fainting.”
In other words,
instead of still coming to the Lord, he’s still on negative volition because
anybody that uses human viewpoint is on negative volition, so we have the
believer on negative volition and the problem still doesn’t break him out of
the situation, it is a big enough problem so that he should see that human
viewpoint is thoroughly discredited as a successful tool in the situation, but
instead of doing what this author says, considering Christ and getting
encouragement to use the faith technique what does he do? He just fades out. And that’s called fainting, soul
fainting. This is actually is connected
with what we have previously said is chaos in the heart. You start out with negative volition; as a
result of negative volition the Bible says you experience darkness in the
soul. This can affect your mind and your
emotions and this will lead to all sorts of psychological defense mechanisms,
rationalization, isolation and so forth.
That is strictly a
product of negative volition, it is because you have failed to handle some
problem the way God wants you to handle it, and it’s not because your mother
dropped you on your head when you were a baby; it is because you in your own
responsibility have deliberately violated some norm or standard of the Lord. And as a result we have a tug of war going on
between the conscience and the mind and the mind can’t stand the conscience but
the mind can’t do anything about it so it starts to build scar tissue over the
conscience. And there we have the mind
darkening because the conscience is the light of the mind and if you obstruct
the flow of the conscience to the mind then you have a darkened mind. So the next thing happens is you have a
darkened mind and then you begin to have the absorption of a human viewpoint
framework. Here is where you have
increase of doubt and this leads to the fact that you can’t use the faith
technique, so you become less effective the further this process goes on to the
point you doubt everything.
And the next step
in the process is that you begin to hate; you begin first of all to hate God;
it’s God’s fault this happened to me, God’s a meanie, God loves everybody else
but God doesn’t love me, God has it in for me, God spends all night thinking
about things to get me the next day and when I wake up in the morning God has
it in for me, He has a special plan to foul me up for the next 25 hours. God puts aside everything that He’s doing
just to get me. So you begin to hate God
and this carries over in your personal relationships, and you begin to hate
people that are made in His image, and so on.
Then finally God lets this go on so far, if you’re a believer, and then
you’re under the wrath of God and that means as a believer you won’t lose your
salvation but you will experience some discipline in a very unduly like
fashion. So this is the chaos of the
soul, and this is what happens when we have believers on negative volition.
Let’s look further
in this verse, after considering Him, “lest we become faint in our minds.” Hebrews 12:4 is a quick admonition, “Yet ye
have not resisted unto blood, striving against sin,” in reference to the cross
of Christ and severe persecution.
Now Hebrews 12:5,
“You have forgotten the exhortation that speaks unto you as unto children
[sons], “My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when
you are rebuked of Him, [6] For whom the Lord loves He chastens and scourges
every son whom He receives.” Now the
word “forgotten” here, again is a perfect tense and it means that these believers
at one time knew this. This is the
interesting thing; think of these, these are second generation Christians. Not one of the people to whom Hebrews was
written had ever seen the person of Christ.
Do you know how we know this?
Turn back to
Hebrews 2:3; these are all second generation Christians. “How shall we escape, if we neglect so great
salvation, which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed
unto us by them that heard him.” It just
turns out that verse 3 and verse 4, “God also bearing them witness, both with
signs and wonders, and with various miracles,” the verb “was confirmed” is an
aorist tense and it would suggest that that confirming period lasted, say from
30 AD down through the time of the hearing, which was about 45-50 AD, and in
that time interval the signs were functioning but the signs are not functioning
by the time this epistle was written. In
other words, the “confirming” is in the aorist tense, it is finished, it’s over,
and the signs that were functioning between 30 and 50 AD have stopped. And here is one of those New Testament
evidences that shows you that as the New Testament era got older these
confirming signs faded out. But this is
a second generation; they heard, say between 45 and since this epistle was
written late, but yet does not mention the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, we’ll
say the upper limit was 69 AD, so between 45 and 69 AD, this generation of
believers had the gospel preached unto them, they believed and they were taught
guess what? The Old Testament! They didn’t have the New Testament.
