The Fear of God (or, a wrestling with I John 4:18)

i can remember being a young child--still young enough to be what many consider "carefree" but old enough to embark on fledging flights of critical thinking--and i can remember a very specific evening. i remember crawling into my bed in the room at the end of the hall after watching Aladdin, kissing my mother goodnight and letting the darkness sweep out from the flip of a light switch as it engulfed the walls and the ceiling and floor and the bed and my body. and i was still.

and my mind began to tread into the systematic prayer: "now i lay me, down to sleep..."

but the words, formed and generated as they were so many nights before since i had learned the bedtime supplication, started to drift from their typical path. in fact, my mind veered from the words and started thinking on their Recipient. and His nature. i started considering where God was and what He was doing right at that moment and if i was on a holding line or live on air. and then i thought again about where He was, and on the line of the prayer "if i die before i awake, i pray the Lord my soul to take." which was followed by the thought: "well, if i'm going to die, what will my next waking moments be like?"

and i was petrified.

i considered what it meant to live in eternity, and it frightened me. the longevity of it frightened me. my inability to fathom such magnitude frightened me. the naive assumption of my impending boredom of living in clouds and doing the same things day after day after day into infinity frightened me. my heart raced. my sheets became hot and heavy over my stiff and alert frame. i kept myself up far past my bedtime, reeling my mind over such thoughts.

and it is this moment that i point to and say, "this is where i first tried, and failed, to experience a fear of God."

~

I John 4:18 says, "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." i scratched my head at this verse recently, as i had been weighing the concept of godly fear. if i'm supposed to fear God, and God is love (earlier in verse 8), how can there be no fear in love?

when we talk about a fear of God, anyone (Christian or atheist, ignorant or well-informed, young or old, etc.) can relate to what we mean by fear. it's the unattributed bump in the night. it's the ghost movie you knew you shouldn't have watched, especially while housesitting at 8 p.m. at night. it's the haunted house, the lost child, the upcoming test or the contemplation of death.

but if these are our only reference points when we apply an emotion of fear to our encounter with the living and active God, we have only begun to wrap our arms around what that colloquialism and commandment mean. we limit our scope of godly fear to merely personifying God as an angry father striking down the sinner with lightning bolts. is this what God made fear for?

in his book World War Z, Max Brooks explores the societal, global and psychological implications of a fictitious zombie outbreak. early in the novel, an interviewee makes the following insight about the ability to sell a "miracle drug" during the initial signs of the epidemic:

The only rule that ever made sense to me I learned from a history, not an economics, professor at Wharton. "Fear," he used to say, "fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe." That blew me away. "Turn on the TV," he'd say. "What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products." ...Fear of aging, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of failure. Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells.

indeed, fear is primal. what motive but fear does the first man attest to his act of shame? "...'I heard the sound of you in the garden, and i was afraid...'" (Gen. 3:10). certainly this is quite the literal sample of a fear of God. fear is a driving motivation and factor in decision-making. why would we be equipped with such an emotion? doesn't a spirit of timidity cripple our faith (II Tim. 1:7)? i would assert there is no doubt that a Christian--and therefore every human--needs fear to appreciate a dimension of our relationship with our Creator.

following a cursory exploration of Strong's concordance, the word "fear" is often linked to two ancient words and derivations thereof: the Hebrew "yare" and the Greek "phobos" (disclaimer: i don't claim to be a scholar in semantics, languages, translation studies, etc.--just a guy trying to better understand his faith). these words have forms that are often associated with terror, fear, being fearful, fright--you get it.

however, when used in certain contexts, these words take on a higher level of meaning. it's not just a fight-or-flight response, but a longstanding awe and reverence for the source of fear. the base-level terror is what we read of in Matthew 10:28 and Luke 12:5 where Jesus teaches us fear God's power rather than men. However, we see the elevated sense of reverent fear when the Israelites are commanded to fear God: "It is the Lord your God you shall fear (revere)" (Deut. 6:13). It's also that sense of reverent fear that the unbeliever is rebuked by the psalmist: "there is no fear (reverence/respect) of God before his eyes" (Ps. 36:1). this reverence is required to fully acknowledge God for who he is.

