Reason #11: Fear of God

Oops.  This must be in the wrong file.  We’re not supposed to talk about this anymore.  Isn’t this all puritan and fear-mongering?  God is love, so we, like, shouldn’t have to be afraid of Him, right?  That fear stuff is so 18th century.

Oh. Except that it’s not.  As I mentioned in the last section, God is the judge.  Jesus himself will judge each person for their deeds, and those who do not turn from their lifestyles of greed and selfishness and invite God to change them will have to face Him on that day.  That’s scary.

Do you ever wonder what God will say to you?  What would He say if you saw Him today, right now?  What would you say?

A lot of Christians like to reassure themselves that once I’m saved, I’m saved, so I don’t have to worry.  Well, that’s true, if you’re really saved.  And what is salvation?  I’m not going to delve into this too much here, because that would also require many books of discussion, and we’d still not all agree or understand it.  I just want to point out what Hebrews says in chapter 10.

Heb 10:26, 27:
For while we are willfully sinning after the receiving of the knowledge of the truth, a sacrifice no longer remains for sins, but some fearful expectation of judgment and a zeal of fire going to consume the adversaries.  (NT Transline)

The passage goes on to say a few more sobering things about people who have known something of God but have departed from Him, and ignored what they heard.  One of my former pastors once said, “I believe that salvation is permanent, but I’m not going to test my theory.”

That about sums it up.  I’m quite confident in God’s salvation, and have little fear of death (at least, while sitting in this chair).  None of us really knows what happens after we die, or how God will speak to each of us, or what kinds of rewards He will give to all the various people.  What is clear is that not everyone in heaven is given the same thing.  And our deeds will be judged.  I don’t know how all of that works out (and neither does anyone else…), but I do know that I don’t want to meet God and hear Him talk about my lifetime of unbridled lust and perversion, going all the way into my elderly years.  There are elderly men still going to strip clubs, renting porn at the store, and looking at magazines (come to think of it, an elderly man runs one of those magazines, and seems to be enjoying himself, at least publicly…but I digress again).

I don’t want to disappoint my Creator.  I don’t want to hear about all the plans and hopes He had for me that I failed to meet, because my soul was continuously compromised by sin and selfish lust.  Because I didn’t care about the exploitation of women that my actions helped sustain.  I don’t want God to recount all the times He called to me, trying to turn me back, but I didn’t listen because I had to see the next month’s update on my favorite porn site.  It sounded like the best one yet!

I don’t want to hear God quote me a dozen times saying, “I’ll give it up next year.”  I don’t want to arrive in His presence and feel like I’ve never been there before.  I don’t want to hang my head in shame before Him.  I want to look into His eyes and see His pleasure with me.  One of the best quotes from a great movie called Chariots of Fire expresses this perfectly.  It’s a film about two men running in the Olympics.  One of them is a Christian, and someone is trying to convince him to go on a mission to China.  But he replies, “I believe God made me to be a missionary to China.  But He also made me fast.  And when I run, I feel His pleasure.”

What a great awareness it is to know God’s pleasure with us!  To arrive in heaven knowing we have completed the tasks set before us.  To know God has completed His work in us, that we are holy and righteous in His sight.

The fear of God isn’t a negative thing.  It’s a positive.  I don’t have to fear the eternal separation that awaited me before salvation.  But I do fear missing out on the great things He has made available to me.  Two biblical examples demonstrate this, one on each side.  You can read the whole stories for yourself to get the details.  Esther and Jonah are a study in contrast between two people who perceived their lives before God in different ways.

Esther was faced with a choice.  Either she could go before the king and risk death, but do so to save her people from a mass slaughter, or she could preserve her safety and hope God saved the people some other way.  Her uncle Mordecai sums it up as follows:

Esther 4:14:
For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place, and you and your father’s house will perish.  And who knows whether you have not attained royalty for such a time as this.”  (NAS)

Mordecai had faith, and knew God would somehow save His people.  But God’s first choice was to use Esther, and if she shrunk back in fear, her whole life after that would be a life of regret.  Of wasted opportunity.  The question was, who does Esther fear more?  The king, who could execute her, or God, who would judge this decision, possibly more than any other single decision in her life?  Esther chooses God, and risks her life to save her people.  She puts their lives before her own, a Christlike quality.

This is part of what it means to fear God.  It makes us fearless in the face of evil in the world.  The world cannot touch us, and God alone can save us.  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, it says in Proverbs.  Part of that wisdom comes when we realize that to fear God is to not fear anyone, or any situation, on earth.  Fear of God produces courage.  We need not fear loneliness, or success, or what life will be like if we give up our addictions and false comforts.

