Fear and Fearlessness

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." [Proverbs 9:10 (KJV).]

"Ye shall walk after the Lord your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him." [Deuteronomy 13:4(KJV).]

A prayer: Lord, you call us to love you, and you call us to fear you, and you do so for our good. Help me to understand. Sin makes my mind hazy, so please make my mind clear. May my meditations be acceptable to you. May any truth that I find sit down in me.

1. Craziness and danger.

The era of the bluetooth creates uncomfortable encounters in the street. When I see somebody on the street who seems to be talking to himself, I don’t know whether he is having a hands-free cellphone communication or a partner-free conversation such that I should cross the street for safety.

Call that "side-stepping the crazy-hazard."

Which is a way of getting into the subject of the fear of God. Of all of the reasons to fear God, certainly one is his wildness. This essay discusses God as a fear-inducing wildman.

2. Yeah, well, I think it’s an important subject.

This might seem heretical in a time when all talk of god’s nature seems to be about God’s unconditional father-love or about his unbreakable friendship with those who believe in him. If fear of God is heresy, I’m fine with heresy.

The fact is that both love and fear of God are right and biblical. In most any given time in most any given person, both ideas should converge. But one idea alone has dominated modern American church-talk. Call this essay contrarian.

3. The Lord as the wildman of the Bible.

I think that when they are honest, persons who regularly read the Bible will admit that parts of it wrinkle their brow. To some, these troubling parts are reasons to deny that the entire Bible is a credible source of moral guidance. They are a challenge to Paul’s assertion that "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness . . .." (2 Timothy 3:16 (KJV).)

Others take these troubling parts as a summons to wrestle with scripture, just as Jacob wrestled with God alone in the desert on the way to find his fate. (Genesis 32.)

And maybe they are an invitation to holy fear. Maybe they show that God defies placement into comfortable categories. Maybe they show that whenever we think that we have God defined, he breaks out of our good-natured definition.

Here are examples.

4. "Suffer the little children" or "The little children shall suffer"?

"God breathed" Psalm 137 cries out against Babylon. Babylon had defeated Judah and taken its leading citizens into exile. Mind you, Judah was not innocent in its own demise. The sins of King Manassah, a descendant of David, made God furious and doomed his kingdom. Be that as it may, here is the end of Psalm 137:
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. [ll. 8-9 (KJV)]
Whatever were the merits or demerits of the Babylonians, their "little ones" were likely innocent.

God has spoken through prophets. Sometimes he has proclaimed judgment and suffering to come. Through the prophet Jeremiah he promised that the people of Judah and Jerusalem would eat the flesh of their children:
And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege and straitness, wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives, shall straiten them. [Jeremiah 19:9 (KJV).] The prophet Ezekiel pronounced a like horror. (Ezekiel 5, esp. 9-10.)

This is a prophesy of Isaiah against Israel: "Each will feed on the flesh of their own offspring." (Isaiah 9:20 (NIV).)

          5. Sacrifice: descendants of Saul.

When Israel entered the land God had promised them, to conquer it, a shrewd tribe tricked them. This tribe, the Gibeonites, clothed ambassadors in worn and torn and patched clothing. And they provisioned the ambassadors with dry and moldy food. In this way, they convinced the leaders of the Israelites that the ambassadors had traveled far, even though they dwelt near.

The ambassadors offered a treaty of peace with the Israelites. The Israelites believed them to be a distant tribe and not among those named for annihilation. So they made a pact with them to guarantee peace.

But in the time of King Saul, Saul had a different idea. He slaughtered the Gibeonites. They cried out to God.

When King David replaced Saul, there was a famine for three years. God told David that the famine came because of Saul’s crimes against the Gibeonites.

So David parlayed with the Gibeonites. They demanded that David surrender to them seven descendants of Saul. David did so, and the Gibeonites hanged them. (This narrative is in 2 Samuel 21.)

6. Job and Job’s children.

For undeserved punishment, the book of Job stands out. He was a righteous and blameless man, and God took everything from him. God took away his wealth, his children, and his health. This was because of a bet between God and Satan.

In the end, Job is restored to health, wealth, and family. Still, you wonder if his love of his new children could make him forget his lost loved ones.

