A Bit on Fear, Part 4 October 16, 2007

Considering obedience as freedom and grace, we can look afresh at Jesus.  If the fear of the Lord means using everything at our disposal to get ourselves in the way of God’s best intentions for us; and if the law is the way God chooses to communicate his best intentions to us so that we would be conformed to his character and personality, then Matthew 5:17-18 should elicit a resounding ‘of course!’ from us.

Jesus says: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.  I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.”

 If obeying the law is fearing God and Jesus comes as the perfect image of the invisible God, then Jesus is the ultimate human picture of what it means to use everything at our disposal to get in the way of God’s best intentions for us.  In fact, clothing ourselves in Christ is getting into God’s will.  We clothe ourselves in Christ, the flesh-and-blood human version of the scroll-and-ink law, the embodiment of the wisdom literature and the psalms, the climax of the OT narrative.  And in doing so, we find that everything that God has put at our disposal is just enough for each of us to begin witnessing the fullness of God’s gracious plan for the world and to participate in his pursuit of redemption for his creation.  And what do we have at our disposal?  Our heart, soul, and strength–our churches, friends, families, libraries, classrooms, computers, pasts, futures, jobs, bank accounts, starbucks accounts; our intellects, emotions, interests, desires, intentions, thoughts, bodies; in short, everything (but ‘everything’ can be so vague).

As God’s image bearers living under the reign of Jesus Christ, when we read the Old Testament commands to fear the Lord we can have confidence that Jesus has led us into the kind of relationship with God that will not spare us a single one of his best intentions for us.  We obey and participate by the grace of the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of the one in whom God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell–and we seek to be transformed in thought, emotion, intention, words, and actions to the image of Christ.  Our God has left us with many resources to enable us to fear him and love him wholly, and his Spirit gifts us with wisdom from the Scriptures so that we can grow more and more like our God in our character and personhood. 

Weekend Plans October 15, 2007

Steve and I returned this afternoon from a weekend conference for middle school students through the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida.  A good friend of ours and myself were the speakers.  We had a great time, and the camp was a beautiful place to get away to for a couple days.

“A Bit on Fear, Part 4″ is coming soon!

Regulation of Religion October 11, 2007

There’s an insightful op-ed piece in the NY Times today that explores the dynamics behind government regulation of religion.  The author is Slavoj Zizek, a philosopher who takes matters of theology and religion very seriously.  It seems that the Chinese government has passed a law that requires all Tibetan regions to obtain permission for reincarnation to take place under their watch.  While this may offend our cultural sensitivity as Americans, Zizek provides a well-played rebuke to our regard for the heritage of other cultures.  Read it here.

A Bit on Fear, Part 3 October 8, 2007

Knowing that fear is the beginning of wisdom, we can read Deuteronomy 10:14-22 with a different view to the God whose character provides structure to these words:

To the Lord belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it. Yet the Lord set his affection on your ancestors and loved them, and he chose you, their descendants, above all the nations–as it is today. Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer. For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigners residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt. Fear the Lord your God and serve him. Hold fast to him and take your oaths in his name. He is your praise; he is your God, who performed for you those great and awesome wonders you saw with your own eyes. Your ancestors who went down into Egypt were seventy in all, and now the Lord your God has made you as numerous as the stars in the sky.

God’s command to fear and obey is not grounded in distant, wishful thinking as though he were some great patriarch watching TV from his couch and, having misplaced the remote, asks his kids to get up and change the channel when something that bores him comes on. Rather, God’s character establishes our character and God’s action establishes our action. It seems that we have a tendency to view the law as though God were just dictating what we should and shouldn’t do, and so we feel impinged upon by the commandments we find there. But 1 John 5:3 says that God’s commandments are not burdensome. How does that work out? Surely caring for foreigners and loving the orphan and the widow is burdensome. If God wanted to free us of burdens, then he would take care of the fatherless and let his children go play catch in the front yard; giving commandments of this sort doesn’t seem to lead to freedom.

The freedom is found in being like God; not in his nature, but in his character and personhood. He doesn’t command us to care for orphans in order to fill the gap created by his own neglect; God only commands us to do what he is already doing. God commands us to be caring and compassionate because he is caring and compassionate. God’s best intentions for us were evident from the point of our creation: he intends for us to be his image-bearers, to be like God. Fear of God, then, motivates conformity to his character and action. Verse 22 reveals the result of fearing God: abundant life. We demonstrate our fear of God by participating with him in his plan of redemption for the world, and our reward is to see life pour out upon us and increase from measurable quantities (seventy in all) to immeasurable (as many as the stars in the sky). With our God, the obedience that accompanies loving fear is both freedom and grace.

