The Sweet Fear of the Lord Born of Love

The fear of God is rare nowadays. Teaching on it is scarce. And the living of it out is even more scarce. And, even where it is taught and where some try to live it out, perhaps it's often misunderstood.

The fear of God, whatever many might say of it, really does include the fear of God, and not just some sort of reverance or respect. There's a knee-knocking component to a true fear of the Lord. And given that it is the beginning of wisdom, and given that apart from it we cannot suppose ourselves to be participating in the faith once for all delivered to the saints, it behooves us to cultivate the fear of the Lord in our lives.

In order to cultivate the fear of God, one could do much worse than Buynan's Treatise on the Fear of God, from which I recently posted some instruction about where the fear of the Lord comes from. Today I want to focus on an important aspect of the fear of the Lord, with the help of Bunyan again, which I think some who focus on the fear of the Lord miss, but which is utterly essential for the fear to be healthy and biblical. And it is how the goodness, kindness, and love of God produce and shape that fear. Consider two points Bunyan makes in his treatise.

First, Bunyan says that this fear is a "son-like fear of God" that " flows from the distinguishing love of God to his elect" (56). That is, it is a filial fear born as each person is born into the world—that is to say, by the will of another. We didn't choose to be born into the world, nor do we choose to be born again unto a fear of the Lord. It is born of everlasting love (Jer. 31:3). Flowing from God's distinguishing, selective love for his own, the fear of God is placed within his children as a provision of the new covenant (Jer. 32:38-40). And so the covenant context of this fear, then, is divine love. It flows from God's fatherly particular love for his children. That love, therefore, must flavor the fear of the Lord as we seek to cultivate it. It is a sweet and pleasant fear.

Second, though there are many inducements for generating the fear of the Lord, there is one most potent. Buynan says it well, and I heartily agree with him, both because of the Bible's witness and because of experience. Referencing Ps. 130:3-4, he says:

This godly fear flows from a sense of the love and kindness of God to the soul. . . . Indeed nothing can lay a stronger obligation upon the heart to fear God, than sense of, or hope in mercy (Jer. 33:8-9). This begetteth true tenderness of heart, true godly softness of spirit; this truly endeareth the affections to God; and in this true tenderness, softness, and endearedness of affection to God, lieth the very essence of this fear of the Lord . . . (58).

Amen, Bunyan. This fear is my portion. It is a sweet and lovely and pleasant fear. And to it I want to submit sweetly all my days.

Trigger Alert: Hate Speech

Christianitity is indeed a religion of love. And without love, we are nothing (1 Cor. 13:2). If we do not love, we do not know God, for God is love (1 John 4:8). That's his nature. And so those born of God love even as he loves (1 John 4:7). 

But Christianity is also a religion that requires the follower of Christ to hate. That's right. Love hates. Love for God and love for people necessitate hating certain things. The Christian must hate—and, specifically, hate what God hates, and hate it as God hates it. For example, see Rom. 12:9; Heb. 1:9; Jude 23; Rev. 2:6; Ps. 97:10; Prov. 6:16-19. 

But be prepared if you hate what God hates and how God hates, and you express that hatred. Even many (and I mean many) professing Christians will label you as unkind, harsh, uncharitable. If you say you hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans, that's hate speech, man. And you'll hear it, yes, even from those within the visible church. It's your lot in postmodern America where a certain sort of tolerance reigns supreme. And this postmodern notion of tolerance has many (and again I mean many) professing Christian churches by the throat. 

So if you hate what God hates and how God hates, and you express that hatred, be prepared to have that expressed hatred labeled hate speech, harsh, unkind, unloving, critical, judgmental, uncharitable. 

However, if you are a Bible-believing and Bible-driven Christian, that is to say, if you follow Christ, there will be some things you simply find intolerable. And you'll rightly abhor those things. And though that ought to be praised as godliness, don't hold your breath for that praise. Instead, brace yourself in faith and love for all manner of accusations of unChristlikeness. (Precious few minding Jesus' holy hatred of what God hates.)

Christianity is a relgion of affirmations and denials. Always has been. If everything is affirmed, then the faith once for all delivered to the saints is effectively denied. Let me say it again. If we affirm everything, then we deny the faith. There must be some doctrines and practices that we deny, or we shall have nothing at all to affirm and confess.

So a concluding biblical exhortation and question. First, the exhortation: "Love without hypocrisy. Hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good" (Rom. 12:9). And, second, in addition to the good liturgical question—what do you believe?—it seems salutary and biblical also to ask: Christian, what do you hate?

The Wrath of God as an Expression of the Love of God

So far from God's wrath being in opposition to God's love, the wrath of God is actually an expression of his love. Michael Reeves explains:

His love is not mild-mannered and limp; it is livid, potent and committed. And therein lies our hope: through his wrath the living God shows that he is truly loving, and through his wrath he will destroy all devilry that we might enjoy him in a purified world, the home of righteousness. 

 To illustrate, Reeves points us to the personal wrestlings of Croation theologian Miroslav Volf, who pens these powerful words:

I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn't God love? Shouldn't divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That's exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God's wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. 

Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century where 800,00 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators' basic goodness? Wasn't God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God's wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn't wrathful at the sight of the world's evil. God isn't wrathful in spite of being loving. God is wrathful because God is love.

—Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2012), 119-120.

Loving People in God

St. Augustin's God-besotted God-centeredness in the Confessions is well known. Reading through the Confessions, I'm struck also by how God-centered is Augustin's thinking about love for people. The following quotations from book 4 will give you a good feel for this (italics mine).

In a section discussing friendship, Augustin confesses to God:

Blessed are those who love you, O God, and love their friends in you and their enemies for your sake. They alone will never lose those who are dear to them, for they love them in one who is never lost, in God, our God who made heaven and earth and fills them with his presence, because by filling them he made them (79–80).

Then in a portion discussing delighting in things of this world, Augustin addresses those who would delight, among other things, in souls:

If your delight is in souls, love them in God, because they too are frail and stand firm only when they cling to him. If they don't, they go their own way and are lost. Love them, then, in him and draw as many with you to him as you can. Tell them "He is the one we should love. He made the world and he stays close to it" (82).

Oh for more Augustinian God-besotted God-centered love for people!

—Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961).

God's Father-Love in the School of Prayer

A good lesson in the school of prayer:

The knowledge of God's Father-love is the first and simplest, but also the last and highest lesson in the school of prayer. Prayer begins in a personal relationship with the living God as well as a personal, conscious fellowship of love with Him. In the knowledge of God's Fatherliness revealed by the Holy Spirit, the power of prayer will root and grow. The life of prayer has its joy in the infinite tenderness, care, and patience of an infinite Father who is read to hear and help.

—Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer (Springdale: Whitaker House, 1981), 31.

Who Handed Jesus Over to Die?

"Who delivered up Jesus to die? Not Judas, for money; not Pilate, for fear; not the Jews, for envy—but the Father, for love!" 

—Octavious Winslow, No Condemnation in Christ Jesus (London, 1857), 358. 

Heaven on Earth: Divine Love

Speaking of trinitarian love toward us—the fountain of divine love in the Father's sending of the Son, the purchase of the benefits of the Father's love, and the application of that love by the Spirit—John Owen speaks sanity to worldly madness: "What we have of heaven in this world lies herein." Oh for more of that sort of heaven on earth! For heaven is a world of trinitarian love.

Love (III)

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
          Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
          From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
          If I lacked anything.

"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here":
          Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
          I cannot look on thee."

"Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
          Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
          "My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
          So I did sit and eat.

—George Herbert (1593-1633)

The Matter of Communion with God

Chapter 3 of part 1 in On Communion with God is, all of it, marvelous stuff.  It makes my heart sing and dance, thrills my soul with pleasure and refreshment, renews my mind with the triune love of God.  Along with chapter 4, it treats of the matter of communion with God.  The whole of it is worth reading and meditating upon at length, again and again.  And I will do this.  I do not by any means intend here to reproduce all that is valuable, but I will set forth some of the sweetness to point to the pot of honey.

Communion with the Father consists in love.  The saints do peculiarly and eminently have communion with God the Father in love—and this love is free, undeserved, eternal.  This is, says Owen, the great discovery of the Gospel.  Indeed it is.  To know God not as our angry judge but as a loving heavenly Father is the best news in all the world.  Owen cites "God is love" (1 Jn. 4:8) and shows that clearly the love of the Father is in view in the context.  He then shows how Jesus purchases and mediates this love and the Holy Spirit sheds it abroad in believers' hearts.

The Requirements of Believers for Complete Communion with the Father in Love.  Now the first bit was important and antecedant to this second bit, but this second bit is important for modern American Christians to consider and practice.  There are two requirements for complete communion with the Father in love according to Owen:  First, that we recieve the Father's love; and second, that we make "suitable returns" unto the Father. 

"Communion consists in giving and receiving."  And we do not hold communion with the Father until we receive his love.  How then is this love received?  Answer: by faith in the Son crucified, risen, exalted.  It is through Christ alone that we have access to the enjoyment of the Father's love (e.g., Jn. 14:6; Eph. 2:18; 1 Pet. 1:21).  "When by and through Christ we have an access unto the Father, we then behold his glory also, and see his love that he peculiarly bears unto us, and act faith thereon."  So we may not receive the light of God's love except by the beams of the Son; by the beams of the Son we see the sun of the Father's love, which is the Fountain of all light. 

So "Jesus Christ, in respect of the love of the Father, is but the beam, the stream; wherein though actually all our light, our refreshment lies, yet by him we are led to the fountain, the sun of eternal love itself.  Would beleivers exercise themselves herein, they would find it a matter of no small spiritual improvement in their walking with God."

Owen then goes on to describe the "suitable returns" that believers make in love to God.  He rounds off chapter 3 by describing wherein our love and God's love are similar and different.  The riches in this chapter are worth mining and offering up to God in love, delight, satisfaction, obedience, worship.  For God the three-in-one and one-in-three is infinitely worthy of our deepest longings, most intense affections, highest delightings, absolute obedience, and consummate trust.  All praise and worship and love and honor and glory be to him who lives and reigns forever—one God, Father, Son, and Spirit—world without end.  Amen!