And so therefore
turning back to Hebrews 12:5, the word “forgotten” refers back to their Bible
class on Proverbs, and it refers back to the time when these new believers were
taught the different Proverbs and he said now that you’re in a jam, you people
who went to Bible class and learned Proverbs, why don’t you apply what you
learned? But you’ve forgotten it,
haven’t you. And this seems to be the
malady of this particular group of believers because in Hebrews 5 they’re
spoken of as a group of clods who had heard and heard and heard and heard and
never applied it so therefore they forgot it.
And he said this is why, you people are falling apart at the seams
around here. Do you know why? Because you have heard the Word and you
haven’t applied it. Result: you forgot
it.
So, “You have
forgotten the exhortation that speaks unto you as unto children,” and here
we’re introduced to our position in Christ.
When we receive Christ we are put in union with Him and God the Father,
God the Son and God the Holy Spirit do certain things for us. Now here it refers to the work of God the
Father. What does God the Father do? According to Romans 8:28-30 He foreknows us,
He predestinates us, He calls us, He justifies us, He glorifies us, and Hebrews
12, God the Father disciplines us as a father should So the divine institution number three, which
is family now becomes… this creation ordinance now becomes an instrument or a
tool of revealing the character of God.
See, God always puts us existentially into a situation where we will
have to experience something that he can then use as a mode or a tool of
revelation. And so all of us are raised
in the family and so He’s going to take that experience of being raised in the
family and turn it around to reveal His character. He said I am the perfect Father of a family
and I am going to handle you as a perfect father would.
Now this shouldn’t
be foreign to any member of the human race, baring orphans and so on. But under normal conditions this should not
be an unfamiliar thing. So he says I,
this exhortation, speaks unto you as unto children, and it’s Proverbs 3:11-12
that are quoted. “My son, despise not
thou the chastening of the Lord,” and we have dealt with these two verses in
the Old Testament, we won’t spend time this morning dealing with them, “My son,
despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when you are rebuked of
him.” Just a word to amplify the word
“chastening” here; the word “chastening” is the word musar and it means severe training.
It means that God the Father starts in with us at the time that we’re
regenerated. Now obviously He’s worked
in our lives before the time we become a Christian but at the time we become a
Christian of the many things we now become part of the family of God. This is what is so blasphemous about this
thing that you hear, the universal Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of men; in
Scripture there is no universal Fatherhood of God, unfortunately, but it just
isn’t there. There was before the fall,
by creation God is the Father of all men, yes, but after the fall God isn’t the
Father of any man except that as that person receives grace through Jesus
Christ. And then we have the formation
of the family of God. Now we join in the
family.
If you’ll think of
this in terms of adoption it will help you visualize what’s going to be spoken
of in the next few verses. Visualize
yourself being adopted into a family, literally being adopted into a family. When you go to live in someone’s home and you
go into having another set of parents, that means that they set the tone for
that home, and if you are adopted into that home you will abide by however that
family operates; they’ll have certain customs, they’ll have certain needs,
certain desires, certain orientation and you blend in with it. So you take up the nature of the family. Now, you are adopted into that family at a
point in time, that’s the legal adoption.
So we’ll say the legal adoption occurs instantly. There is a certain time, at a certain time of
day when you legally become part of that family. Now, but that isn’t the only thing that’s
needed. You can legally become a member
of the family but not actually experientially, right? It’ll take you maybe months, or maybe years
to adjust your life patterns to that home and how that home operates, and in
adults there are some very severe adjustment problems here until you finally
get with it. Now that’s the same point
the Bible is making, it’s just as simple as that. If you are adopted into a family there is
going to be an adjustment problem between your previous way of life and your
present way of life inside that family.
