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Sermon Manuscripts
What Does It Mean
To Fear The Lord? Part I
a sermon in the series:
The Holiness of God
A sermon delivered
Sunday Morning, January 11, 2009
at Oak Grove Baptist Church, Paducah, KY
by S. Michael Durham
© 2009 Real Truth Matters
Matthew 10:28
And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
Throughout this series, we have stated that we must not take God lightly; we must avoid approaching Him in a reckless or careless manner, because He is holy. We have tried to define what the holiness of God is or means, but we have been grasping to try to do so. It is difficult to define God’s holiness.
It involves moral purity – that is the first thing that comes to mind when we think of God’s holiness, but it is more than His moral purity. It involves that God is altogether different from any and all of His creation. He is not like us at all. We are like Him in some ways, but He is not like us. God is infinitely unlike even the holiest angel. The difference in His character and essence from the holiest of His creation is infinity. He is so above us all in worth and honor and beauty and majesty that none are even able to come into His presence without the aid and mediation of Jesus Christ. He is so holy that everything I have stated in this series up to this point is but a grain of sand in comparison to what is yet to be known of His holiness. His holiness is so vast that the combined knowledge of the greatest theologians is microscopic in comparison. God is holy.
For this reason, we should have some fear about us concerning this God of the Bible. He is to be revered, respected, adored, held in so high esteem, that now and again you feel your heart tremble as you’re overwhelmed thinking of His greatness. Don’t take my word for it – listen to the words of our text. As great a service as Charles Spurgeon and Martin Lloyd Jones were, these are not the words of Spurgeon or Jones. They are not the words of Jonathan Edwards or John Calvin, or John Wesley. They are not original with Luther or George Mueller or Hudson Taylor or any of these great men of God. They are not even the words of the apostles John or Paul. These are the words of our Savior Jesus Christ: “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”
These words fell from the lips of our precious Savior. We should not discount them as mere sentimentality or the language of a Puritanical age long gone. We cannot dismiss them as simply religious jargon used to suppress individual liberties. We cannot just say they are idle words that have no meaning because we are afraid they may strip us of a little fun. These are the words of God, the words of whom we ought to fear. Therefore we need to heed them, to obey them, because they come from the highest source. For this reason, I have asked this question of this message on this text: What does it mean to fear the Lord?
Are we to be literally afraid of God, to cower in fear? Are we to dread Him for fear He might break out upon us as we have heard in these series of messages? Remember Uzziah? God broke out upon him in leprosy, because he dared to do that which he was not called to do. What about Nadab and Abihu? Fire fell upon them. Uzzah was stricken immediately dead because he touched the ark. Moses was not allowed to go into the Promised Land. Ananias and Sapphira were carried out of a worship service because they dared to confront this holy God.
So are we to dread Him, to be terribly afraid of Him, lest He break out on us because we displease Him? What does He mean? What I want to do here is first to define biblical fear, and second, to show how and why we are to fear the Lord. In Part I, I will simply define it – I will explain how and why in Part II.
The Bible actually uses the word fear in several different ways. Here we will look at three of them.
The first way the word “fear” is used in the Bible is right here in our text, Matthew 10:28. It means to be literally afraid or terrified of. Clearly it means this, because Jesus is discussing bodily harm and eternal destruction. Jesus says that you and I should not fear another human being who can kill our bodies but cannot touch our soul. Human beings do not have the power to reach beyond the grave and inflict suffering, but you had better be afraid of Him who has that ability and that power. He is talking about someone doing violence against us, and so I would say this has little to do with the word “respect” that so many want to use to replace the word “fear.” Even some translations do – not here, particularly, but many want to interpret the word “fear” as meaning respect. It can mean that, but it doesn’t here.
One problem with the kind of Christianity we have presented in recent decades is the refusal to admit that we should be afraid of God in any way. But here, Jesus states emphatically that we should be afraid of God, because He has the power no one else has. They may be able to take your physical life, and send you to hell if you are not a Christian. But once there, you will be met with the wrath and judgment of Almighty God, not another human being.
