Not All Fear Is the Same

Today, we live more safely than we've ever done before. From seatbelts and airbags in our cars, to the removal of lead paint and asbestos from our homes, our safety is guaranteed more than our shorter lived ancestors could have imagined. Quite simply, our culture has lost God as the proper object of fear.

As Michael Reeves just shared, today's society lives in a paradox. Despite living in the safest and most advanced time in recorded history, we have never been more fearful and anxious. This week on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. Reeves is helping us see that the answer to conquering our lesser fears is to rightly and biblically fear God. Today, we begin a brand new series that Ligonier Ministries just released titled, The Fear of the Lord. Listen today as Dr. Reeves encourages us as he reminds us that the fear of God is the one positive, wonderful fear that deals with all our anxieties.

Here's Dr. Reeves. Welcome, everyone, to this series on the topic of the fear of God. Now, fear is a complicated emotion.

As children, we love to leap out on our friends and shout boo. And yet, at the same time, we were scared of the dark, scared of the monsters under the bed. We were both fascinated and repelled by our fears.

And not much changes when we grow up, even as adults. Adults love scary movies, thrills that bring them face to face with their darkest fears. So there are thrills, but also we agonize over all the dreadful things that could happen to us. We fear losing our lives. We fear losing our loved ones, losing our health. We fear that we might fail. We fear that we might be rejected. Fear is probably the strongest human emotion, and yet it is one that baffles us.

And when it comes to the Bible, the picture seems equally confusing. Is fear a good thing or a bad thing? For many times in Scripture, clearly fear is a bad thing from which Christ has come to rescue us. So the Apostle John writes in 1 John 4.18, 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.

Or take Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist. He prophesied that Jesus' salvation would mean that we being delivered from the hands of our enemies might serve God without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. Indeed, the most frequent scriptural command is do not be afraid. And yet, again and again in Scripture, we are called to fear.

Even more strangely to our ears, we're called to fear God. And the verse that comes to mind quickest here is probably Proverbs 9 verse 10. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

But while that's the best known, it's far from being alone. At the start of the book of Proverbs, we read the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. That's Proverbs 1 verse 7. David prays in Psalm 86, Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth.

Unite my heart to fear your name. Isaiah tells us that the fear of the Lord is his treasure. Job's faithfulness is summed up when he's described as being a blameless and upright man who fears God. And it is not simply that that was an Old Testament state of affairs that the New Testament rises above. In the Magnificat in Luke 1, Mary says that his mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.

Jesus in Luke 18 describes the unrighteous judge as one who neither feared God nor respected man. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 7, Let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God. In fact, the fear of God is so important a biblical theme that Professor John Murray wrote simply, The fear of God is the soul of godliness. The 17th century Puritan John Owen likewise argued, he said, The fear of the Lord means the whole worship of God, all the obedience which we owe unto him.

Now, all of that could leave us rather confused. On the one hand, we're told that Christ frees us from fear. On the other, we're told that we ought to fear and fear God no less. And it can leave us wishing that the fear of God was not so prominent an idea in scripture.

Partly because we have enough fears without adding more, thank you very much. And fearing God just feels so negative today. It doesn't seem to square with the God of love and grace that we meet in the gospel. Why would any God worth loving want to be feared? And it's made worse by the impression that fear and love are two different languages preferred by two different Christian camps, perhaps two different theologies. We can feel that there are those who seem to speak of love and grace and who never speak of fearing God. And there are others who seem angered by that and want to emphasize how afraid of God we must be. As if the fear of God is like cold water on the Christians' love for God. Leaving us with the impression that the fear of God must be the gloomy theological equivalent of eating up your greens.

You know, something the theological health nuts will binge on while the rest of us guzzle tastier but higher calorie fare. And my aim now is to cut through the confusion. I want you to rejoice in the paradox that the gospel both frees us from fear and gives us fear. It frees us from our crippling fears, we will see, giving us instead a most delightful fear. And I want to show that for Christians, the fear of God really does not mean being afraid of God. Indeed, what we'll see through this series is that scripture has many hefty surprises in store for us as it describes the fear of God.

Let me take you to one now, just as a little sample. In Isaiah chapter 11, we're given a beautiful description of the Messiah filled with the Spirit. And here's how Isaiah 11 starts the first three verses.

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. Now, those last two statements should make us question what this fear of the Lord is. Here we see the fear of the Lord is not something the Messiah wishes to be without. He has the fear of the Lord and he's not reluctant about it. It's not that he loves God and has joy in God, but finds unfortunately that to fulfill all righteousness, he knows he also must fear God.

Quite the opposite. His delight is in the fear of the Lord. And it forces us to ask, what is this fear that it could be Christ's very delight? But before we dive into the good news that the Bible has about our fears and the fear of God, I want to pause for a moment to notice just how anxious our culture has become.

For seeing where our society has got to can help us to understand why we have a problem with fear and why the fear of God is just the tonic that we need today. For these days, it seems everyone is talking about a culture of fear. From Twitter to television, we fret about extreme weather, political turmoil, global terrorism. And in our digitalized world, the speed at which information is transferred and which news is disseminated means we are flooded with more causes of worry than ever before. Fears that once we would never have shared or heard of are now crossing the world in seconds and are pooled. And in private, our lives are filled with still more sources of anxiety. Take our diet, for instance.