A Bit on Fear, Part 2 October 8, 2007

If fearing God means using everything at our disposal in order to put ourselves in the way of his best intentions for us, then what are some demonstrations of the fear of the Lord? Throughout the Old Testament, God was faithful to give his people instruction in how to love and serve him, to walk in his ways and obey his commandments which he gave them for their own good. In this way the law meant freedom–the law is how we make our character like his character, the law gives us some of the particulars that makes our love for the God of Israel distinctive from the love of other peoples’ for their man-made gods. God’s commandments are to be obeyed out of a loving, intimate fear. Such a fear is wholly unlike the fear of the surrounding nations for their gods.

For instance, in 1 Kings 18:16ff we see the difference between Elijah’s fear and the fear of the Baal worshipers. Elijah’s fear has as its object a God who is reliable, who does what he says he’s going to do, who can’t be manipulated, and who hears the prayers of his people the first time those prayers are said. The Baal worshipers suffered humiliation because they’re god was not reliable, he did not do what he said he would do (fire was, after all, one of Baal’s specialties–the challenge should have been easy!), their god is sometimes persuaded with increased effort such as slashing oneself and needs prayers being prayed by 850+ prophets repeated for hours at a time. The Baal worshipers fear made them anxious, frantic, and humiliated. Elijah’s fear gave him rest, security, and boldness.

The boldness and security that comes from fear in God is what makes it possible for us to listen to his commandments.  We know in whom we have believed so that our obedience comes not from an uncertain wariness about God’s response to us but out of our rest in the consistent character of the Lord.  In this way, fear is indeed the beginning of wisdom.

A Bit on Fear, Part 1 October 5, 2007

And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul, and to observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good (Deut. 10:12,13)?

In the Old Testament, we frequently find the command to fear God. Fear is an odd command (about as odd as the command to love in our culture, which assumes love is a passive feeling that just happens sometimes).  When we think of fear, we associate it as an emotion in response to a threatening person or situation.  We fear being left by those we love, we fear terrorist attacks that might take our lives, we fear losing our jobs, we fear car accidents, we fear being audited by the IRS, we fear all manner of things that might cause us harm.  And when we are afraid–seriously fearful–we do whatever we can to make sure that the threat of harm is not realized.  Fear drives us to avoid the object of our fear.  As a result, we seek security in relationships with those we love, we invest in preventing terrorist attacks (or avoiding places or situations where they’re most likely–hence, most of us don’t vacation in Afghanistan), we work harder to impress our bosses, we wear our seatbelts and stop at red lights, we make good on our taxes–in short, fear motivates us to live our lives in such a way that moves us out of the path of the things we fear.

But in all these cases the object of our fear is harmful and threatening to our sense of well-being.  What does fear look like when the object of our fear has our best interests in mind?  In the command to fear the Lord our God, we know that the object of our fear has our best interests at heart–in fact, he has our best interests in heart more than we have our best interests at heart.  He intends better for us and for those we love than we do.  In this case, then, fear is not getting out of the way of the object of our fear, it’s not avoiding the Lord.  Instead, the way that fear would motivate us to use everything at our disposal to avoid the intentions of a violent intruder in our home, the fear of the Lord motivates us to pursue the intentions of the God who has called us out of sin and death.  We don’t get out of his way the way we would dodge an oncoming semi that had drifted into our lane on the highway; rather, we swerve our lives in front of God’s purposes for us.  We obey his commands, listen to his Word, and learn his heart so we can use everything at our disposal to serve him, walk in his ways, and demonstrate that his decrees are for our own good.

A Bit on Evil: A Quote from Miroslav Volf October 2, 2007

In his book Free of Charge, Miroslav Volf writes,

Is evil, whether humanly caused or natural, God’s gift?  It is not.  Evil just inexplicably is.  God didn’t create it.  It’s a twisting of God’s creation, a negation of its original goodness, and therefore an assault on God.  In the end, God will finally and definitively overcome evil.  And even now God is engaged in countering it.  Just as God was mysteriously in the Crucified One, God is in the midst of humanity’s suffering, listening to every sigh, collecting every tear, resonating with the trembling with every fear-stricken heart.  Just as God was in the Resurrected One, God is in each helping hand, in each act of self-sacrifice, in each life laid down for another, and God occasionally even heals and protects without any human mediation.  God suffers and God helps (30).