Obeying Your Bridegroom

In our last Relationship Tuesdays, we looked at the aspect of love of God as Father through obedience, and how obedience to His commands is a recognition of His not only knowing but desiring what is best for us. 

Today we are going to look at demonstrating our love for God as our bridegroom or husband, which is another metaphor that God uses to describe His relationship with us throughout the Old and New Testament:

“For your Maker is your husband--the LORD Almighty is his name--the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; he is called the God of all the earth.” Isaiah 54:5

“As a young man marries a maiden, so will your sons marry you; as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you.” Isaiah 62:5

“Then John's disciples came and asked him, "How is it that we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?"

Jesus answered, "How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast.” Matthew 9:14

And these are just a few examples.  The entire theme of the book of Hosea is God as bridegroom, and how upset/jealous He gets when His people go after idols.  And idols are not just dead images and statues that get set up and worshipped; idols are anything that takes any of your love away from God.  He wants you to love Him with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.  (Read more about this idea in Flee From Idolatry)

God basically equates anything less than loving Him with everything as adultery.

So if we are supposed to see ourselves as the wife of God, we need to look at how a wife ought to behave toward her husband:

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Ephesians 5:22

Our role as the church/wife of Christ is one of submission.

Submission shows love because it’s not a forced obedience; submission is willful/selfless obedience.  Loving wives choose not to strive against their husbands and submit to their authority.  Loving people choose not to strive against God and submit to His authority, just as Jesus submitted to the Father when He said, “not my will, but yours be done." (Luke 22:42)  Wives choose to love their husbands not just more than they love other men but instead of loving other men.  Likewise God wants us to love Him not just more than all other options, but instead of all other options.  So we choose to trust and obey God, just as a wife chooses to trust and obey her husband.

Next time we’ll be looking at Obeying our King.

Obeying Our Father

In our last Relationship Tuesdays, we talked about how Jesus wants us to demonstrate our love for Him through Obeying God and came to the conclusion that you’re basically lying if you say, “I love Jesus” or “I love God”, but you’re not doing what He said to do.

Why does obedience mean so much to God?  I think if we look at the metaphors of how God sees our relationship, we can start to get a good idea of why obedience is so important.

Let’s start with the metaphor of Father:

One of the big ten commandments in the Bible is “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.” Exodus 20:12  Paul says that part of “honor” means obedience: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” Ephesians 6:1  

I wrote about this topic sometime back as it relates to our physical parents, namely that there are no qualifiers in this statement; scripture does not say honor and obey your parents unless   fill in the reason  .  It just says: honor and obey in the Lord, which means the only reason to withhold obedience is if it means sinning against God.  You can read more in the post titled: How to Honor Your Parents.

The point of the matter though is that God is our heavenly Father, and our earthly parents are just a reflection of Him.

Within that paradigm, consider that our parents have our best interest in mind when they are giving commands.  They may be misguided or selfish at times, but who of us isn’t. Ultimately, they really do want what’s best for us.  Likewise, God wants what’s best for us.  The difference is He’s never misguided.  He always knows what’s actually best.

Jesus puts it like this: “Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” Matthew 7:9-11

Scripture repeatedly tells that God’s commands are best for us:

This is what the LORD says--your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: "I am the LORD your God, who teaches you what is best for you, who directs you in the way you should go. If only you had paid attention to my commands, your peace would have been like a river, your righteousness like the waves of the sea. Isaiah 48:17

Oh, that their hearts would be inclined to fear me and keep all my commands always, so that it might go well with them and their children forever!  Deuteronomy 5:29

Walk in all the way that the LORD your God has commanded you, so that you may live and prosper and prolong your days in the land that you will possess. Deuteronomy 5:33

Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained, But happy is he who keeps the law. Proverbs 29:18

The list can go on and on.

Conversely, much like when we refuse to honor our earthly father and mother, when we refuse to honor and obey our heavenly Father, things will not go well for us. 

See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you listen to the commandments of the LORD your God, which I am commanding you today. And the curse, if you do not listen to the commandments of the LORD your God, but turn aside from the way which I am commanding you today. Deuteronomy 11:26-28

And what’s the whole reason for this blessing and cursing from God when it comes to obedience?

