(3) For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds. (4) Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin. (5) And ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him: (6) For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. (7) If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not? (8) But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons. (9) Furthermore we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live? (10) For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure; but he for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness. (11) Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby. (12) Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees; (13) And make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the way; but let it rather be healed.
There is somewhat truly blessed in what is here said of the Lord Jesus. What joy could be set before him, which could increase his own joy, in the glories of his own essential power and Godhead? And if it be meant, the joy of giving everlasting happiness to millions, in giving them a Being in himself, and a blessedness of being in himself abstracted from all personal interest, what a view doth it give of the love of Christ? Moreover, when we are enjoined by the Holy Ghost to consider Him, in order to prevent our becoming faint under exercises, what an argument ariseth here - from, to give confidence to the soul, in the consideration, that as he was, so are we in this world. And the argument runs thus: If Jesus, for our sakes, endured such things against himself, what ought we to endure, if needful, for ourselves. Oh! who shall count the contumacy, reproach, and scorn, which the Son of God sustained, in his Person, Offices, and characters, when he became man for our salvation? How sweetly the Apostle argues from it in the next Chapter, to go forth without the camp, bearing his reproach? Hebrews 13:13. And how sweetly he adds to this argument another; in that, though some of them might, and would be called to suffering, yet hitherto they had not. Reader! there is nothing so truly accommodating, to bring a child of God into a blessed frame of mind, when at any time exercised with sufferings, as the consciousness of Christ's sorrows. The path is made sacred, which we are called upon to walk in, when we behold the footsteps in it of the Lord Jesus, and those footsteps marked with blood.
There is somewhat very affectionate and endearing in the application of that passage from Proverbs 3:11, to the cases of the Lord's suffering family. The character of a father, in the tenderness of one, is happily chosen, to represent the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort. And the contrast, to the case of bastards, who are disregarded by their father, as being ashamed to own children un-lawfully begotten, is as striking, to set forth the vast difference, between the children of the bond-woman, and the children of the free. Reader! it is astonishing to observe, what a decided, and marked attention, is uniformly observed through all the Bible, by way of showing the Church, the delight the Lord takes to mark the precious from the vile; and to instruct the Church, how to know him that serveth God, from him that serveth him not.