Jonah, on the other hand, did not fear God, so much to the point that he actively disobeyed a direct command from Him.  Jonah was told to preach to a non-Jewish nation, full of idolatry and evil of all kinds–Assyria, who had conquered much of the world at this time and would later conquer Israel.  He didn’t want these evil sinners to be shown any mercy from God, so he flees.  As we all know, God catches up to him using a rather unique aquatic encounter.  Check out Jonah’s language after he obeys God when given a second chance, and the Assyrians repent:

Jonah 4:2
Please Lord, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country?  Therefore in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity.  (NAS)

After this Jonah even asks God to take his life!  First off, God’s mercy is amazing, because this nation did not “deserve” any of it, from what we can tell.  Yet God shows them mercy, and offers them a chance to repent.  Even more incredibly, they take it and the city repents.  God likewise, as is His nature, relents and does not destroy the city.
Jonah can’t stand this, because he wants the city to be judged.

His own judgmental heart toward these people is stronger than his fear of God.  Now, God is merciful to him too, because the rest of the book is God trying to teach Jonah something about His nature and authority.  It’s profound.  This story reveals to us something of how God relates to individual people and whole nations, and how great is His mercy.  But it also shows how He reacts to disobedience, in this case from one of His own prophets.  Jonah finally does obey, but as we see here, he doesn’t like it.  But imagine if he hadn’t obeyed, the second time.  What would God have said to him then?

What will He say to us, if we live a lifetime of sin and compromised Christianity, if there is such a thing?  I want Him to say good things.  What can be greater than pleasing the Creator?  And what can be more scary than arriving before Him, uncertain of the response we’ll get, because our shame follows us to the grave?  How much sin does it take before your spirit becomes lukewarm for life?

Reason #10: To Avoid Suffering

This is a tough one to be honest about.  Some of us have done terrible things.  Strip clubs.  Exploitation.  Prostitution.  Maybe even children were involved, even if on screen (note: this doesn’t make it less destructive–for the child, or the woman for that matter).  There are drunken bachelor parties (which, by the way, are not the only kind; see #9 as motivation to have a ‘regret-free’ bachelor party), escort girls, business traveling and all the alone time that comes with it, and internet chat room and webcam filth.  These are the best, of course, because you can anonymously say whatever you want from across a wire, and no one will know.  See Reason #11 next on what to think about this.

For anyone who has dabbled in any or all of these and the many other forms of sexual perversion extolled by our culture of “freedom,” we know that feeling of total disgust when we get ‘caught,’ in whatever form that manifests itself.  The most visible example is the reality show called To Catch a Predator, on Dateline NBC, where reporters pose as 13-year old girls in chat rooms to lure potential predators to a house so they can be videotaped, humiliated, and then arrested.  I personally despise this show, for a variety of reasons, but it does have one redeeming quality.  You see firsthand accounts of people experiencing shame, possibly for the first time in their lives.  Shame sucks.  There are few feelings worse than this.  Some guys on that show are reputable members of their communities.  Afterward, I can only imagine the damage this does to their careers and families.

God uses shame, however, for a positive outcome.  It’s called godly sorrow in most translations.  Here it is in the NT Transline:

II Cor 7:10:
For the grief in accordance with God works unregretted repentance leading to salvation, but the grief of the world produces death.

Repentance without regret, and the receiving of mercy from God.  He gives us a new heart of purity and righteousness, and we stand before Him clothed in white.  This is real and it happens to the fullest measure, totally renewing our hearts and souls, when we repent in truth and faith and sincerity.  This is how God uses shame.  The world uses it, like that show I hate, to cast judgment on people and look down on them, and make itself feel superior.  “I may go to strip clubs, but at least I’m not like those sickos going after children in chatrooms on the internet.”  This show helps all the other perverts (ones like you and me!) justify our conduct as being ‘not as bad’ as the others.  The ‘not as bad’ morality runs rampant in our culture.  People use it in a multitude of contexts to justify their despicable actions.  We’ll discuss this more in a future section.

That’s not how God sees it.  Each of us is accountable for our own works.  Each of us will face Him one day.  And he won’t weigh our conduct against that of other people.  He will weigh it against His word, the only standard for moral conduct.  By that standard, we’re all in trouble, apart from His great mercy.

God uses shame to lead us to repentance, but shame is not His first tactic.  God doesn’t want to humiliate you.  He’s not waiting for a chance to let you get caught in the act of some horrific sin just to ruin your life.  He gives us many chances to reform our conduct and repent, to change our hearts, in private, between us and Him.  He provides other people we can turn to for help who won’t judge or embarrass us.

