Clough Hebrews Lesson 65

The Musar or Training of the believer – Hebrews 12:7-11

We stopped last time with Hebrews 12:7, the first 11 verses of chapter deal with Jesus Christ as the perfect model for the child of God. You’ll see here those three motives for exhortation in the Bible, once again the first one is the plan of God. That’s one motive, because of the plan of God, because of His perfect design, because God is who He is and because He has shown us much grace in the person of Christ, therefore it follows that we should be behaving a certain way. The second motive is the model motive, that is the Old Testament saints, Jesus, all were able to function using the faith technique, not perfectly, but they functioned, and because they functioned we can function. And that becomes the second motive; there’s no one who can argue that God has not provided sufficient assets for every child. And then the third motive that we have seen is the reward/punishment motive, which we’ll get into later on in chapter 12 and that is that God punishes those sons out of line and rewards those who are in line.

Jesus was goal oriented, we found in verses 1-6, Jesus Christ looked forward to the joy that was before Him, and the joy that was before Him, as a member of the human race, not just as God but as man, man has been given the command to subdue the earth; the subduing of the earth is… here’s Adam, and here’s Adam’s posterity. What Adam decided at a point in time would effect all of his posterity and because it did affect all of his posterity it means the principle that the father subdues the earth both in himself and in his progeny, so that, bigger idea now, your obeying the Word of God and submitting to it in your life not just because of you but because of your children and because of their children, and on down through the generations to come. These people will be influenced by what you have done now, in the present. So we have this motive and Jesus sees not only the result of His own obedience, but he sees the new humanity streaming out from Himself, subduing the earth and then the body of Christ, of course, will be complete. And this was the joy that was set before Him. And because He was able to put this first, it says that He despised the shame, in verse 2, and the word there is kataphroneo, which means to look down on. This is when He did look down on something, on His list of priorities, this was first, everything else was second, and the cross was way down on the bottom of the list.

In verses 5-6 we had a quotation from the book of Proverbs and the book of Proverbs introduced us to a theme and now the author uses the theme to teach doctrine. What is the theme? The theme is that there is a parallel between the believer’s life in Christ and the father/son relationship. So here we have the father/son relationship in the third divine institution, which is family, and because the third divine institution has been established from creation, it was established not just to train children but in addition to training children the third divine institution was designed to picture future sanctification lessons for us. So, we find, verses 5-6 means that the Lord punishes and He chastens and He trains His sons just as the Lord trains believers. The word to “chasten” in verse 5 is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word musar, which was the word that was used in the book of Proverbs and is used to indicate the training that the Israelites got for forty years. It is physical training, it’s the kind of thing most Christians hate, the most of us who are always fussing at God for His musar. So whenever you fuss and complain and gripe to God it’s generally over musar, so that’ll define what it is for you.

All right, Hebrews 12:7, the first part of verse 7 is mistranslated in the King James, it should be: “It is for chastening that you endure,” now this is a tremendous principle and it carries into every area of life. Let’s write it out correctly; “it is for musar that you endure.” Now the implication of that sentence is if you don’t endure you probably won’t get any musar and you won’t benefit very much from it. It’s certainly arguing that if there’s no musar there’s been no endurance. So the Bible connects your endurance with musar. And the principle that this has for us in every area is that quitters lose in every area; you don’t benefit by quitting anything.

And you’ll find this in life; the people who quit marriage, one after another in a string of divorces, they are quitters, they’re the kind of people that can’t stand pressure. And they marry somebody with a great aurora around them because it’s based on idolatrous attraction in the first place and then all the Shekinah glory disappears, after they go back up the aisle, and then they suddenly discover this other person has a sin nature, and this is such a big shock to them they can’t stand it and so they quit, get divorced, the easy way out, which it isn’t the easy way out, it just sets you up for disaster. So you’ll find people that go from marriage to marriage, people who jump from job to job, never satisfied, always looking at the grass on the other side of the fence, these kinds of people are very unstable people and where you have a group of people who are this unstable, you will find similarly those exact same people have tremendous difficulty in the Christian life because the habit patterns of quitting under pressure carry right over into the spiritual life and don’t think it doesn’t. You can train yourself in spirituality by sticking to a job and seeing that it is finished before you go on to something else. Students that down to their sixth year of a four year course because they’ve taken eight majors along the way, they’re the same kind, never can get stuff together, always hopping around, never completing anything. Well, these people are people that never get with it.

And this verses is simply giving you the principle of life, this applies not just in spirituality, it applies in all across the board, you cannot benefit unless you endure. It starts with a simple athletics and conditioning your body. You’re never going to condition your body to do anything unless you endure, and as you exercise, exercise, exercise, exercise, exercise, over and over and over and over again, and if you quit you lose it and your body loses it. And then it goes for mathematics; people say oh, I can’t take math. Any person who has entered high school can learn anything up through calculus, no reason why they can’t. And that includes basic theoretical math.

And they reason that they don’t is one thing, they lack discipline, not IQ; it’s not a question of IQ. It’s a question of discipline, and a lot of people have told themselves that they stupid when they are not stupid. If you’re this kind of person, you have walked around selling yourself a bill of goods that you are somehow more stupid than the person next to you. No it isn’t, you’re just undisciplined. And if you had discipline you would have made it. So it goes with whether it’s in athletics, whether it’s in academics, whether it’s in marriage, whatever it is, endurance is the key to benefit.

