A Dreadful Fear of God

When people become simply afraid of God, they'll never entrust themselves to him. They must turn elsewhere for their security. People with this sinful fear of God will not trust in Christ for their salvation.

They'll look elsewhere. There are many misunderstandings when it comes to the fear of God. If we believe the lie that we're to simply be afraid of him, we'll actually run from God. And as you'll hear today, just because people run from God doesn't necessarily mean that they're running away from religion. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind.

I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. A purely dreadful fear of God, that's not what Michael Reeves has been calling us to this week. Yet that is the kind of fear that many have of God. So today he'll unpack this lie from the enemy and demonstrate why it's a grave distortion.

Here's Dr. Reeves. We all know fear. When you experience fear, your body reacts. You feel the adrenaline as your heart races, your breathing accelerates, your muscles tense.

And sometimes that can be intensely fun. You think of the rush of the roller coaster or the big game. Sometimes it can be terrifying as panic grips you so utterly that you cannot think, but only shake, sweat and fret.

Now, underneath those bodily experiences are common thoughts. We fear when we encounter something we cannot control. We fear when we face the prospect of either losing something that we love or experiencing something bad. We even fear when we face the prospect of gaining something wonderful, when that thing seems too impossibly wonderful for us.

And drilling to the bottom of the matter, the Dutch theologian Vilhelmis Abracol explained fear issues forth from love. That is, we fear because we love. We love ourselves and so we fear bad things happening to us. We love our families, our friends, our things, and so fear losing them. But it's not only that we fear losing things we love. Strange to say we also fear precisely that which is lovely. You would expect us to turn away only from ugliness and from sights that revolt us. But in reality we also find we have to avert our gaze in the face of extreme beauty. For sheer loveliness is overwhelming. The bridegroom can dream of staring into his bride's eyes and yet find himself at times unable to hold her gaze because of her loveliness.

J.R.R. Tolkien once called this the fear of the beautiful. And he explained that the fear of the beautiful was the very reason why he loved the genre of fantasy. He said, I desired dragons with a profound desire.

Of course, I and my timid body didn't wish to have them in the neighborhood intruding into my relatively safe world in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir the dragon was richer and more beautiful at whatever cost of peril. Now, we don't instinctively recognize that we actually fear that which is rich and good and beautiful.

And yet, as the perilous world of dragons was fearfully attractive to Tolkien, so good things can be deliciously formidable. And that is why the fear of success is often stronger than the fear of failure. Failure and mediocrity can be comfortable, undemanding friends. Our frailty means that the prospect of success can be daunting.

And in the face of greatness, vitality, joy, we can just feel it's too much for us. Fear also has a tendency to create a groove in our minds. The more we fear something, the more we tend to be engrossed with it and can't let it go. And so whether we are fascinated or repelled by our fears, there are common traits to all our fears. They arise from what we love.

They excite the body, and they can fixate the mind. They have a common DNA, our fears. However, it is also important to recognize there are different sorts of fear.

And confusion on this point is quite deadly. So take, for example, how some Christians, they see the lack of reverence and awe of God in our churches, and they can sometimes think that the answer is to make people afraid of God, as if our love for God needs to be tempered by being afraid of Him. But Scripture speaks quite differently. Take, for example, Exodus 20.

Exodus 20, the people of Israel gather at Mount Sinai, and we read from verse 18. Now, when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood far off and said to Moses, you speak to us and we will listen, but do not let God speak to us lest we die. And Moses said to the people, do not fear, for God has come to test you that the fear of Him may be before you that you may not sin.

Isn't that a strange sentence? Do not fear that the fear of Him may be before you. So Moses here sets out a contrast between being afraid of God and fearing God.

Those who have a fear of Him will not be afraid of Him. And yet he uses the same fear word in Hebrew for both. So evidently there is a fear of God which is desirable, and there is a fear of God which is not desirable. So what we're going to do now is look at the different types of fear of God that we meet in Scripture. And the first type of fear of God is condemned by Scripture. I've been tempted to call this wrong fear, but there is a sense in which actually it is quite right for unbelievers to be afraid of God.