Let me address here God’s right to punish sinners in an eternal hell. Some of you may think it is utterly wrong for me to state that possibility, that God condemns men and women to a place of eternal torment. If you do believe in God, perhaps you believe in a God who is absolutely loving, and it seems to you unlike the character of love to banish somebody to an eternal torment. It would be the most unloving thing He could do to make somebody suffer – you say a “God of love” could not be loving if He did that. So, in the name of fairness and love, I want to say to you that because God is a God of love, because He is a loving God, he must punish people in hell – just the opposite of what you may think.
You could not have a God of love if He were not judicial in administering wrath to those who broke His law. How is that, you ask? If He didn’t judge the evildoer – that is, the person who breaks but one of His laws, then He would have nothing to save you from. And if there was nothing to save you from, then there was no reason for God to send his Son to die for you, which is exactly what He did: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son…” Why did He give His Son? “…that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
If there were no prospect of perishing, then God sending His Son to die would have no purpose. It would be the ultimate cruelty and injustice, and not love. But on the other hand, the truth is, because there is a hell (which all sinners deserve to suffer, including me), we learn of God’s mercy and of His love. Now we know for a fact that God does love us and He wants to forgive us, and He wants to show mercy. There is something from which to be rescued. If you will only surrender yourselves to obey His Son, Jesus Christ our Savior, you would be saved. He truly loved us in order to rescue us. If there were no hell, no condemnation, no wrath, no judgment, there would be no reason to believe that God is either good, or love. It is the reality of hell that teaches me that He is loving, and He is merciful. If God didn’t send the rebellious, the unbelieving and the sinful to hell, then Jesus’ words have no basis. They have no point and they make no sense. We would not and should not be afraid of God – we should be afraid of others who can kill our bodies, but we shouldn’t and wouldn’t be afraid of God if the idea of terror is not included in the context here, and Christ would have no reason to tell us to fear Him in the context of suffering, death and hell. It just wouldn’t make any sense.
The modern culture has said “no” to a God who is to be feared. It has opted for a kinder, gentler God. Postmodern man deplores the idea of a God who keeps a book and records every sin. He rejects the so-called antiquated, angry God of the Bible for a God who is cool and collected. He prefers tolerance in his God; he requires his God to be lenient or liberal. He wants a non-judgmental kind of God.
You know, what’s so sad today is that even many evangelicals have replaced their drums, and are beating a milder drum, and say, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself. We shouldn’t fear God; we should just be afraid of being afraid.” They suggest that the New Testament in no way commands God to be feared. Some say the word “fear” doesn’t even really mean fear. What else could Jesus mean? What could the writer of Hebrews mean in 12:18-19 when he says, speaking about Mount Sinai, “For you have not come to the mountain that may be touched and that burned with fire, and to blackness and darkness and tempest, and the sound of a trumpet and the voice of words, so that those who heard it begged that the word should not be spoken to them anymore.” They heard the Word, the voice of God, and they literally cried out, “Please, don’t say anything to us!”
Verses 20-24: “(For they could not endure what was commanded: ‘And if so much as a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned or shot with an arrow.’ And so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, ‘I am exceedingly afraid and trembling.’ But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are registered in heaven, to God the Judge of all, to the spirits of just men made perfect, to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better things than that of Abel.”
At this point, some of you may be thinking that what I have read thus far supports the view of these so-called evangelicals who say we should not fear God. Here we are in the Old Testament, at Mount Sinai, and everything about Sinai was terrifying. Even Moses got scared at the presence of God on that mountain. But now we have come to the heavenly Jerusalem where everything is peaceful and tranquil; we have left the angry, hostile old covenant God and found a God that in Jesus Christ is calm and cool and collected – so maybe up to here it might seem that is the author’s point. But keep reading with me and see how he makes his point of application.
