Fear of God? 預覽

Learn His Ways

God lamented ancient Israel: “They have not known my ways” (Heb. 3:10). What angered God, in particular, is that the majority of the spies who investigated the Promised Land won out over Joshua and Caleb and did not go into Canaan when they could have (Num. 14:1-10). God has ways. You have your ways. I have mine. My wife knows my ways. I know her ways. You may not like God’s ways! For example, he is a jealous God (Deut. 5:9). That is what lay at the heart of the issue with ancient Israel and with many today. Sadly, some hate this truth about God. He is a God of glory (Acts 7:2). He is sovereign, as he said to Moses: “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy” (Exod. 33:19). He is a holy God (1 Pet.1:16). He is all-powerful (Jer. 32:27). God wants us to love and worship him for the way He is.

The Holy Spirit—the Third Person of the Trinity, has His ways. He can be grieved (Eph. 4:30); He is very sensitive. The chief way we grieve the Spirit is, almost certainly, by “bitterness” and unforgiveness (Eph. 4:31–32). The Holy Spirit may be quenched (1 Thess. 5:19) by not recognizing and affirming the way He may choose to manifest His presence. The Holy Spirit can be resisted, as when the Jews rejected the preaching of Stephen (Acts 7:51). The Holy Spirit can be blasphemed by people who attribute to Jesus “an unclean spirit” and thus, are guilty of an “eternal sin” (Mark 3:29–30).

Jesus Christ, God’s eternal Son, is the “same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). Some think the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are different and not the same. Some do not realize that the Jesus of the four Gospels and the Jesus revealed in the Book of Revelation is the same Jesus. First, Jesus never apologized for the God of the Old Testament (His Father); He mirrored God Almighty. “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). “I can do nothing on my own” (John 5:30), only what the Son “sees the Father doing” (John 5:19). The same Jesus who is “gentle and lowly in heart” (Matt. 11:29) has eyes “like a flame of fire” (Rev. 1:14). The “bruised reed” which Jesus would not break (Matt. 12:20) has feet “like burnished bronze” (Rev. 1:15).

The God of the Bible is eternal and independent of His creation: the one and only true God—the Creator of the universe, the author of Scripture, the God who sent his one and only Son into the world to die on a cross.

Get to know God’s ways. Embrace them. Esteem them. Honor them. The result will be that the fear of God will be a part of you. Never—ever—apologize for the God of the Bible.

The children of Israel should have known God’s ways, but they allowed unbelief to set in and missed their inheritance of entering into the Promised Land, called God’s “rest” (Heb. 3:19; 4:1, 9–10). The result for them? Cowardice. The fear of man. Listening to one another rather than hearing God. Counterproductive anxiety. Ingratitude. Stubbornness. Unteachableness. Unfaithfulness. Deafness. Hence the word, “If you hear his voice” (Heb. 3:7). As long as you and I can hear God’s voice, it is a good sign that we can still enter into our inheritance! It means God is not finished with us yet.

It is only a matter of time that we must choose whether to accept or reject the fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord is a choice. The writer of Proverbs envisaged a time when people would call upon God, but “I will not answer; they will seek me diligently but will not find me.” Why? Because they “hate knowledge” and “did not choose the fear of the LORD” (Prov. 1:28–29, emphasis added).

The reason the writer of Hebrews said, “If you hear his voice,” is because the Christian Jews in AD 60s were already becoming hard of hearing—“dull of hearing” (Heb. 5:11). The worst scenario – God forbid that this happens to you or me—is to become stone deaf. That is what lay behind those who, having been enlightened, having tasted of the word of God, shared in the Holy Spirit and the powers of the age to come, nonetheless chose not to obey and affirm God’s ways: they could not be renewed again to repentance (Heb. 6:4–6).

I, therefore, ask you: Will you choose the fear of the Lord? Joshua exhorted, “Choose this day whom you will serve” (Josh. 24:15). You must choose between making the glory of God your priority and making praise from one another your priority (John 5:44). Total forgiveness is an act of the will: to let your enemy off the hook or make them pay. You must choose whether to affirm God’s ways or choose a god whose ways resemble what you want God to be like.

The fear of the Lord is “clean” (Ps. 19:9). Pure. Rewarding. Good.