fools despise wisdom and instruction.” NRSV
I grew up in the 60s and 70s, the age of Aquarius, the age of free love (and free sex), the age of letting your hair down. A lot of what happened in those two decades changed the American (and perhaps the world’s) landscape. We became more casual about a lot of things, about our relationships, about our dress, about our attitudes, and yes, . . . about our worship.
I can remember attending church in the early 60s. Ours was a smaller church in a tiny suburban community (near LA). It wasn’t a community of influence and the families that attended didn’t have much money. And yet, there wasn’t a problem for people to come to church with both minds and bodies “dressed for success,” as it were. Of course, many families (as did ours) had only one set of “Sunday clothes,” but we wore them cleaned and pressed every Sunday. Were there the one or two affluent families? Of course! Everyone knew that Mr. A made enough money for his wife to dress in designer threads (though she was a thrifty woman and sold each year’s closet to a resale shop to help finance her next year’s wardrobe). But, on the whole, unless your mom sewed (as did mine), your Sunday clothes were the same from week to week.
No one minded.
And no one would have ever thought of coming to church in their casual clothes. We wanted to give our best to the Lord, including what we had on. (Plus, don’t you know that what you wear affects how you act?)
One of the (many) reasons church looked like this was a very serious “fear” of the Lord. These days, you don’t hear that word discussed much in church. It distresses me that we want to take all these “extreme” words out of our worship vocabulary and substitute them for words that make us feel better. Christianity is what it is because it gives us free and unlimited access to the Almighty Creator of the universe. Think about that. While we, as Christians, are many things we are also creatures, creations. I think sometimes we forget that.
One of the repercussions of the casualness of the 60s was to water down the true meaning of who we are and Who Father God is. This (the 60s) was the era of the beginning of many modern translations (which I love). But we threw out the formal language (the thee’s and thou’s). We threw out the capitalizations (capitalizing all the pronouns and nouns that were related to God). We threw out the red letters (all the words spoken by our Lord).
Now, none of that essentially changes us as Christians. But I think it can be indicative of a lowering of our respect for God. In many cases, God has gone from being (also) our Sovereign to being (only) our Friend. And we, as a Church, are beginning to show the signs of it.
When I was growing up, one of the people I grew to admire (because my mom admired her first) was Queen Elizabeth II of England. In addition to reading biographies about her, my mom always talked about how we might entertain the queen if she ever came to our house to visit (a treat that never occurred). But, in my studies about the Queen, there was one thing I learned: The Queen was able to choose commoners (us) as her friends, but commoners were not free to choose the Queen as friends. In other words, there wasn’t the same freedom of friendship with royalty as I had with the kids who lived down the block from me.
It’s the same with God. God, Creator of the universe, can call us “friend,” but we don’t have the same freedom. We can’t simply pal up with God unless He takes that first move. We don’t have permission to enter the throne room without permission.
I think that, in some ways, we have so reduced friendship with Jesus to “being pals” that we have forgotten that our friendship is with the King of kings and Lord of lords, the Creator of the universe, not just with Joe down the street. In other words, while we are blessed to be called “His friends” that friendship is not the same as what we experience with other people.
Jesus is our Friend, but only because He chose to make us His friend. He isn’t our pal.
Proverbs talks about the “fear of the Lord.” I believe that, in an effort to make Christianity more palatable, we have lost that “fear.” We don’t want to be afraid of God, so we have explained that this word really means “respect” (which it does), but not “fear” (which is also means. In fact, this word also means “terror.”) And while context helps us determine specific meaning, there is also the sense that God is Creator and we, as creatures, do need to have a healthy fear of Him.
A. W. Tozer talks about this. In fact, I think it’s one of the motivations for this particular book:
“I refer to the loss of the concept of majesty from the popular religious mind. The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshiping men. This she has done not deliberately, but little by little and without her knowledge; and her very unawareness only makes her situation all the more tragic.
“The low view of God entertained almost universally among Christians is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us. A whole new philosophy of the Christian life has resulted from this one basic error in our religious thinking.
“With our loss of the sense of majesty has come the further loss of religious awe and consciousness of the divine Presence. We have lost our spirit of worship and our ability to withdraw inwardly to meet God in adoring silence. Modern Christianity is simply not producing the kind of Christian who can appreciate or experience the life in the Spirit.” (A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 1961. p. vii).
It’s not wrong to be afraid of God. What’s wrong is to have such a prideful fear that we turn away from Him. Personally, I think that most of us know, in our heart of hearts, that God is to be feared. But, when we sin, rather than immediately going to the Throne in humility and shame to receive forgiveness and restoration, we are so wrapped up in our own pride that we ignore our sin and lower God to our image so that we don’t have to confront who we really are or what we’ve done. We don’t want to be humble (or be humbled). We don’t want to be shown our sin in the light of His righteousness. So, we have stripped Jesus of His title (Lord) and position (Christ/Messiah) and made Him simply our pal. And in doing so, we have hurt ourselves. We have stepped outside of the presence of the true and only Almighty God of the universe and made instead a god in our own image.
It’s not wrong to fear God. He is both fearful and loving. If we truly want to love (and worship) Who He is, then we must learn to know Who He is (at least as much as a creature can know the Creator) in all of His fulness and glory.
There is a wonderful psalm that speaks, I think, to all this:
“The law of the Lord is perfect,
reviving the soul;
the decrees of the Lord are sure,
making wise the simple;
the precepts of the Lord are right,
rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the Lord is clear,
enlightening the eyes;
the fear of the Lord is pure,
enduring forever;
the ordinances of the Lord are true
and righteous altogether.” (Psalm 19:7-9 NRSV)
If we want the law to revive us, if we want His decrees to make us wise, if we want His law to enlighten us, then we need to embrace the true fear of the Lord; we need to see God as He is and trust Him to be and do what He has already promised.
© 2008 Robin L. O’Hare. All Rights Reserved. International copyright reserved. This study may be copied for nonprofit and/or church purposes only without permission when copied in its entirety (including this notice).