Now why can we say that this is an absolute rule that holds across the board? Simple, who is it that created the world and all the details thereof? Same God, isn’t it? Who was it that designed the institutions, the first divine institution, the second divine institution, the third divine institution, wasn’t it the same God? Of course it was. And who designed the plan of sanctification? The same God who created the external world. So it shouldn’t surprise you that men like the author of Proverbs and this author here can pick up a truth from the natural world and apply it to the spiritual world, crisscrossing back and forth, seemingly oblivious to the category? Why? Because there’s the same inherent design in all the categories because it’s the same Designer. And this is why oftentimes people who are brought up in a wise environment, who have been taught to observe things carefully, who have been taught to work and to work toward a goal and to finish that goal, make tremendous believers when they become Christians, because they’ve got all the basic habit patterns for sanctification. All they have to do is to learn some doctrine to go with it and they’ve got it made. And then we find the people, some of whom tragically come from Christian homes and they’ve never learned anything, they can’t breathe with any kind of a rhythm and so when they get into the Christian life they flop all over the place because they’re undisciplined, miserable people.

So the principle, “it is for musar that you endure,” and the word “endure” is present tense, you keep on enduring, over and over and over and over. Then it should be a period, not a comma, God is dealing with you as with sons,” emphasis is “as with sons God deals with you.” “as with sons,” so this tells us about the whole point of sanctification. Now let’s clarify terms, be precise, everyone starts off knowing what we’re talking about tonight. The first phase is justification, that happens at the time that you trust in Jesus Christ. You don’t invite Jesus into your heart because He’s not in your heart, He’s at the Father’s right hand. His nature is in your heart wrought by the Holy Spirit but Jesus in His humanity is not in anyone’s heart. He is at the Father’s right hand. Now justification talks about something that transpires at the Father’s right hand, when we trust the Lord. Jesus Christ’s righteousness is credited to our account, in the split second that it happens, here’s one point in time when Jesus Christ’s righteousness is credited to our account and instantly afterwards, a split second later the Father declares us as having that perfect righteousness, as having legally fulfilled the Law in His sight, and therefore we are totally and completely justified. And this is what the New Testament means when it says “you are complete in Christ.” All these second blessing, third blessing, fourth blessing junk that’s going around is nothing but a denial of the doctrine of justification by faith for which the Reformation was fought to make this point clear, that when you trust in Christ it’s all complete.

Now after this point, justification now forms a cellar or foundation under the rest of your life. Now justification isn’t forgotten, you see, it’s not just a point, it happens at a point but the results, it’s a perfect tense, so it forms a foundation under the rest of your life and we call this the second phase of the plan of salvation, it begins at the time you trust in Christ and terminates at the time you die or the rapture, whichever occurs first, and during this time, the theological word for it is sanctification, just another word for the second phase of God’s plan of salvation. What is the basis of sanctification? Justification. That’s why no one is saved even by regeneration, regeneration doesn’t save anyone; never has; justification is the base of salvation. You are regenerated because you are justified, not the other way around. You are converted, the Holy Spirit does His work in you because the righteousness of Christ is credited to your account and therefore to remind us that justification is the foundation for the Christian life, what does God have us do every time we commit sin? “If we confess our sins He is faithful and just,” so we go back to the cross, back to the cross, back to the cross, back to the cross, back to the cross, back to the cross, over and over and over and over and over and over again in the Christian life.

Why has God designed the mechanism that way? To remind us that underlying sanctification is justification. You’ve got to go back always to the same basis. Why are you acceptable with God” If you commit some sin tonight or 25,000 sins tonight you are still acceptable with God. Can you believe it? Well, if you can’t you’re fouled up in the area of justification. So phase three begins at the time we die or the rapture, the technical word for this is glorification. Now, when this author goes to take the second part of the plan of salvation, sanctification, the period of time between the cross and death, when he talks about that he says that is a time when you ought to learn how God works with you and he says you don’t have to look very far, all you have to do is look at a father/ son relationship and that’s your relationship. It’s your relationship with the Lord, a father/son relationship.

Now why a son and not a daughter? A lot of this devotional literature is written as though God deals with you as with a daughter. God does not deal with you as a daughter, He deals with you as with sons and there’s a reason for that. The son in the ancient world was the titleholder of property. And so therefore the son had to be trained in order that he manage properly his father’s property. So there was an ulterior motive for training your son well. You don’t want a goof-off because everything you’ve worked hard for is going to go right down the drain in the next generation if you haven’t prepared your son. So the concept of training one’s son is linked to another word in the Bible used for salvation, inheritance, “inheritance, incorruptible, undefiled, which fadeth not away, prepared in heaven for you.” Now why is that in there; same thing, no stress, no strain, no big hairy theology, you just can see it concretely in the way a family runs. The son is a title holder so “God deals with you as with sons.”

