Hebrews Lesson
202 June 24, 2010
NKJ Isaiah 26:3 You will keep him
in perfect peace, Whose mind is stayed on You, Because he trusts in You.
Open your Bibles to Hebrews 12. What I want to start
with this evening is just a review as we think our way through what the writer
of Hebrews is saying. He starts
off in verse 1 (which really should be linked more to chapter 11) with
presenting a conclusion from all of these Old Testament examples cited in
chapter 11.
NKJ Hebrews 12:1 Therefore we also,
That is in addition to all these great Old Testament
examples.
since we are surrounded by so great
a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so
easily ensnares us, and let us run
with endurance the race that is set before us,
We have a race metaphor here, an athletic contest. The
imagery here is of a contest taking place before witnesses. This is all
metaphorical just by way of illustration that because there are those who've
gone before us who have also run the same race then we too need to do the same
thing. You set aside the sin through confession of sin. This is not clean up
your life, pull yourself up by your own spiritual or moral bootstraps, clean
everything out and then run the race because you can't do that. The picture is
of a positional cleansing or forgiveness - rather experiential cleansing that
occurs when we confess our sins.
The focus is verse 2, occupation with Christ.
NKJ Hebrews 12:2 looking unto Jesus, the author
…who is the pioneer
and finisher of our faith,
The completer.
..the one who fulfills all the Old Testament examples,
types and everything comes together.
who for the joy that was set before
Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand
of the throne of God.
So endurance – the Greek word here hupomone is the key idea that we can
trace all the way through this - endurance and discipline in a sense of
training. So Jesus is able to endure the cross by focusing on the end result,
which is the joy set before Him. The joy set before Him is what comes when He
is accepted into the presence of the Father and sits at the right hand of the
throne of God.
Then again we’re the challenged to think about Jesus.
NKJ Hebrews 12:3 For consider Him
Or, meditate on Him.
who endured such hostility
Reflect! Take time to think about what must have been
involved in Jesus endurance there at the end, everything that He faced: the
physical beatings, the rejection, the hostility, the physical torture involved
in the whipping and everything else prior to being put on the cross, the
physical pain of the cross; all of which was really nothing compared to the
pain and the horror that occurred when the sins of the world were imputed to
Him.
from sinners against Himself,
So think about that as an example.
lest you become weary and
discouraged in your souls.
NKJ Hebrews 12:4 You have not yet resisted to bloodshed,
…as He did.
striving against sin.
Then verse 5 comes back to the key principle in 5 to
11which deals with training, training, training.
Now I’m not going to use the chart tonight, but I did
have some more of those charts we passed out last time in case anybody didn't
get one of these flowcharts? That maps out sort of the general plan, the
general procedure that God has for every believer, sort of a flowchart so that
as you go forward in obedience walking by the Spirit then God produces through
endurance maturity. When we’re in disobedience living according to the flesh then
that produces human good. It has no long term, (no eternal value, no spiritual
value) and ends up where we basically can destroy our lives in self-induced
misery and by discipline.
The principle of divine discipline is introduced in
verse 5. As I pointed out last time this is not the idea we normally think of
as divine discipline only in terms of the negative, which is how this is
translated: "the chastening of the Lord". That is a negative concept
that we see here, but this is not the word that we find in the original. The
word that we find in the original is the word in the right hand box there, paideia, which has to do with
upbringing, training, instruction and discipline in that sense, not discipline
in the punishment sense. It may include that. It’s the broader sense that
includes both the positive for motivation to do well and motivation or
encouragement when you have done well plus the negative punishment when we
haven't done well. For the most part as I pointed out, for the most part when
you read through Hebrews 12, but chastening in the KJV is usually the word the author chose to translate paideia.
Hebrews 12:5-6 as I pointed out last time is a quote
from the Old Testament in Proverbs 3:11-12. The same idea is found in both
places that we are not to reject or despise (belittle, have disrespect) for the
discipline of God. I really like this idea that we have in the Old Testament
verse – the word musar
indicating this binding: that the purpose of discipline is to bring a control
into life. It’s the idea of self-control. It's the idea of self-discipline.
