IT’S NOT YOUR GRANDFATHER’S  KIND OF DISCIPLINE
We should not be surprised to know that God’s idea of discipline is not what we normally think of in our respective cultures. Most of us think of discipline as punishment for wrong behaviors with respect to some kind of standard (e.g. civil laws, criminal laws, household laws, mores, traditions, etc.) established by people with authority to create laws and enforce them (e.g. government, parents, employers, religions, etc.). God’s discipline is different because it is enforced with respect to the standard of his spiritual laws written on the hearts of New/First Covenant disciples. Men have no part in establishing God’s laws.

A quick, simplistic comparison of cultural discipline and Godly discipline would say that one is managed by external sources to force people to conform to human laws and the other is enforced internally by God to encourage conformance to spiritual laws. Another comparison would say that cultural discipline uses punishment and shame to change fleshly behaviors while Godly discipline uses restorative love and kindness to effect an internal change of heart.

STUDY TIP: See The Heart is the Place.

In all cultures, the standards of behavior are codified as written laws or handed down from generation to generation as oral laws. They are typically rigid and unbending, but they tend to evolve over time along with the culture. These laws include religion which evolves along with the culture in which it is practiced. They are all conceived by and managed by people.

God’s standards are very different. First of all, they do not change over time because God does not change. Secondly, God’s laws are only written on the hearts of people who love God — not written on paper. They are spiritual and cannot be seen with the natural eye. Thirdly, they differ from cultural laws in the important fact that obedience and covenant faithfulness are closely tied to listening to God’s voice — not to human teachers or authorities.

It can be said, therefore, that knowing God’s law is the same thing as knowing his character and his will as revealed exclusively by his voice. Human teachers may think they know a thing or two about God because they have read some or a lot of the Bible. But what they think they know is a mere shadow of the truth that can be revealed only by God directly when he speaks to our hearts. So it can be said that, to a great degree, the purpose of Godly discipline is to correct and expand on the deficiencies and errors of human teachers who have interpreted and applied what they think they know about God in systematic theologies, moral laws/codes and ceremonies/traditions, all of which constitute religion.

Judaism and Christianity are based on human understandings derived from the literal words of the Bible which cannot accurately describe God who is spirit. True knowledge and wisdom about God’s character and ways can only be discerned with spiritual eyes and ears that see way beyond anything that human words can imagine or describe. God describes these differences in starkly contrasting words such as light and dark, clean and unclean, good and evil, holy and profane, spirit and flesh, righteous and unrighteous, and many others.

In the most general terms, the distinctions between what man teaches about God and what God teaches about himself are called Old/First Covenant and New Covenant. Therefore, God’s purpose in discipline is to reteach Old/First Covenant religionists about himself so they have a New Covenant understanding. Therefore, our purpose in reading the Bible should be to discover where our religious beliefs and practices conform to Old/First Covenant religion so that we might repent of them and have our hearts changed so that we no longer desire to be religious.

Since God is spirit and unfathomable by the natural mind, it is impossible to reduce God’s character and will to words on a page. Only a prideful fool would think he or she could do as good a job as God can do to explain his vast character to another person. But hundreds of generations of fools (i.e. false prophets) have tried to do just that in Old/First Covenant religious laws which are covenants of death that are not able to give life. Since God is spirit, his spiritual character and laws can only be represented in a spiritual way (i.e. the New Covenant), which is a very personal and  dynamic covenant that is understood only by listening to his voice. This truth is confirmed in the truth that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the spoken word of God (i.e. Christ).

It makes sense to prefer a New Covenant understanding of God that comes from words spoken by God’s own voice that is the source of spiritual life. We should study the Bible, therefore, to learn where we have limited our understanding of God by accepting human teaching about God instead of listening to his voice.

With these understandings we can begin to appreciate why it is so important to God that his people represent his name (i.e. character) accurately to the world. We can also begin to appreciate why God considers failure to listen to his voice to be sin and why he has such strong feelings about false prophets.

All of these subtleties about the spiritual nature of God are necessary background to understand why God sometimes promises that he will bring evil on Israel for failure to listen to his voice. This is hard to accept or understand until we understand that, God considers anyone who prefers to receive instruction from a human instead of listening to his voice to be an idolater who practices evil.

What he promises is that he will discipline his people when they disobey his commands not to follow the religious practices of the people/nations who live around them. He will discipline (i.e. exile) his people when they follow these practices because they are based on human teachings and traditions that nullify God’s spoken word. It is no surprise that he would do this considering that he is jealous of his character (i.e. name) and does not want to be misunderstood, misrepresented and misquoted to the world.

Those of us who have ever been misunderstood and misquoted can begin to appreciate why God would want to take vengeance on those who misrepresent and misquote him. But God does not take revenge through external, physical means. He does it spiritually by piercing our hearts while reading the Bible study. The broken and contrite heart that we experience when he opens our eyes to understand that we have misrepresented and misquoted him through our religious activity and speech is our discipline. Our spiritual sacrifice is what we make when we repent of our religiosity and quit practicing religion.

We conclude from all the above that we will know if we are reading the Bible with our spiritual eyes and ears wide open when our hearts are pierced with grief upon recognition that we have misquoted and misrepresented God through our religious behaviors and speech. Then we will have heard God’s spoken word which gives us spiritual understanding of the thoughts and intentions of our soulish heart. In other words, we will see our hearts as God sees them. What we will see is that we have spent precious time, energy and money following man’s religious ways instead of resting in God’s spiritual ways which have no material, fleshly cost.