7. God gulls, then he punishes the gullible.

Many prophets in the Bible did not serve God. For example, Balaam knew God, but he did not always do God’s will. He joined the Moabites against the Israelites. The Israelites killed Balaam while he dwelled in the company of their enemies. (Numbers 22-24, 31.)

Such prophets were a plague on Israel. But does this, from the book of the prophet Ezekiel, challenge your notion of fairness?

And if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the Lord have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand upon him, and will destroy him from the midst of my people Israel. [14:9 (KJV).]

8. Cursing the fig tree.

In Mark chapter 11, Jesus was hungry and saw a fig tree. But it had no figs, so he cursed it. He cursed it even though it was not the season for figs. Jesus’s disciples passed by the fig tree the next morning, and it was dried up from the roots.

9. The cruelest sacrifice.

The ultimate un-tameness of God is the fact that he would send his son to suffer and die on the cross. An Episcopal bishop has even criticized this as child-abuse. (Never mind that, as Marilynne Robinson pointed out, Jesus was 33 at the time.)

Although I join Marilynne Robinson in thinking ill of the bishop’s criticism of God, that criticism might be preferable to our own sometimes too-casual regard for this history- turning act.

I understood some things better as a child than I do as an adult. Crucifixion terrorized me. Crucifixion terrorized me much so that I was greatly relieved to go to Denmark as a child and to hear a teacher describe Jesus’s death, in the Danish way, as death by "hanging from a cross". After hearing that I (erroneously) pictured in my mind’s eye the instrument of Jesus’s death as a rope from the top of a cross.

Since this did not involve nails and slow death, I happily drew pictures of this death of Jesus. I was almost riotously relieved.

I do not now have that dread of the idea of crucifixion that I had as a child. Familiarity has plucked the needful terror of crucifixion from my adult mind. I am less for that loss.

The point is that there is a seeming wildness in a God who makes his own beloved son, the one blameless person in history, suffer death by torture and descent into hell.

10. The flip side of fear.

God inspires Psalms about children being dashed on stones. He dooms his chosen people to eat the flesh of their sons and daughters. He causes a king to give the descendants of another king over to a vengeance-seeking tribe to end a famine. He wipes out a righteous man’s family on a bet. He misleads prophets, then he punishes them for being misled. He punishes a fig tree for not bearing figs out of season. He inflicts a cruel death on the one man in history who doesn’t deserve it.

God is wild. God is unpredictable. God defies our ideas of rightness. We are right when we fear him. 

But there is a divine purpose lurking in the fear. The fact is that sometimes God is an assailant. (As when God wrestled with Jacob). Sometimes he is a frenetic whirlwind. (Job 38:1; 40:6.) But after God wrestled with Jacob, God blessed Jacob. After God spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, God blessed Job.

Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers. In his years of slavery and imprisonment, he must have rued the injustice of that.

But one day, he understood that God had sent him into slavery and into prison to prepare a place of prosperity for himself and his brothers. Egypt became a refuge to them in a time of worldwide famine.

11. Fear and courage.

Fear should grow into courage. Fearing God, we should be brave to stand against the ways of this world. Fearing God, we should be brave to lose comfort and lose security to gain God. Fearing God, we should be brave in the face of death.

Because on the far side of fear lies salvation.

See how fear and fearlessness are put side-by-side in this passage from Luke:
And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him.
Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God? But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows. [Luke 12:4-7 (KJV).]
"Those who fear the Lord will have a happy end; on the day of their death they will be blessed." (Ecclesiasticus 1:13 (NRSV)(Canonical in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian traditions.))

12. Paul.

The apostle Paul is a hero of the Book of Acts. But he is no hero at the beginning. He persecuted the new church. He approved the slaughter of Christians.

Saul was on his way to Damascus to continue to bind the followers of Jesus. Then God struck him down to the ground and blinded him. This, of course, must have been terrifying. He was blind for three days, and in that time he did not eat or drink. Then God sent a disciple to cure his blindness. (Acts 9)

From that moment, Saul (known now as Paul) preached Christ. He suffered greatly for Christ: beatings, shipwrecks, exposure to the elements, whippings, imprisonment. Tradition says that he was beheaded.

This is the apostle who said during his ministry, "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." (Philippians 1:21 (KJV).) I like to think that, having learned to fear God, Paul died calmly.

A prayer: Lord, you who know how to give good things to those who ask. Please bless me, and bless my family, and bless my friends with that fear from which courage grows. Amen.