The Holy God is terrible to those who are far from Him. Instead I'm calling it sinful fear, since it is a fear of God that flows from sin. And this sinful fear of God, it is the sort of fear that James tells us the demons have when they believe and shudder. It's the fear Moses wanted to remove from the Israelites at Mount Sinai. It is the fear Adam had when he first sinned and was afraid and so hid from God.

Adam was the first one to fear, to feel this sinful fear, and in that moment he shows us the essential nature of sinful fear. Sinful fear drives you away from God. And this is the fear of the unbeliever who hates God, who fears being exposed as a sinner and so runs from God. This is the fear that is at odds with love for God.

It is the fear that is rooted in the very heart of sin, dreading, retreating from God. This is the fear that generates, produces the doubt that rationalizes unbelief. Fear is the motor of unbelief. It is the motor for both atheism and idolatry, inspiring people to invent any reality but the living God they shrink from and dread. So take, for example, the late Christopher Hitchens, one of the so-called Four Horsemen of the 21st century New Atheism. Now, Hitchens liked to describe himself as an anti-theist, not an atheist but an anti-theist, because he was opposed to the very possibility of God's existence. But this anti-theism, he was very clear, was motivated by a fear of God. He was asked on Fox News what he thought about the possibility of God's existence, and this is what he said. He said, I think it would be rather awful if it was true. If there was a permanent, total, round-the-clock divine supervision and invigilation of everything you did, you would never have a waking or sleeping moment when you weren't being watched and controlled and supervised by some celestial entity from the moment of your conception to the moment of your death.

It would be like living in North Korea. Hitchens tragically misunderstood and so feared God. He thought he was a tyrant in the sky. And the same could be said of the young Martin Luther. Luther once explained how, under the Roman Catholicism he'd grown up with, he said Christ was depicted as a grim tyrant, a furious, stern judge who demanded much of us and imposed good works as payment for our sins. This, he carried on, makes us reluctant to go to him. If my conscience is stricken with fear, I feel sufficiently repelled. My heart and bad conscience quite naturally shun him whom I fear.

Fear and terror prod and goad me away from him so that I do not stay with him. As a monk, Luther found himself utterly terror-stricken at the thought of this grim tyrant he thought existed in heaven. He was afraid of God, filled with a fear that was the very opposite of love. As he put it, I did not love, yes, I hated, the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God, said Luther. It was only when he felt himself to be born again in the knowledge of Christ as a kind Savior that he could bring himself to say, He will not be a terror to me, but a comfort.

But those experiences of Christopher Hitchens and Martin Luther show that this sinful fear that flees from God arises in good part from a misunderstanding of God. So the unfaithful servant in Jesus' parable of the ten minas, he displays exactly this problem. Do you remember, he complains unfairly to his master. He says, I was afraid of you because I knew you were a severe man.

He saw nothing of his master's kindness. In the servant's short-sighted eyes, the great man was all stingy severity, and so the servant was simply afraid. And this is exactly the blindness that Satan loves to inflict on us. Just as it was in the garden, Satan's chief labor is to misrepresent God.

He would present God to us as pure negative threat, the embodiment of anti-gospel bad news, because then if we believe him and perceive God as pure threat, we will run from him in fear, wishing the heavenly ogre did not exist. And yet while this deception-fueled fear of God drives people away from God, it doesn't always drive them away from religion. It need not even drive them away from an apparently impressive morality or from a religious life, obedience to the law. So having presented God as harsh and dreadful, this fear gives people the mindset of the reluctant slave, who obeys his master not out of any love, but merely from fear of the whip. Out of slavish fear, people will perform all manner of external duties to appease a God they secretly despise. And to all the world, they can seem like devout, exemplary Christians, if rather lacking in joy.

And so it was with the young Martin Luther, who murmured and raged inwardly while outwardly acting the part of a devoted and obedient monk. When people, through misunderstanding, become simply afraid of God, they'll never entrust themselves to him. They must turn elsewhere for their security. People with this sinful fear of God will not trust in Christ for their salvation. They'll look elsewhere. They'll trust in the law, in their own efforts, in anything, anyone else but Christ. But there is another part to this sinful fear. And the other part is sinful fear consists also in the fear of letting go of sin, or what we might call the dread of holiness.

