Rejoice and Tremble (eBook)

1

Do Not Be Afraid!

Boo!

It’s one of the first words we enjoy. As children, we loved to leap out on our friends and shout it. But at the same time, we were scared of the dark and the monsters under the bed. We were both fascinated and repelled by our fears. And not much changes when we grow up: adults love scary movies and thrills that bring us face-to-face with our worst fears. But we also brood and agonize over all the dark and dreadful things that could happen to us: how we could lose our lives, health, or loved ones; how we might fail or be rejected. Fear is probably the strongest human emotion. But it is one that baffles us.

To Fear or Not to Fear?

When we come to the Bible, the picture seems equally confusing: is fear a good thing or bad? Is fear something to embrace or to flee? Many times Scripture clearly views fear as a bad thing from which Christ has come to rescue us. The apostle John writes: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” (1 John 4:18). Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, prophesied that Jesus’s salvation would mean

that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies,

might serve him without fear,

in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. (Luke 1:74–75)

The author of Hebrews agrees, arguing that Christ came specifically to “deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Heb. 2:15). Indeed, the most frequent command in Scripture is “Do not be afraid!”

Yet, again and again in Scripture we are called to fear. Perhaps even more strangely, we are called to fear God. The verse that quickly comes to mind is Proverbs 9:10:

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,

and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.

But while that is the best known, it is far from alone. At the start of the book of Proverbs we read,

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;

fools despise wisdom and instruction. (1:7)

David prays,

Teach me your way, O Lord,

that I may walk in your truth;

unite my heart to fear your name. (Ps. 86:11)

Isaiah tells us that “the fear of the Lord is Zion’s treasure” (Isa. 33:6). Job’s faithfulness is summed up when he is described as “a blameless and upright man, who fears God” (Job 1:8). And this is not merely an Old Testament state of affairs that the New Testament rises above. In the Magnificat, Mary says that

[the Lord’s] mercy is for those who fear him from

generation to generation. (Luke 1:50)

Jesus describes the unrighteous judge as one “who neither feared God nor respected man” (Luke 18:2). Paul writes, “Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God” (2 Cor. 7:1); and again, “Bondservants, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not by way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord” (Col. 3:22). Clearly, the New Testament agrees with the “Preacher” when he concludes Ecclesiastes: “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man” (Eccles. 12:13).

In fact, the fear of God is so important a theme in Scripture that Professor John Murray wrote simply, “The fear of God is the soul of godliness.”1 The seventeenth-century Puritan John Owen likewise argued that in Scripture, “the fear of the Lord” means “the whole worship of God, moral and instituted, all the obedience which we owe unto him.”2 And Martin Luther taught in his Small Catechism that the fulfillment of the law means “we are to fear, love, and trust God above all things.”3 Walking his people through the Ten Commandments, Luther wrote that a right understanding of each meant knowing “we are to fear and love God.”

All of which can leave us rather confused. On the one hand, we are told that Christ frees us from fear; on the other, we are told we ought to fear—and fear God, no less. It can leave us discouraged and wishing that “the fear of God” were not so prominent an idea in Scripture. We have quite enough fears without adding more, thank you very much. And fearing God just feels so negative, it doesn’t seem to square with the God of love and grace we meet in the gospel. Why would any God worth loving want to be feared?

It is all made worse by the impression that fear and love are two different languages preferred by two different Christian camps—perhaps two different theologies. The one camp speaks of love and grace and never of fearing God. And the other camp seems angered by this and emphasizes how afraid of God we should be. The fear of God is like cold water on the Christian’s love for God. We get the impression that the fear of God must be the gloomy theological equivalent of eating your greens: something the theological health nuts binge on while everyone else enjoys tastier fare.

My aim now is to cut through this discouraging confusion. I want you to rejoice in this strange paradox that the gospel both frees us from fear and gives us fear. It frees us from our crippling fears, giving us instead a most delightful, happy, and wonderful fear. And I want to clear up that often off-putting phrase “the fear of God,” to show through the Bible that for Christians it really does not mean being afraid of God.

Indeed, Scripture will have many hefty surprises in store for us as it describes the fear of God that is the beginning of wisdom. It is not what we would expect. Take just one example for now. In Isaiah 11:1–3 we are given a beautiful description of the Messiah, filled with the Spirit:

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,

and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.

And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,

the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,

the Spirit of counsel and might,

the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

Those last two statements should make us question what this fear of the Lord is. Here we see that the fear of the Lord is not something the Messiah wishes to be without. Even he, in his sinless holiness and perfection, has the fear of the Lord—but he is not reluctant about it. It is not that he loves God and has joy in God but finds (unfortunately) that to fulfill all righteousness he also must fear God. Quite the opposite: the Spirit who rests on him is the Spirit of the fear of the Lord, and his delight is in the fear of the Lord. It forces us to ask, what is this fear, that it can be Christ’s very delight? It cannot be a negative, gloomy duty.

Today’s Culture of Fear

But before we dive into the good news the Bible has about our fears and the fear of God, it is worth noticing how anxious our culture has become. Seeing where our society now is can help us understand why we have a problem with fear—and why the fear of God is just the tonic we need.

These days, it seems, everyone is talking about a culture of fear. From Twitter to television, we fret about global terrorism, extreme weather, pandemics, and political turmoil. In political campaigns and elections, we routinely see fear rhetoric used by politicians who recognize that fear drives voting patterns. And in our digitalized world, the speed at which information and news are disseminated means that we are flooded with more causes of worry than ever. Fears that once we would never have shared cross the world in seconds and are globally pooled.

Our private, daily routines are filled with still more sources of anxiety. Take our diet, for example. If you choose the full-fat version on the menu, you’re heading for a heart attack. Yet we’re regularly confronted with the latest discovery that the low-calorie alternative is actually carcinogenic or harmful in some other way. And so a low-grade fear starts with breakfast. Or think of the paranoia surrounding parenting today. The valid but usually overblown fear of the kidnapper lurking online or outside every school has helped fuel the rise of helicopter parenting and children more and more fenced in to keep them safe. Small surprise, then, that universities are now expected to provide previously unheard-of “safe spaces” to protect or quarantine students. Children have grown up so protected that they are not expected to be able to cope with opposing viewpoints or criticism. It is just one indicator that they are considered more fragile than students were a generation ago.

However, it is wrong to single out the pejoratively named Generation Snowflake: as a whole, we are an increasingly anxious and uncertain culture. Anyone in management knows about the staggering proliferation of bureaucratic red tape around health and safety. Yet it...