Day: July 9, 2012

In this place and time many of us who call ourselves believers have come to know very little of the greatness and majesty of God. Perhaps we have allowed ourselves, whether consciously or unconsciously, to become caught up in the shallow meaninglessness of our “culture of disrespect”. Many Christians are immersed in a popular culture that we dwell in like fish swimming in de-oxygenated water that will not sustain their lives. In our case the part of our lives being starved is the spiritual. This is, in a profound sense, the most important part and what we are starving for, among other things, is a reverential attitude towards the Sovereign of the Universe as He really is.

Today we often bring an unthinking levity to our services that, when not kept to a minimum, can prevent us from entering into true worship. It is hard to lose ourselves in the kind of deep respect and awe for our Creator that He requires, and we desperately need, when there is no sense of the sacred in the way we “do church”. Perhaps humor and informality has its place in certain contexts and times in a worship service, but not if it leads to a kind of flip casualness in our approach to a God (a casualness that, unfortunately, the author has not himself been guiltless of).

For instance large segments of the Western Church in the early years of the 21st century have all but banished the word “fear” from the lexicon of words we apply to our daily relationship with our Lord. There are reasons for this, some of them resulting from a misunderstanding of what the word means in its deepest Christian sense. By “fear” we do not mean the terror inspired in a child by a cruel and vicious parent or other fallen human authority figure. Many of us have known such terror and the church has gone out of its way in recent years to explain that this is not the kind of fear the authors of Scripture had in mind. Unfortunately by only defining what the word isn’t in the biblical context, and not spending more time explaining what it is, the result has sometimes been a general disregard of the word and its not only proper, but necessary use.

We are to fear God in the sense of a deep reverential awe and sincere spirit of submission to the One who is Creator, Master, Judge, and Redeemer. We are to fear Him in the sense of understanding that He is infinitely greater than any created thing and the rightful, and righteous, master of every created thing. He is also the one Who, in dread sovereign power will determine the eternal destiny of all moral beings.

The men of the Bible knew this fear. In the Old Testament, when confronted with the Holy One of Israel, men like Daniel fell on their faces and cried out their unworthiness to stand in the presence of the Divine. When granted a vision of the resurrected Christ the New Testament saints had a similar reaction. Just ask Saul of Tarsus or John the Revelator.

One must come to the conclusion that many Post-Modern Christians in studiously informal and “relevant” churches have lost this kind of reverential submission, this “good fear”, of almighty God.

And why is this fear good? It is good because once a human soul becomes acquainted with its moral wretchedness relative to an absolutely holy and righteous God it can simultaneously become open to the love, grace and mercy of that very same God. God is perfectly holy, but He is also perfectly loving and His primary desire for the human race is its redemption, the permanent restoration of blessed communion with its Creator, not its condemnation. The cross of Jesus bears mute testimony to this ultimate truth. The paradox is that the fearsome God is also the tender and compassionate God, but you cannot know one without the other and come to a place of real repentance and true redemption.

We quite rightly decry “fire and brimstone” preaching if its only source is the self-righteous anger of the preacher. Yet there is a place for reminding Christians that our Lord is not mocked. If we want to approach God in a sort of casual moral informality marked by flippant treatment of holy things, and even the name of God, we may someday face the kind of hard discipline that can only restore a proper respect for that Name. Thanks be to Him that even such a severe mercy at the hands of the Father is indicative of His loving nature because, while it is severe, it is still a mercy.

What would be far better would be to examine ourselves now to see if we have a proper “God-fearingness” within our hearts and to ask for the conviction of the Holy Spirit if we sense we do not. By sincerely taking this initiative to become penitent and thus more reverentially related to the Sovereign King of the Universe we may come to have a newfound healthy fear of disrespecting Him, and that kind of holy fear is exactly what we are talking abo