Masochistic Christianity

...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