Introduction
We live in a time of escalating fear. There is the immeasurable force of natural disasters, like the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina and we are warned of a climate catastrophe through global warming. The World Health Organisation says an outbreak of bird flu that could kill 20 million people is inevitable. On the other hand there is Islamic terrorism; travel warnings, fridge magnets, TV ads and new security laws are designed to keep us alert for danger. We are living in an age of great fear.
Jesus foretold, “signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves, 26 men’s hearts failing them for fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world”. Then he said,“when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” (Luke 21:25 – 28). When the world is most fearful the church should be most expectant.
It is a time of great threat and great opportunity. Great threat, because scripture says, “The fear of man brings a snare” (Prov 29:25) but great opportunity, for when lost humanity’s fear is at its greatest the church’s fear of God can be at its purest. I have many reasons for believing this is not the case
I was in a church related meeting recently with a group of leaders who were being nice to each other and calling one another by titles, like “Pastor this and that”. I could sense the fear of man in the meeting and as I prayed about this I felt led me to Isaiah 33:6, “The Lord …will be the stability of your times, abundance of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge; the fear of the Lord is the key to this treasure.” Most of the church has little to offer the world in terms of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge because we are more ruled by the fear of man than the fear of God.
To understand the nature of the fear of God and how it frees us from the fear of man we need to go back to the beginning.
The Origin of Fear
Adam and Eve were placed by God in a garden of pleasures – Eden means “delight”. They had authority over the animals, knew nothing of sickness or old age and were at peace with their Creator. It seems they had nothing to fear. But they did have something to fear. 16 “And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”” (Gen 2:16- 17). Adam and Eve were to fear only one thing – God. Even though they had yet to experience pain, suffering or death, they needed to fear “the loss of God’s pleasure”. However the Lord communicated it, by tone of voice, urgent appeal, deep emotion – it must have been clear to them that death was the loss of God’s joy. This is what we were all need to fear.
The Satanic temptation ““You will not die ….you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:4- 5) is an invitation to reach a state of equality with God where he does not need to be feared. This is an evil misrepresentation of God’s holy nature and the healthy fear that is due to him. Let me give an illustration:
JY out walking Brandy my dog earlier in the week, he starts to chase something next to a major highway and I am afraid for him that he will run out and be hit by a car, I call him back with a stern voice and he comes back to me because he fears my disapproval. I want the ignorant dog to fear me for his own protection, not because I enjoy lording it over him or intend to deprive him of something that is good for him. In God’s case, the heavier his hand upon us the heavier his heart concerning him (Gen 6).
If humanity had only feared God then our joy in relating to him would never have been destroyed. Instead we have sought to be lords of their own lives, we have substituted worldly pleasures for the pleasure of God, we lost eternal life and plunged the world into a state of evil where fears rule everyday life –fear of rejection, mockery, misunderstanding, ridicule, job loss, violence, poverty, sickness and death. People constantly live in fear of each other.
In most churches the people fear the pastor or the pastor fears the people! In many marriages wives fear husbands or husbands fear wives; parents live in fear of their teenage children. People are afraid of the boss, afraid to walk down the street at night, afraid of break ins, afraid of growing old…This is the terrible state of the world in which we live. When we chose not to fear God, his judgement was to choose to leave us in our fear of one another. The solution to our human fears is not winning Lotto or the prosperity gospel but a true fear of God. You cannot fear God and humans at the same time.
The Fear of God expels the Fear of Man
I would like to read a few verses from Psalm 90 that teach us deep truths about why we need to fear God: 3 You turn us back to dust, and say, “Turn back, you mortals.” ….8 You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your countenance. 9 For all our days pass away under your wrath; our years come to an end like a sigh. 10 The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong; even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away. 11 Who considers the power of your anger? Your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you. 12 So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart. (Ps 90:3, 8 -12).
The measure of the fear that is due to God is in proportion to his judgement, and this judgement is revealed in the fact that all people die (cf. Rom 1:18ff.). The wise person recognises that God has placed them (this whole present world order)under the sentence of death and appropriately fears him.
In other times and places people have openly acknowledged the reality of death. Mozart said “I thank my God that he has granted me the good fortune …of learning to know it (death) as the key to our true happiness….I never go to bed without thinking, young as I am, tomorrow I may no longer be.” (CD III/4, 589).