And then the question is asked at the end, “for what son is he whom the father does not chasten,” and “does not chasten” is a present tense, in other words, doesn’t continually train. Now if you look at the third divine institution we notice something. We compare all the different divine institutions, these are simply ordinances that God has set into His creation. The third divine institution is the basis of authority. Now you mark that out; if children do not learn authority in the home they will never learn authority. They’ll have problems with it the rest of their life, like a lot of Christians are having trouble with authority. They have trouble with the authority of the pastor, they have trouble with the authority of the Board, they have trouble with the authority of the Word, they have trouble with the authority everywhere they go. They have trouble with the authority of the employer on the job, they have trouble with the authority of the commanding officer in the service. Christians, always having trouble with authority, because obviously they never learned about what authority is and that tells a lot about the way they were brought up.

Now, to “chasten” or to “train” presupposes there’s authority. Now you are not going to respond to a trainer if you don’t trust your trainer. This is one of the first things that in military training you’re taught; various things are done to make you trust, all sorts of propaganda, salesmanship, anything to get you to trust in the D.I., to get you to trust in the training program because you’re not going to give yourself in a training program if you do not trust your trainer. It goes with a coach in athletics. The coach has got to be trusted by the guys on the team or they’re not going to put out for him. So, in order to bear up under training you have to have trust. You have to have respect. You may not like the coach, you may not like the trainer personally, but you have respect for his ability to train you. You may hate him personally, it doesn’t make any difference, you respect his authority. So, why is the third divine institution used now used for sanctification? Very simple, because both the Lord and the author of Hebrews is trying to develop, first you have to have authority, then you can have your training, and where is authority developed? It’s developed in the third divine institution. So, the implication is that even the musar is an act of faith, even the endurance is an act of faith. You endure because you trust that the guy does know what he’s doing. Even though he asks you to do stupid things, even though some parts of the training may really strain your faith, nevertheless, you keep on because you trust the program and the author of the program.

So don’t forget that, all learning… all training in your life is always done with authority. Now you see what’s wrong with a lot of these education theories, open concept and so on, they’re trying to act as though there’s no authority in the classroom, the teacher is going to get right down on the level of the students. That’s ridiculous, no teacher should get down to the level of the students; if you got down to the level of the students at the end of the course it would be all pupils, the only thing that would happen is the teacher went down and the pupils didn’t go up. You have got to have authority and the teacher has to establish authority, and if you’re a teacher or you’re a student of education you had better learn this, when you get in a class and you have to knock everyone’s teeth out, you make authority the first thing. The first couple of weeks beat everyone around the room until you get the point across that you are in charge. And after you’ve made that point, then you can start teaching something. And how you’re ever going to make it in an open concept God only knows. By the way, God didn’t use open concept; do you know how we can prove that. Isn’t it interesting that He segregated Israel from the rest of the world while He was training Israel. He took Israel off into a corner; there’s no open concept in history, you bring Israel and we’ll quarantine Israel, we’ll keep them in the closet while I’m training Israel and then we’ll have open concepts; open concepts after we are trained, not before.

So this just goes to show the human viewpoint that’s all around us and it just infiltrates the mentality of your soul till you get all screwed up and you come to Scriptures like this and you can’t even understand them, so this is why I have to labor the point, to break down these obstructions in our soul so we can understand a simple point of doctrine.

Now let’s look at it: “It is for chastening that you endure, God deals with you as with sons, for what son is he whom the father doesn’t constantly administer musar?” And musar is the word for severe physical training; it includes corporeal punishment. It is part of a training program.

And then Hebrews 12:8, “But you be without musar, whereof all have become partakers, then are you bastards and not sons.” Or, “you have become partakers,” now the word “are partakers” is a perfect, “you have become partakers.” Now why is this perfect tense? Point action with results that continue. Now why is that so important, why didn’t he just say you are partakers, present tense? Why perfect? What’s the implication? [someone answers] We became believers at a point in time and… [more said] all right, but see the other point in verse 8 the first part of it, “if you be without musar,” look, here’s the point when a person trusts in Jesus Christ, a point in time. We have become partakers which means that the partaking here goes on and on and on. So if I am out here as an observer and I look down, say three years later, after this person has trusted the Lord, and I see that person’s life and I see evidences that person is still being trained, in many areas the hard way, they’re still suffering, they’re still adversities, they’re still pressures, I see musar there, I see changes being made. All right, that’s evidence of their salvation. But if you see somebody who professes to have trusted in Christ back here and they’re kind of leading a life on cloud nine here, floating along, and no pressure, no problems, not learning anything, just going from one feeling to the next feeling, one emotion to the next emotion, and that’s the story of their life, the 55^th blessing to the 56^th blessing, one dedication ceremony to the next dedication ceremony, and that’s all their life is, is one series of ecstatic experiences and depressions in between, that’s not musar, that’ just a picture of a believer who’s really out of it or a person who never trusted the Lord in the first place, that’s the implication. They’re a theological bastard is what they are.

