If you strike a dog with a stick by Charles Spurgeon

Hosea chapter 6 verse 1

Come, let us return to the Lord. He has torn us to pieces, but He will heal us. He has injured us, but He will bind up our wounds.

Notice first that Hosea is convinced that his trials come from God. Ungodly men set down their troubles to chance, and sometimes they even trace them to the devil, as if they expected their father the devil to have chastening dealings with them. Frequently they lay their trials at the door of their fellow men and grow quarrelsome, malicious, and revengeful.

It is a happy day for a man when he knows in whose hand is the chastening rod and learns to trace his troubles to God. Alas, there are even some children of God who greatly err in this matter when under affliction, they spend their time in bewailing second causes and do not look at the first cause. This is quite brutish.

If you strike a dog with a stick, then he will bite at the stick. Had he a little intelligence, he would bite at you. And know that the blow came, not from the stick or stone, but from the hand that used these implements.

Often when believers are in trouble, they look at the secondary agent and they spend their anger or their thoughts entirely there. If in the day of adversity they would consider, then they would perceive that afflictions do not spring out of the ground, neither do troubles come by chance. But the hand of the Lord is in all these things.

When times are good, be happy, but when times are bad, consider God has made the one as well as the other. Whichever way the trial came, it ultimately came from Him. If the trouble was caused by a triumphant enemy, or by a deceitful friend, if it came as a loss in business, or as a sickness of body, or if it wounded us through the arrows of death piercing the heart of our beloved, in each case it was the Lord.

Learn that lesson. God has smitten you, He has torn you, He has done it all. He has ordained our trials for chastening and established them for correction. let us not despise them by refusing to see his hand or by angrily rebelling against him.

Perhaps I am speaking to one who has been followed by a succession of troubles until he is now surrounded by a sea of affliction. You have scarcely escaped from one trouble before you have plunged into another. It seems to you as if your bad luck, as you call it, were no more absent from you at any time than your shadow. You cannot succeed at anything. Whatever you touch withers beneath your hand. You have been sick again and again. You have lost your best friend when you most needed him. You have lost your employment and wherever you apply you get no favorable reply.

Perhaps you are so sorely smitten because the Lord has some great design of love to your soul. May you look on the series of trials through which you have passed as being really sent to you, not by chance or haphazard, nor by the conjunction of the stars, nor by anything of that atheistic foolery which men are so fond of inventing, but sent from God himself with a gracious intent. He smites, he tears, he slays, but this is his surgery of love.

Hosea had learned to trace his troubles to God himself and not to second causes. Notice that it is customary with God to smite his beloved people, according to his own words, those whom I love I reprove and chasten. Oftentimes the Christian who endures heavy trials receives such severe treatment because the Lord has a secret love to his soul. These chastisements and heavy blows, which are compared in the text to tearing and to smiting, often fall upon God's own beloved people just because they are His beloved and He cannot in any better way display His love to them.

Look at the vine which bears fruit, and you shall see that every year at the proper season, the ruthless knife of the pruner cutting away what seems to be the liveliest shoots, removing the hopeful branches, and leaving the poor vine to bleed, or to appear to be a mere dry stick. Yes, the vine needs pruning. It belongs to the gardener's choice plants, and he looks to it for rich clusters.

You who are tossed to and fro and are broken by sorrow need not startle with dread because you are made to suffer, for the Lord lays heavy hands upon his own redeemed people and reserves the ungodly for his wrath.

The believer who sinks lowest in soul sorrow may still bless God that he is not in the torments of hell. At our worst we are indulged with a fullness of mercy compared with what our sins really deserve.

My son, do not despise the chastening of the Lord, and do not resent His rebuke, because the Lord disciplines those He loves. For the Lord disciplines the one He loves, and chastises every son whom He receives.