When all these blessings and curses I have set before you come upon you and you take them to heart wherever the LORD your God disperses you among the nations, and when you and your children return to the LORD your God and obey him with all your heart and with all your soul according to everything I command you today, then the LORD your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you. Deuteronomy 30:1-3

The blessings and the cursings are all about restoring relationship with God, which is the whole point of this series: Relationship with God.  He rewards our obedience and disciplines our disobedience all in an effort to bring us closer to Him and by proxy what is good for us. 

What an amazing Father we have!  And when we obey Him, then we are in essence saying, "I love you, Daddy!  Thank you for watching out for me and helping me.  I couldn't make it without you."  So why wouldn't we obey Him?

Next week we’ll look at Obeying Our Bridegroom.

Obeying God

In our last Relationship Tuesdays we talked about God’s love, specifically God’s love for us inherent in the Gospel of Love.  About how He loved us so much to send His Son to die for us, not just so that we can avoid hell, but so that we can learn to love the way He loves: loving others and loving God. Love alone paves the way for a righteous life, as summed up in the big two commandments: Love the Lord your God, and love others like yourself.  And Jesus tells us that if we love Him we will obey His commandments.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be looking at the importance of obeying God in our relationship with Him.

I think a lot of times we get this mistaken idea of what obeying God’s commandments looks like.  We seem to think that if we go to church, pray, read our Bible, and maybe sing some songs that we’re walking in obedience, that we have a right relationship with God.  But there’s a lot more that Jesus tells us to do like feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for widows and orphans, heal the sick, to just name a few.  The Bible is chalk full of things God has commanded anyone who claims a relationship with Him to do for His glory.

One of my favorite illustrations of the misconception we have about obeying God comes from Francis Chan in the Basic series, but here’s a video that sums it up with a transcript from the series below:

When my daughter comes to me and I tell her, 'go clean your room,' she's not going to come back to me and say, 'dad, I memorized what you said to me. You said to go clean my room!' because I won't celebrate and say, 'yes! That's exactly what I wanted!' no. And she's not going to come say, 'dad, I can say go clean your room in Greek.' because that's not going to fly. And she's not going to say, 'my friends and I are going to gather every week and discuss what it would look like if I cleaned my room.' None of that works. Just go and clean your room.

So why do we think that kind of teaching is going to work when it comes to Jesus?

In John 14:15, Jesus says, “If you love me, you’ll keep my commandments.”  And then in John 15:10, Jesus says, “If you keep my commandments, you’ll abide in my love.” 

Nowhere does He say go and learn my commandments, and that’s how I’ll know you love me. 

So for the next few weeks, we’ll look at why actual, physical obedience to God’s commandments is such an integral part of our relationship with Him, and why obedience demonstrates love.  We’ll start with Obeying Our Father.

The Gospel of Love

In the last Relationship Tuesdays, we talked about Love and Sin, specifically how sin can be boiled down to not loving God and not loving others.  And when you really take the moment to think about it that makes perfect sense.  If you loved God, you wouldn’t want to hurt Him, you wouldn’t want to disobey Him, and you would want to cultivate your relationship with Him instead of tearing it apart or substituting it with knowledge or empty religion.  If you really loved others, you wouldn’t want to hurt them, you wouldn’t be selfish, and you would want to help them when they’re in trouble.

And the truth is we’re all in trouble.

We’re in trouble because we are not a loving people.  Humanity is not essentially good, not essentially loving, and we haven’t been since Adam and Eve took the first step of not loving God all those years ago.  Our natural inclination is to not love anyone but ourselves, aka be evil.  Now I’m not saying we don’t have our loving moments, but even our most loving of moments often hold selfish intentions lurking in the background.

But God can’t abide beings that are not purely loving because, as John 4:8 so aptly puts it, God is love.  He can’t watch them suffer without Him as they tear their lives and the lives of others apart, and so He introduced death into the world. 

But God also loved us too much to leave it at that, and so He sent His son into the world: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16

God loved us enough to send His Son to die and be resurrected, so we too might die to our unloving natures, and He sent His Spirit to empower us so that we could be transformed to a point where those acts of love would not just be what we try to do but what we naturally tend to do.

