The Razor Between Discipline and Condemnation

“My son, do not despise the LORD’s discipline or be weary of his reproof, for the LORD reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.”

Proverbs 3:11-12

One of the most vexing questions that believers have occurs in the deep valleys of life: Am I being punished by God? That question can become even more agonizing: Am I being cut off by God? What this question is really asking is whether this suffering, or this torment by other persons, or this loss, or this dark night of the soul, is discipline or condemnation.

The difference on paper is simple enough. Discipline in this context is that training administered by some authority over us—meant to bring correction and improvement, but which resembles mere punishment. To the untrained eye, this act of love appears as an act of hate. Condemnation is not a familial act, but a legal act. It is not meant to train, not to correct, nor to improve, but rather to exact retribution, to avenge, to sentence, or to finally cast off. And on the surface of this life, these two are so intermingled as to their matter and means, that confusion is inevitable.

Therefore, our loving Father in heaven has an interest in providing for us a method by which to rightly divide between them. So it is in this Proverb that we are given the beginning of such a razor to distinguish. I say “beginning,” because as the division is made, and we search the Scriptures, it becomes ever clearer.

Doctrine. Despising the Lord’s heavy hand is the razor’s edge between discipline and condemnation.

• There is a duty to endure God’s discipline.

• There is love expressed in God’s discipline.

• There is assurance found in God’s discipline.

Those first two points are premises directly taken from the two parts to this proverb. I conclude the third point as a logical inference from those two premises.

There is a duty to endure God’s discipline.

Do not miss that the inspired author says this to his earthly son—‘My son’ (v. 11a)—so as to commend him to the ultimate Fatherly care. But it is a command; and it has two parts: ‘do not despise the LORD’s discipline or be weary of his reproof’ (v. 11b-c). The first part is more active than the second, and that is crucial to the claim that made up my big idea. A genuine Christian may often become weary; but what we call weariness is a lot like bitterness—a root that brings forth rotten fruit (cf. Heb. 12:15). So a root of weariness can become the fully developed abhorrence that despises. The priests who complained, as if God could not hear them, “What a weariness this is” (Mal. 1:13)—these were in grave danger, being more than God’s children, but also His priests. In fact, their words concealed a loathing for the ways of God.

No duty is purely negative. We are not going to refrain despising and being weary of anything that we are naturally predisposed to despising and being weary of. So we must ask: What is the opposite of these? The opposite of despising is treasuring, and the opposite of weariness is readiness. Those take transformed minds. Our trouble is what we think about God’s ways versus our ways. The truth is that we think better of ours. In a sermon on God’s hand of discipline, Charles Spurgeon said,

All repining against the Providence of God has in it the element of rebellion against the Most High! If I love my own will and if I desire my own way in preference to God’s way, I have made a god of my own wisdom, or my own affection.1

The imperatives surrounding discipline naturally include a call to repent: “Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent” (Rev. 3:19). But whether one’s sin is clearly and immediately revealed or not, the command here in the Proverb is to have a certain disposition about it. In fact, we are always more ready to make corrections when we are first able to receive it with the mind and heart. This duty makes that possible.

There is love expressed in God’s discipline.

The love of God is the ground of discipline, which means that the love of God is a ground of the pain that we experience as believers. Here is expressed as a straight proposition and then by analogy.

First, by proposition: ‘for the LORD reproves him whom he loves’ (v. 12a). To reprove (יָכַח) has the sense of correction by argument, to bring a new conviction, or at least to bring the wayward sinner back to what he knows to be true and right.

If you love someone under your care, you care that they are improved in every way. First among such ways of improvement is in knowledge and wisdom. So, “Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge” (Prov. 12:1). Why? The assumption is that discipline increases knowledge.

Second, by way of analogy: ‘as a father the son in whom he delights’ (v. 12b). Paul says that love “does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth” (1 Cor. 13:6). As a father, I cannot celebrate that which I know is poison to the soul of my children. No child should seek the mere approval of their father, but the loving approval, which must be an approval of the good, the true, and the beautiful as they take on those virtues. Another apostle, John, wrote, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth” (3 Jn. 4).

