Suffering and Discipline

The Hebrews epistle is deeply pastoral, written to encourage Jewish Christians in their suffering inflicted on them because of their faithfulness to Jesus as Israel's Messiah. The writer's hope and goal for them was that they would persevere in their faith and not languish or fall away. And crucial to that perseverance was rightly perceiving their hardship as their Father's loving discipline. When they embraced Jesus as Messiah, they became sons in Him, and His path unto the perfecting of His sonship was now theirs.