Discipline - Flesh or Spirit?

But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us, and we respected them; shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits, and live? (Hebrews 12:8-9)

I have a question. Is it true that illegitimate children are never disciplined? I don't quite understand where that assumption comes from. Maybe there is some cultural concept from the days of Paul that was implied here that is unfamiliar to us today. For in my mind, just because a child is born out of wed-lock or from a rape or any other way that would label them illegitimate, that does not imply that they should be free of the need for discipline.

But then, come to think of it that is not the point at all. The problem is not with the child but with the absence of a parent. The problem with illegitimacy is not the status of the child bringing shame on him but the lack of a loving parent around to train and mentor the child. I am now starting to see that what Paul is really saying here is, if you are not experiencing discipline/mentoring in your life you should be pitied greatly because you do not have a relationship with a Father who cares enough about you to raise you and invest time and effort teaching you the necessary skills for life.

Wow! I never realized how much my prejudice paradigm was keeping me from seeing this passage clearly until I asked that question. Instead of looking at this through the eyes of shame and condemnation, if I look at it with the view of the privileges enjoyed by children with good mentors for parents then the real social poverty of a person without a loving and skilled mentor becomes very sad. Being an illegitimate child is not to view the child with shame but with sadness for the absence of a good parent, even if they have people who claim to be their parents.

I now pray for reparenting for myself. I have been realizing my need of this over the past few years increasingly but I don't know how it is to take place. But God is in the business of providing all of our needs and as this is one of them I trust Him to supply it too. In fact, I believe that this passage is all about that very thing. It is really an invitation to enter more fully into the relationship of being mentored and reparented by God to fill in the huge gaps in our maturity that most of us suffer with.

In verse 9 I see a very significant distinction made. It is the comparison between our relationship with the father of our flesh and the father of our spirit. In many respects, many of the problems that come from our sinful flesh causing so much trouble inside of us often was received through the mistakes and sometimes even abusive ways that our flesh fathers trained us. God revealed centuries ago this natural principle in the second commandment when He said, You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me. (Exodus 20:5)

I realize that this text has been largely misinterpreted to mean God imposes punishment on succeeding generations for sins of the fathers. But when understood in the light of the truth about the real character of God and the principles of reality set up in creation, it will be seen that He is simply describing the natural consequences that flow through means of both genetics and environmental influences within families and cultures. When I looked up the word for visiting I found that it can easily mean simply observing, being aware of and not necessarily imposing arbitrarily.

The real jealousy of God is always in the context of His passionate love and desire to be fully reunited with all of His children in perfect love and harmony. There is no dark side with God and therefore everything like this must be considered in the light of the real truth about His feelings and desires toward us. In fact, it has been pointed out by some that this declaration is actually a statement of great mercy in that while God is fully aware and observant of the tragic generational effects of sinful tendencies, He limits those effects to only three or four generations instead of allowing them to produce much more chaos and pain.

So when I view these verses in Romans in light of this revelation about God's mercy, I can see that God is eager to stop the cycle of iniquity as quickly as possible that has been put in place by the messed up ways that our earthly fathers or mothers treated us and instilled false ideas about life and about God deep into our hearts. We absolutely do not have to wait for three or four generations to stop the cycle of evil. God's grace abounds much more where sin abounds and any one of us can enter into the reparenting, retraining relationship with God to be mentored, discipled (which is what real discipline is all about) and learn to grow up into the full image of God as demonstrated in the perfect example of Jesus.

I think the most significant point to understand in what this means is the designation of God as the Father of our spirit as opposed to the fathers of our flesh. The real problem we have above all else that we received from our fleshly fathers, is the distortion of reality through the terrible contamination and abuse of our spirit. It is in the arena of our spirit that God wants to work primarily and spirit is the root of the word spiritual. If we try to focus on goodness and righteousness and Godliness without primarily focusing on the condition and the healing of our spirit, then we will never be truly spiritual – we will only become religious. And God save us from religious people.

