The Fear of God - 2

Faustino Munoz

The Fear of God • Sermon • Submitted 5 years ago

1 John 4:17–18

Fear

Knowledge

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Intro

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Celebration of Josh & Kim’s Baptism

So, last Landing we had started this series on Fearing God. We talked about what it means to fear Him. Today we are going to dive a bit deeper.

Inconsistency

Do you hate inconsistency? I do. There are a ton of things that we like to be consistent. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. I would love for the Cubs to consistently be the best team in baseball. That doesn’t happen of course though. I like consistency in my food. If i go to a fast food place, say Burger King, I want the fries to be the same every time that I go there. Truthfully i love Burger King fries and I’ve never had a bad experience with them (yet). I like consistency in my friends. I want my friends to be good friends regularly. Some of you may have friends who you just have an inconsistent relationship with. I had friends like that while I was your age, those that were my best friends one day and we hated each other the next (and sometimes we went back and forth).

We like stability, faithfulness, and hopefully consistently amazing fries every time.

That’s one reason that our God, the God of the Bible, who sent His one and only Son to die on the cross to save us, is so unique. He is consistent. He does not change His way one day to the next. No, instead he is constant. We can read multiple times in the Bible about how God is unchanging and steady. Unlike us.

Constant

As we are talking about fearing God, I want to ask:

What is the opposite of fear?

Read

In this passage, we wee that the opposite of fear isn’t bravery like I think many people would answer. Instead, it’s love. Now, before you check out mentally because you feel like you’ve heard this before, let’s put this into a cultural context. When the Apostle John wrote this book of the Bible, the Romans Empire was still in control. That same Roman Empire, was covered and peppered with a lot of different religions, philosophies, and beliefs (not that unlike today). In thinking of those various religions that are filled with many many different gods and goddesses, and especially if you have eve studied or read about Greek/Roman mythology, many of those gods and goddesses were super fickle. They were inconsistent.

They were unfaithful, emotional, punishing, and just about as inconsistent as they could possibly be. People worshipped those gods not out of love but out of fear. Fear that if they made the Gods angry, they would come down and attack them. Or they worshipped them because they wanted to gain favor in their eyes so that they would give them something.

here’s an interesting factoid from 2013:

Here’s an interesting factoid from 2013: “By the end New Testament times, popular belief in ancient Greek and Roman religious mythology seems to have declined, though it had not disappeared” (Walter A. Elwell and Robert W. Yarbrough, Encountering the New Testament [Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing, 2013], 184).

It seemed that even by the end of the “New Testament times” meaning when the NT was written, the people had grown tired of gods and goddesses who would punish them or bless them based on how they were feeling that day. People began to doubt those gods as they heard the Gospel that the Apostles and Disciples were preaching to the world. A Gospel that was completely contrary to everything else that people had been taught.

Right then and there, the love of God shown in Jesus began to shine brighter. The fear, actual fear, not the respectful fear that we discussed last time, of constant punishment from a fickle god with a lightning bolt in his hand was going away. The God that was revealed in Jesus was not fickle but faithful, not hostile but loving. God was holy and would bring punishment to the world yes but not to those who follow Him.

Fear of Father

It is from that constant love that God has for us that we see how our relationship with him should be, and how we fear Him. It’s like the relationship between a parent and their children. Now, it’s important to note that not every parent-child relationship is this way. Martin Luther talked about this fear of God through this loving relationship. He called it filial fear. He said:

“drawing from the Latin concept from which we get the idea of family. It refers to the fear that a child has for his father. In this regard, Luther is thinking of a child who has tremendous respect and love fo his father or mother and who dearly wants to please them. He has a fear or an anxiety of offending the one he loves, not because he’s afraid of torture or even of punishment, but rather because he’s afraid of displeasing the one who is, in that child’s world, the source of security and love”

(R.C. Sproul, “What Does It Mean To Fear God?,” Ligonier Ministries, January 18, 2018, https://www.ligonier.org/blog/what-does-it-mean-fear-god./).

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