‘Behold, the Lamb
of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
61st teaching
1.27.2013
“the Fear of God”
Mystery
Question:
If you could cure any single fear that you have, which would it be and why?
If you could cure any single fear that you have, which would it be and why?
Project
Scriptura: God’s Majesty
Review:
What was our subject last week? What are some
things that our culture associates with beauty? What does it associate with
ugliness? What’s a good definition of the word beauty? In what way is Jesus
Christ beautiful according to Isaiah? How is God’s beauty seen in nature? What
is God’s ultimate, unseen beauty?
End
of Review:
I came across a book I forgot I owned, Lectures in Systematic Theology by Henry
Thiessen I wished I had remembered it sooner as a resource before I taught
through Bibliology and the attributes of God, but cest la vie.
Still, I’d like to share this quote I
found in it, which I thought might come as encouragement to you to study and to
study hard. Thiessen wrote, “Until rather recent times, theology was considered
the queen of the sciences, and systematic theology, the crown of the queen. But
today, the generality of so-called theological scholarship denies that it is a
science, and certainly the idea that it is the queen of sciences. James Orr
already said a good many years ago, ‘Everyone must be aware that there is at
the present time a great prejudice against doctrine, a great distrust and
dislike of clear and systematic thinking about divine things. Men prefer… to
live in a region of haze and indefiniteness in regard to these matters’.”
That’s sad. May we not be those who
have ears that want tickling, but may we be able to endure sound doctrine with
clear thinking about the things of God. I dare to say that God is insulted if
we speak in vagueness about the things He has revealed with certainty.
*Anyhow, tonight’s study is entitled,
“The Fear of God”.
Turn to Hebrews 12. It seemed to me today, as I read through this chapter
that one of the themes of this chapter is the fear of God, whether it’s in the
context of discipline or judgment, or awe, terror, or reverence. Read Hebrews 12:1-17.
That’s a reference to Esau, Jacob’s
brother, in the book of Genesis. But now, the writer is going to reference
another event, this one out of the book of Exodus. He’s about to talk of the
giving of the Law at Mt. Sinai. Look at Exodus
19:16-19.
You definitely see the fear of God
there. Now, the writer of Hebrews is about to reference this event, and he
points out that it was indeed terribly frightening. Hebrews 12:18-29.
There we have quite a bit said, and in
all of Hebrews 12 you do see the
Fear of God. It is mentioned in relation to the chastening from God, in
reference to Mount Sinai and the old covenant, but even to the new covenant and
the reminder that we must serve God with grace, reverence and godly fear. He’s
the same God who shook the mountain of fire thousands of years ago, though He
is more familiar to us now as gentle Jesus, meek and mild. There’s a kind of
balance here.
As with all of our studies of God and
as with each of these attributes, we must remember that God is a harmonious
Being. You know what harmony is, right? It’s when everything fits, works
together and blends.
You know the difference between
harmony and discord if you’ve ever listened to beautiful music, such as of an
orchestra. You know that harmony is absolutely essential. If even one of the
violins is off, or if the tenors are flat, or if the trumpeter comes in late,
then there’s a lack of harmony and it ends up sounding awful. You’re left with
discord.
But there is no discord in the Being
we call God. His attributes fits together. He is perfect and perfectly
harmonious. There’s a kind of balance, then, between the tender mercies, the
gentle, drawing love of God and this doctrine of the fear of God.
I found a commentator who said this: “To
teach men to regard God with terror is to undo the best teaching of all
Scripture, which indeed has too often been the main end of human systems of
theology.”
Certainly, that is not our end. I do
not wish to “undo the best teaching of all Scripture”. I do not wish to make
God out to be this terrifying monster you cannot escape to the diminishing of
His love for you, but we cannot ignore the other side of the coin, this
important facet of Scripture wherein many people reacted towards God in a way
we can only recognize as fearful.
We must strike a balance. So let’s
come at this subject tonight with several points. Firstly…
1.
Phobias
We’re talking about the fear of God,
so let’s first talk about fear itself. What is fear? We get our English word fear from the Old English word faer (really, they just swapped the
vowels?). Faer has to do with sudden
danger, calamity or peril. So at face value, fear has to do immediately with
danger and dangerous situations.
Indeed, Wikipedia’s definition of fear
picks up on the same thread: “Fear is an emotion induced by a perceived threat
which causes entities to quickly pull far away from it and usually hide. It is
a basic survival mechanism occurring in response to a specific stimulus which
is perceived as a risk of significant loss of health, wealth, status, power,
security or of anything held valuable. In short, fear is a motivating force
arising from the ability to recognize danger.”