That’s why John says, “We love because he first loved us.” 1 John 4:19 Notice that the verse doesn’t just say that He loved us first, but also “We love because”.  Conversely if we don’t love, we don’t know God’s love.  Check out the next verse: “If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.” (1 John 4:20)

But by God’s grace, we can love our brother and we can love God because grace isn’t just forgiveness; it is the favor of God in love that we might love Him, love others, and spend eternity doing so.  If this isn’t the outcome of the grace we think we have, chances are we don’t have it.  Everyday we ought to be increasing in love for God and others.  And that grace, while unmerited, is powerful and effective to accomplish it’s purpose within us. 

You cannot help but love if you truly know God’s love, and I’m not talking about a feeling.  I’m talking about action and attitude here.  Again refer to 1 Corinthians 13 to see what love is and isn’t.  You’ll notice nowhere in the “love list” does it say, “love is a warm fuzzy feeling”.  That warm fuzzy feeling makes people without Jesus do all kinds of unloving things.  Serial killers get the warm fuzzy feeling when they kill people for goodness sake.  Love ought never be defined by a feeling.  It should always be defined by action.

And that is why we can demonstrate the new love within us, given through God’s free grace, by obeying God.  Jesus says, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.” John 14:15  Obedience is the ultimate act of love toward God, and it’s obedience with all our heart, soul, and strength.

Which is why our next topic of Relationship Tuesdays will be Obeying God.

Love and Sin

In our Relationship Tuesdays, we just started looking at God’s love, and today we’re going to continue looking at God’s love in relation to sin, and it’s going to be a relatively simple lesson.

1 John 4:18 says, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.”

There’s a reason why we don’t have to be afraid of punishment when we abide in God’s perfect love, and the premise for this is summed up in the following verses of 1 John 4:

We love, because He first loved us. If someone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also. 1 John 4:19-21

Paul says we know what sin is because of the law (Romans 7:7), Jesus says that the whole law is summed up in two commandments: love God with all your heart, soul, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. (Mark 12:30-32)  If love fulfills the law, then anything other than love is sin. 

Perfect love = Not sinning against God or anyone else

If we don’t sin aka love, there’s no punishment.  Thus perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.  If you’re afraid of punishment, it means you’re not living in a loving way in every area of your life. 

Now you can get all sappy and say, well the enemy attacks us and tells we’re not good enough and push the blame onto the serpent just as we’ve always done since the garden, but because I love you, I’m going to tell you the truth: 

That’s a lie. 

Pushing the blame of ungodly fear off onto Satan is an unloving act toward God.  You’re basically saying, “God I don’t think you’re big enough to protect me from the lies of the enemy.  I don’t think this armor you’ve given me is strong enough to deflect those fiery darts.  In fact I think you’re a liar because all those promises you made about the devil fleeing when we resist just aren’t true.”

And yet by giving in to the lies, you’re not resisting, so why would the devil flee?

Do you want to know if you’re loving God and others perfectly?  Read 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, and replace the word Love with your name.  “Stephen is patient, Stephen is kind, Stephen is not jealous, Stephen does not brag, he is not arrogant” . . . I’m already falling short of perfect love, and I’m not even a quarter of the way through it.  I’d wager no one, save Jesus, could read 1 Corinthians 13 this way and not be lying through their teeth.  It’s called a sinful nature.

But there’s good news.  We even call it The Good News, and we’ll talk about it in our next Relationship Tuesdays: The Gospel of Love.

Perfect Love Drives Out Fear

In the last few Relationship Tuesdays, we have been looking at what it means to fear God.  It’s not just an awe and respect that we ought to feel.  It is an actual fear.  And that fear does not stem from a fear of reprisal and punishment.  It stems from this relationship of created/Creator.  As Creator, God is more than we will ever be.  And while we were created in His image, we will ever be only that, an image--a restored image in the resurrection but an image all the same. 

