When we are divinely illuminated, every study about God grows on us with increasing delight. The more we love Him the more profoundly fascinating every line of thought becomes that opens up to us either His adorable nature or His method of dealing with His creatures. There is an awful, solemn beauty in the operations of His justice as truly as in the magnificence of His mercy. Have we ever taken the time to seriously think over the way God chastens us? Have we gone back over our past lives and noticed the different seasons and ways that the Lord has scourged us? Have we been humble enough to confess our sins and to trace the connection between our faults and God’s penalties? Have we had the grace to lovingly thank Him for it all? Then have we had the wisdom to decipher from the dark cloud His fatherly love? In putting together some facts as to how God chastens us we may note the following:  

1. God deals differently in the matter of punishment with His own people than He does with the impenitent sinners. This is a clear doctrine in Scripture. A great number of passages could be cited, such as those in Deut. 32 and Psalm 50, where there is a clear distinction drawn between the correcting chastisement which God sends upon His own children and the unreforming wrath which is poured upon His enemies. I saw recently in an old book that some Hebrew scholar had compiled, that he affirmed that in every instance in the Old Testament where the word “curse” is used, by man or Satan, the word denoted wrath and hot vituperation. He also declared that, in every instance where God used the word “curse” with reference to punishing His people, it was in the original a different word from the other and signified to impoverish, to degrade, to reduce, and to render one poor and weak. It never conveyed the idea of personal wrath, but that of needful scourging.  

2. We are now dealing with those scourgings which the Lord sends upon His own people, not as an eternal penalty for sin, but as a corrective penalty for disobedience. These are a part of the economy of grace which the Holy Ghost expressly tells us “bring forth the peaceable fruits of righteousness.”  

The punishments of hell are not corrective, nor are they a part of grace, but the appropriate and endless rewards of unrepented sins. No one who is sincerely striving to serve God should ever be discouraged because of God’s chastisements. We are told once by King Solomon and again by the apostle, “that we should not despise the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when we are rebuked of Him.” “For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.” When the Lord is correcting us, it proves that He does not ignore us, that His eye is upon us. Though His hand may seem heavy, yet the very fact that such an infinite and eternal God condescends to lay His hand upon us at all should cause us to run into His arms.  

The most terrible thing that could happen to us would be to have God ignore us and leave us to ourselves. This is the unspeakable woe that seems to have happened to thousands about us who roll on in prosperous sin. God does not chasten them! He does not deal with them on the penitentiary principle—that is, punishment with a view to penitence. Their punishment will be on an entirely different principle and unspeakably horrible. But the chastisements to God’s disobedient children are all fashioned in grace. So, however dark the night or however heavy the blow, it reveals to us the fact that we have a place in the attentions of God—that poor and mean as we are, we occupy a place in His infinite regards. This radiant fact that God’s eye is upon us, should be the fountain of a thousand encouragements.  

3. The Lord’s chastisements are never precipitate or rash or premature. Mercy is His delightful work, but He Himself speaks of punishment as His strange work. It is as if it were an art He had not thoroughly learned and had a disrelish for, and one that His loving heart would find excuses for postponing as long as He could. His ever blessed justice gets the consent of infinite love to sorely whip us only when infinite wisdom sees that it would be unkind to put it off any longer.  

What a vast portrait gallery the Old Testament is of the long-drawn patience of God in affecting His people! Like a loving mother, He makes many a threat, and rebukes and pleads with every device of persuasion, before letting His penalties overtake the disobedient over whom He seems to shed tears at every blow. True, there are some instances where punishment followed suddenly upon sin, like a peal of thunder after a vivid flash of lightning. In nearly all such cases the sin was committed against extraordinary light. The sinning ones did not have in them the principle of repentance and had fixed their destiny in evil, as in the cases of Achan, Abiram, Judas, Ananias and others. It is safe theology to believe that God postpones the infliction of punishment where there is sorrow for sin or a sincere desire to do better. And yet we should never wish the chastisements of God delayed, for the sooner we are corrected for out faults, the better for us.  

4. God arranges a perfect fitness of relationship between the chastisement and the reason for which it is given. The whole universe, whether physical, mental or spiritual, is steeped in this rule of the corresponding fitness between cause and effect, between goodness and rewards, and between evil and its punishments. In millions of cases, God’s people have not the sufficient intelligence to see the connection between all their chastisements and the reason in themselves for such chastisements, but the reason is there, nonetheless. And if we would get very close to God in the light of prayer, and in perfect humility search ourselves as to our actions and motives, we could probably, even in this life, discover most of the relationships between something in ourselves and our various chastenings. Every kind of sin has a perfectly appropriate kind of punishment. Every wrong motive, every form of self-will, every variety of folly, every rash and unbridled word has a close-fitting form and measure of chastisement.  

