See the previous posts in this series here, here, here, and here.
Let me pause to ask, are you hung up on the word “fear”? Someone may object, “Doesn’t the Bible say ‘Perfect love casts out fear’?” It does. In 1 John 4:18. Love casts out that servile, ugly, deadening fear that follows close on the heels of sin and independence. But loving God and fearing God are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are one.
How can that be?
Did you know that the Crayola Crayon Company manufactures twenty-three varieties of red crayons? All are crayons. All are red. But each one is a progressively different hue of that one color.
Did you know there are progressive hues of the fear of the Lord?
Ed Welch has written helpfully on this theme. He sets out the fear of the Lord as a continuum.Consider with me, in the light of God’s revelation of Himself to us, the appropriateness of each hue of the fear of the Lord set out in this way.
God is utterly holy. Holy, at its root, speaks of otherness. God is over, beyond, higher, deeper, wider, and different than anything we can imagine. Indeed, our imagination cannot take in all that God is in His holiness. He is righteous in the most absolute sense. By the way, I am not. And neither are you. “God is a consuming fire” (Deut. 4:24; Heb. 12:29). Terror is not inappropriate.
Not only is God holy, righteous, and a consuming fire, He possesses infinite power. He cannot be resisted. Dread is not an inappropriate response.
This God—holy, righteous, consuming, all-powerful—holds “In his hand … the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind” (Job 12:10). This God holds my next breath and heartbeat. He dispenses them to me at His pleasure. He will one day withhold them in His wisdom. I am at His mercy. Each moment I remain animate and alive, is a gift from His hand. Trembling before Him is not an inappropriate response.
The great marvel is that this God continues to dispense to me breaths, heartbeats, and brainwaves. Why? Each morning my eyes open to a new day—why? Each time I set down to a meal—why? In God’s kindness He continues to drop breadcrumbs of grace along my path. We discover that “God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance” (Romans 2:4). Astonishment is appropriate.
But more astonishing yet is the discovery that before I ever existed (indeed, before anything but God existed), God set His love on me. He did so not because I am holy, for I am not. He did so not because I am righteous, because I am not. He knew ahead of time that I would prove unholy and unrighteous. Yet then and there He determined He would deal with me according to His love. He set His love on me not because of something in me, but because of something in Himself. God set things up so that the ground of His love for me would never be in my performance, but in His person. He remains holy, righteous, and a consuming fire and yet in all of that He is love. Awe would be a good word to describe the response of one who is beginning to see.
So much so did God determine to deal with me in His love that “at the right time” (Romans 5:6) He stepped into time and space in a human body and with a sinless human nature in the person of Jesus. He came, He said, to seek and to save what was lost. That was me. He secured me to His Father forever by dying my death and becoming my life. Such sacrificial love calls forth reverence within us.
All this God did “so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness to us in Christ” (Ephesians 2:7). Who would not yield to and commit themselves to one so powerful and yet so determined to deal with us in grace? Yes, complete devotion is the right response.
Indeed, in view of God’s mercies to us in Jesus, we offer up our bodies to Him as living sacrifices (Romans 12:2). Trust is the inevitable extension in our growing relationship to this God.
This life of trusting obedience becomes our “reasonable service” of worship (Romans 12:2) before one so utterly holy, completely righteous, committedly loving, and enduringly gracious.
Love of God and fear of the Lord are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the more we know the Lord, the deeper we move into relationship with Him in both fear and love.
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