The lack of musar in the life is reason to doubt salvation. So next time when you feel like God is picking on you, why did God bless that other person and He didn’t bless me, this concept, just remember that’s musar, be thankful for it, it’s an indication that God the Holy Spirit is working in your life. If the Word of God begins to pain you, and you begin to have spiritual growing pains as you go into… the deeper you get in the Word it seems like, the more messes you get into, well that’s grace, that’s musar. See, that’s altogether a different concept of sanctification than what you’re fed with the Christian devotional junk that you get in the Christian bookstores. Read that stuff and boy, you know, somebody is living in one world and you’re in the other, a big story here about how if you just go through this rigmarole with my secret to the Christian life, all these secrets to the Christian life. God is an open book, there’s nothing secret about it. And you go through this and that and all you have to do is have… and then from then on it’s just a bed of roses. And you say to yourself you have a thorn, that sort of thing. Well, you’re right, it is thorns, and that’s musar.

You see, this is the reason we have all these hyper spiritual people running around is because they are lazy people who are weak and they can’t stand authority and they can’t stand severe training and they rebel against it, just absolutely rebel against it and part of their rebellion is shown up by desiring some ecstatic experience that’s going to solve the whole problem in two minutes. You know, your kid falls down and a big gash on his leg, abrasion, and then you’ve got to sterilize the thing and screaming and yelling in your ear while it’s going on and you know how that kid would love for you to put some on there that would just heal that thing up in two minutes. All right, that’s natural desire but that isn’t the way the fallen world works. So, it doesn’t work that way spiritually either, so you have to fight this tendency in your own soul to desire an instant solution to spirituality, and you beware of these people that come up to you with all this charming literature and this book and that book and all the rest of it. There’s only one book and that’s the Word of God. That’s the key.

“But if you be without chastisement, whereof all have become partakers,” in time past, “then are ye bastards, and not sons. Furthermore,” verse 9 says, so here’s a second argument. Now the first argument in verses 7-8 is what? Can someone state just the overall argument. He’s going to move to another part, he’s going to still use the analogy of the third divine institution to study sanctification, but he’s gotten through expressing a thought in verse 7-8; what is the thought concisely stated. What would you say would be a way of summarizing verses 7-8 so when we hit the “furthermore,”… on Wednesday night what I’ve been trying to do is get you to read the Bible yourself with more skill. I’m trying to show you that when you read the text, ask yourselves these questions and it’ll cause you to be a much more perceptive reader of the Bible. So when you come to a word, and you see verse 9, “Furthermore,” and you’re reading your Bible by yourself, that’s a signal to you to stop and say wait a minute, hold it, “Furthermore,” wait a minute, I want to make sure I got the point that he just got through before I go to “Furthermore.” No use running on to something else if I haven’t understood what he’s tried to cover so far. So you hit these kinds of words: therefore, furthermore, moreover. Watch those words, those are the most important words, in fact they’re more important than the verb tense in the study of Scripture, those transitional phrases. Every time you get to one of those you stop, put on the breaks and hold it, make sure you understand where you’ve come from before you beyond one of those words.

So we stop at the word “Furthermore” and say okay, now what’s the thought of verses 7-8? Obviously he’s using the family as an analogy but in what way is he using the family as an analogy. [someone answers] Okay now she used the word discipline, and we often times… and I’ve used the word discipline over and over for this passage but I hesitate to use it now and would rather use another word. Does anybody see my problem? Why is discipline not such a good word to use; it doesn’t convey the full force of the passage. [someone answers] All right, all training isn’t punishment. So a better word is actually training; training is part of being in a family. And if we are in the family then training is there, that’s it. That’s why the third divine institution in the Bible is the center of education, training.

All right, now verse 9 is going to carry on another thought, there’s going to be a refinement of the first one, the first one was a general idea, now he gets to the specific. “Furthermore, we have had fathers of our flesh who corrected us, and we gave them reverence. Shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live? For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure, but He for our profit, that we might be partakers of His holiness. [11] Now no chastening for the present seems to be joyous, but grievous; nevertheless, afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them who are exercised thereby.”

Now let’s look at Hebrews 12:9-11, this is a second amplification of verse 7 and 8. Verses 7 and 8 again, the general idea, training is part and parcel of being in the family. So if you want a picture of sanctification the word this author would have you think of in your mind is training; application, what therefore is the word that characterizes the church program? Training, the local church is the training ground for believers, not evangelism. Evangelism isn’t done in the training ground. Wars aren’t fought on training grounds, they’re fought on the battlefield. On the proving grounds is where we train the soldiers, then we send them into battle, same thing. The local church is not the place for spiritual warfare in evangelism; the local church is a place for sanctification and training and if believers would be trained we’d have all the evangelizing that we could hope for. But the reason that we don’t see more is that we have no training, it’s just that simple.

The local church is the training ground and we make no apologies for training as hard as we can. And some people want to be entertained and they come for 3 or 4 months and they decide that there are greener pastures where they can get entertained, they bring somebody each Sunday, they get so many points and the pastor will stand up in front and eat a goldfish alive and… I’m collecting a notebook, if everyone clips these things out of the people, you bring five new people to Sunday School then I’ll stand on my head and play a trombone for you, the other one I heard was the goldfish thing, then we heard something else that really took the cake, one church in town said that if you bring five people to Sunday School we’ll give you a kite; well, you’ve heart the expression, go fly a kite, but they had one that outdid it, if you come on time we’ll give you the string. This is ridiculous but that goes on. Of course we are nice and we don’t mention names.