Delight begets delight. The good hand of God in discipline begets a good heart in the one who is truly His. Jeremiah Burroughs was describing what it means to not only freely submit to God’s heavy hand, but to learn delight in it:

To be well pleased with God’s hand … comes from this: not only do I see that I should be content in this affliction, but I see that there is good in it. I find there is honey in this rock, and so I do not only say, I must, or I will submit to God’s hand. No, the hand of God is good, ‘it is good that I am afflicted’.2 (cf. Ps. 119:71)

Does not a child learn more about their father in the course of time with discipline as much as any other experience with them? So it is with our Father in heaven. But one of the things we learn here will revolutionize our growing familiarity with God the Father—something that is not true at all about our earthly fathers. Here is where the analogy most breaks down. And it is something in the very nature of discipline itself.

Discipline taken as a whole is a training. Corrective discipline is one part of that. At first, it might seem that the analogy is not totally broken. Earthly fathers can discipline holistically. At our best, we can use our words, our examples, and our bringing our children into situations where they must encounter hard things that prepare them for life. In other words, we don’t wait for failure to correct. We have a vision for character formation. How much more does God have a perfect vision for the shaping of our souls? Consider the account of the man born blind.

As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him (Jn. 9:1-3).

All of this is to say, that when it comes to the discipline administered by an all-wise, all-powerful, and gracious God, it is never primarily for the sin, but for the glory of God. And that is very, very good news! Even when the discipline is corrective—to make us see the seriousness of a sin we have committed and steer us away from sinning again—even of this correction, it was all ordained from before you and I ever existed.

There is assurance found in God’s discipline.

If there is a duty to endure God’s discipline and if there is love expressed in God’s discipline, then it follows that this love is made known and proven through that endurance. And this is really only another way to say that, in the endurance, the child learns to love Him who disciplines. As the child undergoes loving discipline, the love communicated excels lesser loves, and melts away the false loves, those attachments to the evil deeds that brought about the discipline in the first place.

To do the opposite of despising is the duty and proves the love. That’s how this third point follows. That’s how one moves away from the razor’s edge and no longer wonders: Is it discipline or is it condemnation? Note that I am not saying that one is not a Christian if they never come out entirely or perfectly on the side of that razor that never wonders again, or never complains again. What I am saying is that if you want assurance through discipline, it will be on the side of contentment and familiarity with the Father’s discipline for your greatest good.

Practical Use of the Doctrine

Use 1. Instruction. God’s fatherly discipline of His children extends to them as a group. There was a pattern set for corporate fatherly disciple when, in Deuteronomy 32, God recounted how He had first “found him [Israel] in a desert land” (v. 10), and “the LORD alone guided him, no foreign god was with him” (v. 12). But the bulk of that chapter shows that God will judge this national Israel as a group because, “They stirred him to jealousy with strange gods” (v. 16). In the end, He cuts off the nation, but saves a remnant. This is true even of the flow of the Old Testament to its end, as there is, at the end of Malachi, what the prophet calls “a book of remembrance … written before him of those who feared the LORD and esteemed his name” (3:16). These were not condemned. God kept them. But these still did experience the final descent of that old covenant people. For them, it was discipline.

Use 2. Exhortation. This Proverb is quoted by the author of Hebrews, and it is specifically used for the action item: to endure. Here is that passage in its entirety:

Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?

“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.”

It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it (Heb. 12:3-11).

The first end of this endurance is holiness. Notice that point in Hebrews. The discipline of earthly fathers, even at best, is usually for a good that fades. But it is still, by analogy, a kind of purification.

Use 3. Consolation. This is an assurance of salvation passage. Central to the Hebrews 12 appropriation of the Proverb to endure is confirmation. When the Scriptures call us to persevere or endure to the end, it is never simply calling us to live a long life here. No—it is calling us to endure or persevere spiritually, which implies discovery and strengthening of our familial bond with God the Father: “Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall” (2 Pet. 1:10). Confirming election and discovering God’s fatherly love are not two different things, but two aspects of the same. Paul said of the Father that, “he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons” (Eph. 1:5). So endure with clearer and clearer confidence on that side of the razor where it’s all fatherly discipline and never again a hint of condemnation. Paul uses a well-known expression to make this familial point:

For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Rom. 8:15-16; cf. Gal. 4:6)

What that means by a “cry” in the form of Abba! Father! is a desperate cry, a searching cry, as if a child lost in a crowd looks up to finally see the identity of their parent they feared they would never see again. In other words, what the Spirit of adoption does inside of us is cause this desperate cry—yes, even through the process of painful discipline—to begin to look up, through the crowd of our idols, past the many faces of those who may have abused us, and recognize the approving delight of our true, eternal Father.

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1. Charles Spurgeon, “Discipline” Sermon on Deuteronomy 32:11,12, preached on May 9, 1867.

2. Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2005), 33-34.