I remember when I was in elementary school. Back in
those days (some of you remember) this) they had certain subjects like
geography and arithmetic and language were all graded. You got A through F in
those subjects. But on the other side of the page they had a variety of
character traits one of which was self- discipline. You got a check, plus or
minus. My dad had his old K-bar Marine Corps knife that he had with him in
World War II. He said I could have that if for three six weeks in a row if I
would get a plus in self-discipline. Teachers must have been a lot harder in
elementary school because I had to wait until I got into junior high. I think
in elementary school their view is everybody starts with a minus and has to
work their way up; but in junior high everybody starts with an E and he has to
do something overt to drop down to something less. I had to wait until I was in
the seventh grade before I got that K-bar knife. Now I hope I find it when I go through all my dad’s stuff. I’ve
been doing that recently just to bring some order into things. Just recently I
went out to his garage and pulled out his Marine Corps trunk. It had been opened
maybe twice since 1945. I found a little New Testament in there that my
grandmother had given him when he went into the Marine Corps, plus two or three
other maps that he had and some other things - various insignia and things like
that that he had in the Marine Corps. It has been interesting to go back
through that material.
But the idea there for discipline is that idea of
self-management, self-control. That means that there's a restriction put on our
desires. We’re not just going to do anything we want to whenever we want to
without any sense of self-control. That’s same idea that you get in terms of
discipline as I pointed out last time in Proverbs that foolishness is bound up
in the heart of the child.
Now when we come to Hebrews 12:6, the New Testament
uses the term mastigao for scourging
which is parallel to chastening. So you have the two sides there.
NKJ Hebrews 12:6
For whom the LORD loves He chastens,
Disciplines -
paideuo
And scourges every son whom He
receives."
So that intensifies the idea of the discipline. It
focuses on the negative side - mastigao
which means to chastise, to whip, to scourge – a very harsh word for the
negative of divine punishment.
Then in verse 7 – I think here we’re moving into
some new territory. You have an unusual construction in the Greek. In the
English for some reason this is translated as if it’s a conditional clause and
there's no conditional clause in the Greek at all. In fact it's almost an
incomplete sentence. It’s as if the writer’s moving fast; and he drops
something out. All you have is the object. The verb is an indicative mood verb.
It’s not a command to endure chastening, it is an indicative mood which merely
descriptive – "you endure chastening". It is simply a
descriptive statement not a prescriptive statement. “You endure discipline” or
“you endure training.” There's no “if” there at all. I'm not at all convinced
that that should be supplied. It is simply a basic statement and very likely
could be indicated or translated as purpose clause, “that you endure training”
indicating the reality that the believer will endure training.
Again this brings us to the key word here – hupomene. Hupomene is the noun. Hupomeno is the verb. Meno
is the verb here – same meaning which means to endure. It’s a compound
word from the preposition hupo
meaning under and meno meaning to
remain. Now when we come under a lot of adversity, the last thing we want to do
is stay in that position. Most of us want to somehow try to get away from the
difficulty, change the circumstances - operating on a false assumption that if
we have the right circumstances we’ll be happy. Happiness biblically speaking,
real happiness is above the circumstances. So we are to be happy in the
circumstances whatever they are and to remain in them because of our mental
attitude and our focus. Jesus is able to maintain joy even in the midst of the
suffering on the cross because His focus is on the joy set before Him. He's
thinking about the endgame.
So the idea of endurance is to remain under without
caving in to sin. It is staying in
the adversity without converting it to stress in the soul by trying to handle
it through various human viewpoint techniques, which simply in the language of
stress management, all it does is manage stress (move it around a little bit
rather than conquer and deal with it). So we are enduring discipline.
Then the next phrase that is stated there is that God
(the way it’s translated) deals with you as with sons.” Some passages translate
it “God treats you”, “God deals with you as with sons.” It's an interesting
word here. As far as I can find it's the only place that this word is used in
the New Testament with this particular meaning.
So let me back up here. “We endure chastening.” The word chastening there again is paideuo for upbringing or training. We endure training. Then God deals with you as with sons. So
we have the Greek verb prosphero,
which means to bring something or to offer something and every other use that
we have in the New Testament is related to offering. We talk about Christ’s offering
of Himself on the cross. Many times it was used in Hebrews 8, Hebrews 9,
Hebrews 10 talking about how the high priest offers a sacrifice in the
Temple. All of those have to do
with some sort of ritual offering. This is the primary word to describe that. But
there is a classic meaning of the word that is not found in the New Testament
though it was a common use in older Greek.