This is not strange talk, it is biblical, “you saw my body as it was formed. All the days planned for me were written in your book before I was one day old.” (Ps 139:16). (Our lives are not in our own hands.) The only one with the power of life and death is God. If Adam and Eve only had a godly fear of death, if they had taken God at his word then we would never have had to die.
Difficult as it is to endure, a healthy fear of God expels the destructive fear of man. As a 21 year old university student in a state of deep depression I was so extremely fearful of other people e.g. walk down street. Read Bible wanted to become Christian didn’t know any Christians tried to enter a public Christian meeting couldn’t walk through door paralysed by fear.
Used to read Bible every day (twice) every morning wake up with deep fear that if I died I would go to hell. In the fear of the Lord everything else is screened and the mind and conscience becomes totally focused on being right with God. Matters of health, finance, family and career become totally secondary to reconciliation with God.
Eventually the fear of divine judgement in my life was so great (like the response of Isaiah to the terrifying holiness of God revealed to him, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isa 6:5)) that I had to break through that demonic wall of fear and become saved, whatever the cost. The true fear of God is so much more powerful and penetrating (and eventually healing) than the fear of man.
Was my conversion strange, was it some sort of psychological sickness? Not at all, take the crowds on the day of Pentecost? When Peter rebukes them “Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah,this Jesus whom you crucified.”,they cry out in fear, “Brothers, what should we do?”Peter said to them, “Repent….”” (Acts 2:36- 38)
When the eighteenth century Puritan Jonathan Edwards preached the sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, people screamed aloud, clutched the backs of pews and the stone pillars of the church, fearing that the ground would open and swallow them alive into hell! The effect of this sort of awe (“awesome” DY comment) was permanent. When you have been encountered by a true holy fear you do not backslide easily.
Through George Whitefield’s preaching in New York in the 1740’s, 100,000 professed Christ. 10 years later 85% were still in the churches. One of Billy Graham’s most famous crusades was at Wembley Stadium in London in 1954. 5 years later 5% of those who responded to the altar call were still in church. The outstanding difference is the presence of the fear of the Lord.
We are in a spiritually appallingly time when a whole biblical vocabulary has been stripped from the preaching in many churches – sin, wrath, punishment, judgment and hell are no longer even mentioned. No wonder there is so little holiness, so little real respect for God – we have domesticated him.
A section from C.S. Lewis’ book The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe can help us understand these things. In this tale, Aslan the lion is a symbol for Jesus. Mr. Beaver tells the children about Aslan:
“Is — is he a man?” asked Lucy.
“Aslan a man!” said Mr. Beaver sternly. “Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. Don’t you know who is the King of the Beasts? Aslan is a lion — the Lion, the great Lion.”
“Ooh,” said Susan, “I thought he was a man. Is he — quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
“That you will, dearie, and make no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver, “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else silly.”
“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver, “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
There is more to life than safety – God is not safe when he is confronting injustice, prejudice, greed, deceit, abuse and all sin and wickedness. As Hebrews warns, “…let us …offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; 29 for indeed our God is a consuming fire.” (Heb 12:28 -29) The fire of God consumes only one thing, it is a threat to only one thing – evil. This is not something most of us understand, but Jesus understood it perfectly.
Jesus’ Fear of God
Jesus had no fear of human beings because he always said and did what God asked of him. This is why the Father proudly proclaims, “You are my Son, the Beloved;with you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:22). The joy of God and the fear of man cannot reside in the same heart.
Isaiah prophesied of Christ, “The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him–the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of power, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord–and he will delight in the fear of the Lord...” (Isa 11:2-3). Delighting in the fear of the Lord may sound contradictory to us, but the rest of the text explains what it meant for Jesus, “He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; 4 but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with fairness for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.”
Jesus delighted in the fear of the Lord because it immersed him in the goodness of God’s opposition to all evil. Living in the fear of the Lord plunges a person into an atmosphere and mode of life where they share in God’s will to ultimately destroy everything that destroys (Rev 11:18).
When Jesus said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Matt 10:28), he was not encouraging mere self- preservation, he implores us to come to terms with the fact that the only thing that stands between us and annihilation is the merciful love of God. He warns that unless we live in holy fear we will ultimately come to a place of total ruin where nothing will be enjoyed. He speaks these words because he is trying to save us from what he himself must soon experience.
