That is an interesting (and hard) lesson for us to receive. I don’t like to think of God as a wrathful God, and nor is spanking in much favor today among currently favored parenting practices.
I’m not sure what effect spankings had on me growing up. I didn’t get that many - but it wasn’t zero either, and was always roundly deserved when I did (and I often deserved them when I didn’t get them too). It’s probably a good thing I didn’t have parents that were violently inclined in that regard or I might have gotten beatings - and maybe on a somewhat regular basis.
Maybe there is something to that too, because I very much respect both my parents while they were alive and as a remembrance now too, and I don’t think I would have as much had they been violently inclined to deal with everything they saw me do in some “consistent-to-a-fault” application. That might have broken my spirit - and maybe in some very regrettable ways in terms of my relationship with (and respect for) them. There must have been times when they wanted to break my spirit, and I now imagine it may have been a grief to them that I failed to exhibit as much broken spirit as they might have wanted at certain points.
It is also interesting to me that in scriptures we read of God valuing “a broken spirit and a contrite heart.” I think there must be such thing as “good brokenness” and “bad brokenness” - though all of it seems pretty bad to us at the time. I’m not sure I’d be able to tease those apart, though, other than perhaps in whether they drive us to God or away from God.
This reading is a tough one. All the while I was asking myself, “How does one endure this?” How is it possible before perfection to endure this process of being perfected? How does imperfect faith perservere through this process?
Great example of legitimate authority, rebellion, coercion and edification! Not everyone will quell their rebelliousness and allow themselves to be edified though, even with coercion. Maybe the major factors involved are pride and honesty – we’re happier and healthier if we humble ourselves and recognize legitimate authority, cheerfully obeying mandates.
I’m also going to guess (just from knowing you here, @Randy ) that you have something of a more tender spirit than some other people would have? …and probably did even as a kid?
I also know people (wonderful people, well-adjusted adult people - don’t get me wrong), who have quite the aggressively contrarian spirit, and for whom being told they “can’t do something” is the only thing they need to hear to goad them into doing it. (Tempered by reality, - they aren’t stupid, and if somebody tells them they can’t jump off a building they don’t go and do that, of course.) But if you tell them they aren’t supposed to do something, and their hyper-sensitive ‘BS’ detectors go off, then their gut reaction is to go there in a heartbeat - and they tend to scoff at the beatings, and see those as a reflection on the one administrating the punishment rather than on themselves.
[They also (if they’re successful in life - and the ones I’m thinking of seem to be) tend to be the ‘go-getters’, the ‘gitter dun’ people, the entrepreneurial sort, the employers rather than the employees.]
I sadly remember an incident in my youth (early grade school) where I refused to let coercion humble and edify me and I’m sure it was especially painful for my parents.
The reason I brought up the ‘contrarians’ above as I did, Dale, is because it seems wrong to me to think that we have a “one-formula-must-fit-all” approach to righteousness, or ‘good Kingdom citizenship’ as it were. I know that conventional Christian wisdom is that there must be some universal truths across all humanity, and that humility before God is one of those universals, and I’m not disagreeing with that. But I’m also fairly sure that we don’t all know what humility even looks like in all cases. I think that sometimes the stuff that looks really culturally humble to us isn’t, and some of the stuff that doesn’t pass for humility might actually be born of it in deeper ways than we imagined.
That, and I think that I would put a much higher premium on the infinite patience of God, than I do about the coerciveness of God. How or even if God coerces is far from obvious from me (in either direction).
I’m certainly not saying that we all have the same temperament. Submission to legitimate authority, or even recognizing it, is certainly going to be harder for some than others. But speed limits are fairly firm and easier to submit to for some drivers than others.
I don’t believe it is, nor do I think the Bible teaches it, speaking of the overall arc. Skeptical theism comes to mind, as does lèse-majesté, to do wrong to majesty.
This goes right to the issue of election, and yet, ironically, it’s impossible to want to be chosen, without being chosen. But do we want what we really think we want?
Election, Spurgeon 11/25 p.m.
There is no more humbling doctrine in Scripture than that of election, none more promotive of gratitude, and, consequently, none more sanctifying. Believers should not be afraid of it, but adoringly rejoice in it.
I don’t follow Spurgeon, and so can’t speak to his sense of this.
But MacDonald I have read enough to have a pretty good idea of the distinction I think he would make here:
There is “chosen” in the sense of
Here are my chosen few - my elect, who are saved from among all the rest who are forever damned.
…OR…
Here are the chosen - those to whom I have entrusted my law, and finally my gospel that they may take it into all the world, that through them my blessing will come to all, and in the end every knee will bow and every tongue confess (willingly, and not a forceful or coercive parody of worship - but the real thing.) Every broken off branch can be grafted back in.
MacDonald (I’m nearly sure) emphatically lands on 2 and loathingly rejects 1. And he does so as one who refused to stop reading Romans, but kept reading it right on through - including especially chapter 11 where it becomes fairly explicit why option #1 is a very dark misreading of scripture indeed.
All it is, is a refusal to see God as anything that is even less righteous than we are. It is ultimate faith in the goodness of God and in the triumph of good in the end, which will not grant any co-eternity to, or any eternal share of itself toward evil.
Sometimes a hyperbole is false. And there’s an instance of false hyperbole: Not every branch can be grafted back in.
There really are some branches that are dead or too far gone–from rot or lack of water and nutrients or cold freezes–such that trying to graft it into any other plant just won’t work.
I’ve never tried, voluntarily, grafting any branch into another plant, but my wife has a few times, with plumeria branches. All failed.
And we bought a couple of apple trees that had grafts from different apple trees. Gave them to a brother who has five acres that has seasonal weather to help put the trees through necessary changes.
Moreover, not just anybody can graft a bit of living thing into another; takes a knowledgeable person to do the job right.
The interesting thing about grafting, IMO, is–if you’re the kind of person who believes plants can feel pain–grafting requires cutting: cutting the branch to be grafted and cutting the plant into which the branch is to be grafted. Grafting requires.both cuts: one cut wounds the branch and the other cut wounds the plant into which the branch is to be grafted.
Two wounds? Hmm, … there’s a metaphor there, for sure, IMO.
His righteousness so far exceeds our own, it can create counterintuitive notions of morality. He is a judge that cannot be judged. And he is the only being for whom it is right that he loves himself. He creates us to worship him and coerces us to do so by making us joyful when we do.
I think this is quite insightful. Some of my compliance may have been because I was a first born, and naturally identified with my parents (but don’t get me wrong–I did get some spankings from my mom later on, and I’m pretty sure they were fewer than I deserved!). I found, in reading Nouwen’s “Return of the Prodigal Son,” that I was much more sinful in terms of the older son’s pride and contempt, than I had realized. I probably obeyed in part because of identification rather than earnestly seeking righteousness. In fact, in my 20s I apologized to one of my siblings when I realized I had been kind of a pill as an older brother, sometimes (he said he didn’t remember that). I also agree strongly that there are strengths in each type. I am amazed at the difference among my own kids. Some kids weep if you look at them sternly, and others push the boundaries. Sometimes that’s not really so much rebellion, as adventurousness. One of my partners told me once that her parents punished her bookworm sister by putting her books in timeout! I know kids who would prefer any punishment to losing their video game time allotment. Some do better with an encouragement, like a carrot; others don’t care what we say. I agree we can’t go with a cookie cutter approach. I wonder if it ties into the “Five Love Languages” theme, a bit.
Thanks.