Now the writer of Hebrews is known for writing more in
a style where he's influenced by more of an older classical form of Greek. He's
still writes Koine. Everybody
spoke Koine Greek in the New Testament era. Nobody’s walking around speaking
antiquated Greek. They’re not speaking Attic Greek. They’re not speaking
Boeotian. They’re not speaking any of these other ancient forms of Greek. But
there were certain idioms that had come into the language a hundred or two or
three hundred years earlier that still continued. We have the same thing in
English. Because of the endurance of the King James translation, there are
certain idioms that are still in use even though most people don't know what they
mean because we live in an era where people really don't know their Bibles
anymore. So they hear these sayings that come out of the Bible, but they don't
know what they mean. They don't know it has its origin in the Bible. It’s
Elizabethan English, but it still has a meaning as idiom in modern English. The
same thing was true about Greek. You had idioms and words that had a much older
history in the Greek language, but it had meaning in the current time period of
the first century.
It's not as if the writer knew older forms of Greek. He
just comes out of a culture (a background, an education) where he used more of
an upper class aristocratic form of Greek that had more idioms in it related to
Classical Greek. So he uses this word here not in the way he's used it
previously in terms of bringing an offering, but using it here in the sense of
a person's conduct or how someone would treat another person or deal with
another person. The 20 times that the word is used in Hebrews; this is the one
time where it has the idea of God dealing with somebody (treating somebody);
how God behaved toward an individual.
Here we have the simple statement: not "if",
but simply “you endure chastening. “God is dealing with you as with sons.” So
it's a statement with a purpose that you endure chastening, endure
discipline.
Then a second statement: God deals or God is treating
you. It's a present and so I think the idea of ongoing action; God is treating
you as sons is a better way of understanding that. God is treating you as
sons.
NKJ Hebrews 12:7
… for what son is there whom a father
does not chasten?
He is going to bring in the idea here of legitimacy. This
is a common thing. If you were in a family, it is the role of the role of the
father to train the children. It's
the role the father to teach the children and to train them and prepare them to
be adults. The role of parenting is to train children to be adults. Don't train
children to be able to socialize and work with their peers. The goal is to
teach and train children to be able to function and operate with adults. So
parents should think through a training procedure for how they're going to
teach their children everything from manners to the Bible to helping them go
beyond whatever it is they're being taught in school. Either you have children
in public school, then you need to be aware of the fact that the education
standards and curricula have been dumbed-down so much over the last hundred
years or so that if you just rely on what is happening in the public school
classroom, then your children are going to miss out on a tremendous
amount.
I'll never forget the first time I really came to
understand that was when I was in my first church. We had taken the old quarterlies that Betty Thieme and
Ursula Kemp had written. I was trying to find copies of those and put those
together to use in the in our Sunday school class. I called up Ursula Kemp. We
were talking.
She said, “Robby I don't think you can use those
today,” because in her experience the children (this was about 1981) children
at that time weren’t as well educated in the school classroom in public school
as they had been 20 years earlier. So it was more difficult to teach the kids
in Sunday school. That's even truer today. This is again one of the big
problems facing evangelical churches especially churches like ours that are
more focused on teaching at a greater level teaching the Word and teaching
doctrine to kids and getting them to think because no place else in their
environment does that happen. Parents have to be teaching their children to think
and to think critically. They won't learn critical thinking skills from anyone
else. If they don't get in the home, they won't get it. They’ll become the
products of the typical state sponsored education system and come out the other
end and not be very well educated or be able to think very well.
So the universal truth though has been that it is the
role of the father to train the children. Too often what happens in our society
is that somehow it gets delegated to the mother, and that's true. Certain
things can be handled and probably should be handled by the mother but
ultimately the children need to know that the father is the one who is in
charge and the father is the one who sets the standard. Even though he may not
be involved in everything, he needs to be involved a lot more than is usually
true in most homes.
The other day I was having lunch with Joe Wall who I've
known for many, many years. Joe was the pastor of Spring Branch Community Church
a couple different times. I first met Joe back when I was going off to college.
He was a frequent speaker at Camp Peniel. I knew several people who went over
to Spring Branch Community Church. Well about a month or so ago Joe and I were
having lunch together up in Tomball and we were talking. Somehow we got off on to this subject
of the role of fathers.