If you choose the full vat version, you're heading for a heart attack. And yet we constantly seem to hear that the low-calorie alternative is actually carcinogenic or harmful in some other way. And so a low-grade fear starts with breakfast. Or think of the paranoia surrounding parenting today. The valid but usually overblown fear of the kidnapper lurking online or outside every school has fueled the rise of helicopter parenting. And children more and more fenced in to keep them safe.

And we shouldn't single out the pejoratively named generation snowflake as a whole, as a whole. We are an increasingly anxious and uncertain culture. Anyone in management knows the staggering proliferation of red tape around health and safety. And yet it hasn't made us feel safer. If anything, we triple check our locks even more obsessively. The certain safety that we long for eludes us. Leaving us feeling vulnerable like victims at the slim mercy of everyone and everything else. And therein is an extraordinary paradox for today we live more safely than we've ever done before. From seat belts and airbags in our cars to the removal of lead paint and asbestos from our homes. Our safety is guaranteed more than our shorter lived ancestors could have imagined.

We have antibiotics to protect us from infections that in other centuries would have been all too easily fatal. Though we have more safety than almost any society in history. Safety has become the holy grail of our culture.

Unlike the holy grail, it's something we can never quite reach. Protected like never before. Our culture is skittish and panicky like never before. Now, how, how can this be?

Where does this paradox come from? Quite simply, our culture has lost God as the proper object of fear. For the fear of God, I hope to show, was a happy healthy fear that controlled our other fears.

It reigned in anxiety. And with our society today having lost God as the proper object of a healthy fear, our culture is necessarily becoming ever more neurotic and anxious. Without a kind father's providential care for us, we are left uncertain about the shifting sands of morality and reality. In ousting God from our culture, other concerns from personal health to the safety of the planet, these concerns have assumed a divine ultimacy in our minds. Good things often, even good things, have become cruel and pitiless idols.

And thus we feel helplessly fragile, and society fills with anxieties. Now, the suggestion that the loss of the fear of God is the root cause of our culture's anxiety is a real blow to atheism, because atheism promised exactly the opposite. Atheism sold the idea that if you liberate people from belief in God, you'll liberate them from fear. So this is how Bertrand Russell argued the case nearly a century ago in 1927 in his famous address, Why I am not a Christian.

Let me read you a paragraph from Russell's Why I am not a Christian. He said, religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown, and partly the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing, fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it's no wonder if cruelty in religion has gone hand in hand.

It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world, we can now begin a little to understand things and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it. Now, there is there in what Russell said a tragic misunderstanding of what it means for the Christian to fear God.

But my primary reaction is this. I struggle not to laugh at how wildly inaccurate his prophecy made nearly a century ago has turned out to be, because nearly a century after he said these words, it should be clear to even the most vision impaired mole that throwing off the fear of God has not made our society happier and less fretful, quite the opposite. Instead, what does our culture do with all our anxiety?

Well, given its essentially secular self-identity, it will not turn to God. So the only solution must be for us to sort it out ourselves. And thus, Western society has medicalized fear. Fear has become an elusive disease to be medicated. And let me be clear here, I don't mean to imply that the use of drugs to curb anxiety is wrong.

I don't claim that. Only that there are palliative, sometimes an important one, but they are not an ultimate solution. And yet, that attempt to eradicate fear as we might eradicate a disease has effectively made comfort, complete absence of fear, a health category or even a moral category. Where discomfort was once considered quite normal and quite proper for certain situations, it is now deemed an essentially unhealthy thing. And it means that while our culture is awash with anxiety, fear has come to be seen as a wholly negative thing, and Christians have been swept along. They've joined in society's negative assessment of fear. So small wonder then that we shy away from talking about the fear of God because fear we see as a negative thing.

Despite its prominence in Scripture, it's understandable, but it's tragic. It was the loss of the fear of God that ushered in our age of anxiety, and it is the fear of God we will see that is the very antidote to our fretfulness. For the fact is not all fear is the same. Not all fear is unhealthy or unpleasant.

We must distinguish between different sorts of fear, between wrong fear and right fear. And that is what we're going to do next as we look at how Scripture details some quite different types of fear, some negative, some positive. And then, having seen that, we can rejoice in the fact that the fear of God is not like the other fears that torment us. Then we can appreciate how it is a fear that causes delight to Christ. It is a fear that causes delight to His people. The fear of God is the one positive, wonderful fear that deals with our anxieties. Michael Reeves' description of Western society is so accurate. We see that fear all around us, and we especially hear it in the media.

And as Christians, we know the only antidote. Yesterday, we featured a special interview with Dr. Reeves that we recorded at this year's national conference. If you missed that, I encourage you to search for Renewing Remind wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can go back and hear that interview, as well as past episodes. Today's message is from a series we've never featured on Renewing Remind before, The Fear of the Lord. And you can own the complete eight-part series along with the digital study guide when you give a donation of any amount at renewingremind.org. This series is a helpful study for any Christian. But consider how beneficial this series could be for teenage and college-aged Christians who have grown up in this age of anxiety. You can request your copy at renewingremind.org, or give us a call at 800 435 4343. When you consider the fear of the Lord, do you imagine a dreadful fear of God? Next time, Michael Reeves exposes a lie from the enemy, a wrong fear of God. So join us tomorrow here on Renewing Remind. .