by D.A. Carson
Connor S. from Crystal Lake, Illinois, asks:
Hebrews 12:6-7
reads: "For those whom the Lord loves he disciplines, and he scourges
every son whom he receives. It is for discipline that you endure; God
deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does
not discipline?"
Does this mean that hardships, sickness,
disease, and the like happen because God is disciplining his children?
(Moreover, what about hardships that happen to unbelievers? If this is
not God's discipline in their lives, then why do these events happen? Is
it God's punishment?) Does this mean every bad thing (or only some bad
things) that happens to Christians, happens because God is disciplining
us? If a Christian gets the flu, or a cold, or cancer, or gets in a car
crash, or loses a job — should these hardships be seen as God's
discipline? Of course God is sovereign over all things--but when bad
things happen to Christians, should these happenings be seen as God's
discipline, or God's soverign use of evil for our good, or results of
sin and the Fall, or all of the above?
We posed this question to D. A. Carson, professor of New Testament at
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and author
of many books, including
How Long, O Lord? Reflections on Suffering and Evil. Carson is the co-founder and president of The Gospel Coalition.
******************
It is easy to think of passages in which God sends catastrophic
judgment in a purely retributive way, without an ounce of cleansing
discipline (e.g., the destruction and death of Saul, for whom Samuel was
ordered to cease praying). It is easy to think of passages in which a
human being experiences years of suffering entirely unconnected to any
immediate human sin (e.g., the man born blind in John 9) — and in this
case one must assume, on the one hand, that the blindness was part of
living in a fallen world (he would not have been born blind had Genesis 3
never occurred), and, on the other, that in God's providence the
suffering, according to Jesus, provided an occasion for God to be
glorified through the display of Jesus' miraculous power. It is easy to
think of passages in which long-term suffering (e.g., the man paralyzed
for 38 years, John 5) and even death (1 Cor 11) is the direct result,
not of the entailments of the Fall, but of particular sins. In the first
of these two cases, the paralysis leads to Jesus' healing miracle, and
Jesus' subsequent instruction to stop sinning lest a worst thing befall
the man suggests there was a disciplining function; in the second of
these two cases, so far as the record goes, we do not know how many of
the Corinthians heeded Paul's warnings and repented, but for some it was
clearly too late (they had already "fallen asleep").
It is easy to think of passages where suffering is clearly
not deserved
for any direct offense, and where the only "explanation" given is not
so much an explanation as a powerful appeal to trust the living God
whose power and knowledge are infinitely greater than ours (Job). It
would be easy to list other passages with variations on these themes. It
is easy to remember that in the Old Testament God declares that he is
the Lord, the Healer (Exod 15:26),
while in the New Testament Jesus is disclosed as the great Physician
— but of course we must remember that God is also the sovereign Judge
who deploys the cruel Assyrians to punish his covenant people (Isa 10:5ff), and the Apocalypse warns us to flee the wrath of the Lamb.
Pastoral Implications
From such diverse passages, we should draw at least three important inferences with substantial pastoral implications.
First, we are likely to make exegetical and theological
mistakes when we take any one of these passages and treat it as if it
explains
all suffering. The biblical account of Job does not
nicely explain why people were falling ill and dying in Corinth because
of their unworthy approach to the Lord's Supper. Jesus' exhortation to
the healed paralytic in John 5 cannot be repeated to the man born blind
in John 9. Examples could easily be multiplied. Just as wise pastors
will not formulate church practice on, say, divorce and remarriage,
based on only one passage, but will instead attempt a responsible
integration, so also wise pastors will not fasten on a "one size fits
all" passage about suffering and interpret all suffering through that
one lens. A Christian would be foolish to think that
every instance of suffering he or she undergoes must
necessarily be
the result of God's disciplining hand arising out of a particular sin
— just as a Christian would be foolish to overlook the possibility that
God
may be inflicting suffering in a disciplinary fashion.
Second, in any suffering, or in any other event for that
matter, God is doubtless doing many things, perhaps thousands of things,
millions of things, even if we can only detect two or three or a
handful. A godly woman in her middle years is diagnosed with stage-four
breast cancer. What is God doing? My little brain can imagine several
possibilities. At one level, he may be providentially allowing the
effluents of the Fall to take their course, a constant reminder that it
is appointed to all of us to die, and then face judgment (Heb 9). He may
be preparing her for eternity: it is a great grace to know when you are
going to die, and prepare for it. He may be shocking her 20-something
son, who is living his life indifferent to the gospel, to prod him into
self-examination and repentance. He may use her testimony about the joy
of the Lord even in the midst of suffering to call another of her
children into vocational ministry. He may be using her as a way to teach
people in her church what it looks like to "die well," anticipating
several other deaths in the next two years. He may be teaching her
minister-husband to slow down and care about his family, and in
principle other people, instead of being endlessly busy with "the
ministry." He may be sparing her from living long enough to witness the
moral destruction of her daughter. Her funeral may be the means by which
several of her unconverted relatives, for whom she has been praying,
will come to faith — conversions for which she would happily give her
life. Perhaps one of those converts will become a Christian pastor of
rare gift whose ministry of proclamation will touch thousands. Perhaps
she is hiding some deep bitterness and hate in her life, and God is
using this means to confront her.
I've barely started a list of possible things God may be doing, and I
have a small brain. What does the omniscient God think he is doing? In
other words, sometimes we have to cover our mouths and confess, in
faith, that we cannot possibly grasp all that God is doing when someone
suffers. So why should we think in antithetical terms about how God must
be doing
this but not
that, when in reality he may be doing
this and
that and
that, and
that and. . . ? But he is trustworthy; we know that, for he sent his Son to suffer on our behalf.
Third, it follows that when we face suffering of any kind, we should use the occasion for self-examination. God
may be speaking to us in the language of a wise heavenly Father who chastens those he loves. Such chastening
may be God's response to specific sins in our lives; it
may be
a more general way of toughening us up in this broken world so we will
stop thinking that God owes us good health, or that our clean living and
organic food guarantees us long and robust life. Or it
may be
that God has a bet going on with Satan himself: think Job. So our
self-examination ought to be honest, and any repentance should be
forthright — but we should not whip ourselves into thinking that the
crippling accident we just endured was a function of our sin. Even if it
were, the remedy is always the same: flee to the Cross, and trust our
good and gracious and holy God. And it's not inconceivable that we may
conclude, with Job, that this suffering cannot be God's punishment for
specific sins in our lives.
We sometimes observe that hard cases make bad theology. But easy,
formulaic answers to questions of suffering are invariably
reductionistic — and they make bad theology, too.
Source: http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2013/01/15/how-does-god-discipline-christians/
