Purple & Ash

Embracing the Discipline of the Lord

“Those who once feasted on delicacies perish in the streets; those who were brought up in purple embrace ash heaps.”

— Lamentations 4:5

Lamentations, which the English Bible sets after the prophecy of Jeremiah, is a book of five poems written over the ruin of Jerusalem. The city had fallen to Babylon, whose captain of the bodyguard burned the house of the Lord and every great house in the city (2 Kings 25:8–9), and the poet writes from among the consequences. The fourth poem begins with gold that has grown dim and holy stones scattered at the head of every street (4:1), and it goes on to the precious sons of Zion, once worth their weight in fine gold, who are now regarded as earthen pots (4:2).

The verse quoted above, Lamentations 4:5, turns from the ruined streets to the people who had lived in comfort within them. Fine clothing and rich food were the two marks of such comfort, and Jesus uses both when He describes a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and feasted sumptuously every day (Luke 16:19). Lamentations sets the people of such houses among the ash heaps. The poet gives his own account of why a city the Lord had chosen came to this, in verses 6, 13, and 22 of the same poem.

The Father’s Hand in the Ashes

It is generally supposed, in churches that are glad to speak of grace, that a verse of this kind belongs to an older and harsher chapter of the story, and that the God who now receives sinners and eats with them (Luke 15:2) has put aside the hand that turned Jerusalem to ash. Scripture does not allow the division. The letter to the Hebrews tells believers who were suffering that the Lord disciplines the one He loves, and that God is treating them as sons (Heb. 12:6–7), so that the language of correction is addressed to the household and not only to the nation that fell.

The question this article takes to the text is therefore a plain one. How can the Father who lets a city’s children lie down in ashes be the same Father of whom Hebrews says that He disciplines those He loves, and what does a believer owe Him when the purple turns to ash? Lamentations 4 describes a covenant people under a covenant judgement, and nothing in it treats every hardship a Christian meets as a verdict, so the text will have to say how far the two passages reach toward each other and where they stop. The answer argued here is that the Father who let a covenant people lie down in ashes is the same Father who corrects His children as sons. His correction serves purposes that Scripture names, among them the exposing of sin, repentance, likeness to Christ, and dependence, and a believer receives it well by trusting His character before seeing His reasons. The Bereans of Acts 17:11 received the word with all eagerness and then examined the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so, and the same course lies open to the reader here.

The Covenant City

The city that fell was not an ordinary one. Psalm 132:13 says that the Lord had chosen Zion and desired it for His dwelling place, and the people who lived under that choice had been told, in the covenant read to them before they entered the land, what would follow if they disobeyed Him, including a siege of their towns until the high and fortified walls in which they trusted came down (Deut. 28:15, 52). Lamentations does not leave the cause to be guessed. Chapter 4 says of the ruin that “this was for the sins of her prophets and the iniquities of her priests” (4:13), and the poet says in the second poem of the whole ruin that the Lord “has carried out his word, which he commanded long ago” (2:17).

The ESV says that those brought up in purple embrace ash heaps, and the Hebrew behind “embrace”—ḥābaq (חָבַק)—is the verb of arms closing round a person, as when Laban ran to meet Jacob and embraced him and kissed him (Gen. 29:13). The poem pictures people raised in purple with their arms closed round a heap of ash.

The ash heap is not, however, where Scripture leaves the people who sit in it. The same English words stand in the song of Hannah, who says that the Lord raises up the poor from the dust and “lifts the needy from the ash heap” (1 Sam. 2:8), and Psalm 113:7 says it again. Lamentations itself sets the boundary. The poet confesses that the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases and that His mercies are new every morning (3:22–23), that the Lord will not cast off forever but will have compassion in the abundance of His steadfast love (3:31–32), that good and bad alike come from the mouth of the Most High (3:37–38), and, at the close of the very poem that speaks of the ash heaps, that the punishment of Zion’s iniquity is accomplished and that He will keep her in exile no longer (4:22).

Is Discipline the Same as Condemnation?

The letter to the Hebrews was written to people who had already paid for their faith. Their earlier days had held public reproach and affliction, compassion for those in prison, and the plundering of their property (Heb. 10:32–34), and the writer tells them that in their struggle they have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood (12:4). The writer then asks whether they have forgotten the exhortation that addresses them as sons, and he quotes Proverbs 3:11–12 in the wording Hebrews gives it: “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives” (Heb. 12:5–6). The suffering the readers have named is hostility from outside the church, and the writer calls it discipline all the same: “It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons” (12:7).

That choice of word carries more than punishment. The English “discipline” renders a Greek noun—paideia (παιδεία)—built on the word for a child, pais (παῖς), and it names the whole upbringing of a child, instruction and correction and training together. The ancient Greek translation of Proverbs 3:11, which is the form Hebrews quotes, uses the same noun for the Hebrew proverb’s word for corrective instruction. The verb of the same family describes Moses, who “was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22), where nothing suggests that Moses was being punished. A reader who meets the word in Hebrews 12 therefore should not conclude from the word alone that a hardship is a correction for sin, since the same word covers a correction for sin and a training in endurance.

