Job 5:17
Behold, happy is the man whom God reproves.
Hence, do not despise the chastisement of the Almighty.
If you have noticed the coaching fad running around the business world, it has a simple basis. Instead of someone being negative about your behavior, you have someone who is telling you about your negative behavior in a positive tone. After all my years of parenting, I know my kids have a tendency not to listen to me. If I can get someone else to say the same thing to them, its like magic. If your boss tells you something, your general response is most likely negative. However, when my boss one day said: ”Can I give you a little coaching?” I listened up and learned. This is the background for how I read this verse.
“Happy” was selected over “blessed” not just because seven of my eight sources used it, but I wanted to focus on the emotion, not just the good outcome. “Reproves” was chosen over “corrects” as it carries the negative reinforcement that I felt aligned with the happy emotion. God is not trying to make Himself happy by correcting us so much as trying to make us better and improve our future.
“Despise” was chosen over “spurn” or “reject” as I felt the idea was to change our attitude and not so much the outcome. The idea being that we should welcome the opportunity to get better and not simple “accept” that we have been shown how to improve. “Chastisement” is a big word picked over “discipline”, “correction”, and “reproof” that carries this negative mood I felt was being conveyed. It is the little sting that helps us remember the lesson.
There are a couple topics about the names of God and interjections and such that I am skipping over, but I wanted this to be about the joy and positive feeling that can come from being “coached” away from our bad behavior. I have often crafted a statement so well that no one understood what I was trying to say.
The meanings of words are different in people’s minds based on their education and experience. One of the goals of a “classical” education is a background from which two parties can understand each other across their differences of experience. I do not have a classical education and it has done well for me in my technical career. But my life would have been different if my technical education had more classical content and generated not just a engineer with an advanced degree but a business person with a technical skill. I personally never put a lot of stock in the classical education things as I think it makes people lazy and arrogant in how they treat others. But it does have benefits.
God wants us to be more like His Son and we should want that too. God uses our experiences to mold us into the tool He needs for His glory in His timing. We should welcome not only the blessing of the opportunity, but the molding along the way to get us ready.