Many of you are
used to thinking of the family of God as a position and that’s very fine, but
in Hebrews 12 stop thinking that way; it’s wrong. Now you must think in terms of the family of
God on an experiential basis; this is what it means in experience to be in the
family of God. And so this is why in
verses 5-6 we have the content of the orientation to family. Here is what God the Father, who runs the
family, says, you may, believer go through some personal adjustment problems
but I’m not going to change this family just because you happen to trot in. I have a way of handling this family and this
is the way it’s going to be, we love you very much and we’re going to take care
of your needs and you’re not going to suffer unnecessarily, but you will be
conformed to the way this family runs and this is the way the Father deals with
us as believers.
Now why is this so
important? Why am I belaboring the
point? Because we have in our generation
a breakdown in this third divine institution.
The family is going in this country, it’s practically gone, but it is on
its way to disaster and as a result what is happening to this whole
problem. We aren’t having this occur
because what we have little Johnnie wants to go out and beat somebody over the
head with a pole he just does it and his father will go down and get him
off. And if he goes out and gets in
trouble we’ll just hire a lawyer and the lawyer will get him off. So little Johnnie learns all growing up all I
have to do is just fuss and howl and cry and yell and scream and even if I may
be 16 or 17 I’ll still yell and scream and carry on, and throw a fit and I know
that after I throw a fit long enough my father and mother will go down and
solve the problem for me, I don’t have to solve it, I’m not going to suffer the
consequences of what I do, I’ll get off somehow. And so all during life little Johnnie has
learned a little learned behavior pattern here of getting off. So we’ll just say that that’s a –R learned
behavior pattern #101, and this is a pattern that’s quite common today and it’s
quite well ingrained in a lot of people.
Now what happens? A person with pattern 101 comes into the
Christian life; he becomes a Christian, maybe they go to a college or
university some place and someone tells them the gospel and they become a
Christian and to add complications and make it more interesting we’ll say that
the person that led him to Christ didn’t know anything more about the Christian
life than he did at the time and so they said: accept Jesus and your problems
will be over. So he just sees something
and he invites Jesus into his heart, whatever that means, and he doesn’t
understand anything about the cross, he doesn’t understand anything about the
fact that Christ finished the work on the cross for our sins, doesn’t
understand that he must have an atonement by substitution, and so forth. Not understanding all that he invites Jesus
into his heart but somehow he gets into the kingdom and is born again; that’s
great. So he becomes a Christian in
spite of it all and then he begins to notice something you know that guy that
led me to the Lord, he said my problems would be over. Well you know, my problems have just begun
because he decides he’s going to take –R learned behavior pattern 101 and he’s
going to live his Christian life on the same basis he lived his family
life. If all I have to do is yell,
scream, carry on, kick my heels and God will relax His grip and I can con God
into certain things, but he just begins and it doesn’t seem that he can con God
into these things. And it seems like he
could yell and scream and carry on with tears and everything else and he’d get
his way, but then he goes into prayer to the Father, he throws a fit, carries
on, tears and everything else but he doesn’t get his own way. Something’s different and that’s right.
And so today we
have a tremendous post evangelistic shock that hits about two or three months
after somebody accepts Christ, and some of them, I’m afraid to say, never
recover because they have not had proper training in the home and when it comes
down to receive Christ, they get shoved, as it were by the Holy Spirit inside
this new family, God adopts them into the new family and they carry over this
same behavior pattern and it isn’t working and so what happens? The pressure gets more and more because God
just keeps on spanking. He doesn’t
follow the new system where Johnnie comes up and spits in your face and you’re
supposed to ask him, I see that you have a problem. God doesn’t operate that way. He operates on a certain basic standard and
that standard will be upheld, period; regardless of whether Johnnie spits in
his face of not.
So this person
starts on negative volition, just trying it one day, and he gets clobbered and
he doesn’t like that; why, he’s supposed to have happiness and joy and peace in
the Christian life, he’s not supposed to have worries and depression and all
the rest of this. But it seems like he’s
got more depression after he became a Christian than before he became a
Christian. Sure he does, because this is
how God is spanking and he’s applying it and it gets worse and worse and worse
and finally this person gets absolutely defiant; they are not going to accept
God’s will, God may be calling them into a certain area of service, and I don’t
mean “full time service,” [quote, end quote].