But training is the theme and the local church that provides you with the best training, the hardest training and the most rigorous training is the best church for you. That’s how you decide. You pick out the church that can give you the best training and that’s your criteria of a local church. You are there to be trained because you’re not being trained all the rest of the time that you’re wandering around. You have to have someone prod you and prod you and prod you until you get training, until you produce as a believer. And that’s the way you pick out a group; if you move some place you ask yourself one basic question of a local church, besides the doctrine, of course, is the doctrine straight and the second thing is that even if they believe the doctrine, are they training people, are they equipping people. If they’re not, forget it, go somewhere else.

So, “Furthermore, we have fathers,” and the verb tense here for those of you who are Greek students is imperfect, notice, first time we’ve had that in some time, what is the imperfect tense? The imperfect looks like this except it’s in past time. So, “we have had fathers,” all during a period in the past, which would be childhood. He’s out of childhood now and he looks back to that period of childhood, the twenty years or so and he says during that time we constantly had fathers, we “had fathers of our flesh who corrected us;” now the word “correct” is an interesting one, we said so far that most of the emphasis is on training but the interesting thing about this word is the emphasis isn’t so much on the new truth as it is correcting… correcting. There’s a built in momentum.

Here’s a child, okay, he’s growing up and he already has been given by God a desire to learn; children are born to learn, you don’t have to stimulate a child to learn, you can kill his desire to learn by thwarting him, but did you ever notice, you take a young child, a little baby, how curious they are, into everything. Now why are they doing this? That’s just their desire to learn, they love that. Give a baby a lot of bright colors or something and watch him, fantastic, he’ll stare by the hour watching this thing. Why? Curious, he wants to look at his environment. Now who put the curiosity into a small baby? You didn’t. You just had the thing but you didn’t put the curiosity in it. The curiosity came by God’s creation and the baby wants to learn because what is an inborn point of the baby’s life that God has put into him, as a man, without any child psychology, you know this from Bible doctrine, what has every baby got in his soul as far as a ground motive for his life, starting from the point he takes his first breath? Subdue the earth, it starts with his own body and the first few years of his life that baby is subduing the earth and you’re not even telling him how to do it, he’s doing it, all by himself.

Now where did he get the training? God gave it to him. Do you realize that the most astounding intellectual feat that you will ever perform in your life has been finished by the time you’re six years old and that is that you have learned a language without knowing any other language before you learned it. And no one, in all the history of philosophy to date can explain how language is learned when you don’t know any language before it. It’s the old story, you define a word but you define it in terms of another word. How do you define that word? In terms of another word, so you’ve got one big circle. This means that and that means that and that means that and that means that and so we’ve got one closed circle and the mystery is how does the child break into the circle. And he doesn’t break into it by association. That’s one theory that you often learn in psychology, the child learns to associate a noise with something and therefore he connects the word up with an object. It’s not that simple because animals can be trained to associate sounds with objects. A certain kind of whistle to a dog and you feed him, and he’s associated the sound with the food. Animals can do that, but man does something else. What does man do that the dog doesn’t? The baby may hear the word food or eat, he hears people talking about getting food, he hears the word food and eat and he associates that with a meal. But what does a baby have in that process that no animal does? Think back, the nature of the baby versus the nature of an animal. What does the baby have that an animal doesn’t. [someone answers reason] Well, you have to be careful how you define reason because animals can think. All right, he has the idea of truth, a dog can associate and think but the dog doesn’t sit back and say I wonder if that’s true or I wonder if that’s false. But men do, and a child, very early in life begins… and you know why we know that, because that’s how the child evaluates you as a parent, whether he can trust you or not is a truth question. And that child may receive instructions from that parent but as the child is receiving instructions from the parent he’s also saying to himself, and you couldn’t… he’s not verbalizing this, this is what he’s doing, he’s saying is that object, that big hand, that big face that I see all the time, is that trustworthy. And he learns to trust or he learns that you are not trustworthy and the way he learns is by observing your consistency toward him, for good or for evil.

If the child disobeys and you consistently make your point at discipline on that point, the child learns, ha, there’s reliability, there’s predictability here. But if you’re always…discipline for one thing and then you let him get away with for four or five times, and then you think about disciplining him again, and then let him get away with it, you’re not teaching the kid trust; the kid learns to suspect the whole thing because there’s no predictability out there I the external world. He’s got to have predictability.

So, the child grows up and he has this desire, first he works with his own body, and the high point of working with his own body is when he can master language, and by that time he’s God-conscious and now he’s aware that God is there, that he is being judged by a higher power than himself, that he has been created, he’s a creature, and the child goes on and now he begins to maser things around him, social relationships develop, concepts of property; that’s what we’re stressing in our family training program, this is where property is learned, and a lot of children never learn property. You can watch some kid, some families will bring their kids into your home and good night, they strip the place, stuff smashed all over the floor, spilled, broken, toys flying out the door, now what’s going on here. No concept of property. No concept of property—that’s the first divine institution so you’d better teach your child property, what is his and what isn’t his. Property, very important.