Every instance of a created being not fearing God comes from the idea of becoming more than a creation.  Even Satan’s prideful rebellion was based on a lack of fear of God.  If he had feared God, the idea of taking the throne and becoming like the Most High would have never entered his mind.  And he paid the price for not having an appropriate fear of the Creator.

But, it seems that with us, God often starts His conversations with the phrase “fear not”.   There’s no doubt we are to fear Him, but almost universally that fear comes about for the wrong reasons. 

Look at what Isaiah says when he stands before the throne: “"Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.” Isaiah 6:5

That phrase “woe to me” it’s a translation of the word “oy”.  This word has lost some of it’s connotation over the years.  You’ve probably heard this word in the movies somewhere from some grumpy old Jewish person saying,  “oy, it’s humid out” or something similar.  “Oy” when Isaiah was using it was the equivalent of our “ooohhh”; it’s passionate grief or despair.

Isaiah is in despair because of his sin.

But God says, “fear not” because He doesn’t want our fear of Him to stem from a fear of reprisal or punishment for sin.  Remember in 1 John 4:18, John writes, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.”

For the next few posts in our look at having a relationship with God, we’re going to talk about God’s love, a much more agreeable topic than fear to be sure, but I wanted to start with the fear of God so that we keep in mind who it is that we’re talking about when we talk about God’s love.  He is not our equal in this relationship, like say a husband and wife for example.  And we’re never going to grow up and be equal to Him, like with our parents. 

He is beyond us in every way and worthy to be feared, and yet He loves us, and He wants us to love Him.  And within that context, He doesn’t want our fear to derive from the fear of punishment because we’re sinful people.

Up Next: Love and Sin

No Fear of the Lord

In our previous Relationship Tuesdays, we’ve been looking at the fear of God in terms of being a created being.  And today we’re going to look at what a lack of the fear of God looks like.

We fear God because He is our creator.  In every way He’s beyond us.  And it’s not just us who have this response.  When we look at glimpses of heaven in the Bible, we see the seraphim around the throne and these are pretty scary characters: they have six wings; they have four faces: a man, a bull, an eagle, and a lion; and as if that weren’t enough they are covered in eyes.  It’s like something right out of horror show.  And yet before the throne of God these terrifying creatures not only bow, they cover their heads and their feet in holy fear of their creator.

And if they’re afraid, how much more should we be as sinful rebels before the throne?  I mean just look at Isaiah’s reaction when he stood before God.

But you know I don’t think everyone is afraid of God like they should be, and that’s often what gets us in trouble.  Take for example, Isaiah 14 when talking about Satan:

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! [how] art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit. They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, [and] consider thee, [saying, Is] this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms; [That] made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof; [that] opened not the house of his prisoners?”

Satan had no fear of God.  He assumed that He could just usurp His throne.

Or look at Adam and Eve, they ate from the tree of knowledge and good and evil.  They had no fear of God.

Everywhere you look in the Bible those who lack a fear of God are called wicked and reprobate.  They do what they please.  They profane righteousness.  They are in a word, evil. 

And even on judgment day, in Matthew 7 Jesus talks about those who are going to list everything they did for Jesus, make claims of having relationship with Him, trying to convince Him why they are worthy of heaven; telling God why you’re worthy of His approval isn’t a position of fear before a Holy and just God. 

Alternatively if you look at Revelations 15, you get a glimpse of what the saints of God, those who have a relationship with Him say:

And I saw what looked like a sea of glass mixed with fire and, standing beside the sea, those who had been victorious over the beast and his image and over the number of his name. They held harps given them by Godand sang the song of Moses the servant of God and the song of the Lamb: "Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, King of the ages.

Who will not fear you, O Lord, and bring glory to your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your righteous acts have been revealed. (Revelations 15:2-4)

I mean this is on the verge of entering the end of the age at this point, and the saints in heaven are still talking about fearing God.  I don’t think this is something that goes away when we enter eternity.  In fact, I think it gets even more pronounced as we stand face to face with His holiness.

The Fear of Claymen

Last week in Relationship Tuesday, I made the statement: “We should fear God for the same reason we serve Him, not because of what He can do to us or for us.”

So what does this mean? 