He said, “You know I had a deacon at Spring Branch
back in the 70’s who would get up every morning an hour earlier than he needed
to. He got up every morning at 4:30; and he would study the Bible – not
just listen to a tape, not just listen to somebody teach – but study the
Bible on his own for about an hour and a half. Then he would – he did
that every morning. Then every evening he had a Bible study with his three children
to teach them the Bible. He clearly understood the role of a parent.
I said, “Well Joe, who was that?”
He told me who it was and I remembered him. One of his
sons was a little bit younger than me. We had counseled together at Camp Peniel.
He also had a daughter who married a guy who graduated from Dallas Seminary and
had gone on. They have been on the mission field for about 35 years now. The
oldest son had also been involved in on some sort of ministry for many years
and just recently died of cancer. But the ministry that those children have had
and had throughout their lives is the direct result of that training from a
father who understood what his mission was; that he needed to be in the Word,
learning the Word and then teaching it to his children especially terms of
their own context and their own situation.
It's the father's role to do the spiritual training in
the home. It's not the mother's role. It's not the Sunday school role or the
prep school role or the church’s role. It is specifically the father's role to
make sure those children understand the Word and to train them and prepare them
for life.
So the writer of Hebrews asks this rhetorical
question.
NKJ Hebrews 12:7
…for what son is there whom a father
does not chasten?
Then he answers it in verse 8.
NKJ Hebrews 12:8
But if you are without chastening,
of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate and not sons.
Here he uses a first class condition, but he’s using
it in the sense of a debater’s technique or assuming it to be true for the sake
of argument. If you're without chasing (assuming that you are and he would not
be saying that of the recipients) if you are without chastening of which all
have become partakers.
That phrase contradicts the nuance there of the first
phrase. He’s saying:
NKJ Hebrews 12:8
But if you are without chastening,
But we know you’re not. I'm just assuming it's true
for the sake of argument. On the other hand he then states in the next clause:
of which all have become partakers,
then you are illegitimate and not sons.
All of us as believers have become participants in
divine training. He uses the word paideia
again.
If you are without training of which all have become
partakers, then you are illegitimate and not sons.”
This is the only example I know of in Scripture where
we have any kind of an idea of a way to qualify whether or not you are really
saved. When you get into the whole debate with free grace versus Lordship, the
lordship gospel advocates say that you're not saved if you have certain kinds
of sin in your life. That's just not true. Every Christian sins. Everybody
still has a sin nature. What this verse is saying is that the evidence you're
not really saved is if you don't go through divine discipline.
Now nobody else can look in your life and say whether
or not you're going through divine discipline. Now you can look in your life
and decide whether or not God’s ever disciplined. If you think that “Well you
know God never has disciplined me for disobedience”, then maybe you're not
saved. That's what the author’s saying. But I would say looking at the audience
here, most of you I know well enough to know you've gone through a little
divine discipline. That sort of validates the fact that you are indeed a believer.
That is what the writer of Hebrews is saying here is
that someone who is a believer (someone who is in the royal family of God) will
go through divine discipline. He is stating that in sort of a negative way but
the force of his argument is that if you’re a believer – he’s talking to
these Jewish background believers (probably priestly believers who were who
were saved and have been going through persecution and rejection from the
families and other things) and what he's telling them is the fact that you're
going through this kind of adversity and hostility and rejection is part of
God’s training program that validates and affirms the fact that you are saved.
He is stating a positive principle that if you're a believer you are going
through training. Therefore you are a believer. This is exactly what you can expect in order to affirm the
reality of their situation: that they haven't been forgotten by God.
NKJ Hebrews 12:8
But if you are without chastening,
Discipline
of which all have become partakers,
then you are illegitimate and not sons.
So what does he mean when he comes to speak of
sons?
NKJ Hebrews 12:9
Furthermore, we have had human
fathers who corrected us, and we paid
them respect. Shall we not much more
readily be in subjection to the Father of spirits and live?
Here he's raising the analogy that just as in a human
home and human family we expect fathers to correct us, how much more should we
expect the Father (our heavenly Father) to correct us?
Then verse 10:
NKJ Hebrews 12:10
For they indeed for a few days
chastened us
That is, they being the human fathers. Paideuo - brought that discipline and
training into our lives.
as seemed best to them, but He
That is a heavenly Father.
for our profit,
That would be a spiritual profit.
that we may be partakers of His holiness.
