“All this has come upon us, though we have not forgotten you, and we have not been false to your covenant. Our heart has not turned back, nor have our steps departed from your way; yet you have broken us in the place of jackals and covered us with the shadow of death.” Psalm 44:17-19
I came upon these verses in my reading of Ps. 44 this morning and was reminded that not all of God’s discipline comes in response to our disobedience. Because this is true we must be careful in jumping to conclusions when we see people “broken in the place of jackals and covered with the shadow of death” lest we fall into the trap of Job’s comforters. Some of the most difficult discipline to bear is God’s discipline that comes without any obvious connection to wrong doing in our lives. We expect God’s discipline when we have forgotten him or his covenant, but not when we haven’t. Yet this, in my experience, is the bulk of God’s discipline.
Would this kind of discipline be any easier to bear if we knew that threw it God was actually strengthening us for a battle against future sin or helping to insure that we will not forget Him? What if the design behind our suffering was to intensify our longings for Eden and the renewal of all things? “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 12:11).