Let’s say you decide to be creative today and do a little sculpting.  You carefully work the clay between your fingers, and you decide to make a figure in your own image: a little clay person.  Slowly a body begins to form with arms, legs, and a little head complete with eyes, nose and mouth.  And let’s say that you open the mouth of your little person and breath into it, and lo and behold, your creation comes to life. And you name it George.  Why you ask?

Hey, it’s my imagination, and that’s what I would call him (yep now it’s a him too).

At first you and George have a grand old time.  You teach him how to speak and how to live, and you give him directions that will help him to be safe.  After all, you’ve been around longer and a have a view on life and the clay person’s surroundings that little George is never, ever going to understand.  Every time he looks up at you, he trembles, and you have to take his little clay hand and say, “it’s okay Georgie don’t be afraid.”

However, one day you tell little George not to eat a little clay piece of fruit you made, and he looks up at you, defiance written all over his little clay face, and says “take a hike, loser”, and then goes right ahead and takes a little bite.  After a while, George isn’t listening to you at all, and he’s even going so far as saying he doesn’t even think you exist.  That you’re just a figment of his or someone else’s imagination.  He curses you and spits in your direction as if it could get any where near you.  He starts building little clay images of his own and saying, “this is what made me”, and when he gets tired of that, he just starts claiming to have evolved over millions of years, even though you just made him hours ago.

Now, at this point you could just smash little George.  That would be no big thing for you.  You could take control and make him do what you want. The little monster is out of control after all.  I mean honestly what would you do?

And yet here we are little dust people acting just like George.  Our fear ought not stem from the fact that God could squash us. He could pull us apart piece by piece and feed us to the dog.  He could throw us into a proverbial kiln that never shuts off.  There’s really nothing that God couldn’t do to us.  Who could oppose Him?

And yet despite all that the fear George felt before he disobeyed did not stem from all the horrible things you could to him, it came from your otherness. And it’s the same with our fear of God.  He is above and separate from everything else that is.  He made it all.  Another way to say this is “God is holy”.

I mean consider the seraphim in Isaiah 6.  They stand around the throne of God faces and feet covered in the fear of God, yelling “Holy, Holy, Holy” or “different, different, different,” all day long for eternity. 

God’s holiness is a fearful thing, and anyone that would tell you otherwise has never experienced His presence in His real, raw power.  And much like George the clayman, we’re foolish to not approach God with fear in this relationship He’s called us to because ultimately the lack of the fear of the Lord leads to sin.

Next Week: What No Fear of the Lord looks like.

The Man's Man

Last week in Relationship Tuesday we began to talk about the fear of the Lord.  This is the starting point for a relationship with God.  Without a proper fear of the Lord, we can’t understand all the complexities of the relationship He wants to have with us.  And this is a real fear, not simply awe and respect, though those are important.  Everyone who’s come in contact with this God who’s offering us relationship has hit the dust in sheer terror, even John the beloved disciple.

John and Jesus were tight.  John even rested his head on Jesus’ chest at the last supper.  There are very few people I would let cuddle up with me like that, and all of them are family, namely my wife, my son, and my little sisters, though they’ve stopped doing that so much now that they’ve grown up.  If any of my guy friends said, “hey let me rest my head on your chest”, I’d probably laugh and punch them in the mouth.

Seriously though, John and Jesus were close, and to be fair John was probably a teenager at this point, just a boy, so it’s not so weird as all that.  Jesus was like his father or older brother, and John loved Him. 

Everything John writes is about love, but we also read that he was a bit surly.  Jesus calls him and his brother “Sons of Thunder”.  They sound like a professional wrestling tag team group.

They’re the ones who ask if they can call down fire and consume people.  They’re the ones who ask if it’s time to go to war with Rome and bring the kingdom.  They’re the ones whose mother asks if they can’t sit on Jesus’ right and left in the kingdom.  John was the only disciple that went and stood at the crucifixion even though it meant he would be seen as a disciple and could have been arrested and killed too. There were two things you can be sure of when reading the Bible: John the apostle loved Jesus, and he was fearless.

