-George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons

What does it mean to fear God?  Why and how do we fear a God who we are told is love?  Too often our vision of God is trite and shallow; we have insisted on making God in our image.  Uncomfortable with the possibilities of a Living God we have strenuously searched for a dead God that would not inspire so much fear.  As I talk to people out in the world, whether they be relatives or merely acquaintances I find that there is are terribly common reasons for falling away from faith.  Often faith is “lost” because of suffering: one watches a loved one die from cancer, one watches a family consumed by alcoholism, one suffers from depression.  These people who suffer come to the conclusion that God must either not exist or must be evil, or at least not so good as the “religious folk” make him out to be.  Since God cannot or will not alleviate their suffering, their natural response is to turn away, to say in their hearts, “I will not worship a God who allows this type of thing to happen.”

            My question for them is then, “what sort of god would you worship?”  A god who keeps you safe and “happy” at all costs?  A god who does not allow you to make the choices he knows will end badly?  Who keeps you in complete safety and complete slavery like a smothering mother?  MacDonald began the above reflection with the passage from Hebrews, “Our God is a consuming fire.”  It is the purity of God’s nature that burns up evil, and it is the burning of the evil in our nature that causes suffering, thus it makes sense for someone who seeks to avoid suffering, to also avoid God, “for our God is a consuming fire.”  The problem with this logic is that when we shut God out a void is created that evil fills and the evil that rushes in immediately sets about lighting myriad little blazes that may not seem to burn like the purity of God at first but which will soon ignite into a fire that offers no constructive end and which, in fact, cannot be quenched by the human will.

            On the other hand if we cling to faith, trusting that the “sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing to the glory about to be revealed to us.” (Rom 8:18)  Then the consuming fire will purify us and we will stand before God as “dwellers in the immovable kingdom.”  Our nature and God’s nature will meet face to face; the created will see the Creator in whose image we were made.  In that meeting the reason for the suffering will be fully understood and fully accepted in the same way that the pain of a woman’s labor is washed away and forgotten at the sight of her precious baby.

            This “holy fear” that comes from the confrontation of two natures does not arise out of cowardly fear of consequences but out of the reverent fear of understanding the nature of God our Maker.  We fear, we love and we are loved in the same moment.  If we relate to God as something less, if we seek to make a god in our image, then the best we can do is invent a god with awesome power that inspires fear as a dictator.  We cannot make for ourselves a god who is worthy of love.  We may succeed in making an kindly and “lovable” but ultimately insipid God, we may succeed in inventing Thor the thunder god or Zeus with his lightning bolts but we did not, could not and would not invent the God Yahweh, who is a “consuming fire.”