All right, all this is what is developed in the family. So all this time “we have had fathers of our flesh who corrected us,” see the motive is there, the motive to learn is already built into the soul by God, you don’t, nothing you can do to motivate learning, frankly; there’s not really much you can do about motivating learning. Now the behaviorist will tell you all these arguments about short term rewards, and all you have to do is reward positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, that’s manipulation. You do that to a dog or a rat in a cage, but you don’t do that to a person. A person has to be spiritually motivated; if they’re not spiritually motivated they’re not going to learn. If they’re having a spiritual problem they’re not going to learn. People walk in here all the time and they must do an electrical inspection, count how many fluorescent tubes are out, and so on, find out many different ways people part their hair or don’t, find out the average length of the hair. I am just curious what goes through these people’s minds, they always sit there and never open the Scriptures, you know, here we are exegeting carefully the Greek and the Hebrew verse by verse and they’re looking around, and you know they’re not learning, and I never understood these people. I never understand why they take up a pew. Really, we need the chairs around here, if you want to look at lights there are a lot of more attractive ceilings than this one.

So verse 9, “we gave them reverence,” [tape turns] now notice this in Scripture, “we gave them reverence,” and it doesn’t say we like our fathers, it is the same concept as in the Ten Commandments, “honor thy father and thy mother,” and it doesn’t mean that you have to like them. And this is where a lot of these parent guidance books are wrong: be a friend to your child. Now it’s nice if you are a friend, we’re not knocking that, but when that becomes number one, you are wrong. Your child is not to be your friend if he first can’t respect you. If he can respect you and still be a friend, great, that’s double blessing. But if he can’t respect you, huh-un, he can’t be your friend. So remember that. We “reverence” our father and we reverence in the same way you can respect a person who can train you well. You may not like them personally, you may disagree with some of their decisions but on the whole you respect their ability to train you and that is reverence and that is what the Bible commands as an attitude toward parents. A lot of Christians wonder if they have the right attitude toward their parents. The attitude that God would have you have toward your parents is one of reverence for them as trainers and no matter how stupid you think your parents were you can learn something from them. No person has lived in this world 50 or 60 years and hasn’t picked something up. The fact they survived fifty years at least tells you they know how to cross the street, so you can learn something.

“Shall we not much rather” then, and notice the argument from the lesser to the greater, the kind of argument shown in verse 9 is the same kind of argument Jesus used many times: Matthew 7:9-11; Matthew 21:37 are places where Jesus the same logic. He argues from the family, the lesser, the human family, to the greater, the divine family. He says what you see goes on here goes on upstairs. Turn to one of the most famous passages, so elementary, so disarming, so simple to see and yet most of the time when we get in a jam we forget all about it. This is a good verse for memory, Matthew 7:11, but the context starts at verse 9, “Or what man is there of you whom, if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? [10] Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? [11] If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more,” see, the same argument, “how much more then does your heavenly Father give good gifts to them that ask Him.” See, the argument from the lesser to the greater. Jesus uses it, it is a legitimate argument, it’s grounded on the presupposition that the universe is structured with these institutions in it that the creation occurred just the way the Bible said.

So back to Hebrews; verse 10 is more of a deeper meditation on the curriculum. One is the “fathers of our flesh” and the other is the Father of our spirits, the human spirit is what makes us different and the human spirit enables us, if you want to draw a chart that is often used in psychology from stimulus to response, you have plant and a plant is direct response to a stimulus, give it a light stimulus, a noise stimulus, chemical stimulus and you get a certain reaction out of the plant. So you get a straight line reaction in a plant from stimulus to response. Now you come to the animals and the animals begin to have something else called a learned behavior pattern, in that animals can learn various response to stimulus, you no longer have a short straight line going between the stimulus and the response. Animals can develop alternate paths and they can be trained to choose alternate paths to certain stimulus. Okay now that’s the learned behavior pattern, animals have a lot of instinctive behavior patterns also, but those are eliminated in man, most of them and so man has learned behavior patterns and he has understanding. Now this is what makes man different in his response to stimuli. Man can respond with a learned behavior pattern or he can respond with understanding and that’s why all this Skinnerian behavior mod things that you learn in education are wrong because they are basically treating the stimulus response as though there’s no understanding there. And that’s wrong and it comes because Skinner is an evolutionist and he argues that man is just a few genes higher than the apes; and obviously if that’s the case then it’s just simple short term goals that modify behavior, and that’s not the way the Word of God has it. The Word of God has it that man has understanding and understanding means God-consciousness, it means we look at the world in terms of internal objectives.

Now this is why in the very next verse what should we be talking, since we’re talking about the educational process, what comes up immediately but the very element that man has that animals don’t? The sense of eternity. So divine training, or training with man differs from training with animals. In comparative psychology and learning experiments done with animals you have to be very careful about generalizing conclusions and bringing them over to man because you’re dealing with a creature that’s absolutely different. Man has eternal sensations.

