Revelation 2:21-22 “And I gave her time to repent of her sexual immorality, and she did not repent. (22) Indeed, I will cast her into a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her into great tribulation, unless they repent of their deeds.”
We have seen thus far that the Lord never chastens His children the moment they commit sin, for He always gives them time to repent first. In other words we experience His grace. In the passage of scripture quoted above the Lord Jesus clearly tells us that He had given His daughter time to repent of her sexual immorality but she had refused to do so, which resulted in the Lord then chastening her. And so our Lord deals with each one of us in exactly the same manner, and if we begin to practice sin in our lives He gives us time to repent of that sin. If after a while He sees that we are refusing to repent of that sin however then, as our loving parent, He chastens us in order to bring us to the point of repentance. So what chastening does the Lord use on His children in order to deal with their sin? We know that His chastening is not pleasant, for that much was made clear to us in the passage in Hebrews quoted earlier. In the above quoted passage we see that two mechanisms that the Lord uses to chasten His children are sickness and tribulation. So does that mean that every time a Christian gets sick or experiences some form of tribulation, that the Lord is disciplining them? The answer to that question is no, but it would certainly be prudent for the believer who may be encountering such circumstances, to check up on their walk with the Lord to make sure that they are not walking in any unrepentant sin. As an aside, the tribulation mentioned in this passage refers to things going wrong in the saint’s life; it does not refer to persecution for being a Christian.
1 Corinthians 11:30-32 “For this reason many are weak and sick among you, and many sleep. (31) For if we would judge ourselves, we would not be judged. (32) But when we are judged, we are chastened by the Lord, that we may not be condemned with the world.”
In the passage of scripture quoted above the Holy Spirit through the apostle Paul reveals to us that the Lord had chastened certain believers in that church for partaking of the Lord’s Table in an unworthy manner. The Holy Spirit tells us that they were chastened with weakness, sickness and early physical death. And so we can see from this passage that two further mechanisms the Lord uses to chasten us is weakness and even early death. I want you to notice from this passage that our Lord chastens us so that we will not be condemned with the world. In other words if the Lord sees that the path we are on will eventually lead us to committing the sin to spiritual death, then He rather judges us with early physical death so that our spirits remain saved in the day of the Lord. And so from the examples we have seen in this section, we can see that some of the forms of chastening that our Lord uses in His church are sickness, weakness, tribulation and eventually early death.
1 Timothy 1:18-20 “This charge I commit to you, son Timothy, according to the prophecies previously made concerning you, that by them you may wage the good warfare, (19) having faith and a good conscience, which some having rejected, concerning the faith have suffered shipwreck, (20) of whom are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I delivered to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme.”
The context of the above quoted passage of scripture is that these two ministers of the gospel, Hymenaeus and Alexander, had begun to teach false doctrine in the church. And so the apostle Paul had judged these two believers for their unrepentant sin of preaching false doctrine, by delivering them to Satan so they would learn to no longer blaspheme. We see in this passage that as a result of Paul delivering these two to Satan that they had suffered ship wreck in their lives. In other words, everything had gone wrong in their lives. We saw in an earlier passage that Paul also delivered the unrepentant saint in the church in Corinth to Satan, for the destruction of his flesh. And so we see a truth from these passages, which is that the Lord uses Satan as His instrument to chasten His church. In other words the Lord allows Satan to have access to the lives of His children. And so we see that because of their sin, it is the saints themselves that open the door for Satan to bring destruction into their lives. So is it the Lord’s perfect will that these things happen to His children? Emphatically no! His perfect will for us is that we walk completely free from all weakness, sickness, things going wrong in our lives, and that we live long lives on the earth, and He made provision for all of this when He died on the cross for us. But we are talking about sin, and as we saw earlier, Jesus died for our sins and made provision for us to walk free from sin. If we choose to walk in sin however and we refuse to repent of that sin, then after a period of grace, God as our loving Father is going to chasten us in order to correct our behaviour. And He uses the devil to do just that.
Michael E.B. Maher
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