Verses 25-29: “See that you do not refuse Him who speaks. For if they did not escape who refused Him who spoke on earth, much more shall we not escape if we turn away from Him who speaks from heaven, whose voice then shook the earth; but now He has promised, saying, ‘Yet once more I shake not only the earth, but also heaven.’ Now this, ‘Yet once more,’ indicates the removal of those things that are being shaken, as of things that are made, that the things which cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us have grace, by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear. For our God is a consuming fire.”
Instead of saying things are less frightening in the new covenant, he is making the point that it is more frightening. God shook the earth when He descended on Mount Sinai, but there is coming a day when He will shake the whole earth and heaven also. If He spoke from earth and would not let them escape who rejected His authority, what do you think He will do now to us who reject His authority now, after He killed His own Son? We aren’t talking about 1,000 bulls or goats – He killed his Son, His own dear Son, for you. What do you think He will do if you reject that? Far worse than anything in the Old Testament. His exhortation is simple, friend – obey God with fear because He is an uncontrollable and inextinguishable fire. You can’t put God out.
God is to be feared in the sense that you should be afraid of Him. That is not heresy. They may one day burn me at the stake for saying things like that, but so be it. I fear God’s fire more than I fear the fire of man. I mean that – you should be afraid of God. If that causes all of you to say, “I cannot return and hear this man say such blasphemous things,” then take your leave now and do not return. But I will be saying it to an empty building. I will continue to say the fear of God means that I am to be afraid. You should realize that He is holy; He plays to win, and you will play by His rules or you will suffer the consequences.
Don’t let anyone convince you that God is disrespected if you are afraid of Him. That’s not disrespectful; it’s really quite respectful. Don’t let them convince you that if you fear the Lord it shows He is somehow whimsical; that you can’t predict how He is going to be – that is not what I am suggesting. It would be wrong to think you should fear God because you cannot predict what mood He might be in. It would suggest that God is moody, temperamental, and basically unstable. That would be disrespectful. But that is not the issue; the issue is we do know what He will do when we disobey. There is no room for argument or questioning. We do know what He will do when we don’t submit to His authority, and for that reason, we are afraid.
The way “fear” is used in this text is to say you should be afraid of God if you do not obey God. He has promised destruction to all who reject His authority, and He has the power to enforce that authority. You know very well what He will do, and so you’re afraid to cross Him because He always wins.
Let me direct your attention to the second way the word “fear” is used in the Bible. It is used to mean awe or reverence. While this is not the direct meaning of Jesus’ point in our text, it is implied and here’s how: Because God is sovereign – meaning He has all authority and control over every person and every part of His creation, that means He can inflict justice and destroy all rebels. He is so immense and so great that He cannot be outrun. His power and providence reach all the four corners of the earth and beyond. You could even get in a space rocket and fly away to an unknown planet, and there you would find God. The providence – the scope of His rulership – is universal. There is no place where you can hide from His eyes. He knows where you are and what you are doing, and the only reason He has not come and arrested you already is because He is longsuffering.
Beware – do not misconstrue the longsuffering mercy of God to be tolerance and lenience toward sin. That is not what it means. The only reason you have not been brought before His holy tribunal is because He is merciful to you. He does love you, but He will have His warrant served if you refuse His patience and mercy. He will have His angels come, and they will cut you down, and they will bring you before His bench of judgment, and there you will stand and clearly before all eternity the words will sound as His gavel falls, “Guilty! Guilty in the highest degree!” And He will sentence you to an eternity in eternity’s prison without parole. He has that kind of power.
Therefore, having that kind of power and authority, we should give Him the respect that we would give anybody with authority. He is worthy of it. He is to be held in awe, and the greatest respect.
There are other verses of Scripture that use the word “fear” in this way.