in the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer sums up two alternative displays of fear in nature in laymen's terms:

'I read something in National Geographic about how, when an animal thinks it’s going to die, it gets panicky and starts to act crazy. But when it knows it’s going to die, it gets very, very calm' (emphasis mine).

 i believe Foer captures the elusive difference between a simple terror of something and a submissive, yielding respect of that something. to fear something is to give the source of our fear power (boggarts, anyone?). fear recognizes control and a lack of understanding. i freak out around spiders because i don't know the nature of spiders and i don't spend a lot of time around them or studying them. similarly, i'm afraid of heights because it is an uncommon occurrence for me to be high up and i recognize my helplessness over the circumstances should gravity pull me down.

applying this to my adolescent, heaven-fearing self: thinking about my soul's condition after death and the temporal concerns of how time will be spent resulted in my panic. i rebelled, in typical fight-or-flight fashion, against something that i couldn't understand (this is why i say i failed at my first attempt to fully fear God). knowing about my soul's condition and God's grace and the hope of heaven, however, yields peace, calmness, stillness.

we must fear God, in the full sense of that word, to be faithful to God. this is why Paul encourages Christians to work out our faith "with fear and trembling" (Phil. 2:12, 1 Corin. 2:3). but it's not the babe in Christ's initial understanding of fear (terror) that yields sanctification; this surface-level fear is a mere hearing and gut-reacting to God's wrath, judgement day, our own imperfect condition, God's power, etc. only when we marinate our fear into its full form do we allow ourselves to be paralyzed in perfect submission to God's authority and might, recognizing His control. He is the only thing truly worthy of our purified fear.

circling around to I John 4:18, then: the more we lose ourselves in God's perfect love, the more our terror-fear and fear of punishment is cast out, leaving room for a reverent-fear and respect: God is holy, perfect. i am imperfect. God has done something about it, and that something is Jesus. it is in the wake of such fear-deserving love and power that i must work out my faith and respond to God's calling to a higher standard of living.

i would argue that our world needs more Christians who truly fear the Lord (and i place myself at the front of this line). i am much too comfortable, too fearless, with modern conveniences and standards of living in this world, so much so that i often lose myself to become part of this world--i fear the things the world fears. Trials and tribulations, being ostracized or not being "normal." may we take the time to acknowledge our fear of God, attributing to him the sole source of worthy fear, and may we let ourselves fall trembling face down before His throne in reverent submission. may this keep us in humble service to Him. may our fear mature into the daily awe that guides in Jesus's footsteps in our lives. and may we more fully experience God's blessings in this life because of it.

Made to Suffer

"it's the sticks and stones that wear us down
that often save our lives."
-mutemath, break the same

i've been pondering about the nature of suffering, recently.

not that i've been in some earth-shattering season of my life, but rather i have been musing on the inspiration and application of things i've seen and learned from books i've recently read (the road, mccarthy; desiring God, piper), tv shows i watch (breaking bad, walking dead, lost) and movies i've recently seen (life of pi, the intouchables, the grey).

all these things started lining up as i've been teaching a class on sunday morning about refuting modern atheism. i wondered and i asked myself, "what's the biggest reason folks turn away from God, His full and unadulterated Word and His Son?"

surely there are several answers worth exploring. but its emotional weight seems to make the suffering we see in our world as good a candidate as any for the denial of God.

in all the media i listed in the first paragraph, we see suffering: some are fictitious, such as a zombie apocalypse, but others--like a plane crash in a frozen wilderness or a husband being dragged into the drug trade to support his family--those seem very real. in both real and imaginary cases, we can see their struggle. we taste their tears. we relate with their burning anger or sense of hopelessness.

we can relate, because we see that pain in our own world. why the holocaust? why 9/11? why school shootings?

and because we see that pain in our own lives. why this test result? why this broken relationship? why this stupid decision that now impacts the rest of my worldly life?

and so many a person sees all this and says, "if God is all powerful, if God is everywhere and can do anything, why would He do these things?"

it's important to stop right there and make clear: God is not a supernal, angst-ridden preteen with a looking glass burning up his trapped ants for amusement. we are precious in God's sight. rather, God allows calamity and unfortunate occurrences befall us. just look at job: he suffers a lot, but it's not at the hand of God (though it may seem to him like that's the case).