We find in the Book of Kings that national pride in great numbers was followed by pestilence, which cut down the bloated statistics, which was appropriate to the sin. We see in Daniel that imperial vanity was scourged with a spell of seven years’ insanity, which was the appropriate penalty for the fault. How few Christians suspicion that ill-health may come from unkind or vain and foolish conversation. Yet over and over in Scripture, God has united the health of the body with the behavior of the tongue, as in the passage, “He that would love life and length of days, let him refrain his tongue from evil.”  

Oftentimes where no overt outward sin is committed, there are interior mental and moral states, in motives and intentions, or omission of duty. There may be procrastination, or spiritual indolence, or wrongly judging others, or some un-Christlike disposition. These may need a particular form of scourging. There could be some unscriptural notion that we cling to, which needs beating out of us. We may rest assured that God makes no mistakes, and that His dealings with us extend down into the most infinitesimal details of our being and life.  

If we will quietly look over our past lives, and recollect the most insignificant chastisements we have undergone, can we not trace out in our conduct, or in our words, or in our inward disposition, a perfect fitness of relation between our faults and our chastenings?  

Notwithstanding their terribleness and painfulness, there is a sublime, attractive wisdom in the way God corrects His creatures, like the awful beauty of a magnificent city on fire at night. You may ask, does not God sometimes chasten His children when there is no special sin in them? Certainly, but even in such cases there is a latent something in them, some undeveloped tendency, some liability to sin, some form of ignorance which nothing but certain kinds of chastisements will correct. Paul’s chastening thorn was to offset his liability to spiritual pride.  

5. All chastisements, properly speaking, flow out from the fatherhood of God. Remember God sustains many relations to His creatures as Creator, Preserver, Redeemer, Legislator, Judge, Provider and other relationships; but all infliction of pain for correction, for restoration or for the highest development in holiness, originates in the office of the fatherhood, and issues from the infinitely loving heart and drops from the most gentle hand of the Person of the eternal Father.  

It will help us if we get our spiritual thinking on these lines in harmony with the Scripture. Jesus tells us emphatically that it is not the office of the Father to inflict the punishments of hell, for all that department of His administration is put in the hands of the Son of Man. But in dealing with His children on corrective principles, every single chastisement flows out from the uncreated love and tenderness of the Person of the Father. Hence we read that as a father He pitieth His children. The Apostle to the Hebrews exhorts believers that in the matter of chastening, God speaks to them as unto children, saying, “My son, despise not the chastening of the Lord.” And again he says, “If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons.” And again he says, “Our earthly fathers have corrected us, and shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits and live.”  

Hence in order to see our scourgings in the right light, let us remember they do not proceed from the office of the Redeemer, nor from the office of the Comforter, but pre-eminently from the office of the Divine Paternity; and while the whole Godhead act in unity, yet the office of infinite, loving Paternity is the highest and most tender, the earliest and the most ultimate office of our ever blessed God. In the very nature of things, God loves those who have the greatest capacities for receiving Him, and He chastens those most whom He loves most.  

6. The effect of chastisement, when it rightly exercises the soul, is expressly stated by the Holy Spirit to be that of “yielding the peaceable fruit of righteousness.” We have perhaps noticed these effects in the lives of others, and happy for us if we have been so wrought upon as to find these effects in ourselves. Do we not remember instances where God’s children, after having bowed their heads and passed under the rod, came forth into a calmness and peacefulness of spirit, where the wildness or excessiveness of the self-life had been burned away? Their taciturn and subdued natures were like sequestered lakes in whose pellucid depths God and the guarding angels could read the reflection of heavenly scenery. All affliction is blessed that brings us out into deep, sweet, unquestioning peacefulness of spirit.  

Our loving Father often follows His work of chastening with many deep and marvelous gifts, both to the heart and the mind—gifts of love, and gifts of vast mental vision and spiritual discrimination. A mother, after punishing her child, will seem to love it with fresh measures of affection and tax her maternal genius to invent gifts and expressions of her love. In like manner our Heavenly Father, after scourging us for our faults, seems to love us with a new and more tender kind of love, and to tax His wisdom for new gifts, both of His providence and His grace, as if to reward repentance and humility.  

One of the peaceful fruits that should follow the exercise of chastening is that of arousing the soul to a closer walk with God. There are cases where chastisement has opened up a new career of spiritual devotion and burning zeal. As limited express trains, when overdue, often run above schedule speed to make up for lost time and shoot past all other trains, so it were well if God’s corrective dealings should accelerate all the energies of our love far beyond our ordinary notions of spiritual living.