<p>12:5 <em>You have forgotten the word of encouragement which reasons with you as with sons: My son, do not regard lightly the chastening of the Lord, nor become faint when you are reproved by Him</em>- This alludes to the idea of a living word by speaking of an Old Testament passage as 'reasoning' with us. We are a separate people. We have been redeemed from them by the precious blood of Christ. We are spiritual Jews. What God spoke to men like Jacob, He therefore spoke to us (Hos. 12:5; Gen. 28:15 cp. Heb. 12:5,6). All Scripture is recorded for <em>our </em>learning and comfort (Rom. 15:4). The exhortation of Prov. 3:11 &ldquo;speaketh unto <em>you </em>as unto children...&rdquo;. Hebrews 3 quotes&nbsp; Psalm 95 as relevant to all readers. The warnings there for its &quot;today&quot; were also be a warning for the first century &quot;today&quot;, and yet likewise we can still take hold of the past word of God and relate it to the needs of our &quot;today&rdquo;. We can fail to personalize God&rsquo;s word, in the sense of realizing that it speaks to us personally. Daniel told Nebuchadnezzar what would happen to him unless he repented; and he wouldn&rsquo;t listen. When his judgment came, God told him: &ldquo;O King Nebuchadnezzar, <em>to thee it is spoken</em>: The kingdom is departed from thee&rdquo; (Dan. 4:31). We have a way of reading and hearing, and yet not making the crucial connection with ourselves.</p><p>The quotation from Proverbs 3 is about how &quot;my son&quot; should accept discipline. But the &quot;my son&quot; passages in Proverbs were particularly relevant to the Lord Jesus. Prov. 3:4 speaks of the son growing in favour with God and man, and that is quoted about the Lord in Lk. 2:52. Here, a few verses later in Prov. 3:12, the &quot;my son&quot; is defined as &quot;the son in whom the heavenly Father delights&quot;. That Son in whom God's soul delighted was the Lord Jesus. And so a passage specifically about the Lord is quoted here about us, implying we are in Him. And that is exactly the context here in Hebrews 12. The Lord's sufferings are to be seen as ours, and all are specific hard experiences are to be understood as in some way a fellowshipping of His sufferings.</p>