I mean God may be calling this person to do something in life. God may be calling this person to go into the
academic world and he can’t stand the academic world; like me, I couldn’t stand
to be a preacher about ten years ago.
The worst person to ever be around would be a preacher, and something
happened. So God will call you into
various things and so here it is, we have four or five different things down
here and God may be isolating one of these, and okay, you, I want you over
here. I don’t want to go over
there! I want you over there; don’t want
to go! And so we have negative volition
crop up in the Christian life and so they’ll go to church or study the Word
enough to be comfortable but it never really is comfortable because basically
he’s saying I’m not going to go and God says oh yes you are.
And we have this
tension that goes on and on and on and on.
And unfortunately in our day many of these people wind up in mental
institutions. Now this is not saying
that everybody in a mental institution has this problem. That’s not what I’m saying. But I am saying that many of them do and this
is why the modern psychiatrist and psychologist have such a lousy view of
Christianity. If I were in his shoes I’d
have a lousy view of Christianity.
Imagine how depressing it must be to see case after case after case
after case after case of Christians having problems with guilt. Naturally you’d
come to the conclusion that Christianity is the problem; sure you would. Actually in one way it is. Whenever the Word of God is taught it will
cause depression. You just stop and
think of that. Every time the Word of
truth is presented in some people it will cause tremendous depression and may
lead to a mental breakdown. Do you know
why? It’s not the Word of God’s fault;
it’s the rebellion that people have against it.
Because you see, once you have heard the Word you can’t be neutral any
longer; before you could hide, before you could say well God, I really don’t
understand the truth. Do like Patton
used to do in World War II when an order came in on the teletype or something,
he would say I don’t really understand that, it was garbled so let’s send it
over and in 24 hours while they were sending it over he’d advance another
hundred miles. But this doesn’t working
in the Christian life, it doesn’t work that way, when God sends an order down
and you say it’s garbled… huh-un,
because you have the illuminating ministry of the Holy Spirit and He makes sure
it gets ungarbled very fast.
So once the Word
of God is taught it can send people by the score into depression and be very,
very troubled. Is that going to stop me
from teaching the Word? Absolutely not,
I’ll go right on doing it. Why? Because that is the command of the Lord, to
go ahead and teach regardless of what happens.
But you have a tremendous pressure on the part of a lot of people, some
of them in the psychological community today that would love to see people
split off from evangelical Christianity because of this problem. And we may well have a knock down drag out
with the psychological community like we are now having with the educational
community over this issue. So this is a
problem in our day. But I want you to
notice that it is related; in part the people who claim that Christianity is
the cause of a lot of this are very correct; it’s just that they don’t carry it
far enough.
Let’s go back to
Hebrews 12:7; this is a commentary on Proverbs 3:11-12. “If you endure chastening, God deals with you
as with sons;” those of you with more modern translations will see the correct
translation of the first clause, “It is for chastening that you endure,” that’s
the point. It is not “if you endure
chastening” as in the King James; it is “for chastening that you endure.” God is dealing with you as with sons, “for
what son is he whom the father chastens not?”
This goes back to the fact that man is not an animal; whereas animals
have a lot of instinctive behavior patterns, man has a great deal of learned
behavior patterns, a tremendous number, far more than any animal. And man must learn and the chastening is a
training ministry of God the Father in the believer’s life. So this is why “what son is he whom the
father” does not train?
Hebrews 12:8, “But
if you are without chastening, whereof all are partakers, then you are
bastards,” now the word “are” looks like a verb to be but it is actually a
perfect tense and it means have become.