"'...but stretch out your [God's] hand and touch all that he [job] has, and he will curse you to your face.' and the Lord [in reply] said to satan, 'behold, all that he has is in your hand. only against him do not stretch out your hand.' so satan went out from the presence of the Lord" (Job 1:11-12). even though satan request it be God's hand that tests job with trials, satan is the tempter--the deliverer of hardships--in job's case. and God sets the limits of how far we can be pressed (1 Corinthians 10:13).

so that leaves us with a slightly different quandary. to steal language from john piper, "why has God ordained that evil be?" why does God allow us to suffer as His children?

doesn't He love us?

again, another tangent that i think relates: our culture has warped the definition of love. to love something in contemporary america means to tolerate the way things are, to accept and embrace what is without changing it. to not ruffle feathers or try to change the way people live, even if we believe it's wrong.

the Bible teaches that true love stands in direct contrast to this worldly way of love. true love loves enough to discipline, to cause subjective pain to better in the end. God sees the whole mosaic of redemptive history (thanks again to piper for his wording), so His love is full and complete--not temporal like ours.

example: parents love their children, but you better believe discipline sets them straight when they're exploring the limits and bounds of their world. this is done out of a love motivation; it's how kids learn and become knowledgeable of goodness and the best way to live (Hebrews 12:11). so it is with God's children: even if "bad" things happen to us, it doesn't mean God loves us any less; He is, after all, the perfect being of love (1 John 4:8).

now, rounding about to my main thought: just as God allows the pain of discipline to mold His children to look more holy and righteous day by day, so he permits struggle and heartache and natural disaster to occur. we only see the close up instant and say, "what pointless suffering. what a pity. what a shame." but God allows these things to happen, and ignites opportunities for the gospel, His love and His will to go forth into the darkness of our world.

while i never may have to struggle for survival out in the elements, or while i may never be on death row for my faith, i just as very well could be in those or similar scenarios. if that's the case, then my soul is better off for it. because i would be learning how to trust and rely on God. i'm much too comfortable in this life i've been blessed with, and i learn to rely on myself instead of Him.

so in faith facing my sufferings, whether relatively small or big, are all to the glory of God.

because, in fact, we are guaranteed to suffer (John 16:33; 2 Timothy 3:12).

in fact, we should rejoice at the chance to have our souls bent and stretched to give us God's blessings of endurance, character and hope--a full and complete soul that lacks nothing (Romans 5:3-5; James 1:2-4).

in fact, our suffering is temporary compared to the eternal hope of forever being with God (1 Peter 5:10; Romans 8:18).

in fact, a true, Bible-believing Christ follower's suffering is precious in God's sight and He will not leave them to face suffering alone (1 Peter 4:12-19; Isaiah 43:2).

whether you suffer now, in 30 years or somewhere in between, take heart knowing that God does not allow purposeless suffering. may this peace of God's grace and justice protect us now and down through life.

relationships ≅ Relationship

i recently sat in a room at the uc medical center in cincinnati drafting an outline for what would soon be this blog. my fiancee huddled over a book to my right, and my grandmother laid a few feet in front of me on a hospital bed. her head was mostly shaven, sporting a line of staples from the surgery and procedures following a sudden ruptured brain aneurism. her eyes, half opened while half closed, don't seem to stare at anything in particular.

i steal glances at her every few moments in between my scribbles. here and there i'll even chance a few steps over to her side, ask her if she wants a sip of sierra mist. she's doing incredible, given the state she was in just a little over a week ago. i remember holding her hand for the first time in that hospital bed, thinking, "i can't remember the last time i've felt her hand for so long."

why do we wait to hold hands with family members until something tragic, heavy or disturbing happens in our lives?