In this respect, fear is helpful. Sheer
terror and anxiety may not always be a pleasure, but fear can be beneficial. If
something is dangerous, fear can help us to avoid that danger. Fear tells me
not to go standing in the middle of the freeway, stick my head into snake
holes, pet lions roughly or go on blind dates.
Case in point (if you’ll forgive me a
self-gratifying illustration), there was an episode of one of the greatest
television shows of all time, the Batman
Animated Series, called “Never Fear”. In it, the villain is the doctor of
fear himself, the Scarecrow, who has come up with the ingenious idea of
dispersing a chemical agent contrary to his modus operandi. Rather than bringing fear to his victims, the
Scarecrow used this chemical to take away fear from his victims.
And so all kinds of horrible things begin
to happen throughout Gotham city. A regular pencil pusher once afraid of
heights swings hundreds of feet in the air; an average office worker once
afraid to voice his opinion at work tells off his boss; even Batman himself is
affected and comes dangerously close to killing the Scarecrow, as the Dark
Knight is no longer afraid to take a life.
Clearly, even in this cartoon, it is recognizable
that fear can be a helpful thing if we’re to avoid dangerous situations and
dangerous things. But the concept of fear goes much deeper than just avoiding
peril. It is selling the concept of fear short to say it only has to do with
escaping harm. There’s more.
As is commonly known, psychiatry gives
names to specific fears, identifying them as phobias. These phobias describe often irrational fears as mental
disorders. Irrational fears? Think of that. That goes against the definition
of fear having to do with danger. It is perfectly rational to be afraid of
heights since falling from them can kill you. It is perfectly rational to be
afraid of large animals since they are powerful enough to hurt you.
But there are many irrational fears
identified as phobias by psychiatrists. Some of these are hilarious:
Ablutophobia is fear of bathing. What?
Anglophobia, fear of England or English culture. Pogonophobia, fear of beards.
Xanthophobia, fear of the color yellow. Coulrophobia, fear of clowns. That’s
one that always got me: there’s nothing inherently dangerous in clowns. Why are
so many people afraid of them?
There’s also Ophthalmophobia, fear of
being stared at. And (good luck) Sesquipedalophobia, fear of long words. Or try
Friggatriskaidekaphobia, fear of Friday the 13th. And especially
jocular: Anatidaephobia, the fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching
you.
So you see that a great many classified
(some jokingly classified) fears are far from rational and admittedly far
removed from any real threat of danger. You may rest easy knowing that no duck somewhere,
somehow is plotting your demise. Clearly, we can still call something frightful
and be afraid even if there is no immediate harm involved.
But what are we to call the fear of
God? Well, believe it or not, there is a psychiatric classification for the
fear of God or of gods. It’s called Theophobia.
Another term might prove more helpful.
It is the term Numinous. Numinous
comes from the Latin word numen,
which means divinity. So Numinous is a term that’s used to describe the power
or presence of a divinity.
The man who coined the term Numinous
was a German theologian named Rudolf Otto, who said that the Numinous is an
experience which invokes fear and trembling but also a kind of attraction and
fascination.
C.S. Lewis elaborates on the term
Numinous in his book the Problem of Pain,
and does a right good job of explaining the distinctiveness of the Numinous to
us. He writes of the Numinous: “Those who have not met this term may be
introduced to it by the following device. Suppose you were told there was a
tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would
probably feel fear. But if you were told 'There is a ghost in the next room',
and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a
different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is
primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is
a ghost. It is 'uncanny' rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it
excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of
the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply 'There is a mighty spirit
in the room', and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the
mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel
wonder and a certain shrinking - a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a
visitant and of prostration before it - an emotion which might be expressed in
Shakespeare's words 'Under it my genius is rebuked'. This feeling may be described
as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous.
“…When man passes from physical fear
to dread and awe, he makes a sheer jump, and apprehends something which could
never be given, as danger is, by the physical facts and logical deductions from
them. Most attempts to explain the Numinous presuppose the thing to be
explained - as when anthropologists derive it from fear of the dead, without
explaining why dead men (assuredly the least dangerous kind of men) should have
attracted this peculiar feeling. Against all such attempts we must insist that
dread and awe are in a different dimension from fear.”
And he goes on, but certainly this is
very careful language to describe the distinctiveness of the fear of a God-Spirit
versus the mere tangible and physical fear of a wild animal like a tiger. The
fear of God, then, builds upon and transcends the mere concept of fear of
danger, and reaches this level of the Numinous, a kind of shrinking feeling, of
awe, dread and profound wonder.
2.
