How to accept God’s corrections and disciplines
We think we can’t go back to God
The Old Testament prophets had no problem with their experience of God’s seeming brutality. “He struck us . . .” Their image of God as willing to smite the evil man, or even entire nations, wasn’t considered untethered violence or unbridled revenge in those ancient days. God reacted as he did, as my grandmother used to say, to knock some sense into people.
Image by Gerd Altmann
We moderns ascribe such willing approval of God’s might and well-recorded forceful actions which fit the pre-Jesus caricature of God. That God was mean-spirited. Wars, absurd evils, plagues, and so on cauterized civilizations to God’s presence. He had to be mean. Jesus offered a different solution.
God’s kind side shows up in Jesus for the first time 2,000 years ago, so we are ineptly told. Jesus quashed the whole smiting thing. He did toss a table or two and verbally bit off the head of Peter that one time, but by and large, Jesus reframed God as a kindler, gentler authority figure.
Really? Ahem.
We have good reason to accept God’s corrections and disciplines, just as Hosea, Jeremiah, and Moses did. The purpose of God’s determined intervention is a good thing.
Come, let us return to the LORD, it is he who has rent, but he will heal us; he has struck us, but he will bind our wounds.
(Hosea 6:1)
Restraining a child, holding them until their rage subsides, is the modern-day answer to a smack upside the head. Most parents agree with that. Proverbs, still valuable teaching for believers today, recognizes the immediacy of a physical, in-your-face correction. A child is one thing. A full-grown, willful adult is another.
Strike a scoffer, and the simple will learn prudence; reprove a man of understanding, and he will gain knowledge.
(Proverbs 19:25)
Context, always a problem with modern-day logic and journalism, attends to most of our confusion regarding the God we believe in with a weak, non-aggressive version of God. The context of Hosea’s reading in Chapter 6—the whole of his writing—is God’s love. God’s love comes with a forceful hand. Hosea couches the love of God in a marriage metaphor. The breakup of the Jewish nation into the Northern Kingdom and the southern Kingdom of Judah ripped the marriage covenant apart.
Every correction from God in the larger picture of Hosea’s national divorce foretells the modern Church. Christians are also framed under a covenant relationship. An oath by God to love his people will be kept because God threatens to do what he has to do.
The relationship oath seems much broader in our New Testament life. God goes well beyond a peculiar Chosen People. His oath, a promise worked out by Jesus’ birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, is now spread across every living human being. The relationship covenant we make allows God’s Spirit to live in us. This new oath includes the same Old Testament features of expectations, order, and assumption of God’s will. Except we don’t travel to the temple. We are the temples.
We are courted by God, wrapped in his goodness because we see creation through faith. Those of us who submit to God move into a separate life from the world's manufactured glories. It’s not an easy walk. We seldom maintain intensity with God. We don’t remain in that romanticized, first love, embraced intimacy. Much like Israel, we will cheat on God. We stray. We slowly object to our confines within his order of the universe. We are attracted to other frameworks, ideas, goals, and purposes for our life. Some of us divorce God altogether.
The context of who God is becomes the problem of dealing with the smote option that God can deploy. We interpret God’s correction to us over time as annoying. At first, that’s pretty much the extent of our smiting. He bothers us with a conscience that rejects the minor and major sinfulness of the world. The smotes then get very real.
This give-and-take with God is not a gentle, genial intimacy. The world is so danged attractive with its instant gratifications. Addictive gratifications, I might add. Proverbs and Hosea remind us that God will go to great lengths in his love for us.
. . . it is he who has rent, but he will heal us; he has struck us, but he will bind our wounds.
Strike a scoffer, and the simple will learn prudence; reprove a man of understanding, and he will gain knowledge.
The first words of verse 1 in Hosea’s chapter 6 are our marching orders, the impetus in our part of the relationship with God. We must turn back.
Come, let us return to the LORD . . .
I suspect, from personal experience, that the smiting of God from his love is initially quite obvious. As we practice sin, the further problems we encounter are our own doing. We don’t realize God is still intervening. We said yes to him. He’s not going away. We numb ourselves to his urgings as he constantly reaches for our hearts.
By not reacting with a disciplined mind, a recognition that God loves us enough to suffer our sinfulness, we place the land mines in off-the-course paths, angry with ourselves. We blow up our lives because we think we can’t go back to God.
We don’t need to do that.
God will heal us. He will bind our wounds. God is not different from the God of Hosea. We are now immersed in God’s Spirit, like the holy prophets. We are filled with God’s Word, like the apostles.
Though Jesus might flip over a table we park in his place of conversation and prayer with us, we can return to him. He wants us that badly
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