Hebrews 12:10, “For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure, but He for our profit, that we might be partakers of His holiness.” Obvious interpretation of verse 10 is that they “for a few days” that’s temporarily, during the time of childhood, “chastened us,” or corrected us, “after their own pleasure,” or according to their own understanding, or what seems fit to them, what seems fit. That means, by the way, that no parent is ever perfect. See what that phrase is, as according to what seems fit. Now if you’re a parent and you have a guilty conscience because you made mistakes with your children, verse 10 should help straighten you out. There’s not one parent on earth that ever brought their children up perfectly, and if you’re going to walk around with a big fat guilt complex because you failed in bringing up your children you’re just going to make yourself miserable and your children miserable. The program is over, the training has occurred, now just take what you did that was right out if and work from there and trust the Lord to undo the rest. He’s in the undoing business because He’s in the undoing business with all the other parents in the world, you’re not unique, you’re not the only parent that ever blew it. So don’t get your liver in a quiver about it.

Okay, “but He for our profit, that we might be partakers of His holiness,” now the word “holiness” involves us with the concept of eternity and here’s how it works. Here’s a way of thinking about it and those of you who are working with the divine viewpoint framework developing it so you can understand it, you’ll have no trouble using it in this situation. Think back; what’s the most basic thing? Creation, the fall; you learn from concepts out of that, and you learn it from Genesis 1-4, the four most important chapters of the Scriptures as far as foundation goes. Now what about that? Okay, let’s look. At creation Adam was told to subdue the earth. Adam did not have holiness at the instant of creation; he had, theologians call it a “naïve holiness” or they have various terms to describe it just so that they can say that Adam was acceptable to God, God came walking in the Garden and we have to have a naïve righteousness, primitive holiness, whatever they call it, but that’s not real holiness. What did Adam have to do to acquire holiness? Here he, instantly created, the dust has just become a man, God breathed into his nostrils and now this breathing entity exists.

Okay, he’s existing, now what does he have to do to gain holiness. Now remember, this is before the fall, no plan of salvation, before the fall. [someone answers] Okay, Adam has to produce something to become holy; Adam has to work, he has to have production, that’s what God told him to do, that was the test, produce on the positive side and on the negative side he ought not to disobey, so minus disobey. Now if after an undetermined time, this is generally the thought in orthodoxy, that if after a certain time Adam had done what God told him to do, and Adam had subdued the earth and he had children and had (quote) “passed the test,” he would have been raptured, he would have received a resurrection body and be with the Lord for eternity, and this would have theoretically gone forward because he would have acquired holiness in history and now he would have a resurrection to go along with it.

But such was not the case and so we have the fall. Now holiness comes to us different ways. Here we are, here’s the time we become Christians; at this time, since we are in rebellion, so we come no with –R, we don’t come like Adam did, we come already having fallen, having already rebelled against God, having already been excluded from His presence. So because we are, at the time we come back into presence, we’ve got to have the holiness. There’s no intermediate level any more, that’s all washed out with Adam. So this is why God carries the righteousness of Jesus Christ to our account, we are credited with Christ’s righteousness. When we are credited with Christ’s righteousness the Father recognizes it, that’s the decree of justification, and when the Father recognizes Christ’s righteousness is credited to our account, at that point we are acceptable to the Father, not on the basis of our production but on the basis of this. Now where did that righteousness come from? It wasn’t available before Jesus, so where did it come from? It historically appeared; how did righteousness, perfect righteousness, historically appear? In His humanity, in His life, Jesus Christ passed the test that Adam failed. So that as a man Jesus perfectly obeyed the Father all the way unto death.

Now Jesus was born at the incarnation and He didn’t have holiness. The proof of it is back in Hebrews 5:8, Jesus was not born holy; He was born holy in the rough sense of the word but in the technical, technical narrow sense we’re talking about Jesus did not have holiness at the point of the incarnation. It says in verse 8, “Though he were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered,” and that shows you that Jesus did not have a sin nature but Jesus still had to learn holiness under pressure. You know, it’s something to think about some day when you think of the perfect environment in your dreams, your fantasy world, you dream of fantasy world where there’s not pressure. You know, in the Garden of Eden which was a perfect environment there was pressure. There was pressure to obey or disobey, to force Adam and Eve both to make a decision, pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure. And there was pressure on Jesus, even though Jesus had no sin nature He was under pressure, pressure, pressure, to choose one way or the other. And Jesus made it perfectly and so Jesus’ life generates +R, +R is credited to our account, the Father says okay, I recognize formally it’s credited to your account, you are justified.

Now we begin sanctification. And sanctification goes on and what is sanctification? Sanctification is our production. Now how do we get the right to produce? Whose production made us able to produce? Jesus’ production. See how it fits and how we’re linked to Christ. Jesus Christ’s production generated righteousness, that righteousness is credited to our account which now makes us in a position where we can produce. Everything we produce therefore ultimately goes back to Jesus Christ because it was His righteousness that gave us the opportunity. If Christ hadn’t passed the test no believer would have ever been saved in all of history. The Old Testament was saved promissory, they were saved assuming that Jesus was in fact going to fulfill prophecy. If he’d blown it all their salvation would have gone down the drain. So here we have the Old Testament saints, New Testament saints, our production is because of Jesus’ production. Our production generates holiness. It’s by grace because where do we get our right to produce? Who gave us the garden, who gave us the hoe, who gave us the seed, who gives us the water. Jesus does and because Jesus Christ has completely provided for our production, therefore it’s called production by grace. And the plan of salvation is called grace. It comes into existence only because Christ first came into existence.

