Fear of the Lord

   What do you think when you hear the phrase, “fear of the Lord?” If you’re anything like me, and for your sake I hope you’re not, fear of the Lord conjures up images of a hellfire spitting, thunderbolt hurling God who uses intimidation to command respect. In my mind, I couldn’t justify the jealous God of the Old Testament and the all-loving God of the New Testament. I read the exploits of Joshua and the campaigns of David with a bad taste in my mouth, hastily skimming over what I believed to be an overzealous response to sinfulness. Sure, idolatry is bad, but is genocide really the best way to deal with a few golden cows?

    It was these hang-ups that caused me to go into week 7 of DTS with a kind of nervous anticipation. If there’s one thing DTS has taught me, it’s that God is nothing like I thought He was. His love is infinite and completely independent of my own actions. It’s a Sunday school topic, but one I’ve had an exceptionally difficult time grasping. The truth is, the world just doesn’t offer love like God’s and none of us, no matter how wonderful our relationships, have experienced love like that apart from Him. God’s love is made manifest in us, His willful, backsliding people, whom He loved so much He gave everything, even the violent death of His beloved son, to restore our relationship with Him. The basis of God’s love is relationship—He calls us into intimacy with Him through the work of the cross. God’s love is infinite and all-encompassing, but we can distance ourselves from God through our choices. When we choose to sin, we’re choosing to turn our backs on God.

    Now about that hellfire. The bible defines the fear of the Lord as hatred of sin. God hates sin because it affects you and me, destroying the very relationship He fought so hard to restore. You can’t experience intimacy with a righteous God without a ruthless, committed hatred of sin. Psalm 25:14 says, “the friendship of the Lord is for those who fear Him, and He makes known to them His covenant.” We should fear God because it’s the only right response to who He is. It’s living truth and reality—you can’t have a casual relationship with a holy God.

    Practically, the fear of the Lord looks like obedience. As we develop the fear of the Lord in our lives, we learn to hate sin. It’s easy to get comfortable with sin, to allow it to fester beneath the veneer of our Christian lives, but the reality of sin is death. Don’t get me wrong, there’s no such thing as a little sin—sin grows like cancer, destroying our relationship with God, others, and ourselves. God hates sin, not because He’s a legalist who enjoys saying no, but because sin kills us. God sacrificed everything to free us from sin—can you imagine how He must feel when we choose to embrace the very death He died to save us from?

    Fear of the Lord doesn’t mean being afraid of God. Fear of the Lord is having a deep reverence and respect for God based on His character. God’s character is amazing, and that’s not the Sunday school talking. To know God is to know a love that surpasses every fear and failure, an infinitely faithful God who’s been gently, patiently calling us to know Him even when we had our fingers stuffed in our ears. Knee-deep in our own muck, God’s love finds us, calling us to lay aside the death that clings to us like cobwebs and take the nail-pierced hand of the one who created us to know Him.
 
  In the reality of love like this, our only response is relationship. God offers us intimacy, but we can’t know a holy God when we’re living unholy lives. Sanctification isn’t about what obedience is going to cost us, how hard it’s going to be for us to align our lives with Christ’s, it’s remembering what it cost God to give us the ability to be holy. The only thing that can separate us from God is ourselves, our sinful choices which dull our love for Him until it ceases to exist. So I ask you, what’s dulling your love for God? What’s your closed door, the area of your life that you haven’t given God permission to enter? It could be something small, innocent perhaps, just a little habit that’s slowly, steadily killing you. Don’t let anything dull your love.

   The fear of the Lord is the hatred of sin. As God’s people, we must cultivate a ruthless, active hatred of sin. We need to learn to love God enough to obey Him. In it’s essence, the fear of the Lord is the call to trade death for life, destruction for wholeness, and separation for intimacy. So I ask you, do you love God enough to fear Him?