Psalm 22:23 “You who fear the LORD, praise Him! All you descendants of Jacob, glorify Him, And fear Him, all you offspring of Israel!” (Fear and praise don’t seem to go together, do they? Part II of this teaching will help this. When you understand what fearing God means, it will make perfect sense, and you, too, will praise Him.)
Psalm 33:8 “Let all the earth fear the LORD; Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him.” There is the word “awe,” used here as a synonym for the word “fear.” In the Hebrew, the word “fear” literally is translated as, “to stand in awe of” or “to revere.” We are not only afraid of God because of His holy justice, but we are also in awe of Him. We are blown away by God (at least you should be). The word “awe” is the root word from which we get our word “awesome.” God is literally awesome. Someone told me one time that they felt we should use the word “awesome” only in reference to God, and I think they are right. God is awesome, and when you see God you are awed. He captivates your heart. You should be overwhelmed when you stop and put everything out of your mind and contemplate on Him. You should feel those moments of being awestruck as you meditate on His greatness.
If you haven’t had such an experience, think now as long as you can about God’s eternality – how He has no beginning; will have no end. He always was. Where was He? (That is one of the questions I always ask.) I don’t think you have to ponder very long on even this one aspect of God that you become besieged with reverence, and your heart begins to tremble. I remember doing this as a child – I would think about God having no beginning and no ending, and how when we go to heaven it will never end, and literally feeling my heart beat because God is so immense, so big, so much larger than my brain can comprehend! Fear of God does produce worship, doesn’t it? You’re awed by Him.
My third and final point of how “fear” is used in the Bible is this: It means an accurate appraisal of God; in other words, a biblical understanding of God, or a biblically balanced view of God. I believe the phrase “fear of the Lord” is often used in the Bible to mean this – a right view of God according to the Scriptures. You correctly understand Him as He is revealed in Scripture. That is the fear of God. Let me prove this to you. Psalm 111:10: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; A good understanding have all those who do His commandments. His praise endures forever.”
What does David mean when he says, “A good understanding have all those who do His commandments”? Let me ask it this way: Of what do those who obey His commandments possess a good understanding or a commendable grasp? The answer is in the verse: “the fear of the Lord.” In other words, if you don’t know or understand God, you cannot fear Him and will not fear Him as you ought. If you do not understand God’s mercy and His patience, you think it does mean He is lenient and lax about sin. If you think of God as being so loving that He is not righteous in His love, you will have the same problem we talked about earlier: you won’t believe the Bible’s statements about His holy wrath and righteous judgments against sin. Conversely, if you see God as a legalist who won’t let any infraction of His law go by without penalty, and that He delights in that and cannot be appeased, then you will never understand the love of God. In fact, you won’t even see it. Wisdom, says David, is to fear God.
If you are to properly fear Him, you must rightly know Him. It all comes back to knowing Christ, because the only way to know God is to know Christ. You must rightly know Him as the Bible reveals Him to you. “But I can’t know God completely because He is infinite and incomprehensible, and my mind is finite; therefore I’m not biblically balanced.” No, you can’t know all there is to know about God, but you can be biblically balanced in that you can learn what God has said about Himself in the Scriptures. You can know what He has said, and that is our pursuit. If you rightly understand God, you can’t help but fear Him.
This is the problem with the world today, and the problem with the majority of people claiming to be Christians in this country. They truly do not know or understand God, and consequently they don’t fear Him. You can tell a sinner to fear God all you want to, but he can’t. He doesn’t know that of which he should be afraid.
Real Truth Matters and Oak Grove Baptist Church are not about acquiring truth and information for information’s sake. The reason I keep sounding this note and shall until I die is because there is one and only one reason we pursue truth: to know God Himself. That is the reason we are crazy and adamant about truth. It is Him that we pursue as we pursue the knowledge of Him as revealed in the Scriptures. If you don’t pursue the truth of God, you’ll not know the God of the Bible, and it will show: you will not fear Him.
