How the Fear of God Prevents Falling Away from God
When we see revered Christians fall, and know there were good reasons they were regarded as revered, the impact on us is sobering, and in some ways scary.
Those who would too easily conclude that such leaders were hypocrites all along are misdiagnosing what occurred.
The fact is someone can indeed walk with the Lord, learn much of his Word, be effective in his work—and then fall. A preventative for that is what we want to better understand.
Certainly, an important part of that preventative is having the fear of the Lord. The reason the Bible says so much about the fear of the Lord is because the fear of the Lord can mean so much. However, the importance of this dynamic demands defining it correctly.
In his book, Whatever Happened to Worship? A.W. Tozer said:
The fear of God is that “astonished reverence” of which the great Faber wrote. I would say it would grade anywhere from its basic element—the terror of a guilty soul before a holy God to the fascinating rapture of the worshiping saint.
If we singularly attribute safe and sanguine views of God, or if we refuse to retain God in our thinking, we shall have no fear of him at all.
So is this absence of fear a good thing? No, according to Professor John Murray, “to be destitute of it is the sign of hardened ungodliness.”
Goethe wrote that everyone brings fear into the world, but not this astonished reverence toward God. That fear is different! And that fear is needed!
Dr. Rudolf Otto, theologian and philosopher, described the fear of God in his book, The Idea of the Holy. Otto spoke of the numinous, an overpowering reality that exceeds reverence, awe, and rapture.
It is creaturehood overwhelmed.
It is submergence into nothingness before an absolute might.
It is the reaction that comes when confronted by the altogether unfamiliar
It is the breakdown that occurs when the excellencies of God, what theologians call the ineffability of God, lose their hiding and begin to appear.
It is the dread that comes when God’s absolute abhorrence of sin, his intense and burning rage against sin, begins to manifest.
When such fear comes upon people, they tremble, they shake and, like the Apostle John on the Isle of Patmos, they are struck to the ground, as if dead. The encounter overwhelms!
In his book, When the Spirit Comes with Power, John White described his own experience as “a blend of stark terror and joy that threatened to sweep me away.” Commenting further, White wrote:
How could I live and see what I saw? Garbled words of love and worship tumbled out of my mouth as I struggled to hang on to my self-control. I was no longer trying to worship. Worship was undoing me, pulling me apart. And to be pulled apart was both terrifying and full of glory.
Experiences such as this, whether presented in Scripture or in more contemporary testimony, obviously surpass, in depth and height, the conceptions popular preachers so casually mention when they reduce the fear of God to such terms as reverence and respect.
Tozer wrote: “We have lost from our gospel Christianity almost altogether what people used to call religious fear. And along with our loss of religious fear came a corresponding flippancy and familiarity toward God that our fathers never knew.”
In his book, The Attributes of God, A.W. Tozer declared: “… in our humanistic day—our day of a watered-down, sentimental Christianity that blows its nose loudly and makes God into a poor, weak, weeping old man—in this awful day, that sense of the holy isn’t upon the Church.”
The British pastor R.W. Dale told a friend, “No one is afraid of God now.” His standing has drastically slipped.
And is that good thing? Most people would say that it is.
In British jurisprudence, the bench is where the judge sits and the dock is where the defendant sits. In humbler days man knew that he must appear before the Judge of all the earth to give account. But in these brash, brazen, impudent days the fear of God is gone, for now C.S. Lewis points out, “… Man is on the bench and God in the dock.”
So, no awe now! And yet how incongruent this is with the New Testament record!
Speaking of Jesus, C.S. Lewis said, “He produced mainly three effects—hatred, terror, adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.” The response to him was always polarizing. In the words of Scripture, it was either “life unto life” or “death unto death.”
This vanished, if not banished, fear is largely attributable to a distortion of God marketed by many church growth enthusiasts out to gather a crowd.
Proverbs 8 and Exodus 18 talk about fearing God and hating evil (evil, of course, being the opposite of who God is). So how are we to hate evil? Are we to work ourselves up, emitting venom and spite toward all that opposes God.
No, we won’t have to “work up” anything! Because once we see how awesome and beautiful our God is, the hating of evil will become an automatic and unavoidable by-product.
Besides, any lapse into sin, especially if a pattern is beginning to form, may trigger an encounter you will fear. Oswald Chambers described what this encounter is like:
Whenever a decline comes, whenever there is a tendency to turn aside, we will find God is a consuming fire; he will hold and hurt cruelly, and we may cry out to him to let us go, but he will not let us go. God loves us too much to let us go, and he will burn and burn until there is nothing left but the purity that is as pure as he is.
Surely, you will agree, an experience like this will increase our fear of God and our hatred of evil!
Such fear prevents us from falling away.
