I. Chastisement is sent by fatherly love. There, where we are most sensitive, God touches us. The thorn in the flesh is something which we fancy we cannot bear if it were to be lifelong. We have emerged, as it were, out of a dark tunnel, and fancy that the rest of our journey will be amid sunlit fields. We have achieved steep and rugged ascents, and imagine the period of great and exhausting exertion is over. The trial deepest and sorest seems to leave us for a while, yet it returns again.
II. "Afterwards." Does not this world search and try us? God forbid that we should forget the chastening of the Lord, that we should "get over" sorrow, or be comforted like the world. Nowis our afterwards, peace and godliness today by reason of yesterday's sorrow and trial.
III. The cross of Christ is despised and hated, not merely by self-righteous Jews and wise and worldly Greeks, but within the professing Church the Apostle weeps over many who are enemies of the cross of Christ, not of the doctrine that Christ died instead of sinners, but of the teaching that we have been crucified with Him and have been planted in the likeness of His death; that we have been saved, and are being saved, not from death, but out of death; that, dying daily the painful death by crucifixion, we live the spiritual resurrection life together with and in Christ. By affliction and the inward crucifixion we learn to seek our true life, treasure, strength, and joy, not in earthly affections, possessions, pursuits, and attainments, however good and noble, but in Him who is at the right hand of God; and the end will be glory.
A. Saphir, Lectures on Hebrews,vol. ii., p. 371.