“Thou shalt also consider in thine heart, that, as a man chasteneth his son, so the Lord thy God chasteneth thee.” This blessed word holds good at all times and under all circumstances, whether the discipline be individually or corporately applied; whether, passing on New Testament ground, we take 1 Cor. 5 or Heb. 12. Our Father never departs from this principle, never uses the rod, save under the prompting of perfect love. Holiness is the end, love the motive. Moreover, true discipline is but one of the forms of the activity of true love. It is good and wholesome to keep this in mind. Correctness of judgment and tenderness of heart should be blended in us as they are in our God. All that is right must be learned from His ways, and ourselves in subjection, so that we may not neutralize that which is of Him by the adjunction of that which is our own. “Neutralize” is not an adequate expression, for positive harm may be wrought by doing right things in a wrong way.
The manner in which discipline is to be exercised in the assembly is plainly laid down in 1 Cor. 5, as well as the full measure of the Lord's requirements; but we must place ourselves behind the scene, as it were, to see the spirit that suits such an act. Not until we come to 2 Cor. 2 do we learn what it cost the apostle to write, under the dictation of the Holy Ghost, 1 Cor. 5 Not until the saints were themselves broken under the sorrow could he make them understand how much he himself had suffered. It is not merely a question of the Corinthians humbling themselves for the sad and gross evil immediately connected with them; but there is a deeper and wider truth, which is, that those who are right should teach the wrong ones their proper place by taking it themselves. Paul—the right one—is the first to enter into the sorrow, with a breaking heart, that he might draw the Corinthians where he was, and that they might, in their turn, draw the guilty into the same. Paul had chiefly to do with and to say to them; they, I submit, to, the culprit himself, their grief being, more than anything else, calculated to touch his conscience, and win his heart back to the Lord. It can never be only an act of putting away, although there must be that, as due to the holiness of the Lord; but in that act is involved a question of eating the sin-offering in the holy place, confessing the sin in self-judgment, and ever keeping in view the ultimate restoration of the soul. Sever 2 Cor. 2 and vii. from 1 Cor. 5, and a deal of mischief will arise. Saints will form themselves into a court of justice, to pass sentences right and left, without the consciousness that each sentence strikes upon them, and brings them into the punishment. These are the words of the apostle, as to what he felt at the time when he wrote the first epistle: “For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote unto you, with many tears;” and this is the record of the effect produced upon the saints by the spirit of his letter: “For, beheld, this selfsame thing, that ye sorrowed after a godly soil, whet carefulness it wrought in you; yea, what clearing of yourselves; yea, what indignation; yes, what fear; yea, what vehement desire; yea, what zeal; yea, what revenge!” The only way to a godly clearing of ourselves is by godly sorrow; without this, none of that.
This is an unchangeable principle with God. As in Israel of old, so in the church now. When the ancient people had crossed Jordan, and seen in the fall of Jericho how Jehovah dealt with the enemy, they came before Ai to be broken down, They, like the Corinthians later, had lacked “carefulness,” and by their indifference to evil within, room was left for Achan to lay hold of the accursed thing. And the record is striking. It does not say, “Achan,” but, “the children of Israel committed a trespass.” All were involved in the deed, and the people judged before the culprit himself. This is not easily accepted nor entered into, even by Joshua. Sad indeed were his words on the occasion: “Would to God we had been content, and dwelt on the other side Jordan!” That is, we do not like the principle of discipline that strikes the many even before the guilty one is. reached. And not only was this the case when things were in order, and the people one, as under Joshua; but also at the end of Judges, when the tribes lived practically isolated from each other, and “there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes” —a principle which must lead to fearful wrong. A molten image in the house of Micah, and, worse yet, the connivance of a Levite with idol worship, were sad enough; but not until the downright evil of apostasy, the sin of Sodom, and that which brought the flood upon the earth (Gen. 6:12), had been confronted, was the moral sense of the Israelites roused, and then they “gathered together as one man.... unto the Lord in Mizpeh.” The voice of Mizpeh, or sentinel, seems to say, Be on the watch. And now that Jehovah has got them together once more, He must carry out the principle of old—strike the many before the few, and at the cost of forty thousand of their own did they learn their connection with the iniquity of Benjamin. Nay, more: “All the people went up, and came unto the house of God, and wept, and sat before the Lord, and fasted that day until even, and offered burnt-offerings and peace-offerings before the Lord.” Only after this painful, but wholesome, ordeal could God side with them, and fit them to deal in righteousness with “Benjamin, my brother.”
Christians on the wilderness side of Jordan cannot see nor acknowledge this principle—they are not in the place where it is carried out; but when we stand on Ephesian truth, whether or not the church has been faithful to its calling, whether in Joshua or in Judges, we must keep in mind that God will act with us according to what he is, and also to what we ought to be. C.