He learned obedience through what he suffered

February 22, 2022

How is disobedience overcome? The epistle to the Hebrews contains the answer to that mystery. Hebrews states that though Christ was God, he overcame our disobedience by obedience. He learned it in the school of suffering and, once perfected, became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him. Son though he was, he learned obedience. You see, as the Son of God, he could not learn obedience, because he was equal to God. But when God became man, then he was capable of learning obedience existentially, experimentally, but not the way that we learn obedience. We learned obedience by discovering the consequences of disobedience.    Many of us are old enough to belong to a generation that believed in spanking. Our parents gave us a pat on the back that was hard enough and low enough in order to make us learn who was the master of the house. But we also were burnt by matches. We learned obedience by suffering the consequences of disobedience. Now our Lord learned obedience in the school of suffering by discovering how much it cost to obey the Father's will, for example, the ridicule that he received, the opposition of men, politics, religion itself. Each affirmed its own will and caused him suffering.