#DailyDevotion There Are Times God Disciplines Us As Sons
Psalm 44 9But now You have rejected us and brought disgrace on us; You don’t go out with our armies. 10You make us turn back from the enemy, and those who hate us plunder us as they please. 11You surrender us like sheep to be slaughtered, and scatter us among the nations. 12You sell Your people cheap, and don’t make much by the price You get.
Based on the previous verses the rest of this Psalm is very difficult to understand under the covenant the LORD made with His people Israel. The Psalmist declares the innocence of the people. If they had made true statements, how can the rest of the Psalm be true? How can they be rejected by the LORD and the LORD not go out with their armies? How could they be plundered? How could they be sold cheap? It truly makes no sense to us or to them. We feel like we have been left holding the bag.
It can only be made sense of in Christ and in light of the Church. Christ is the only true and faithful Israelite. Yet see how the Father disciplines Him by sending Him into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. See the agony of the Son as the Father disciplines Him in the Garden, in the courts of the Sanhedrin, Pilate and Herod. Look upon Christ’s chastisement upon the cross.
The Church then shares and participates in the suffering of Christ. So the book of Hebrews writes at length:
Heb. 12 4In your struggle against sin you haven’t yet resisted to the point where your blood has flowed. 5And you have forgotten the encouragement spoken to you as sons: My son, don’t think lightly of the Lord’s training or give up when He corrects you. 6The Lord corrects whom He loves, and He whips everyone He accepts as His son. 7What you endure is to correct you. God is treating you as His sons. Is there a son whom his father doesn’t correct? 8All sons are corrected; if you’re not corrected, you’re not sons but are illegitimate. 9Furthermore, our natural fathers used to correct us, and we respected them. Shouldn’t we much more be willing to put ourselves under the authority of the Father of spirits and live? 10They corrected us for a short time as it seemed best to them. But He corrects us for our good, to have us share His holiness. 11While we’re being corrected, it always seems unpleasant and painful. But after we’ve been trained, correction gives us the peaceful fruit of righteousness.
Israel is God’s son. Jesus is God’s Son. We are God’s children in Christ Jesus. The LORD then is disciplining Israel in these verses. He is treating them as sons. He is treating us as He treated His only-begotten Son.
13You make our neighbors scorn us, and those around us to mock and make fun of us. – 14You make us an object of ridicule among the nations so that people shake their heads at us. 15All day long I see my disgrace, and my face is covered with shame, 16because of the voice of those who insult and revile us, because of the enemy and the avenger.
Indeed Christ Jesus went through this and experienced this for us. We will go through it too as His Church as the LORD disciplines us so we may live and receive from Him the peaceful fruit of righteousness. We experience these things so we may share in the holiness of God our Father and our LORD Jesus Christ.
O Wise and Gracious Father, when we experience suffering in our lives help us to recall Your promise that You are disciplining us as sons to the effect that we shall share in Your holiness and reap from it the peaceful fruit of righteousness. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.