That brings in the whole principle of sanctification. Hagiotes is the Greek word there for
holiness. The point that he is making is that God disciplines us so that that
builds experiential sanctification into our lives – experiential growth.
Then he comes to a conclusion in verse 11.
NKJ Hebrews
12:11 Now no chastening
Training.
seems to be joyful for the present,
but painful;
Why? Because you're learning to do what you don't
naturally want to do and not do what you normally want to do. It seems painful.
nevertheless, afterward it yields
the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
Now the doctrine that underlies this whole section
from verse 3 down to verse 11 is a doctrine related to the doctrine of adoption
and being a member of the royal family of God. So I want to look at one other
key verse in relationship to that which is Galatians 4:6 and then go into the
review of the doctrine of adoption.
NKJ Galatians
4:6 And because you are sons, God has
sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out, "Abba,
Father!"
That initial statement there “because you are sons”
assumes the reality of regeneration in every believer. As a mark of
regeneration every believer is indwelt by God the Holy Spirit. At the instant
of salvation (at the instant of regeneration) God sends the Holy Spirit into
(to indwell) every single believer.
The cry here (Abba) is the diminutive form of awb, which is the Hebrew word for Father,
the Aramaic word for father. Ab would
be comparable to saying father, a little more formal term. But a more informal
word and a much more intimate word would be “daddy.” That's the equivalent to
Abba. So it’s emphasizing the intimacy and the closeness of the relationship
between the believer and the Father.
So up what Paul is saying here is God sends forth His
Spirit. The Holy Spirit indwells us and this is part, the sign, of our adoption
that brings us into the family of God and is the mark of our close intimate
relationship with the Father who in turn is now going to be engaged in a
training program for us.
NKJ Galatians
4:7 Therefore you are no longer a slave
but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.
Now in this context what Paul was talking to the
Galatians about was the problem of the Judiazers who were coming in.
These were those of the Jewish background who were
saying, “No, it's okay to believe Jesus is the Messiah; but you don't really
get it all by trusting in Jesus as Messiah. If you really want to get the
second blessing, you have to also obey the Torah. You have to obey all of the
Law. You have to be circumcised, go through all the rituals, all of these,
everything else in order to have a real relationship with God.”
He is using adoption here to show that there is a
difference between the relationship of the believer to God in the Old Testament
because of the Law and the believer in the New Testament. He uses the Roman
form of adoption. The Romans had one form of adoption; the Greeks had another
form of adoption. As I’ll point out, Paul relates to both. He uses both
analogies depending on what he is trying to teach.
This is what the Holy Spirit is doing through the
writers of Scripture. They will take various things that are going on in the
culture and then just bring them over as an illustration or a metaphor to describe
a spiritual truth. Sometimes the emphasis in the New Testament is on more of a
Roman form and other times it’s on the Greek form. The Greek form of adoption
focuses more on an intimate relationship whereas the Roman form emphasizes more
on the legal aspect of adoption.
What Paul had said in this particular context is that
as a child (an adopted heir) is under the tutelage of someone called a pedagogue.
This is a slave whose responsibility it was to train the young child until he
reaches the age of adulthood (the age of maturity) at which point he goes
through a formal ceremony and he's recognized as an adult son. But when he is
young, he's treated like a slave even though he is the heir. The analogy that
Paul is using in Galatians 4 is that in the Old Testament it's like the young
child in the Roman system who is under a pedagogue who is training through
certain standards but then when you reach adulthood (equivalent to the Church
Age believer) then there is a different (may be similar in many ways but a
different) set of standards and responsibilities because now you're treated as
an adult child. You have a completed canon of Scripture, the indwelling and
filling of God the Holy Spirit, baptism of the Holy Spirit, things of this
nature. The emphasis then in the background of this is on the discipline that
God brings into our life as part of that training within the household.
Let's start the Doctrine
of Adoption.
NKJ 1
Corinthians 15:22 For as in
Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.
NKJ Ephesians
2:1 And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins,
We are born that way. Now that doesn't mean that we're
all evil; but that means that because of the sin nature there is that trend of
the sin nature. We’re spiritually
dead. We’re separated from God. That doesn’t mean we're going to do things as
bad as we can do them. But it does mean that we are oriented that way. We can
choose to do good as well as to do bad. But none of that is a good that would
bring credit with God because the fact is that we are born spiritually dead. A
spiritually dead person can't do anything to gain God’s merit or gain God’s
favor.
