Discipline as Part of God's Love

One of our challenges in studying God and speaking about God is that all of our efforts automatically fall short. We can spend a lifetime trying to understand and know all there is to know about God only to decide like Thomas of Aquinas that all we have found out is like “straw.” We emphasize some characteristics and minimize others. Still others we can not even hope to comprehend.

Still, the effort is worth it. To love someone is to want to know more about them. Think of a man and a woman in a new found romance. They spend every minute they can in each other’s company trying to discover everything about their beloved, yet even a lifetime spent together will not accomplish that task. If getting to fully know another human being is beyond our capabilities, how much more so is getting to fully know God.

We do get glimpses, however. All of scripture gives us images of God. Jesus came to show us the Father and bring us into a personal relationship with Him. He invited us to call God “Abba,” a very intimate title similar to “Daddy.” Obviously, we have a God that loves us and cares for our well-being. This gives us great reason to rejoice. And yet, as that tremendous love has been emphasized in recent history, many have lost sight of one of the aspects of that love – God as disciplinarian.

We don’t like to think of God as punishing us. The image of God as an judge held court for so long that the pendulum swung fully the other way so that we now have an image of God that excludes that aspect of His personality. We correctly think of God as merciful and ever ready to forgive, but just as a Daddy readily forgives his children, he also doles out some corrective measures at times. God doesn’t do this punitively, as punishment for its own sake, but rather to help us, his children, grow in grace and stay on the right road.

St. Paul in his letter to the Hebrews tells us “God is treating you as his sons. Has there ever been any son whole father did not train him? If you were not getting this training, as all of you are, then you would be not sons but bastards. Besides, we have all had our human fathers who punished us, and we respected them for it; all the more readily ought we to submit to the Father of spirits, and so earn life. . . Of course, any discipline is at the time a matter for grief, not joy; but later, in those who have undergone it, it bears fruit in peace and uprightness.” (Heb 12:7-11 NJB)

Suffering is hard to accept under any circumstances and there are obviously times when bad things happen for no apparent reason. God can always bring some good out of every bad situation. Sometimes, however, God does allow us to suffer the unfortunate consequences of bad decisions we have made in an effort to encourage us to make a “course correction.” God is our loving Father and He always has our best eternal interests at heart. To fail to acknowledge that God’s discipline is part of His love is to try to fit God into the image of Him that we would like to have instead of seeking to discover God for who He is.