This is what it means, “they have become,” and that changes the whole
thing here. “…all have become
partakers,” now when did “all,” who are the “all?” “All” are true believers, those who have
personally accepted Christ as Savior, they are the believers that are in Christ
and at the point they became part of Christ they also became partakers of
chastisement. That is a reference to our
position and when you become a Christian you actually become a partaker of
chastening because you join God’s family.
So from this time on you have a new Father. And he said, therefore, conclusion, if you
don’t have chastisement, in other words, and this is a good test because you
can fool yourself, because you’ve attended church all your life or something
thinking you’re a believer, and you’ve never really accepted the Lord; it’s a
simple test and it’s given right here.
Can you go out and raise all kinds of hell and get away with it? Can you go out and do things that you know
are deliberately against what the Lord wants you to do and get away with
it? If you can, this verse would argue
you are not a believer. A true believer
can get away with it for a little while, but eventually boom, he gets it; he
gets hit. And this is one of the
objective tests that can be given to a person; if you can get away with it …
[Tape turns]
…he got up and
they introduced his name and there were some snickers in the room and he said
yes, he says I know that some of you have heard my name around Lubbock will say
what’s that bastard doing here. Well, he
said, I ceased being a bastard and became into the family, and it was a very
good smooth lead in from his reputation around town to the point where he
became a Christian. And he said I ceased being a bastard when I accepted Christ
and he went on from there. And that was
a very good us, and of course he deliberately did it to irritate some of the
clergy that were there and by the looks of it he accomplished his task.
Hebrews 12:9,
“Furthermore, we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave
them reverence. Shall we not much rather
be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live?” Now the word “fathers of flesh,” that phrase
and the phrase “Father of spirits,” is the contrast meant in this verse. The point is that what we have in the fleshy
realm, as far as the third divine institution, that’s all of the flesh. How is the normal family of the flesh? Well, you have genes, you have an inheritance
factor passed on from father to son, you have various fleshly behavior patterns
and so on that are passed on to the family unit. All right, what does “the Father of spirits”
mean? In the spiritual we have in God,
it’s not some mystical thing; what does spiritual mean? It simply means the realm of absolutes. And over here it means the realm of truth,
the realm of doctrine, the realm of +R learned behavior patterns, these things
are passed on. And so “the Father of
spirits” is going to make sure that we pass this on. Why? Verse 10.
Hebrews 12:10,
“For they truly for a few days,” and who are “they?” “They” refer to the fathers of the flesh,
“they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure, but He,” the
Father of spirits, “for our profit, that we might be partakers of His
holiness.” Now this word, “be partakers”
is not partake but it means to receive.
Now here’s something quite strange and you ought to stop here and not
read this too fast or else you’re going to misunderstand the point. It says “that you might receive
holiness.” Now who is this addressed
to? Believers or unbelievers? Well, if you look at verse 10 it’s obviously
referring to believers because verse 8 has defined all that partake are
believers. Well, if verse 8 has spoken
of this as believers, then it must be that believers can go on in time before
they receive God’s holiness. In other
words, you can have salvation and after salvation this holiness is
attained.
Now what is this
talking about? Some second baptism of
the Holy Spirit that occurs after salvation?
No, because you are baptized with the Holy Spirit at the point of
salvation. So what does this holiness
mean? To understand this let’s go back
to the adoption illustration. Here let’s
say December 10, 1951 you were adopted into this family; that was the legal
time of your adoption. At that time you
receive the name of the family. The name
of the family would be the character of the family so this name was received
legally. Now the name speaks of
character, and when we become Christians we receive Christ’s holiness. This is taught to us in such passages as 1
Corinthians 1, so we know that our holiness by position is there. Christ is made unto us our righteousness. So that was, so to speak, given on December
10, 1951. But after you have come into
the family and legally are part of the family, what has to happen? Well, there has to be this adjustment period,
until you get with that particular family, until you grow up, until you
mature. And that may take to December
10, 1971. So you, although legally are
part of the family back December 10, 1951 actually you may not be part of the
family as far as it’s character is concerned until 20 years later.