it's in the midst of her painfully slow but steady recovery, in the aura of that hospital room (which she's recently vacated for the preferential rehab facilities), where i finally collect my thoughts on her. and my mother. my fiancee. every person i share my life with.

the fact i have started upon is this: our relationships are not merely biological happenstance or survival code. it is no accident God presents Himself to us as a Father in scripture; the title is nothing but true. it's in His infinite wisdom that God has given us our different relationships (especially family, which i'm delving into here) so that we might understand our multi-faceted relationship with Him. 

it's not just the parental role--i'm coming to realize that every meaningful connection i share with another life points me back to understanding how God and i feel toward and interact with one another. each role--parent/child, grandparent/grandchild, siblings, spouse, and more--has congruency with the tie that binds us to our heavenly Father. 

and i can't imagine that this is any coincidence. 

the easiest place to start is the one we see and hear and understand most readily: parents and children. surely there are plenty of cliched anecdotes, allegories and the like of our God as the perfect parent and we who follow Him are His children. this relational description often comes about from the unconditional love He feels for us. but i want to pull up specific interactions here--day to day events that should remind us of the Relationship we have.

for instance: the idea of blessings. Jesus spells out how we understand God by how parents and children understand one another when he teaches, "what father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? if you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" (Luke 11:11-13).

instinctually, parents know how to treat their kids (though some in the world skew the execution of the parental instinct, yea, what it means to even be a parent). parents have the best interest of their children at heart. they know what their children need, require, desire. they are sure to provide--perhaps not in the exact manner or timing their child thinks, but they always come through.

we know God gives us the perfect gift, everything we need: Himself in the form of the Holy Spirit. and whether we've experienced one, both, or warped versions of either of these relational roles (parent or child, that is), we can understand that, like eager children, we ought to look for God as our role model and guide in this life.

it becomes clear with insight into today's youth trends and popular culture that raising children has become an end to check off a list, not a means for preparing them for life and pouring truth into them. it can be hard to see a connection to our Relationship through this sludge of "best friend mommies" and aloof, disengaged dads. and many of us, myself included, don't revel in any form of conflict--discipline not excluded. no wonder a firm hand has become uncool.

but God wants growth. and that doesn't always mean comfort.

we don't have an easy walk in this life, and it's a trial to obey God--just flipping through the old testament and the book of acts reveals as much. it's in these moments of confusion, doubt and anguish that we must ask ourselves in the words of Paul: "have [we] forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons [and daughters]?" (Hebrews 12:5). while sin may seem the easier (or at times even the "right") way of living, God directs our steps as a stern yet loving parent:

it is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? if you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? for they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness. for the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those have been trained by it. (Hebrews 12:7-11)

hear that: we're disciplined for good, to share in God's glory and fulfill our purpose as creators that exude God's glory.

yet just like little kids who think our parents aren't letting us have fun, we shake our fists and yell at the sky, stomping our feet and asking, "why can't it be easier?" "where's the fun in this life?" "why make sin so fun if it's so bad?" instead of a clear answer, we are given: "because I'm your father/mother, that's why." we may not fully understand the rationale of our own discipline until we ourselves discipline our child and see through a parent's eyes--just as we might understand God's mysterious workings in our lives once we stand in His presence, or at least read His words to us.

until then, He gives us an example of how to understand our lot in life with the commandment, "children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 'honor your father and mother...that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land'" (Ephesians 6:1-3).

obeying our parents, then, is like obeying God. we honor God when we obey and submit, just as we obey earthly parents. the truth--that God loves us unashamedly and operates above our limited scope of reality and circumstances--often eludes us. despite this, He always does what's best (He's God, after all): "whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him" (Proverbs 13:24).

of course, there comes a time to leave father and mother, and cleave to a new family (Genesis 2:24).  in this relationship, we also find congruency with our bond in the Lord.

we don't have to stretch our minds too far to see the traits that relate our earthly marriages to our heavenly Father: dedication, sacrifice, life-long commitment, union, etc. but the allegorical links between a marriage on earth and our relationship with God reach further than that. much further.

