James Nisbet's Church Pulpit Commentary
Hebrews 12:6
SIN AND ITS PUNISHMENT
‘Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.’
Scripture tells us of God’s fatherly chastisements; and speaks of them, like human chastisements, as both deterrent and remedial.
I. They are spoken of as deterrent.—‘When Thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world shall learn righteousness.’ We can understand that the fate of Elymas, whom St. Paul struck with blindness, and the fate of the Corinthian adulterer, whom he ‘delivered to Satan,’ must have been of profound and far-stretching influence in the early Church. But how if God’s judgments are not recognised as coming from Him? If any human events may be ascribed to the avenging hand of God, should we not assign to this cause pestilence and war? But it is common experience that times of war and pestilence, so far from being times of learning righteousness, are times of exceptional forgetfulness of it. God’s judgments, like man’s judgments, avail to deter us from sin only so far as they are realised as the inevitable accompaniment and shadow of sin—its necessary consequence. A man who by some intimate knowledge has realised the shattered health of the debauchee and the drunkard’s paralysed will does gain a horror of those sins which speeds him on the path of temperance and chastity. A student of history, who has realised that the decay of nations has in past times been brought about by the decline of public spirit and the growth of private luxury, will lift a warning voice to his fellow-citizens, and for his own part will devote himself without reserve to the public good. But we must allow that the least effect of the Divine chastisements is their effect as deterrent, because it is so hard to realise.
II. The greater stress is laid in the Bible on the side most efficacious in our human punishments, their remedial power, when the sufferer recognises them as chastisements from the Father in heaven. But how can this recognition be brought about in hearts where there seems to be no love of God to appeal to? Sometimes, in God’s mercy, it is the suddenness, the unexpectedness, of the blow, or the sharpness of the punishment, that strikes home to the conscience as by the very hand of God, and creates the conviction that God is not mocked, which is the root of penitence. Many of us may know cases where the detection and prompt punishment of a first offence has stopped a career of wrong-doing. Sometimes it is sickness that, by laying a man low, gives him leisure to consider his ways and take stock of the meaning and purpose of his life. Or sometimes it is from quite other sources—from books, from the wonder of the world, from the quiet influence of a Christian life, that there comes to a man the revelation that what he had previously held to be merely accidental disappointments, accidental troubles, were, in truth, Divine punishments, sent to wean him from his selfishness; and he confesses, ‘It was good for me that I have been in trouble, that I might learn Thy law.’
III. As we compare human punishment, as it is administered in the family and the state, with the chastisements of God, this point emerges. A son sometimes, despite all his father can do, goes, as we say, to the bad. The chastisements of love prove of no effect; and what punishments the state may have had occasion to inflict are equally unavailing. Punishment in such a case becomes perpetual; there is banishment from the family circle, seclusion from society. What will happen if the chastisements of the heavenly Father and heavenly Law-giver are as fruitless? Does there survive in them also, when they are proved powerless to deter or to remedy, their fundamental character of retribution? Must they maintain, as against the sinner, a continual assertion of the law of righteousness? Or, to put the question in a shape in which we are more familiar with it: When all the penitent sinners are forgiven, is it in the will of the righteous and eternal God to punish eternally the impenitent? To that question the highest human reason has always given the answer Yes. The self-pleasing Sybarite may take another view, he may fall back on irresponsibility and predestination and say—
‘Some there are who tell
Of one who threatens he will toss to hell
The luckless pots he marr’d in making—pish,
He’s a good fellow, and ‘twill all be well.’
But Plato has no doubt. The sense of justice, as it is implanted in the human mind, demands that sin and suffering should go together. But then also the human reason has never forgotten that God is love as well as righteousness, and so it has cherished the hope that there must be, within the Divine armoury, weapons of punishment capable of piercing in to the most obdurate and impenetrable hearts, and arousing in them the saving consciousness of sin.
IV. The problem whether any human will can reduce itself to eternal incompatibility with the will of God, so as to be cast as ‘rubbish to the void,’ is not a problem for us. With Scripture before us, we cannot (as some have done) deny the possibility. The problem for us is so to fix our thoughts on God’s righteous law that we may never lose the sense of penitence, and so to fix our thoughts on God’s fatherly love that we may never lose the sense of sonship. ‘Father, I have sinned; I am no more worthy to be called Thy son; but I accept my chastisement; I am Thy son—save me.’
—Rev. Canon Beeching.
Illustration
‘What use does punishment serve in the family? Partly we mean it to be deterrent, both to the offending child and to the other members of the household; we want sin and sorrow to be associated in the child’s mind as cause and effect; but still more we wish it to exercise a remedial effect upon character, and this it helps to do, in its proper character as retribution, by enforcing respect for the law which has been broken. It calls fresh attention to the law of the family, emphasises it, vindicates it. And by itself punishment cannot accomplish more than this. Punishment cannot make any one hate wrong-doing, or feel reverence for law. That effect can only be produced by the character of the father who administers the chastisement; whose own love of right and hatred of wrong, and love of the wrong-doer and zeal for his highest welfare, are clearly distinguished in and through the chastisement he feels bound to inflict.’