Now that’s the
same thing that’s mentioned here. “That
we might become,” or “we might receive His holiness.” I don’t think there’s a parent here that
doesn’t catch the point. You know what
your kids are and sometimes you wish they weren’t your kids, especially when they
do something that embarrasses you, have to go to the John in the front row and
everybody knows it’s yours, so you know what it means to have a child of yours
that’s your own and you wish it wasn’t.
And then you also know what it means, many of you who have worked long
and hard with your children, who have sweated it out, stayed up nights, have
spent time with them, you know what a pleasure it gives you when you see your
child behave the way you want him to and accomplish something. And you say that’s my son or that’s my
daughter, and you’re proud of them. All
right, that’s what it means when the Father… with our holiness here. The holiness means that He is pleased that we
are now acting the way we should.
Now if you would
understand this it would cause many of you to relax because what happens is
that we have, particularly religious people, get up tight over this thing. And in fundamental circles we have gobs of
legalism. And here’s where it gets
started. We have some person who’s been running along here for 20 or 30 years
and then somebody becomes a Christian, at a point in time, and it may take them
2 or 3 years to get rid of some quirky behavior patterns that just seem to bug
this older Christian. I know some that
are particularly irritated, say by smoking or something, and with me it wasn’t
an issue one way or the other since I never smoked, so I don’t know what the
problem is one way or the other, I’m just not familiar with it. But the point is that some people make a big
issue out of this. So here’s this person
that doesn’t smoke; we’ll just take a common illustration. And here’s somebody that became a Christian
and they’re all excited and so they come up with a Bible and they’re talking
about boy, look it, I want to share this with you, I’ve seen this new truth in
the Word of God. And so this person
sitting here just gets smoked out and wonders what’s going on and while they
choke their way through, they can’t stand this.
And so they begin to pass around a few snotty remarks about this person. Well, if he’s a Christian let’s see him act
like one, this kind of thing. And that’s
how legalism gets started in a Christian fellowship.
Now those of you
who have this tendency, you just relax.
God is their Father and he till tend to it on His time schedule. And my experience has been you’re not going
to speed the process up by your remarks one way or the other; in fact, probably
you’ll just retard the process. So just
keep it buttoned up and be patient because if the Father is in the job of
training His children the Father will train the children as they adhere to the
Word so just relax about new believers that may be around that have annoying
behavior patterns. That is part of
growing up in the family of God.
Hebrews 12:11,
“Now no chastening for the present seems to be joyous,” this is the last verse
in the motivation, “but grievous; nevertheless, afterward it yields the
peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them that are exercised thereby.” We’ll start this verse by looking at the end
of the verse. The word “exercised” is
perfect tense; we have a lot of perfect tenses in this passage which means that
whatever this process, however long it took, is looked upon as a unit with the
results that continue down to the present time.
And the word is the word from which we get gymnasium, exercised; second
time it occurs in this epistle. The
other place it occurs is Hebrews 5. And
so this means that these people are exercised by the Father’s training program
inside the family. And after they are
exercised, and repeat, only after they are exercised do they enjoy “the
peaceable fruit of righteousness.” Fruit
is a result, it is the produce, it is something that comes out after all the
exercise.
Those of you who
have been on an athletic team or you’ve trained in some way like that, you know
what it means to exercise and exercise over and over and over and over and over
and over again and it seems like the season never gets there, and it just seems
why go through all this agony of exercising.
Now again, I think there’s a deterioration in our culture right in the
area of athletics and sports. We have
too many spectators and not enough participators, and this has caused the New
Testament, actually, to become ineffective.
Here’s why: Paul and men like the writer of Hebrews, evidently were
participants in some athletic contests of some sort because they know enough
about it that lead you to believe they weren’t just spectators; these men were
involved at some point in their life in some athletics, it might have been ping
pong but it was something. And they knew
what it meant to be trained and to go through that long agonizing period.