Defining the fear of the Lord
Last week, I was talking with some of
you about our subject tonight, and I threw out the question: “What can you call
this fear of God if we’re to think of it in terms of an attribute of God?” And
we puzzled about it, till our puzzlers were sore, and eventually concluded that
the fear of God really isn’t an attribute of God Himself at all, as my wife had
pointed out to me even earlier.
Rather, the fear of God is a human
response to God, to God’s attributes as a collective, mind-blowing whole.
Certainly we should fear and revere inescapable power, infinite presence,
unending life, total knowledge, limitless wisdom, profound affection and
perfect wrath against sin. Certainly God deserves our fear and our trembling.
But there’s a specific attribute of
God which I think is the immediate bridge between our fear of God and His
nature. We’re going to talk about it next week: it is the Majesty of God. God’s
majesty, His splendor, His immensity, His authority, His sheer awe-someness is
what incites this response in humankind to stand before Him with jaws
sufficiently dropped. We fear God as a response to His majesty, specifically.
It was the majestic Presence of God
descending upon Mount Sinai in darkness and fire that shook the Israelites to
their core. “Our God is a consuming fire”
we read in Hebrews 12, and that’s
not changed though God is our loving Father. He remains a consuming fire, with
all the awe and even the sense of danger about such a statement.
But as that’s our subject next week, I’ll
say no more about it now.
*To further define the fear of God, we
need to make two distinctions. I think this will clear up a lot of confusion.
Hopefully this will iron out any thoughts of the imbalance of “how can we fear
a God of love?” How do you balance out the verses about coming to God with
boldness and loving Him with all your heart and soul and mind and of the
tenderness of the Good Shepherd with the seemingly darker picture in contrast:
the dread, the fear, even the terror of the Lord?
Consider that the fear of God is terror in the wicked but reverence in the righteous. There is a
good distinction to make. There’s a kind of dual response in the blanket
statement of “fearing God”. A God-fearing man who is wicked can certainly be
terrifying, paralyzingly so, wanting even to hide from God. But a God-fearing
man who is made righteous by faith stands before Him in adoring awe, holds Him
in such high esteem that he respects and reveres Him with no belittling of His
greatness.
Think about this distinction as we
read through our Project Scriptura verses. Be thinking about which response is
being discussed, whether it is really the terror of the wicked or the reverence
of the righteous.
3.
Biblical Basis for the fear of
God
Ecc 8:12-13, Matt 17:1-8, Pro 14:2,
Psa 118:4, Pro 18:13, Pro 3:5-7, Psa 19:9, I Peter 2:17
I’ve heard it said several times that the command
which the Bible makes most frequently is: Do not fear, and all of its
variations.
Though the First Command is “You shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all
your mind…” it remains that the most common command of Scripture is not to
fear.
So fear is a concept of definite
centrality to the Bible.
*Alright so let’s now examine the two
distinctive responses, the terror-response and the reverence-response.
4.
The Terror of the Wicked
First up, the fear of God which is more like
terror and even horror, which is most often assigned to the experience of the
wicked. Sometimes indeed a wicked man may live without any active terror of
God. I’m sure we can think of plenty of sinners living in blissful unawareness
of the terror they should be experiencing. Note, then, two things required to
activate the terror of the wicked:
A. The wicked must realize their
wickedness
Adam and Eve had no problem with God
until they sinned. It wasn’t until they disobeyed the command of the Lord and saw
that they were naked that they hid themselves
from His presence in the garden. They had known nothing but the sweetest
fellowship with the Creator, but the moment they had sinned against, turned
against Him and become criminals, they shrank away and tried to hide. That’s a
response of fear, a response of terror.
And like Adam and Eve, until a person
today becomes aware that they’ve sinned against God and broken His
commandments, then they haven’t a care in the world. And so many live that away,
as if God were irrelevant. But God becomes frightfully relevant as soon as the
wicked see their awful position of having broken God’s righteous rules and
become deserving of justice and punishment. And the Law is terribly good at
doing just that, showing the wicked their wickedness.
B. The wicked must recognize God’s
justice
The terror of the wicked is not
activated until the wicked sees both that they are wicked and that God wants to
do something about it. Nobody ever repents of their sins to a God who to them
seems indifferent and happy-go-lucky. If God is all smiles and sunshine then
there’s no terror of His judgments. There’s no judgment forthcoming! It isn’t
until the wicked realize that God is perfectly holy and perfectly just and perfectly
justified in rising up and acting against the sins that the wicked has
committed.