C.S. Lewis explored this idea in The Great Divorce. The Great Divorce is a story, an allegory, really, which starts in what he calls the grey town, which is a hellish place. It's hell. And everyone there in the grey town is afraid of the dark. And there is a regular bus that takes short trips to heaven from there. And few dare step aboard the bus, because though they're afraid of the dark, they're even more afraid of the light.

The dark shrouds nameless horrors, but the light is more scary for how it exposes them. So some of the spectral souls get on board the bus, and they arrive in the bright beauty of the heavenly meadow. And one of the spectral souls from hell screams, I don't like it, it gives me the pip. And then the solid people, the residents of heaven, arrive. And Lewis tells us two of the ghosts screamed and ran for the bus.

Their very splendor was terrifying to the shrunken wraiths from hell. Go away, squealed the ghost. Go away. Can't you see I want to be alone?

But you need help, said the solid one. If you have the least trace of decent feeling left, said the ghost, you'll keep away. I don't want help.

I want to be left alone. The fear for the ghosts is their realisation that to dwell in heaven, they must give up their so-called dignity, their self-dependence, their misery, their anger, their grumbles. And they cannot imagine being without the very things that deform them, the things that keep them from happiness. They shudder at the prospect of liberation and purification. Their fear is a struggle against joy. It is a fear of the light and a refusal to let go of the darkness.

It is the very richness and energy of the pure life of heaven that is so overwhelming and fearful to the ghosts, and they will do almost anything to avoid it. Sinners prefer their darkness and chains to the light and freedom of heaven, and so they dread its holiness. Small wonder then that our culture today is building ever higher walls to defend itself from the unsettling beauty of God, or even the very idea of beauty. Traditional conceptions of beauty are being dismissed as discriminatory, non-egalitarian.

All things are declared to be equally beautiful. The existence of any absolute beauty is denied in the arts and media, where they are simultaneously rather revelling in the perverse, the crooked, the ugly. Now, sadly, Christians are not immune from this sinful fear, this dread of holiness. Poor teaching, hard times, Satan's accusations can all feed this cringing dread of God.

So what weed killer can we use? Well, really, the rest of this teaching series will be an attempt to hold out the cure. But for now, though, here are some golden words of wisdom from John Bunyan. John Bunyan once wrote a treatise on the fear of God, and he asked these questions. He said, Do you have fears that make you question whether there was ever a work of grace wrought in your soul? Do these fears sometimes weaken your heart in prayer? Do these fears you have keep you back, keep you away from laying hold of the promise of salvation by Jesus Christ?

Do you have fears that tend to harden your heart to make you desperate? And then Bunyan says, Well, poor Christian, look back on your answer. How much of God do you think is in those fears? It cannot be that these things are the true and natural effects of the workings of the Spirit of God.

These are not his doings. Do you not see the very pore of the devil in these fears? It is Bunyan saw the devil's work to promote a fear of God that makes people afraid of God in such a way that they want to flee from God. The Spirit's work is the exact opposite, to produce in us a wonderful fear that wins and draws us to God. And it is that happy, Scripture-commended, Spirit-breathed fear to which we turn now. Have you ever experienced what Michael Reeves described as a sinful fear of God?

If you have, you're not alone. I think many Christians struggle with it. So I'm glad you're listening this week on Renewing Your Mind. You're only hearing select messages from this new series, The Fear of the Lord, but you can easily stream the entire teaching series and dig deeper with the digital study guide when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. In addition to being able to stream the series, wherever you are in the free Ligonier app, you'll also receive the Fear of the Lord DVD set in the mail. So call us at 800-435-4343 or make your gift at renewingyourmind.org. Tomorrow Michael Reeves describes what he called today a happy, Scripture-commanded, Spirit-breathed fear in a message titled, A Delightful Fear of God. So join us Thursday here on Renewing Your Mind. .