I think it’s
another commentary on our own day that we have so few people that are patient
enough to get through the training that is necessary to become marvelous
believers. And this verse speaks of the
exercise that must be had, where you become a Christian at this point in time
and your problems do not disappear and it may mean that for months and months
and months and even years you’re going to have to go through training,
training, training, training, training before you ever taste of the “fruit of
righteousness.” And you may get down to
the point where you feel I’ve just about had it, I can’t take this any more
kind of thing, I’m at the end of my rope and so forth, all the excuses. But the Word of God says that’s because you
do not understand, you do not have the perspective, you are not occupied with
the person of Christ and you do not look down to the end of the road where “the
peaceable fruit of righteousness” is.
Why is “the fruit of righteousness” called “peaceable?” For two reasons. This fruit of +R, +R means it conforms to
God’s standards, this is experience. In
other words, what is happening here is that you have the formation of +R
learned behavior patterns. When these
begin to develop in your soul then two things are going to happen. Both of these things that happen cause peace
to occur.
The first thing
that happens is that your conscience and your mind are at peace with one
another. And all of that energy that is
dissipated in the inner thought struggle, in the inner thought life, fighting
constantly between the mind and the conscience, the mind and the conscience,
what am I going to do, I know I’m out of it and I’ve failed, all the guilt and
all the rest of it, is not going to be there.
There is such a thing as a godly pride.
Now I have to be careful because pride is a very dangerous word, but
there is such a thing as godly pride; it’s very similar to those of you who
have done something very worthwhile and you’re proud of your achievement; you
don’t think of it as pride in the bad sense of the word but you are proud of
accomplishing something. Well, that’s the same thing that happens here. You have a sense of accomplishment in the
Christian life and that has fantastic repercussions deep down into the depths
of your very soul and that is the peace that nothing else can give. And that peace, this author is saying in
verse 11, is worth years of training to get hold of… years of it!
Secondly, with
other men, peace with other people because you don’t have to be threatened by
what they think or what they feel. You
don’t have to run your life by what someone else believes or they don’t believe
because deep down in the depth of your soul you know that you are right and you
know that you are acceptable with the Father and you can look any man straight
in the eye and never have to worry or feel threatened. That is “the peaceable fruit of
righteousness.”
Let’s conclude
with Hebrews 12:12-13, these are specific details that the author asks us to do
and to watch for. “Wherefore, lift up
the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees; [13] And make straight paths
for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the way; but let it
rather be healed.” Verse 12 is a
quotation from Isaiah 35:3 and it was given to the nation Israel as they were
going into captivity. The “hands that
hang down, and the feeble knees” were the citizens that experienced the shock
of the great disaster of 586 BC. In 586
BC Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian armies moved into the land, destroyed the
land, they slaughtered many people. When
they led the great march out of the land the first thing they did was kill off
anybody about under age 10, because they didn’t want stragglers on the death
march across the Arabian desert, so they killed off everybody, usually with the
parents watching, anybody under 10 was just simply slaughtered there, on
location because they couldn’t bother with them. And anybody that was too old to walk, anybody
that wouldn’t make it, say anybody over 60 or over that they felt just couldn’t
manage, they slaughtered them. And so
with this population between 10 and 60 they took these people and they marched
them for many, many miles. Lamentations
is a book in the Old Testament that records how these people felt. It was one of the great early death marches
in history and may people survived. One
of the most famous people to survive out of this was Ezekiel and in the early
phases of it Daniel and so on.