Condemnation is a different matter, and Paul answers it at the opening of Romans 8: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). The reason follows within three verses, where God sent His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, and “condemned sin in the flesh” (8:3). The sentence was carried out on the Son, and Paul draws the same line for Corinthians who were mistreating one another at the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:20–22): “when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world” (11:32). A magistrate’s sentence closes a case, whereas a father’s correction assumes that the child will be at the table tomorrow.

That is also where the two passages part company. Zion fell under the covenant’s curses as a nation, and the Christian does not stand under that national sentence, because the sentence on sin has been carried out elsewhere. What carries across is the character of the One who acts. Moses had already put it in the language of the home when he told Israel, before they crossed the Jordan, “as a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you” (Deut. 8:5).

A Right Older Than Our Questions

Most people who suffer, and those who watch them, ask first for an explanation. Job asked for one. He had lost his children, his property, and his health, and he sat in the ashes (Job 2:8) asking to know why the Lord contended with him (10:2). His case belongs here for a reason that has nothing to do with correction. The Lord Himself calls him blameless and upright (1:8) and says that Satan had incited Him against Job “to destroy him without reason” (2:3), so that Job’s affliction was neither a punishment nor a discipline. It stands in this article because of what the Lord did with Job’s question, which was to answer it with a claim of right.

Job had already stated the premise himself, though as a complaint: “Behold, he snatches away; who can turn him back? Who will say to him, ‘What are you doing?’” (9:12). When the Lord finally spoke, He answered out of the whirlwind (38:1) and gave no list of reasons. He asked question after question that only a Creator could answer, beginning with “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding” (38:4), and going on through the sea, the dawn, the storehouses of the snow, the mountain goats, and Behemoth and Leviathan.

Then He put the matter in terms of right: “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it” (40:2), and, “Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me that you may be in the right?” (40:8). He pressed the claim to its limit: “Who has first given to me, that I should repay him? Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine” (41:11).

Job received no explanation. He answered, “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted” (42:2), and he confessed that he had “uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me” (42:3). The Lord had not told him why, and Job’s reply, as recorded, asks for no further reasons. He says that his eye now sees the Lord (42:5) and that he repents in dust and ashes (42:6).

Paul takes the same ground in Romans 9, a chapter about the Lord’s freedom in mercy that is no more about discipline or punishment than Job’s case was. Paul cites the Lord’s word to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy” (9:15, from Exod. 33:19), and concludes that “he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills” (9:18). The objection he anticipates is close to Job’s: “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” (9:19). Paul’s first answer is a question about who is speaking: “But who are you, O man, to answer back to God?” (9:20). He names the Lord’s purposes only afterward (9:22–23).

Isaiah had asked it with the same picture, in the oracle that names Cyrus, where the Lord answers those who quarrel with the way He has chosen to deliver His people: “Does the clay say to him who forms it, ‘What are you making?’” (Isa. 45:9), and Lamentations uses the same material for its own people, who were “worth their weight in fine gold” and are regarded as earthen pots, “the work of a potter’s hands” (4:2). Psalm 115:3 says the same of Him directly, in answer to the nations who ask, “Where is their God?” (v. 2): “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases.” Nebuchadnezzar, when his reason returned, confessed that none can stay His hand or say to Him, “What have you done?” (Dan. 4:35).

This is the ground on which the Father’s dealings with His creatures stand, His correction of His children among them. His right to correct does not wait on the child’s agreement or understanding, and Scripture gives at least three grounds for it, each in its own place: the psalmist calls all the earth to give thanks because “It is he who made us, and we are his” (Ps. 100:3); Paul tells the Athenians, who did not yet know Him, that “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28); and Paul tells the Corinthians, in an argument about the use of their bodies, “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price” (1 Cor. 6:19–20). The right is wider than discipline, and discipline is one of the things it covers.

The third of these governs how the first two are heard. A Maker who owed the creature nothing might do with it as He pleased, but this Maker has paid for His people with the life of His Son, and Paul reasons from that payment to the Father’s goodwill: “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Rom. 8:32).

Why Does the Father Correct?

Hebrews gives the purpose in one clause: “he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness” (12:10). The rest of Scripture fills in what that good looks like, and it shows at least five things the Father is after.

Where sin has been hidden, the Father’s correction begins by bringing it into the light, and David is the plainest case. He had tried to cover his adultery and the killing of Uriah (2 Sam. 11:6–25), and Nathan’s parable, which the narrative places after the child’s birth, brought the hidden thing to light (11:27–12:7). David said, “I have sinned against the Lord,” and Nathan answered that the Lord had put away his sin, though the child born to him would die (12:13–14), and the sword would not depart from his house (12:10). Psalm 51 is headed with the occasion of Nathan’s visit, and Psalm 32, whose heading names no occasion, describes the cost of silence before confession, when his bones wasted away through his groaning all day long (vv. 3–4). The Father forgave David and corrected him, and the record gives both in the same chapter.