That is why men do what they do. That is why children disobey their parents – because they don’t fear God. Young people, if you know that you know that you know that it doesn’t matter how bad dad or mom messed up, if they really love God and they are His people, they are God’s authority in your life. That simply means if you don’t obey them you don’t obey God. Are you afraid of God? You had better be. Mom and Dad may not have brought to you the consequences that you deserved. They may have been lenient or have loved you so much that it hurt to bring themselves to do what they needed to do. But, dear friend, God will.
Why can people sleep around professing to be Christians, and do all sorts of acts of lewdness and uncleanness? Because they do not fear God. Why can men hold positions of authority, power, or prestige even in our churches, yet live like the world? Because they just don’t fear God. That is also why you sin when you do, because at that moment of temptation, you fear something else more than you fear God. Solomon, who was David’s son, said in Proverbs 1, “Because they hated knowledge And did not choose the fear of the LORD, They would have none of my counsel And despised my every rebuke. Therefore they shall eat the fruit of their own way, And be filled to the full with their own fancies.”
Wow! That’s a prediction that comes to pass every time people refuse the counsel of God. He gives you what you want. You want to be on your own? Do your own thing? God will give that to you, but it will destroy you. He says, “For the turning away of the simple will slay them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them.” His point is simple: a foolish person is a person who hates knowledge – the knowledge of God. They are lazy and they will not pursue to know God. If they would simply learn God, they would learn to fear Him, and they would not perish and would not be destroyed.
It cannot be any clearer: if you will properly understand the Lord God of the Bible, you will have the proper awe, respect and fear of Him. Solomon says it unmistakably – so clearly, so emphatically, and undebatably – in Proverbs 2:1: “My son, if you receive my words and treasure my commands within you” – that is new covenant, powerful, Christianity: treasuring and not just knowing the word of God in you, finding it to be meat to your soul – “So that you incline your ear to wisdom, And apply your heart to understanding; Yes, if you cry out for discernment, And lift up your voice for understanding, If you seek her as silver, And search for her as for hidden treasures; Then you will understand the fear of the LORD, And find the knowledge of God.” There it is: know God, and you will find fear.
If you get into the Word of God and see how it does touch your life, guide your life, infiltrate your life, and apply to your life, and you treasure and value that, you will not let the day go by without finding that closet where you can meet with God in His word. Don’t just know the Word – hell is full of theologians! Treasure it!
Christ Jesus died so that you could know God. He gave Himself to His persecutors and His executioners and was willing to be separated from His father so that you might know His father. The knowledge of God has come at the highest possible price: the shed blood of God’s dear Son. The tuition has been paid; will you not come to the school of Calvary and learn from the Crucified? Come. You don’t need to be a scholar to learn of Him. He said, “Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly.” The lower estimation you have of yourself, the faster you will learn.
Why, His first pupils were no scholars; they were simply fishermen and tradesmen. But God will teach you, and you will have the fear of the Lord. You may doubt yourself all you want, but dear friend, don’t doubt Jesus. He can teach you. He will make you to know true wisdom, and you will become wise. You will one day stand back and watch yourself make the decisions that you make, and you will be stupefied with amazement that you did that? Yes, because you learned wisdom from Wisdom, Christ Jesus.
Listen as He speaks; this is His word to you. “All things have been delivered to Me by My Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father. Nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and the one to whom the Son wills to reveal Him” (Matthew 11:27). He will reveal His God and Father to you. Come! Trust that word; let that word be the rope you cling to within your heart and believe with all your might. Come to Jesus and be schooled by Him, only by whom you can learn the fear of the Lord and by whom the knowledge of God can be acquired.
I wish to close with David’s prayer in Psalm 86:11, which should be our prayer now: “Teach me Your way, O LORD; I will walk in Your truth; Unite my heart to fear Your name.” You, God, can teach me to know you, and when You do, I will fear You. Amen. |