And yet, when John stands face to face with the glorified Christ in Revelations 1:17, he “fell at His feet as though dead.”  And like every human being who ever has had contact with God since Adam’s fall, Jesus has to reach down and say, “do not be afraid.”

So, why then does this same John, who turns into a quivering pile of Jell-O at the sight of the glorified Jesus, write, “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18)?

If that small phrase were all John wrote, then it would seem strange. But most people who use that phrase to suggest we ought not be afraid of God anymore, don’t quote everything John wrote here: “By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.” (1 John 4:17-18)

John is talking about being afraid of the Day of Judgment and being afraid of punishment.  In that respect, if His love is perfected in us, we do have no reason to be afraid of God’s punishment.  There is no punishment for those who know God and are known by Him. 

However, not being afraid of being punished does not preclude that we have no more reason to fear God.  In fact if punishment is the only reason you’re afraid of God, you don’t know Him. 

We fear Him for the same reason we serve Him--because of who He is not what He can do to us or for us.

Next Week: The Fear of Claymen

The Fear of the Lord

In our last Relationship Tuesday, we talked about God’s desire to have a relationship with us--that He wants us to know Him and be known by Him in a relational sense.   We looked at examples of God having relationship with men throughout the Bible.   One example of those men was Job, and we looked at despite everything that Job went through, He didn’t know God relationally until God showed up and introduced Himself.

Do you remember how God described Job?  Job 1:8 says, “Then the LORD said to Satan, ‘Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.’”

And Satan responds, “Does He fear the Lord for nothing?”

What have you been taught about the “fear of the Lord”?  What does it mean to fear God?

I’ve heard a lot of sermons and read a lot of books that say having “the fear of the Lord” means to have an awe and respect for Him.  And I think we should be in awe of Him and respect Him, but what happens when someone in the Bible comes face to face with the Almighty God?

When God appears to Abraham, Abraham falls on his face (Genesis 17:3).  When God confronts Job, Job drops down and says, “I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:6). When the glory of the Lord filled the temple, the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud (2 Chronicles 5:13,14).  When the Lord appears to Daniel, he is frightened and falls on his face (Daniel 8:17).  Ezekiel is frightened and falls down when he sees God (Ezekiel 1:28).  Isaiah has the same thing happen (Isaiah 6:5).  And lest we think this is all Old Testament, let’s not forget John who also falls on his face in fear like a dead man when he sees the glorified Lord (Revelation 1:17).

It seems to me that these are not just moments of awe and reverence but real fear.  Maybe even terror since a lot them faint away like dead men.

What do you think about this idea that the fear of the Lord means terror: the idea that if you were to stand before God right this minute, you’re first response wouldn’t be a big hug fest, not a moment of confrontation where you get to ask about deep theological questions you have, but sheer absolute terror?

Why does this idea make us so uncomfortable?  And why is a real fear of the Lord such an important part of our relationship with God?

Psalm 111:10 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” If we skip this step of fearing God, all of our ideas about our relationship with God will be founded on foolishness instead of the wisdom of the Lord. 

Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at more aspects of the fear of the Lord like why we fear Him, what happens when we don’t fear Him, the difference between fearing God and fearing punishment, and what John means when he says, “perfect love drives out fear.”

Next Week: John and the Fear of the Lord

Does God Know You?

Last week in the Relationship Tuesday series, we talked about the difference between Knowing About God and Knowing God.  This week we’re going to talk about God knowing us.  That is after all part of a relationship right?  Both parties know each other.

When I use the word “know” here, I’m not talking about know as in the omniscient way He knows everything.  I’m talking about a more intimate knowledge, a familiarity or a relational knowledge, if you will.

In Matthew 7:20-23 Jesus says, “"Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. Many will say to Me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; DEPART FROM ME, YOU WHO PRACTICE LAWLESSNESS.'

Clearly there are those who think they know Jesus, that do amazing works in His name, I dare say more than most of us have done, but who do not have a relationship with Him.  They think they know Him, but when they claim to know Him on Judgment day, He doesn’t recognize them as His own.

It’s like knowing about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.  You can read all the tabloids, see all their movies, join their fan clubs, follow them on Twitter, even get your hair cut to look just like them, but if you were to show up on their doorstep claiming to know them, you’d be promptly dragged away by their body guards, turned over to the police and imprisoned for harassment.