*So in order for the wicked to be in
any terror of God, they must realize their wickedness and God’s justice. These
are essential ideas in the gospel. The gospel says to the sinner that while we
have all sinned and that while God is perfectly justified in condemning us for
those sins, that He sent His Son to take our punishment for our sins so that He
might not condemn us.
Now let’s further break down the
terror of the wicked by describing it in two ways: the Dread of the Lord and the
Fear of Judgment Day. These are two ways in which the wicked fear God:
A. The Dread of the Lord
A couple verses: Genesis 35:5, “And they
journeyed, and the terror of God was upon the cities that were all around them,
and they did not pursue the sons of Jacob.” Exodus 15, a portion of the song of Moses after crossing the Red
Sea, “The people will hear and be afraid;
sorrow will take hold of the inhabitants of Philistia. Then the chiefs of Edom
will be dismayed; the mighty men of Moab, trembling will take hold of them; all
the inhabitants of Canaan will melt away. Fear and dread will fall on them; by the
greatness of Your arm they will be as still as stone, till Your people pass
over, O LORD, till the people pass over whom You have purchased.” Job 13:11, “Will not His excellence make you afraid, and the dread of Him fall upon
you?”
Throughout Scripture you see this
concept of the Dread of the Lord falling upon His enemies and the enemies of
His people.
Dread
can also mean foreboding. This is not a jump-out-and-scare-you type of fear.
This is a slow sense that something bad will happen. Dread is a kind of anxious
and worrying fear, something anticipated. And so the enemies of God were struck
with this oppressive, overwhelming sensation of dread from God. God’s enemies
could do nothing against His people when they were paralyzed by this disabling
dread, this foreboding anxiety sent from the Lord.
B. The Fear of Judgment Day
More common than the foreboding Dread
of the Lord, Scripture reveals the terror of the wicked in their fear of
judgment. Leviticus 26 contains a
clear and frightening example of the power of God’s judgment, and probably one
of the strongest statements of God’s punitive justice against rebellion: “But if you do not obey Me, and do not
observe all these commandments, and if you despise My statutes, or if your soul
abhors My judgments, so that you do not perform all My commandments, but break
My covenant, I also will do this to you: I will visit you with terror, with
wasting disease and fever that consume the eyes and make the heart ache. And
you shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it. I will set My
face against you, and you shall be defeated by your enemies. Those who hate you
shall reign over you, and you shall flee when no one pursues you. And after all
this, if you do not obey Me, then I will punish you sevenfold for your sins. I
will break the pride of your power; I will make your heavens like iron and your
earth like bronze. And your strength shall be spent in vain; for your land
shall not yield its produce, nor shall the trees of the land yield their fruit…”
And so on it goes for many lines more.
This is what remains outside of grace,
outside of the cross. Beyond the borders of the salvation provided through
Jesus Christ and received through faith in Him, this is all that remains and it
is terrifying: judgment.
Joel
2 reads: “Blow a trumpet in Zion;
sound an alarm on My holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land
tremble, for the Day of the LORD is coming; it is near, a day of darkness and
gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness! …The LORD utters His voice before
His army, for His camp is exceedingly great; He who executes His word is
powerful, for the Day of the LORD is great, it is dreadful. Who can endure it?”
There is a Day fast approaching when
God will arise to judge the earth and condemn the wicked who did not receive
Him. People often say that they’ll have a “thing or two” to say to God when
they meet Him. But when the sinner stands, uncovered by grace, before that
great white throne of the Judge of all, there will be nothing they can say.
Their souls will tremble.
How we must warn that this Day is
coming!
II
Corinthians 5:11 says “Knowing,
therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men…” There’s this
persuasiveness with the sinner to turn and repent, that they may escape the
coming judgment.
Even the Lord Himself says to the
wicked, again in Joel 2, “‘Now therefore,’ says the LORD, ‘Turn to Me
with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.’ So rend
your heart, and not your garments; return to the LORD your God, for He is
gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness; and He relents from
doing harm.”
Hebrews
11:7 presents a picture of a godly man motivated to act by the fear of God:
“By faith Noah, being divinely warned of
things not yet seen, moved with godly fear, prepared an ark for the saving of
his household…” Noah was motivated with godly fear, knowing that the Flood,
the judgment of God, was on its way, and so he saved his family. Elsewhere,
Noah is identified as a “preacher of righteousness”. No doubt he spent those
years of building the ark also proclaiming the ark, the way of escape, though
apparently nobody took the time to listen to him.
As with the Flood, the Day of Judgment
is coming. And while the whole preaching of “fire and brimstone” is frowned
upon in modern society, I think there remains yet a place for a healthy terror
of God’s impending justice. I think the fear of God should motivate us to
preach and motivate those who do not know God to repent, to turn from their way
and fall upon the grace of Jesus Christ to save them.