NKJ Ezekiel
36:24 "For I will take you from among
the nations,
Future - this will take place at the end of the
Tribulation, at the beginning of the kingdom.
gather you out of all countries, and
bring you into your own land.
This is that restoration of Israel to the land when
they are spiritually regenerate when the Messiah comes. What happens at that
time? I believe they're already individually regenerate; but as a nation
they’re not.
NKJ Ezekiel
36:25 "Then I will sprinkle clean
water on you, and you shall be clean;
It is a national cleansing that takes place.
I will cleanse you from all your
filthiness and from all your idols.
That is from all of their sin. This is the national
cleansing, national forgiveness.
NKJ Ezekiel
36:26 "I will give you a new heart
and put a new spirit within you;
This is a picture of the national regeneration,
recognizing that there is something missing before that has to be added in
terms of the spiritual regeneration for the nation.
I will take the heart of stone out
of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
NKJ Ezekiel
36:27 "I will put My Spirit within
you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do
them.
This then is an Old Testament recognition of a need
for a spiritual change from death to life; from being spiritually unclean to
spiritually clean.
Jesus answered and said to him,
NKJ John 3:3 Jesus answered and said to him, "Most assuredly,
I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."
Well Nicodemus said, “Well wait a minute; born again? Does that mean I have to go back into
my mother's womb and go through that process all over again?
NKJ John 3:5 Jesus answered, "Most assuredly, I say to you,
unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.
Now Jesus is talking to Nicodemus in that chapter. In
the next couple of verses Nicodemus is still confused and Jesus said:
NKJ John 3:10 Jesus answered and said to him, "Are you the
teacher of Israel, and do not know these things?
The implication is that Nicodemus ought to understand
this. Well, where would Nicodemus get the idea of rebirth from water and the
Spirit? Well we must have gotten that from someplace like Ezekiel 36:26-27
where we have this picture of cleansing that takes place. In the broader
context of Ezekiel 36, God is going to wash them with water and cleanse them
and He’s going to give them a new heart and new spirit, remove the heart of
stone and replace it with a heart of flesh. That is the location for
understanding the background with Jesus is saying to Nicodemus in John 3:5-6. From
the Old Testament to the New Testament there is this emphasis on the need for
an inner cleansing and a new birth; that man is born spiritually dead and must
be spiritually alive. Now what we see in the New Testament is that this new
birth is based on accepting Christ. We have passages such as John 1:12.
NKJ John 1:12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the
right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name:
So becoming a child of God is based on accepting or
receiving Jesus as Messiah.
NKJ Galatians
3:26 For you are all sons of God through
faith in Christ Jesus.
So they way to become and to enter into the family of
God is by faith in Christ Jesus. Another verse that we could add to this would
be Titus 3:5.
NKJ Titus 3:5 not by works of righteousness which we have done, but
according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and
renewing of the Holy Spirit,
…tying regeneration to the work of the Holy Spirit in
that verse. And it’s not by works of righteousness which we have done.
NKJ 1 John 3:2 Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not
yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we
shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.
So the first statement is now we are children of
God. At the instant of salvation
it’s clear you’ve become a child of God.
NKJ John 8:44 "You are of your
father the devil, …
… because you are a liar and that we’re not born children
of God a physical birth. We’re born children of God only by spiritual birth and
trusting in Him. Spiritual birth (or regeneration) refers to the rebirth. The
placing in the family of God comes under the term adoption. So adoption is the
term then that is used to describe the admission of the believer into the
family of God and his legal relationship to God. So it describes his admission
into the family of God and is distinct from regeneration. Regeneration
describes the rebirth; adoption describes the act of being placed into the
family.
That is the background for what we're reading here in
these verses. That is, discipline – paideuo,
the word for chastening in Hebrews 12:11.
NKJ Hebrews
12:11 Now no chastening seems to be joyful
for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable
fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
That second word for train again emphasizes of that
discipline.
Did you hear that thunder? I think we ought to close
in prayer. Remember the last time we got stuck here and we got flooded in and
we were here until midnight? Let’s bow our heads in closing prayer and leave
before we get flooded in.