October 23, 2014
Fear of God
In a recent sermon a pastor
said, “The Ten Commandments direct us in a way that is good for us.” I suppose
there is nothing wrong with the statement, but it seems to make the Ten
Commandments somewhat discretionary. Moses delivered the Commandments amidst thunder,
lightning, the trumpet, and smoke on the mountain — and the people trembled
with fear. Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid. God has come to test
you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning” (Exodus
20:20 NIV).
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----Paul and John and Daniel and just about everyone the Bible describes encountering either the Lord or one of His angels fall to their faces nearly dead. Angels tell them to get up and not worship. The Lord gives them strength and bids them to rise. Hebrews tells us to come boldly. I don’t think this “fear the Lord” thing is simple.
-----I distinctly remember the reason I proclaimed faith in Christ and was baptized. I didn’t want to go to Hell. I didn’t want to live the dull, oatmeal life of a Christian either. And I certainly did not want to lay out my brain along all the stilted paths hacked through the jungle and maintained by generations and generations and generations of preachers learning from the previous one what they passed on to the next one. I had questions seeking better than boiler-plate answers. Moreover, there was fun to be had. There was inner turmoil to resolve. There was me. But there was also Hell. And that scared me to God.
-----Now, was this a fear of the Lord or a fear of Hell? I never feared Hell‘s ability to reach out and swallow me. I never looked at it as having such an ability. It was the place I feared God would put me. He could put me any other place and I would be happy. But definitely not there. And preferably not in church. Just not there. But regardless of why I fell to my face that evening, I got up with a new sensation. It was a joy more than it was courage. For the first time in my life the assurance of “no Hell for me” was in my hands held in His.
-----I didn’t buy the “now saved so forever saved” stuff. It may work that way in God’s mopped out and cleaned to pristine heaven. But it does not work that way in this world of horrors. If I turned loose of what assured my safety from Hell, then of course I would no longer have it. That began the gradual transformation of my fear of going to Hell into a fear of my turning loose of what I now grasped.
-----I couldn’t see a reason to fear God. He loved me. I knew that. But I also knew I was a fool. No ordinary fool either. I knew I was really an idiotic fool. And I knew my backside was the bull’s eye for the toe end of His boot, for my entire life felt like one heck of a hard, continuous, butt kickin’. The fear I felt of Him I blamed upon myself.
-----Something had to give. That would be me. And I learned that my fear of myself was the fear of becoming so sloppy with the truth that I would no longer know it. It was when I began seeking the truth about everything I encountered that I began fearing God properly, or at least I presume properly. It was then that the enormity of Jesus’ being the truth settled into my mind. I recognized my foolishness as being from my fraudulence, “Let God be true though every man be false.” (Rom 3:4) I realized the greater the fraud I am the more I have to fear the truth, because in the end, fraud vanishes like the phantom it is, and only will the truth endure. Now my fear was getting me somewhere. It was finally driving me to correct the erroneous concepts of my heart and mind. It was cleaning up my treasury.
-----Thirty-five years of carefully comparing my thoughts and feelings to the realities of His Word and searching for the concepts which relate the happenings, conditions, and shapes of the physical world to the Bible, I see fearing the Lord as entirely fearing the loss of something indescribably great. More than anything I fear not eternally discovering the innumerable dimensions of I AM THAT I AM for my having determined that I am right about God or anything else without His direction. It’s a positive fear.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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