"Appreciate the discipline of God He is both your upholder and, in the last analysis, your environment; all things come of Him, and you have tasted His goodness every day of your life. Has this experience led you to repentance and faith in Christ? If not, you are trifling with God, and stand under the threat of His severity. But if, now, He, in Whitefield's phrase, puts thorns in your bed, it is only to awaken you from the sleep of spiritual death, and to make you rise up to seek His mercy. Or if you are a true believer, and He still puts thorns in your bed, it is to ensure that you 'continue in his goodness' by letting your sense of need bring you back constantly in self-abasement and faith to seek His face. This kindly discipline, in which God's severity touches us for a moment in the context of His goodness, is meant to keep us from having to bear the full brunt of that severity apart from that context. It is a discipline of love, and must be received accordingly. 'My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord' (Hebrews 12:5). 'It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn they statutes' (Psalm 119:71).
- - J.I. Packer, Knowing God
Goodness and Severity, chapter 16
I quote Packer at length today because I was reading this chapter this morning - and by morning, I mean 4 in the morning - and got such a laugh out of a misunderstanding that comes from the fog of sleeplessness. For weeks, I have had such difficulty sleeping more than a few hours, or sleeping consistently. As I read this paragraph, I first understood the word 'bed' to refer to the place where we sleep. How exactly did the thorns get into my bed? It did not occur to me, until much later, to think of a garden bed... where you are much more likely to actually find thorns in a bed. All the same, in dealing with this insomnia, something about this idea of thorns in my bed made Packer's paragraph make all the more sense.
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