Jesus own fear of God climaxes as he approaches the cross. As he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane his fear is so great that he exclaims, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death.” (Matt 26:38) According to Hebrews 5:7, “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear.” Luther correctly says, “Never a man feared like this man.” Why is Jesus in fear and trembling? At his trial there are no signs he fears the physical tortures of flogging and crucifixion or the emotional torment of human rejection.
What he fears becomes clear in the terrible cry of dereliction from the cross, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Mark 15:34) Jesus’ fear of God has led him into the place where he can no longer delight in the fear of God, where all that remains is the absence of God, the [“dominion of darkness” (Col 1:13) , the “hour (of)]the power of darkness.”(Luke 22:53). On account of our sins, Jesus is left alone with pure evil; his trauma is not the absence of safety, but the absence of the goodness of God. He is in a place (our place, our hell) with no experience of God’s holiness to protect him from the destructive power of sin.
This is what humanity has always needed to fear – that in the End, God would leave us alone (forever) with own evil heart. Nothing could be moreappalling, shocking, terrifying. This is the meaning of hell; our hell that Jesus took upon himself on the cross.
The Courage to Fear God
We need courage to fear God, courage like that of the penitent thief on the cross. 39 Then one of the criminals who were hanged there blasphemed Him, saying, “If You are the Christ, save Yourself and us.”40 But the other, answering, rebuked him, saying, “Do you not even fear God, seeing you are under the same condemnation? 41 And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds; but this Man has done nothing wrong.” 42 Then he said to Jesus, “Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom.”43 And Jesus said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:39- 43).
This repentant thief is in a position we will all reach soon enough, he is on the brink of death, and to be on the point of death is to be beyond any reason to fear man. Very soon, this man, his companion and Jesus, will all appear before the judgement seat of God (Rom 14:10; Rev 20:11). His companion is like a modern Australian, since he feels no fear of God he bitterly denies to the end what is about to befall him. The penitent thief however is full of fear for God and turns to Jesus as his Lord appealing, “remember me”…
The confidence of his appeal for eternal life is not his repentance nor his godliness (he has led a wicked life) but the innocence of the Son of God. Jesus immediately promises him Paradise, the word the Jews of the time used for the pleasures of heaven. This is just as the scripture promise, “the Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him, in those who hope in his steadfast love.” (Ps 147:11). The dying thief is about to be restored to the enjoyment of God and all good created things that Adam and Eve forfeited by their failure to “Fear God, [and keep his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone.” (Eccl 12:13)].
This story teaches us how you know if a person fears God, it is not whether they go to church, live a good moral life, read the Bible, pray, tithe or any other thing – to have the fear of the Lord is to turn to Christ and his cross.
Conclusion
There are only two categories of people – those who are being lost fear being found by God, and those who are being saved who fear losing God and his pleasure. Those who fear God are willing to abandon all their idols and sins in order to be found in Christ. This is Paul’s testimony, “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.”(Phil 3:8).
One of the reasons for our failure to evangelise the nations is that we have lost the motivating force of the fear of the Lord. Paul said, “knowing the fear of the Lord we try to persuade others ….” (2 Cor 5:11) John Wesley said, “Give me a hundred men who fear nothing but God, hate nothing but sin and are determined to know nothing among men but Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and I will set the world on fire with them.” The world is not set on fire because we have substituted the fear of man for the fear of God.
To live in the fear of men is a terrible state of affairs, no matter how hard you try to please other human beings you can have no assurance they will be good to you. I fear for the church, for it constantly and confusedly seems to prefer to please men rather than please God. The absence of the fear of God is a sign of his judgement, “Why, O Lord, do you make us stray from your ways and harden our heart, so that we do not fear you?” (Isa 63:17). The presence of the fear of the Lord is a sign of his favour, “The Lord will bless all who fear him, high and low alike…” (Ps 115:13).
Let me close with a quote from someone who has gone to be with the Lord, ” The Church needs to become a gloriously dangerous place where nothing is safe in God’s presence except us. Nothing–including our plans, our agendas, our priorities, our politics, our money, our security, our comfort, our possessions, our needs.
“Our world is… longing to see people whose God is big and holy and frightening and gentle and tender… and ours; a God whose love frightens us into His strong and powerful arms where He longs to whisper those terrifying words, ‘I love you.’” (Mike Yaconelli)