So, this is why in verse 10 at the last part it says, “that we might be partakers of His holiness,” now do you see what partakers means? Of the same quality, we are restored from the fall to a place where at last we can produce something worthwhile. So that should be an overriding concern of every believer here tonight, is whether or not in your life right now you are producing something eternally worthwhile. It can mean leading someone else to Christ, it can mean a lot of other things besides that; it can mean raising children as unto the Lord, it can mean doing your job as unto the Lord, it can mean being the best student you can as unto the Lord. It can mean a lot of things but the issue always goes back, what is your production, right now, what is your production in the light of eternity. If you were to die tonight and all the work that you have done so far, up to tonight, were weighed in the balances, what would it look like. Now you don’t have to get ultra introspective, Paul warns against becoming ultra introspective but he also warns in other passages that we are to have this in mind, the bema seat, and that’s what he’s saying here, that we might become partakers, “being made partakers of His holiness.”

Now Hebrews 12:11, the conclusion is the mental attitude of the whole thing, it goes back to mental attitude notice again, because if you haven’t found out all ready in the Christian life, 90% of your energy is expended right up here, not overtly but over the mental attitude. I just put that in case there are some new believers here and you’ve just been knocked out with mental attitude sin and you can’t figure out what’s going on with my mind? Nothing, you just have a damned miserable mind that you inherited from Adam and you’re slowly being sanctified and that’s what’s causing the pain up there, so don’t think it strange.

“Now no chastening for the present seems to be joyous,” now look at that long and hard and compare it with the usual sweet devotional literature, see not either this verse is wrong or that literature is wrong, but what that is saying is that the Christian life is not the joy, joy, joy deep down in my heart. There is joy in the Christian life, but it isn’t that continually, one big high on Jesus all the time. You can have lots of lows on Jesus. So, “no musar for the present seems ever to be joyous, but grievous,” look at that, “grievous,” had that feeling about the Christian life, it’s grieving you; you’re normal. Isn’t that good news; that’s a normal attitude to feel grieved at what God is doing in your life. It means some days you will not walk around with that Cheshire cat grin on your face, the sign of the filling of the Holy Spirit or something.

“…nevertheless, afterward,” after it’s finished, “it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness” now the peaceable fruit of righteousness is something you can cash in on in phase two. It’s talking about that during this time, as you produce, you’ll go through a musar period and there will be fruit that comes out of that, that gives peace; then you go through more musar, and then you’ll have some more fruit that comes up and gives peace, not absolute and not enduring because you’re still in phase two. The enduring peace begins at the time of death or the time of the rapture, that’s when Peace with a capital “P” begins, that’s uninterrupted. But here there are these “peaceable fruits of righteousness” that come up and they come up after the musar, and now connected back with verse 7 and what was the principle we learned that started this whole section off with? How do you get the musar? By enduring, and “the peaceable fruit” comes after you’ve endured, a tremendous principle in Scripture; peace follows righteousness, and that goes for the world.

We’re not going to have world peace; we’re not going to have world peace until we have world righteousness first. And after we have world righteousness then we’ll have peace. It’s foolish to talk about peace. The Christian today should be arming himself, he should be training how to kill the enemy, that’s the Christian’s job. We ought to have every man in the reserve or active forces of this country is what we ought to do. We ought to have universal military training, every boy that’s going to seminary ought to be in the service before he goes to seminary, tremendous background for seminary. There’s things in seminary you’re never going to pick up if you don’t have service background. So this is a big necessary time in our day when we don’t apply this as a nation; trying to get peace without righteousness doesn’t work, never has, never will.

“… the peaceable fruit of righteousness, unto them who are exercised,” perfect tense, “who have become exercised [thereby].” And it’s the word from which we get the word gymnastics. Now, do you see the athletic metaphor that is carried on and on, all the way from verse 1 of this chapter, all the way down to verse 11, one big race, one big exercise, one big long struggle to get to the end; that is the normal picture of the Christian life. That is the normal Christian life. And it is abnormal to take a high, one or two days out of a month’s experience and say that’s normal and the rest of these days in my Christian life are not normal. That is foolish and people who that have never understood the fall. They have never understood total depravity; they have never understood the power of sin until Christ returns. Don’t you ever go around guilty because you don’t have one continual high. Be thankful, your nerves would be shot.

All right, let’s turn in conclusion to two verses in Psalm 119 that shows you what a believer said some day, we don’t know when he wrote this, but he went through the musar and came out with the peaceable fruit of righteousness and he said some things about it and there’s no more fitting way than to conclude than to show once again by modeling that there was another believer, a long time ago, who went through the same old grievous process, came out and had a good thing to say about it.

Psalm 119:67, “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but no have I kept Thy word.” It’s a time of rejoicing, he had to get the affliction before he kept the Word. He learned the hard way. Now that should sound familiar to at least somebody in this room besides myself.

Psalm 119:71, look at this one, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted, that I might learn Thy statutes.” Now next time you feel down, take Psalm 119:71 and write it on a 3 x 5 card and stick it in front of your face, put it on the inside of a notebook, put it on a mirror you spend half a day looking at, put it some place where you’re going to see it, and then when you cry next time, you just look at that, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted, that I might learn Thy statues.” Father, we thank You….