Does God "Spank" People?

Hebrews 12, angry fathers, and rewriting God after our own image

“God hit me upside the head with a 2X4.” I’ve heard this sentiment, accompanied by commiserating laughter, in numerous sermons, often delivered with self-deprecating humor, much like its cousins: “Sometimes God needs to give us a spanking!” or “Jesus took my licking for me.”

The idea seems to be: God deals that way with His children, so surely human parents should as well. But is that true? Is that the way God deals with His children?

Hebrews 12, “Chastening,” and Fatherly Discipline

Christian parents are told that God requires them to spank, typically via prooftexted verses from Proverbs. Hebrews 12 is also used to mandate spanking small children and suggest it is somehow godly, something that requires a uniquely American evangelical equation, where “discipline” equals “spanking.”

There are a number of problems with this interpretation, the first being that “discipline,” biblically speaking is a broad concept that includes correction, yes, and also training, instruction, mentorship . . . discipleship. Spanking advocates ignore this and instead zero in on vs. 6, which is often translated “chasten,” and point out that it’s used elsewhere in the New Testament to describe “flogging” (as a recent TGC article did); therefore, parents should spank their toddlers and preschoolers.

Such a conclusion already requires hefty interpretive work, because a literal application would be scourging/flogging adult sons. The handful of other New Testament usages are narrative portions,¹ so we have little to go on regarding intended meaning for an exhortation. This is further exacerbated by the fact that “chasten” is an English translation decision regarding the Greek word, and the Greek word is a translation decision regarding the Hebrew of the original Proverb, which carries the much broader meaning involving reproof, instruction, correction, etc.

Secondly, reading this as “spanking” fails to place these words within the context of the book of Hebrews, which is written to Christians undergoing immense suffering and persecution. Chapter 12 is preceded by chapter 11’s “Hall of Faith,” which concludes with visceral descriptions of persecution and martyrs—all of whom were looking forward with hope. What were they hoping for?

We see it in chapter 12 with the exhortation to fix spiritual eyes on Jesus who, in the incarnation, entered into the suffering-laden human condition, experienced it, undertook the impact of sin and death, and overcame it through the miracle of the resurrection. This is the hope the suffering can fix their eyes on: the God who raises the dead can bring something good out of even the incomprehensible evil and suffering.

This encouragement is a very different thing than saying: God is *the author* of the evil and suffering and death you endure.

When people reframe Hebrews 12 to be about God being the kind of parent who likes to or needs to punish people to get through to us, we invert the encouragement these verses offer to souls weighed down by sorrow, pain, and the reality of a world rent asunder by evil, sin, and death. Perhaps we feel compelled to prioritize tidy systematic theologies, but whatever the reason, when we say that God is the author of evil, and use it to condone harming children, we are in dangerous territory.

Furthermore, just because the author of Hebrews observes that human fathers discipline children, it does not mean that any method a human father uses is good or godly (the “as they thought best,” qualifier of vs. 10 underscores this). Whatever else is going on here, Hebrews 12 is not parenting advice. The fact that it mentions earthly fathers does not give parents license to envision themselves as role-playing God in the life of their child, or that if they decide to painfully and corporally punish their child it will automatically be good and godly.

Implications of Distorted Interpretations

Every human has a father and was once a child. The father-child image, like the mother-child image, is one of many biblical word pictures that take something from our human experience and offer it as a lens through which we can get a glimpse at the God who transcends our human experience.

When we flip this rhetorical tool and instead take our limited, finite human relationships and make them the measure and definition of what God is like, we refashion God after our own image. So instead of acknowledging that there is something true about an unchanging, eternal, and infinite God that we can understand through the imagery of the father-child relationship, we land at: “Let’s start with our our way of operating as fathers and children and then say God is like that.” There's a subtle difference there that has profound implications, because it shapes the starting place of how we perceive God.

Here’s a 3 minute skit exemplifying this:

This skit encapsulates a message many children (and adults!) hear: an angry God is primarily interested in meting out judgment in order to punish individual sins, moral failure, and shortcomings. He doesn’t care about what is happening with people, so long as somebody gets punished.

But is this accurate? Does this align with the God we see all throughout the pages of Scripture who identifies Himself as a slow to anger and forbearing, who warns against child sacrifice, who extends numerous invitations to repentance, who mercifully relents from judgment, often to the discomfort even of the prophets? Indeed God also corrects and reproves and punishes. The judgment we most often see on the pages of the Old Testament stems from the devastating collective consequences of departing from God’s ways: shalom is broken, the land is polluted, oppression and injustice harm the most vulnerable, relationships are destroyed. We see direct punishment too, but it’s quite revealing that we would read any of those narrative portions and identify ourselves with the role of God meting out punishment on children rather than identifying ourselves as the children of God, humans in need of repentance and restoration.

When we teach parents to instead read Bible stories and see themselves in a role parallel to God, we set up human hierarchies where those at the top believe it is their right and duty to inflict painful punishment on others. There is little space for self-reflection in a framework that presumes infallible parental judgment such that parents should “spank first and pray later.”

God alone perceives human hearts, and He alone is the judge of all the earth who does right. When unaccountable, exhausted, exasperated, or frustrated parents spank small children who don’t obey instantly and then tell themselves that is godly, they ignore the one-anothering verses of Scripture. They also miss out on Jesus’ model of leadership, which rejects ideas about lording it over one another and instead instructs leaders to serve.

What Else Might We Miss?

It’s revealing to consider that some passages describing fatherhood never show up in popular Christian parenting books. For instance, Isaiah 46:3-4, a prophetic message offered to generations of rebellious people, depicts tender fatherly care and provision:

Or Deuteronomy 1, which is addresses Israel’s rebellion while also showcasing God’s consistent patient care and provision:

While the adults of that generation experienced the consequence of rebellion, the “little ones” (everyone under age 20) were not held culpable.

Oddly, Christian parenting myths like “first time obedience” and “spank first” do the opposite, offering leniency for parents while demanding exacting obedience for children. These myths ignore the whole counsel of Scripture and neglect the only direct instruction given to Christian parents—repeated twice, something that should tune our ears to listen:

Because when Jesus, who came to show us what God is like, decides to tell a story about a father, the father fails by every metric of Christian parenting advice: he hands over the inheritance, lets his foolish son go, welcomes him back . . . and never punishes him. Neither does he punish the angry and driven elder son.

And when Jesus uses the imagery of parent-child relationships to teach something about God, He doesn’t zero in on punishment. Rather, He wants us to understand the goodness of God.

What a far cry from: “Because we spank our children; how much more will God spank us.” Unfortunately, countless people have been spiritually formed by teaching and communities that misrepresent God’s fatherly goodness and generosity. Sometimes I wonder if this, too, is a piece of what Jesus had in mind when He warned against things that cause “little ones who believe in Me to stumble.”

As we worked on The Myth of Good Christian Parenting, we heard from many people who were presented with distorted teachings like this and told “Good News! This is what God is like.” It impacted their family relationships, but it also impacted their perspective about God in impossible-to-calculate ways. Shipwrecked faith is devastating, and if you find yourself unraveling messages like this regarding God and punishment, I hope you’ll find our work useful.

1. The usage of this word is limited in the NT. Apart from this usage in Heb 12 it shows up in narrative portions about scourging/flogging: Matt 10:17; 20:19; 23:34; Mark 10:34; Luke 18:33; John 19:1.