"‘Your wickedness will punish you; your backsliding will rebuke you. Consider then and realize how evil and bitter it is for you when you forsake the Lord your God, and have no awe of me,’ declares the Lord, the Lord Almighty."
In God, there is no love without justice.
There is no mercy without repentance.
There is no worship without fear..
I read last night, and then again this morning, many comments from friends and family about having a wonderful, prosperous, and amazing new year. I had every intention of writing a study about how much God loves you, each and every one of you. It was to be a study about unending mercy, everlasting love, and God reaching out to embrace you.
All of which is true.
But then. (How many times are our best intentions stopped coldly by a "but then.")
But then, this morning, near the top of my news feed on Facebook came a post from an acquaintance. A post about the abuse within her marriage. About the pain in her heart caused by an unfaithful "Christian" husband. About how the Church needs to rise up and be the Church that God wants, that He intended.
And I knew that I couldn’t write what I had hoped to write. I knew that I needed to return to the message that God has placed on my life and in my heart. The message that has permeated my thoughts (and my writing) for many years.
The message that if we don’t face our sins, if we don’t repent, we are going to face grave consequences. If we refuse to understand that we are not only to love and worship God, but that our love, our worship, is impossible unless we fear Him! He isn’t a BFF to be coddled, compelled into some outrageous situation, and then dropped when He disappoints. He is the Lord, the Lord Almighty. And English doesn’t have words strong enough to describe Who He is and how we should fall at His feet and worship without regret.
In this verse, the NIV says: "[You] have no awe of me." The NKJV translates it thus: "The fear of Me is not in you."
The Hebrew root word is pachad and means "to fear, tremble, revere, dread, be in awe or dread; to be in great dread; to cause to dread." (Strong’s H6342). Unfortunately, in the late 1960's-1970s, this concept became completely watered down within the Church. We were taught that we shouldn’t be afraid of God; that this concept was only that we should respect Him. And then Satan, I’m convinced, used this idea of respect and turned it totally around until it became about us and our rights, us and our circumstances, us and our feelings. And suddenly worship became about how we feel about God and not about Who He actually is.
It’s always been about God. About Who He is. About what He rightly and righteously demands from us as those who claim to be His people. The Lord, Adonai, Yahweh (Jehovah), the Lord of all the hosts of heaven. The Lord Who holds this creation in the palm of His hand. The Lord Creator, Ruler, Master, the Beginning and the End. The Lord Who has demanded that He be worshiped with fear in our hearts because He can justly do whatever He wants with sinners such as us and the only recourse we have is to fall at His feet and accept His mercy which He didn’t have to give, but which He gives freely because of His love.
Here’s the thing: God loves us! That is a truth. But He loves only extends through His mercy and that given through the blood of the Lord Jesus at Calvary. There is no love except through His salvation, no reaching out except through the blood, no love extended except through forgiveness. And forgiveness comes only when we repent. It is not tolerance or acceptance. God doesn’t accept us as we are in the sense that He doesn’t excuse our sinfulness. Our sinfulness was so repugnant to Him that only His great love overcame that revulsion. And that only through His death on the cross to pay the penalty for our sinfulness. There was no excusing, no avoiding, no learning to tolerate who we are. Justice, God’s justice, had to be served and it was through the death of His only Son. There was nothing we could do. And it’s time that we began to be serious about our own sinfulness and crouch down on our faces before a Holy and Mighty God.
If we want to experience God’s love, we must first experience His forgiveness. And we can only be forgiven when we confess our sins. "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9). Forgiveness can’t come without confession and confession comes at the foot of the cross, looking at His justice and righteousness and knowing that we will fall short every day, every time. Confession only comes when we, in righteous fear, allow our worship to shed the pure light of the Holy Spirit on our sins. Only then can we truly understand how much God loves us.
© 2017 Robin L. O’Hare. All rights reserved. Permission granted for nonprofit and church groups to use this article in its entirety (including this notice). For other uses, please contact servinggodalone@yahoo.com.
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