THE LAW OF DISCIPLINE
THE LAW OF DISCIPLINE
Deuteronomy 8: 3 As man is faulty and in everything imperfect, if God has to do with him, He must correct him, and the more He has to do with him in the scene he is in the more He must correct him. If God is ruling the earth He necessarily judgeth respecting every man’s work impartially. If I am nearer to Him as Israel was, He, because of Himself, requires of me intelligent conformity to His will and in proportion to my nearness. Therefore now, as His children through Christ Jesus, His aim and purpose is that we should be partakers of His holiness. I could be no nearer to Him relationally and therefore He requires that I should be in the greatest moral nearness even to His own holiness.
Then there must be discipline, only more stringent and exacting according to the nearness of our relationship to God, which in itself testifies to us of the closeness and greatness of our relationship. I should [p. 197] not require from a servant what I should expect from a son, but the very fact of my expecting it from the latter, nay, even in insisting on having it, proves to him that I regarded him as my son.
Discipline must be, but there is a law, or principle, on which God teaches and leads on His people, and that is from the lower to the higher. The qualities for the higher are induced and discovered in the lower. God keeps the best in reserve, the good wine until now. You are prepared for the better; you will appreciate it more by learning to depend on God in the inferior. In difficulty you ascertain the amount and worth of your resources. As you have learned your resources in God you are prepared for deliverance - the good wine. One learns in the difficulty the necessity of looking to God, and the deliverance in blessing is not vouchsafed until we do cry to Him for help, and this is practically the difference between two in the same measure of sufferings. The one suffers and writhes under it, the other cries unto God and looks only to Him for deliverance.
We see in Psalm 17 four classes of deliverance, which I suppose may include all the varieties of deliverance vouchsafed to us, but the deliverance is always with a manifestation of His power in grace that the soul is brought into a higher place than it occupied before because of His deliverance, though the deliverance was needed because of chastening and discipline on account of failure. The discipline in each case had the desired effect; the soul felt its position and cried unto God, and then the deliverance was of such an order that through the discipline you are brought into a deeper knowledge of God; you attained a better position than you had previously known. If the law of discipline is so evident when failure called for the discipline, how much more shall we see it when it is more a preparation for a better state. Thus the witnesses of God were prepared in every age by the [p. 198] very trials they endured in their testimony. It was always the evening with them before the morning; they learned what it was to be dependent and then entered into the fruition of their dependence.
Enoch pleased God, but he walked here three hundred years before actual translation; so with Abraham and David, darkness precedes and ushers in their brighter scenes, Paul is in prison at Rome before his soul is so occupied with the heavenly position of the church that he writes about it. John is in Patmos before all the future history of the world is disclosed to him and Christ’s future glory on earth. Heaviness may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. God’s purpose is that the nearer we are to Him the nearer we should be in holiness, that is, morally; His heart desires to have us nearer Himself, and therefore He disciplines in order that we may pass over from the lower ground into the higher, because His discipline when effectual always puts us higher than we were before we needed it - morally higher even though reputedly lower.