There have been just a few occasions in my life where I have been ‘caught’ in some way.  Once in college I had a relatively harmless (not as bad…see?) swimsuit video hidden in my dorm closet.  Why was it hidden?  Because I didn’t want my roommate to know I had it, of course, because then I’d look like a hypocrite.  Duh.  Ooh, wait a second.  That reasoning doesn’t really make me not a hypocrite.  It just means he doesn’t know I am.  Anyway, he was concurrently trying to quit smoking, so he had asked me to hide his lighter, I think it was.  One day, he couldn’t take it anymore, and wanted his lighter from me.  Like a good accountability partner, I said no.  Naturally, he started searching, but he didn’t find the lighter.  Instead, he found my hidden gem of 9 semi-beautiful women in various forms of undress on a so-called swimsuit video.  Only partial nudity, so it’s no big deal.

Needless to say, I was embarrassed.  But what was the source of my embarrassment?  He quickly showed it to a passing student in the hallway, who promptly declared I should get something better that shows a lot more, and thought nothing of it.  The eyes of the world.  And my roommate thought this was all hilarious.  So why be embarrassed?  Because I was hanging on to this notion that I was a witness, and that my witness had just been irreparably tarnished.

We’ll get to this later, but this is actually a tactic of the devil, our spiritual enemy.  The truth is, my witness wasn’t damaged in that moment, had I not been so compromised that I couldn’t take advantage of this opportunity to be one.  I could have destroyed the video (yes, this was back when we still had videos…), and explained to him that I too am a sinner, and that I need to repent for having this, and that I’m actually grateful he found it because this moment will help me get back on track, spiritually.  But I didn’t say any of that, because my confidence was weak, and my witness ineffective.  I blew a chance to reveal to him God’s mercy, the sinfulness of man, and the power of repentance.  (This is reason #6, in case you missed it).

Now, that was pretty minor suffering compared to what happens to some people.  Former televangelist Ted Haggard is a great example.  He lost his whole career and reputation because of his sexual appetites.  Fortunately for him, his wife forgave him, and they repaired their marriage and have tried to minister about this to people.  God doesn’t dump us when we fail, but we have to turn back to Him and truly repent.  Repentance is not a fanciful notion or a casual “I’m sorry” stated in a sincere voice to a man behind a curtain.  It is a deep-rooted decision to turn to God and away from sin–all sin–and to believe that God will change us with such power that we will be able to never return to the old way of thinking or acting.  Repentance is impossible without faith.

We don’t need to go into all the possible ways people can suffer in this life because of the kinds of sins mentioned at the outset.  Destroyed marriages, traumatized children, lost jobs, divorce, imprisonment, and tarnished reputations are just the easy examples.  But you see people go through these things regularly.  The poor guys on Dateline didn’t wake up one day and decide to go meet a 14-year old girl they talked dirty with on the internet.  Their plight started years, possibly decades ago, when they chose to put their own gratification and pleasure before the dignity and worth of another human being.  When they chose, quite innocently as a 12-year old boy, to go look at the Playboy their friend found in his father’s closet.

Sidenote: Spare me the inane idea that Playboy isn’t to blame because not everyone who looks at Playboy ends up preying after young teen girls.  If you believe this, your values and beliefs have been compromised by the world and its ‘not as bad’ code of conduct.  It’s as stupid as saying the drug dealer isn’t to blame for all the coked up addicts whose families are ruined because the mothers blow all their money to get strung out on meth.  Of course the mother made that choice.  So did the dealer.  They profit off the other’s suffering.  The Bible has something to say about this too, which we’ll return to later.

Revelation 18:11, 13, 15

The merchants of the earth weep and mourn over her, because no one buys their cargoes anymore–cargoes of horses and chariots and slaves and human lives. The merchants of these things, who became rich from her, will stand at a distance because of the fear of her torment, weeping and mourning.  (NAS)

The Bible doesn’t give people who profit off the suffering or exploitation of others a free pass.  It says they will be judged, and will weep and mourn in fear and trembling on that day.  They are at fault, and they will be held accountable by God.

Returning to the main idea, so much suffering can be averted when we avoid falling into the easy traps of sin that don’t seem that bad from an earthly perspective.  My swimsuit video was a gateway drug.  I could tell you what this eventually led to over the years that followed.  It wasn’t pretty.

Nevertheless, I avoided far more suffering than I could have easily experienced had I taken my addiction to the fullest extent.  There is a lot I never did, and now that I’m married, I am so thankful God protected me from those things.  Draw near to Him, and He will draw near to you.  One benefit of being close to God is that He shields us from many forms of evil and suffering.  He does the work for us, because He’s on our side.  If God is for us, who is against us?