Shock and Awe
How blessed is the man who fears always Proverbs 28:14
Fears – This verse just doesn’t make sense, unless you know that the Hebrew word is pachad. Otherwise, we would have to figure out why a man who is always fearing is considered blessed. In our world, someone who is constantly in fear can hardly be considered lucky. But once we realize that the word for fear should really be translated “dread,” we are suddenly connected to a very old theme – the dread of Isaac (Genesis 31:42) – a description of the God of awe and power. While the verb is often used to describe the sheer panic and mortifying dread that comes over the wicked when they are faced with judgment, in this case we have a positive application. Then we see that great blessing falls on the man who truly understands his place before a sovereign and holy God.
It seems to me that contemporary Christianity needs a new injection of pachad. We simply don’t realize how terrifyingly powerful God is. We water down His blinding holiness. We forget that in ancient days, men fell prostrate before Him in fear of their lives. The days of Jonathan Edwards need some revival. We are sinners in the hands of an angry God, and were it not for the sacrifice of Jesus, we would be crying woes and laments before His throne. To truly fear God is a most blessed thing. It evaporates pride in a heartbeat. It accentuates dependence in a flash. And it forces me to admit that all is grace, grace, grace. Not a single iota of credit belongs to me.
So much of today’s contemporary miss-proclamation of the nature of God paints Him as a kindly grandfather or a pocket genie. What a tragedy! All that does is allow us to imagine that we have rights, that we earn blessings or that we can negotiate rewards. We need a very strong dose of holy reality. God is so frighteningly other than what we are that the entire nation of Israel fell into sheer panic as He descended on Mount Sinai. But we act as though He must be invited to attend our services. We ignore His demands on our social, political and family obligations. In fact, we think that God endorses the separation of the church and the state, as though His world is confined to the realm of the spiritual. We are anesthetized by self-glorification to the fact that He called everything into existence by His spoken word. We need a reality check. God holds existence in His hand, and with the twitch of a finger, we are history. Dread hardly captures the emotion of our true state.
Perhaps now you will tremble and weep when you see that God defines Himself first as compassionate (Exodus 34:6). If He were not so, where would we be?
“The fear of the Lord,” is a constant theme of the Bible. Too bad we are so blind to its true meaning. God is not your buddy, your goodtime helper or your personal concierge. He is GOD. Do you treat Him in the way that all the cosmos demands?