So out of this
long, long situation of adversity there would be the “hands that hang down” and
“the feeble knees.” And Isaiah promises
in Isaiah 35, he says you survive, you get your eyes on Jehovah and you’re
going to make it and you’re going to go over into that enemy land of Babylon
and pretty soon you’re going to turn that land upside down and you are not
going to be blotted from history. God has
sovereignly promised by the Abrahamic Covenant that in 586 the nation would to
down but that nation will go on forever; Israel will never be destroyed and
these people could destroy themselves if they got their eyes on their own
problems. But what were they to do? To get their eyes on the Lord and they were
going to through that march and they were going to survive and in 70 years the
Jews had the entire economic system of Babylon under their strict control. All Babylonian money within 70 years of this
date were three banking houses in the city of Babylon; every one of them was
Jewish. So the Jews managed to conquer
that culture. And later on, in 516 they
would come back into the land and they would re-establish the temple. So Isaiah says for the time you are
experiencing adversity, yes, your hands do hang down, your knees are feeble,
but get your eyes on the long-term objective and move.
Then Hebrews 13:13
is a quotation from Proverbs 4:26, “Make straight paths for your feet,” the
word “straight paths” refers to righteousness and this last detail in verse 13
is one of the most important details in the occupation of Christ
principle. When disaster hits and when
adversity happens to you and you begin to see that God is disciplining, the
tendency is after you confess your sins and you realize that you’ve been wrong
and you begin to get right, still you find the Lord keeps the pressure on
simply because He wants to train you out of this bad habit, or train you into
other habit patterns that you have not yet seen. And you find, right at this point you’ll say
well I’ve confessed my sin and that doesn’t seem to change the situation. I confessed my sin and I’m still experiencing
pressure; I’m still experiencing adversity.
And so therefore the tendency right here is to get very bitter and to
develop a bitterness, and a bitterness that is directed at the Lord because you
can’t get relief from the pressure by merely confessing your sins.
Now confession, of
course, restores fellowship, but it doesn’t necessarily remove the pressure.
When you confess your sins God will allow you the assets that you can actually
enjoy the pressure. That doesn’t mean
you go around with a big smile on your face but it does mean that in the depths
of your heart there is a satisfaction because you know that you’re getting good
training, the best training that you ever can get. But the tendency is, sometimes, to phase
out.
“And make straight
paths for your feet,” means that when you face this kind of disaster you stick
with the norms and standards of the Word, even when you don’t want to. This is an admonition that is given for those
times when you are to adhere to the Word when it hurts. You emotionally may be out of it, completely
out of it, and may despise it, but it says “make straight paths for your
feet.” You stick it out anyway. You stick with the norm and standards of the
Word and you make straight paths, it means actually righteous paths; the
straightness comes from the fact that they adhere to the standards of God.
“Make straight
paths for your feet, lest,” and here’s what’s going to happen if you don’t,
right under the pressure, “that which is lame be turned out of the way,” “be
turned” is an aorist tense and it refers to a believer that gets going on this
thing, maybe he confesses and it doesn’t do any good and so he develops bitter
mental attitudes and finally he’s turned out of the way. What does that mean? He goes into very severe forms of discipline
and can even commit the sin unto death where God just simply removes the
believer from this life physically. It
can be a very, very unhappy situation; that is a believer being turned out of
the way because of a bitter attitude toward the Lord.
“…bur let it
rather be healed,” and “let it” is a passive tense and what this means is that
we are going to have to let God do the healing.
Notice it doesn’t say heal it yourself, go out and get a Band-aid and
heal it yourself. That’s not what it says;
you let the Lord take care of it. And
it’s going to smart and it’s going to sting and it’s going to hurt, and the
Bible nowhere promises the believer freedom from this kind of thing. Don’t buy this charismatic baloney that is
passed around this city by the ton, that you’ve got to get the joy, joy, joy,
of something. Now there is such a thing
as Christian joy but I think you understand what I mean. This business that argues that it’s not right
for any believer ever to have a trial
and if you have some physical malady and if you have some physical
disease, that’s not God’s will for your life, come to us and we’ll heal
you. You substitute one problem for
another one, that’s all that’s going to do. So don’t buy the line.
You have seen in
Hebrews 12 the proper divine viewpoint of adversity and there’s joy in it but
it’s not a superficial joy, it’s a real deep long-term abiding joy in the face
of temporal adversity.
With our heads
bowed….