...your rod and your
staff they comfort me.. – Ps 23:4
“These rules may seem
to be wise as part of a made-up religion in which people pretend to be humble
and punish their bodies. But they don't help people stop doing the evil that
the sinful self wants to do.” Col 2:23 (ERV)
Have you ever heard that “Christianity is a
call to suffering”? Pious as this may sound, it’s an appealing bait that has carnal
religion hidden beneath it.
Not too long after the Apostles and early
church fathers died, the Church slipped into a deviant form of religiosity that
equated piety with abasement and encouraged any outward manifestation of
humiliation, suffering, hunger and other forms of “mortification of the flesh”
as worthy spiritual disciplines.
Saints attained fame and notoriety for the
amount of pain and suffering they endured in caves, monasteries, mountaintops,
etc. Unfortunately, vestiges of this religious masochism (the tendency to invite and enjoy misery), still remains
with us today. And one of it is manifested in the way some Christians define
the Psalmist’s “rod and staff”’; (Ps 23:4).
It’s said that the “rod and staff” are
instruments used by God to correct and discipline us through affliction and
chastisement. It’s from this thinking that we get the shepherd-will-break-the-stubborn-sheep’s-legs doctrinal fallacy. No
right-thinking shepherd will deliberately cripple his own sheep because it’s
‘stubborn’. And if human shepherds don’t, the Good Shepherd doesn’t.
Only a psychologically unsound (or ‘religious’)
mind will say that a buffeting rod is comforting. Even Heb 12:11 freely admits that “No chastening for the present seems to be
joyous, but grievous.” So if the Psalmist says the rod and staff comfort him, it’s because the rod and staff
are for defending and protecting him, not for punishing him.
Does our Shepherd correct? Yes He does. With
what does He correct? He corrects us with His Word! Not with sickness, pain and
loss; because we’re not “as the horse, or
as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit
and bridle,” (Ps 32:9). We’re the sheep of the Good Shepherd; and His sheep hear His voice, and He knows them,
and they follow Him. (Jn 10:27)
Hallelujah.
More Blessings await
you today; you’ll not miss them in Jesus’ Name.
GREG ELKAN
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