The fear of God is a strong catalyst
for action, both for the wicked and the righteous.
5.
The Reverence of the Righteous
I think we have a clear understanding
of what the fear of God means for His children right back where we began, in Hebrews 12. We had read in v.9: “Furthermore, we have had human fathers who corrected us, and we paid
them respect. Shall we not much more readily be in subjection to the Father of
spirits and live?”
The Scripture makes it clear that we
are to respect our heavenly Father more so than we respected our own parents
who disciplined us as children. Just as we both feared and loved our parents,
so too we must fear and love our God. He is our Father and it is only honorable
toward Him that we submit to His authority, to His discipline and to His
Majesty.
What is the fear of the Lord?
Scripture says quite famously: “The fear
of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge… The fear of the LORD is the
beginning of wisdom…” (Proverbs 1:7 and
9:10).
Do you want to be knowledgeable? Do
you want to be wise? Do you want to make the right decisions? Do you want to
avoid the things that are dangerous, the sins that can ensnare you? Do you want
to escape maybe a spiral of sin that you’re caught in right now? The answer is
the Fear of the Lord.
See if we fear the Lord, if we realize
who He is and are in awe of Him, revering and honoring Him, loving Him as the
First Commandment says, then we will avoid those things which grieve our
Father, because they’re things that not only hurt us (which sin does), but
which can drive a wedge of separation in the middle of your fellowship with
God. We’ve all known how distant we “feel” from God after we’ve sinned.
The fear of the Lord, then, is vastly
important for the Christian life. It is a regulator, a compass, and guide to
walk the straight path without deviation, a path that involves wisdom and
knowledge. The fear of the Lord reminds us who God is and what God is like,
that He is worthy not of lives that are squandered in self-interests, but lives
of reflective wonder and obedience, fearing that we should arouse His anger or
disappointment or grief.
Let me finish with an excellent
analogy concocted by my own beloved, Blythe Norton. She earlier compared it to
a locomotive.
A locomotive is a very powerful
machine, with immense potential for destruction, if you happen to stand in
front of it. If you’re standing in its way, a locomotive will mow you down and
destroy you, easily in fact. But if you’re inside the locomotive, in one of the
train-cars, you’re fine. In fact, you’re enjoying the ride. You’re going
places. You’re seeing sights. You’re on the way. But you respect the engine
enough not to get down on the tracks in front of it.
And it is exactly the same thing with
the fear of God. There are only two kinds of people in this world: those who
are inside the train or in front of it; by analogy, those who are
safe and happy in the refuge that is Christ Jesus, safe from the powerful and
destructive wrath of God under the arms of the cross… but then there are those
who are standing in God’s way, and far from being safe inside the shelter of
grace, they stand in front of God, opposing Him with their sin and defying Him
with their wills.
But just as a locomotive will destroy
anyone standing in its way when it’s on the move, so too, when God rises to
judge the earth, He will be an unstoppable force. “But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He
appears?” (Malachi 3:2). Though
the wicked have their freedom now, there will come that Day when no one will be
able to stand against the Holy One.
Matthew
10:28 reads: “And do not fear those
who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to
destroy both soul and body in hell.”
If anything, the purpose of studying
God’s attributes is to be reminded of who and what He really is. Sometimes we
may forget, dreadful thought! But God, though lovingly tender, is no
teddy-bear. God, though beautiful, is no butterfly. God is no waif, no
push-over, no powder-puff, faint-hearted pansy. God is Spirit, immensely
powerful, immeasurably strong, intensely holy, infinitely beautiful and
perfectly just. Our God is a consuming fire.
The Christian life should be marked by
godly fear, a holy fear which purifies. We need no longer dread the Lord in
anticipation of His judgment (if you’re a Christian reading this); we’ve been
saved from that. But it remains that God deserved to be respected very, very
highly.
Remember who it is you pray to.
Remember who it is that you sing the songs to. Remember who it is who left the
regal throne in heaven, who descended in humility and died for you and calls
you by name. Remember who and what it is you deliberately sin against when you
choose to do things your own way rather than God’s way. We must lay aside every weight and the sin that ensnares us in light
of the Holy God to be feared.
We can’t live any longer in a
wishy-washy Christianity free to do whatever we please, and expect God to go along
with it. We live under the authority of our Father, not the other way round.
And He will discipline when He needs to and He deserves to be feared, in all
that’s wrapped up in that word.
So then “…let us have grace by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence
and godly fear. For our God is a consuming fire.”
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