And I don’t choose my analogy lightly.  These Hollywood icons are in many ways defining what relationships should look like whether that’s civil, friendship, marriage, or even family, and a lot of those ideas are superimposed on our relationship with God. 

Now, scripture does use a lot of earthly metaphors to describe our relationship with God such as Father, brother, bridegroom, friend, king, etc., but too often our ideas about these metaphors are informed by the imperfect rather than by the perfect—God Himself.  Our relationship with God as Father for instance is different than our relationship with our earthly father, and it’s far different than the fatherly relationships portrayed in movies.

All that to say, we ought not treat God as we would treat any old relationship, and we certainly ought not imagine that our knowledge about Him and scripture, our good deeds done in His name, or even seeing miracles happen in His name are the same as knowing Him or even more crazy that these things mean He ought to know us.

But how do we know that God knows us?  Jesus says He doesn’t know those who practice lawlessness.  What’s lawlessness?  Jesus also says that all the law and the prophets rest on two commandments: Love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew 22:37-40).  If you love God with everything and love others, you’re not lawless.

Paul spells it out in very simple terms: “If anyone loves God, then he is known by Him” (1 Corinthians 8:3). 

Our quest isn’t to learn about God, so we gain a lot of knowledge: head or heart knowledge for those who speak Christianese.  Our quest is to love God with everything we’ve got regardless if we understand Him or His ways because we’ll never really understand the infinite, unfathomable God, but we can know Him, and if we love Him, we can be known by Him.


Next Week: The Fear of the Lord

Knowing About God Vs. Knowing God

Welcome to Week 2 of Relationship Tuesdays, where we’re looking at how God defines the relationship we have with Him. 

When I started my Christian walk, the first book of the Bible I read was Job.  What a place to start right?  But let’s look at his story in the context of knowing about God vs. knowing God.

When praising Job before Satan, God says this about Job, “Have you considered My servant Job? For there is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, fearing God and turning away from evil."

Job is the most righteous man alive at the time; there is no one like him on the Earth.  I think most of us know the story from this point forward.  Satan says that if God lowered His protection of Job, Job would curse God and die.  God basically says, “take your best shot, but don’t kill him.”  And for the rest of the book we read about Job’s unparalleled misery.  We don’t know how long Job suffered, but we know his friends came and stayed with him for a week before they even talked, which must have been uncomfortable, especially since they broke the silence with all kinds of accusations about how Job must have sinned. 

And through it all, Job remains faithful though he does question God a lot.  And at the end God shows up and speaks to Job.  You’d think it would be words of comfort or encouragement, but God basically says, “Who are you to question me?  I’m God.” 

Job’s response is what really struck me as a new Christian, and even now it reminds me what this Christian walk is all about:

“I know that You can do all things, And that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted. 'Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?' "Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand, Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know." 'Hear, now, and I will speak; I will ask You, and You instruct me.'

I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear; But now my eye sees You; Therefore I retract, And I repent in dust and ashes."

Job, the most righteous man on earth, says, “until now I have only heard of You.  I’ve only known about You.”  And if you read the things Job says about God, his knowledge is on par with any seminarian or pastor you’ll ever meet.  “But now I’ve seen you, and I take it all back.  I was talking about things I didn’t understand, and I repent in dust in ashes.” 

Before I found Jesus, I had taught a class on the Bible as literature, wrote a thesis on St. Augustine and some of the early church fathers, and read the Bible cover to cover several times.  I used to debate with Christians all the time and much like Satan in the wilderness with Jesus, I’d use scripture against them.  But when I met Christ, I realized I didn’t know anything, and even now in the presence of His holiness, I’m an ignorant fool. 

There is no knowledge you’ll ever accumulate on earth that will compare to seeing God.

In 1 Corinthians 8:1-3 Paul says, “Now concerning things sacrificed to idols, we know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge makes arrogant, but love edifies. If anyone supposes that he knows anything, he has not yet known as he ought to know; but if anyone loves God, he is known by Him.”

Next Week: Does God Know You?