Ingredients: Part 2a
If someone were to read through his Bible with pen and paper in hand, jotting down every explicit, overt reference to the fear of God, and then seek to keep a column where passages dealt with not so much the words but the thought and illustrations of the reality of the fear of God, I’m quite confident he would have many pages filled with references and much in his second column of indications and illustrations of this great truth. For one of the most dominant themes in all of Holy Scripture is the theme of the fear of God. It is that which the writer of the Proverbs says is the beginning or the chief part of all knowledge.
So in the past few Lord’s mornings, we have been attempting to grasp something of the weight of this theme and come to a better understanding of what Scripture means when it speaks of the fear of God. The way we’ve approached it is, first of all, by seeking to establish the predominance of the fear of God in Biblical thought. Then we spent two weeks trying to come up with a somewhat workable definition, or perhaps I could better say, a description of the fear of God. That the fear of God is a predominant note in Scripture is obvious to anyone who takes the Scripture seriously.
Well then, if it is a dominant note and to be devoid of it is to be devoid of saving religion, then the question that ought to be focused in the mind of every serious listener is, what then is the fear of God? Do I have it? How may I grow in it? And so we’ve grappled with this matter of seeking to define and describe the fear of God. There is a fear of God which is comprised of dread and terror. And even for the Christian, the fear of God is never totally devoid of this aspect of dread. However, it is the second aspect of fear that is the dominant thought in Scripture when it speaks of the fear of God: the fear of reverence, the fear of awe, the fear of veneration, the fear which seraphim and cherubim knew when they veiled face and feet and cried one to another, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God, the almighty.”
So much then for these two lines of thought upon which we have been moving: the predominance of the fear of God in Biblical thought and then a definition of the fear of God involving dread and terror; involving the fear of reverence and awe. Now, last week what we tried to do was to begin to carry out a third line of thought: the essential ingredients of the fear of God. What is necessary if men and women are to Biblically fear God? And the first thing we dealt with was, there must be correct concepts of the character of God, particularly His immensity, His majesty, and His holiness. Men will not fear God unless they see that there is a God worthy to be feared: either the fear of dread or the fear of awe and reverence.
You don’t need to dread a God who’s one big gushy, formless glob of love. Who trembles before a formless, gushy, ethereal glob of love? Why tremble before that? All you need to do is push it, and a few drops of it will come over you, and you’re all fixed up. And there’s very little trembling and very little dread in the consciences even of unconverted religious people who sit in the best of our evangelical churches week after week and year after year. Why? Because the God whom they hear preached illicits no dread and no terror. When unconverted people see that the God with whom they have to do is a consuming fire, and that His love is holy love, and that His mercy is holy mercy; when they see that all of His attributes are suffused with holiness, immensity, and majesty, perhaps once again the holy trembling and holy terror will seize their hearts, but not until. This God whom you can snuggle up to is not the God who will illicit the fear of dread.
But more so, He’s not the God who will illicit true awe and reverence from His people. Ah, but someone says, “That sounds so Old Testamentish to me. Isn’t there something in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ that just sort of like a rasp rubs off those sharp angles of the dread and terror of God.” No, just the opposite is true, for I read in the latter part of Hebrews 12 where the writer to Hebrews having expounded all the greater privileges that are ours under the new covenant; having contrasted with the Old, says this:
“Wherefore we receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved [that which we now have in Jesus Christ in the fulfillment of the new covenant is an unshakable kingdom. Having such privileges], let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear: for our God is [not was] a consuming fire” (vv. 28-29).
Therefore, we must feed our minds upon the God of Scripture and in particular, those Scriptures which set Him before us in all the splendor, might, and majesty of His person. And this is no less true of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, for the New Testament actually uses the term “the fear of the Lord” and “the fear of Christ” (Colossians 3:22; Ephesians 5:20). So if your Jesus is one who illicits no sense of awe, no sense of holy dread, not the carnal dread that unregenerate men have (Revelation 1), He’s not the Christ of the Bible. He’s some other Jesus. And O how necessary that we as the people of God feed our minds and spirits upon the Scriptural concept of God that will illicit true fear. So then, the first essential ingredient of the fear of God is correct concepts of the character of God, particularly His immensity, His majesty, and His holiness.
The second essential ingredient of the fear of God is what I’m calling a pervasive sense of the presence of God. The foundation of the fear of God: correct concepts of the character of God. The next building block in the fear of God: a pervasive sense of the presence of God. Some of you kids may say, “Preacher, why do you use such a big word?” Well, because I want to give you a little vocabulary lesson this morning. The word “pervasive” is a very good word, and you ought to know what it means. Something that’s pervasive is something that spreads throughout a given area.
Let me illustrate from something you all know. You happen to be driving down the highway, and up ahead you see a little dead body on the road, and as you get closer, before you can even see its color, you know what that animal was, don’t you? If it was one of those little black animals with a white stripe down its back, before you even get close enough to see it, you can tell that it’s a skunk. Why? Because a skunk has a little gland that squirts out something that pervades the atmosphere. It becomes a very pervasive smell. It extends throughout the whole area.
Now, when something is pervasive, it extends through everything. If you come into a small room where there’s a potted lily, the fragrance of that lily is pervasive. It pervades the whole room. You don’t need to go over within a foot of it. The moment you open the door, that beautiful fragrance strikes your nostrils and it registers–that’s a lily. So the second great ingredient of the fear of God is a pervasive sense of the presence of God, that is, a sense of the presence of God which spreads throughout the entirety of our lives so that there is no place in which we find ourselves; no circumstance in which we are found but what we know God–this great, majestic, transcendent holy God is here. And all that He is in His majesty, His holiness, His immensity is not somewhere out there but right here. So then, the fear of God will always be constructed of this pervasive sense of the presence of God.
I remember sometime years ago hearing a statement by the late Dr. Tozer. And I don’t know if I’m quoting him accurately, but if I’m not, the seed thought comes from him, and it’s got a little bit of my own adjustment in it. But he said this: “The most profound word in the human language is ‘God'” You go to your dictionary to look up a word like “pervasive”–and that’s what I did–and it said, “That which is spread throughout.” You can define the word “pervasive.” Now try to define God. Think of all the thousands of theological books that have been written in all the hundreds of languages throughout the earth trying to define God. If you could put them all together into one language and read them all; if God gave you some kind of computer mind that could read through them all in a year’s time, when you’re all done, you would have to say, “We know but the edges of His ways.” The most profound word in the English language is “God.” The most profound fact in all of human experience is the sentence “God is.” All that the Scripture tells us about Him, He is right now.