Exposure is meant to end in repentance, and the risen Christ says so when He writes to Laodicea, “Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent” (Rev. 3:19). The Greek for “reprove”—elenchō (ἐλέγχω)—means to bring a thing to light so that it is seen for what it is, and Hebrews uses the same verb when it speaks of being “reproved” by the Lord (12:5). The church to which the words were addressed said of itself, “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing,” and the Lord answered that it was wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked (3:17). The love comes first in the verse, and the reproof follows from it.

Beyond repentance lies the likeness of Christ, toward which Romans 8:28–29 points when it speaks of God working all things for the good of those who love Him, and states the good: those whom He foreknew He also predestined “to be conformed to the image of his Son.”

A thorn given Paul in the flesh points toward dependence, though he does not call it discipline. He says it was given “to keep me from becoming conceited” (2 Cor. 12:7), that he asked three times for its removal (12:8), and that the Lord answered, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (12:9). The conclusion he drew was, “when I am weak, then I am strong” (12:10).

The text also shows the Father humbling a people against the day when abundance would turn their hearts from Him, and Moses warned Israel that once they had eaten and were full, and built good houses, and seen their herds and silver and gold multiplied, their hearts would be lifted up and they would forget the Lord (Deut. 8:11–14). Abundance is a gift, and the danger Moses names is that the gift will be mistaken for the Giver. When the Father takes the gift away, the taking may be one way of restoring the right order.

Israel, Jonah, Peter

The narratives show the Father dealing with His people in these ways. Israel spent forty years in the wilderness, and Moses told the next generation that the Lord had led them so “that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart” (Deut. 8:2), feeding them with manna that they might learn that man does not live by bread alone (8:3). The passage that tells them they were disciplined as a son is the same passage that tells them they were fed.

Jonah ran from the Lord’s commission, and the Lord hurled a great wind on the sea (Jonah 1:4), appointed a great fish (1:17), and later appointed a plant, a worm, and a scorching east wind (4:6–8). Scripture does not use the word discipline of any of this, but it shows a prophet whom the Lord continues to address rather than abandons, and the book closes with a question put to him by the Lord and with no recorded answer (4:11).

Peter denied the Lord three times, and the Lord turned and looked at him, and Peter went out and wept bitterly (Luke 22:61–62). After the resurrection the Lord asked him three times, “Do you love me?” and each time gave him work to do (John 21:15–17). The number of the questions matches the number of the denials, and the commission is given at the end of them.

Receiving It Well

The writer of Hebrews does not leave the matter at explanation, and he tells his readers what to do. They are to submit: “Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live?” (12:9). Submission begins where Job’s did, with the admission that a person may speak of what he does not understand, and it rests on the Father’s character and not on seeing His reasons.

Self-examination comes next, and Psalm 139:23–24 supplies the prayer: “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” The prayer asks to be searched and does not assume a verdict. When the Lord’s disciples saw a man blind from birth, they asked whose sin had caused it, and Jesus answered that it was neither the man’s nor his parents’, but that the works of God might be displayed in him (John 9:1–3). Self-examination therefore has to be honest in both directions, ready to confess what the Spirit shows and unwilling to invent a sin to explain a sorrow.

Bitterness has to be refused, since Hebrews warns of a “root of bitterness” that springs up, causes trouble, and defiles many (12:15), and bitterness can grow in a person who reads discipline as hostility. Hebrews would have them read it as the work of a Father, and Romans 8:32 gives the ground for doing so.

The last duty is to look for the fruit, and Hebrews does not pretend the process is pleasant: “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (12:11). The word the ESV renders “trained”—gymnazō (γυμνάζω)—belongs to the athlete’s exercise, and English takes “gymnasium” from the same family of words. The picture is of strength built by repeated effort, with the fruit arriving after the exercise is done, and the writer follows it at once with an appeal to lift drooping hands and strengthen weak knees (12:12–13).

Raised from the Ash Heap

Lamentations 4:5 still describes people brought up in purple who now close their arms round ash heaps, and nothing in this article softens it. The city fell under the covenant’s sentence, and the poem records the cost in the streets.

Yet the same book says that His mercies are new every morning (3:22–23), that the Lord will not cast off forever (3:31), and that He will keep Zion in exile no longer (4:22). Hannah’s song says what the Lord does with those who sit on the ash heap, which is to lift them from it (1 Sam. 2:8). Hebrews puts the same pattern in the language of the household: the Father who corrects treats His children as sons. Romans adds that the One who did not spare His own Son gives all things with Him (8:32). The purple and the ash both come from the same hand, and the hand that brings a child low is the hand that has paid for him.

What remains for the reader is the answer the poet himself reaches in the middle of his grief, and it is an act of worship. The Lord’s steadfast love never ceases, His mercies never come to an end, they are new every morning, and “great is your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:23).

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