Verse 9 says here that the discipline we received from our earthly parents basically got our attention. That is within the definition of the Greek word translated respected in this verse. I think it is really a stretch to believe that the kind of discipline many of us received from our earthly parents of the flesh really produced the healthy kind of respect that we need to experience with God. But it usually at least got our attention, but often at the cost of our respect.

When we become intimidated by the counterfeit of true discipline (punishment and/or abuse) instead of becoming appreciative in love and gratitude, then chances are pretty high that the discipline was not the kind that God uses but was much more punitive and arbitrary in nature. That kind of discipline usually has more to do with the parent's feelings and frustrations or even fears of what others will think about them as a parent than it has to do with the healthy development and encouragement of positive traits of character in the heart of the child. Whenever “discipline” is administered with a spirit tainted with anger, selfishness or fear, then that “discipline” will produce fruit of iniquity in the heart of the child that is liable to pass on for another 3-4 generations unless it is checked sooner by the intervention of grace.

That kind of counterfeit discipline infects the spirit of the child with a subtle poison that corrupts them, distorts their view of reality and worst of all drives them farther away from the truth about what God is like, implanting more lies about Him deep into their psyche that act as fuel for triggers for the rest of their life. For the most effective way to implant a lie most deeply is to do it during a time of trauma. This has been one of Satan's most successful strategies in blinding our hearts away from the truth about God's perfect love and goodness and especially His discipline. It has produced the all-pervasive fear about God that permeates all of human thinking and all religions. As long as we associate our ideas of God's discipline with the false ideas we received from the counterfeit discipline we received from the parents of our flesh we can never be free from the false fears about Him that will always be the natural outworking of those lies.

For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness. (Hebrews 12:10)

Implicit in this verse is the assumption that quite likely the discipline we received from the father of our flesh was not necessarily good. I get that from the word but which is a word to denote contrast or an opposite. That is not to say that it was all bad. But because our parents were full of a lot of their own sinful baggage, they simply could not be the kind of parents or administer the healthy kind of discipline to the extent that we needed. And that is under the best of conditions. Many of us had parents who had so much baggage that their attempts at child-raising had much more detrimental effects than it had positive. And even though it was sometimes the best they could do given their own condition, it was far short of the life-giving, maturity-producing mentoring and correcting that God planned for us to experience.

This calls for a massive rethinking of the whole notion of discipline on the part of everyone. I am not advocating the total abandonment of all discipline in the raising of children for I know God is not teaching us that. But we need to examine far more intently the real truth about this subject and explore much deeper the ways that God disciples His children so that the way we treat those we are supposed to be mentoring is closer to the life-producing ways that God does. And primarily I believe that starts and ends with paying much more attention to the condition of our spirit and the condition of the spirit of the one we are disciplining. For any discipline done outside of a view to restoration of our spirit to the bonds of love and peace is a counterfeit and will produce more seeds of death and pain.

Paul goes even further to state here that the whole reason for real discipline is for us to be able to share in His holiness. That is very exciting to me after I have learned what the real meaning of that word is and what the deepest passion of God's heart is in this area. As I have written more extensively about on another site, I believe that God's greatest passion and ultimate goal that He can hardly wait to experience with us the the full exposure of the intensity of His holiness, passion and overwhelming love. That point in eternity is going to take place on the Day of Judgment which itself means revelation or revealing. God is intensely excited about that day that will fully transpire after the passing of the millenium and He is constantly referring to it in nearly every prophecy in the Bible. We have missed most of these references because of our distortions about God and our unbalanced obsession with the Second Coming as being the ultimate focal point in history. Anyway, if you want to read more along that line you can visit the other site and read more about it there.

But that is the light that I see again shining through the words in this verse. God is intensely passionate to restore as many people as possible to a state of safety so that they will be prepared to be glorified with Him in that day. He really wants everyone to enjoy that indescribable climax of joy and love but He is also painfully aware that many are refusing to believe the truth about Him and allow Him to save them. That process of restoration is called salvation, and it has to do with restoring the heart and the spirit into unity and peace and a condition of unselfishness that can never be accomplished or even approximated by the external attempts of religion.

Shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of spirits, and live?

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy: I have come that they may have Life, and may have it in abundance. (John 10:10 WNT)

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