i look at scripture and see, with bated breath, that marriage is a way of God for expressing to us the backs and forths He experiences in our Relationship with Him.

i offer here two points, seemingly disconnected in the old and new testaments, but when compared together reveal a heart-wrenching, beautiful truth.

we see that God must make a perfect helpmate for Adam by taking part of Adam to create Eve. it just so happens that his rib is the specimen of choice (Genesis 2:21-22). how poetically just is this next scene with that context? in the gospel of John: "but when they came to Jesus [on the cross] and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. but one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water. he who saw it has borne witness...that you also may believe" (19:33-35).

don't miss the anatomical specificity here: from the side of the man who brought sin into the world, God  yielded his perfect wife; just as from the side of the man who killed sin and death, God yielded His own perfect wife--the bride--the church.

as husband and wife might embrace and lay affectionate ownership over one another in marriage, John the baptist expresses similar understandings of Jesus' mission of retrieving us: "the one who has the bride is the bridegroom" (John 3:29). Paul sheds further light on this relational parallelism in his letter to the ephesians:

wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. for the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. now was the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her...for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church" (Eph. 5:22-26, 29)

 so: Christ's affection for us is like a husband's affection for his wife. but there is so much more to understand  that's wrapped in the heavenly marriage of Christ and his followers. suffice to say, we can understand our relationship with God and the connection we have with him through Jesus by looking at our own marriages and how they ought to work.

of course, there's an ugly side to this coin, too.

just as drawing the connections between faithful marriage unveils profound implications for our relationship with God, so does the connection between unfaithful adultery and our neglect of this relationship with the Father uncover equally earthmoving yet disquieting truths.

i can't find a better book in God's word to illustrate the heartbreak and aching God experiences at our denial of His hand than when He asks one of his own prophets to act the scenario out in an earthly marriage: Hosea marries Gomar, a prostitute, and sees just how crazy God can get with unfaithful followers. going around worshiping sports, grades, sex, Baal or money is like whoring ourselves out when we ought to be faithful to God.

how far the world has fallen, and how desperately God yearns to draw us all back: "and I will betroth you to Me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. and you shall know the Lord" (Hosea 2:19-20).

i could go on, but then when would i speak of siblings? how the awkward, disgruntled skirmishes of young brothers and sisters helps us grow up (Prov. 27:17), how members of a family are like members of a body, unique and loved and cherished equally but for different reasons and qualities (1 Corinthians 12:14-27)? of course, loving our brother helps us understand how to love God (1 John 4:20-21), and Christ himself is our brother in faith, who calls His followers His siblings (Matt. 12:46-50), who experienced the same trials and temptations of the flesh as we do (Hebrews 2:14-18). just as siblings stick together through thick and thin, so Christ became like us as a peer, a brother, to empathize and save.

by no means exhaustive, these musings of mine have just begun to awaken in me the awe and wonder of how God arranges the world around us. even in the seemingly commonplace cultural norms of family ties do we see traces of His fingerprints, all for our benefit and drawing us to his mercy seat. new understandings, conflicts, milestones and experiences in our earthly lives allow us to gain deeper communion with God as we adopt new roles and relationships throughout life.

~

christmas day, 2012. Leigh and i step into a new hospital room; it welcomes us more than the last one we were in, opening up new space and a greater sense of warm privacy. and there she is--sharp as a tack, though not completely healed, my grandmother turns to meet us, and her eyes are alight.

i have no doubt she would sing over me, for all the pride and joy (Zephaniah 3:17) that her limited movements still express at the arrival of her grandchild and grandchild-in-law-to-be. later on, her phone calls from the rehab facility will make my heart swell with pride in sharing heritage (Romans 8:12-17) with such a strong, kind--and feisty, of course--soul. hers was an exemplar faith to mine in my early years (Psalm 145:4), and she continues to inspire me (II Timothy 1:5; Titus 2:1-3) even now, as i eagerly anticipate seeing her at home again.

thank God for family.

amen.