Dear Friends,

Once again, my thoughts return to the topic of fear in the Bible.

I keep saying it’s the last post about fear…and then it isn’t. But as I said at the beginning of this series, “fear-” and “afraid” appear a combined 717 times in the King James Bible. So this isn’t, shall we say, a smash-and-grab topic!

God willing, I want to look today at a possible reason that we have so much trouble with “the fear of God”.

Do you want to be content or cool?

It’s true…our 21st century American sensibilities sometimes conflict with God’s. But since the path towards your true, lasting happiness…

[Psa 34:11-14 KJV] 11 Come, ye children, hearken unto me: I will teach you THE FEAR OF THE LORD. 12 What man [is he that] DESIRETH LIFE, [and] loveth [many] days, that he may see good? 13 Keep thy tongue from evil, and thy lips from speaking guile. 14 Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it.

…naturally points towards your Creator, your Great High Priest, the eternal Logos, the Ancient of Days, the one who dwells between the cherubim, in the light that no man can approach unto, the One whose goings forth are of old, who bled and died for you, don’t you think it’s worth stepping out from the crowd?

We need to talk about the fear of the Lord

Here are two passages that we don’t seem to know what to do with in this day and age:

[Psa 119:120 KJV] 120 My flesh trembleth for fear of thee; and I am afraid of thy judgments.

[Isa 66:1-2 KJV] 1 Thus saith the LORD, The heaven [is] my throne, and the earth [is] my footstool: where [is] the house that ye build unto me? and where [is] the place of my rest? 2 For all those [things] hath mine hand made, and all those [things] have been, saith the LORD: but to this [man] will I look, [even] to [him that is] poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word.

Yes, these passages reveal, in the eyes of our culture today, a downright nasty not-nice God (yes, that was a Grinch reference!), as well as someone (David) probably struggling with mental illness.

Putting it another way:

You might be having trouble with passages about the fear of God if you…

1. Completely ignore them
2. Put quotes around the word fear, as in, the “fear” of God
3. Say that fearing God simply means to love and respect Him

The skeleton key

So, what do we do with passages about the fear of God? I already wrote three posts about the fear of God (see links at the bottom), so I will very briefly summarize here: the key to understanding the fear of God is to remember that He is our Father.

Whether we’re looking at a child and his natural father, or a child and his heavenly Father, a disobedient child (or a child tempted to disobey) can experience fear at the thought of his father’s loving, albeit painful chastening. In addition, the father desires the child to gradually learn the wisdom underlying the father’s commandments, such that the child begins to obey more from a place of understanding and love than a place of fear.

P.S.: God’s identity as our Father helps unlock a lot of other Biblical topics, which is why I call it a skeleton key. But I digress…

Wait, why isn’t this key working?

Since God’s identity as Father is the key to understanding the fear of God, it won’t work very well if you have a twisted view of fatherhood itself.

Case in point: the belief that a father should never spank his child. This seems to be the consensus among credentialed child development experts for the past few decades or more. If you subscribe to the belief that spanking is always bad, I would expect you to have a lot of trouble with passages about the fear of God. You’ve succumbed to a blindness of our time, and so you won’t be able to “see” passages about the fear of God, even if you are a Christian.

So, let’s spend some time talking about spanking today; not about the details of spanking, not about the right way and the wrong way to spank, but just about the basic justification of it. If you can make peace with spanking, I think you’ll be able to make peace with the fear of God.

Thus Saith the Lord

There are numerous verses about physical chastening in the Bible. I’ll just provide one from the Old Testament, and one from the New:

[Pro 22:15 KJV] 15 Foolishness [is] bound in the heart of a child; [but] THE ROD of correction shall drive it far from him.

[Heb 12:6 KJV] 6 For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and SCOURGETH every son whom he receiveth.

If you are a Christian and you can read those verses, and all the other verses about spanking, and you can still oppose all forms of spanking, please let me know your reasoning.

On the other hand, if you are an atheist, here (4) is a fellow non-believer very concisely (though accidentally) describing the value of a spanking.

I know whereof I speak

I was spanked as a kid, and I’ve spanked my kids. I’m one of the many people who have been on both ends of it and can testify to its important role in raising children. I might go into more detail in another post, but my aim today is just to ask if your attitudes about spanking are hindering you from understanding the fear of the Lord. So, I’ll just say at this juncture that my experience with spanking and being spanked validates the payoff of spanking described in Hebrews 12:11 as the “peaceable fruit of righteousness”.

Do studies show that spanking should be set aside?

You can google it yourself…though there seems to be a dissenting opinion (5) once in a great while, most studies draw conclusions that militate against spanking. If you are against spanking because of these studies, or just struggling with doubt about this topic for whatever reason, I have some thoughts/questions to offer.

• I once took my son to a world-renowned clinical psychologist. When I mentioned that I had spanked him for repeatedly running out into a parking lot, the psychologist shocked me by saying “That’s good. Sometimes you need to get their attention.” Why do you think he told me that?
• We can all agree that a TV repairman can diagnose and fix problems with my TV in a tiny fraction of the time it would take me to fix it, even though I’ve had that TV for ten years and he is just now looking at it. If I’m supposed to disregard all of my personal experiences being spanked and applying spankings, and instead defer to the consensus of psychologists, am I treating myself and my children like TV sets?
• If someone tells me that spanking severely damaged them as a child, I’ll probably take their testimony prima facie. If someone tells me that spanking was really helpful for them as a child, I’ll probably take their testimony prima facie as well. Is it reasonable to simply throw out or reinterpret the testimony of the 2nd group?
• How are we supposed to guard against the excesses, oversights, and corruptions of the scientific enterprise if we simply follow whatever the current consensus is? For example (if you’re tired of hearing about these, then convince me they’re not relevant):
  • Scientific racism / eugenics (watch the documentary called Human Zoos)
  • The Semmelweis debacle
  • Piltdown man
  • The thalidomide scandal
  • The idea that something can come from nothing (Lawrence Krauss…see counterpoint from David Albert)
  • The idea that someone should be allowed to cut off a consenting 13-year-old girl’s healthy breasts

It’s not really that complex, is it?

Don’t put this verse…

[Psa 119:120 KJV] 120 My flesh trembleth for fear of thee; and I am afraid of thy judgments.

…on the same level of difficulty as the four-faced-creatures-passage in Ezekiel chapter 1. If you simply accept the everyday concept of a spanking, you shouldn’t have any trouble understanding Psalm 119:120. To the extent that David is disobeying God, or contemplating disobedience, he is experiencing actual fear of punishment…and this fear protects him. If anything, David could have used more fear of God, not less…right, Uriah?

Don’t overcomplicate the fear of God. Remember the Psalm 34 passage I quoted earlier? I Peter 3:10-12 rehearses this passage, but addresses the passage even more directly, to those “that will love life”.

So…if you want to love life, fear God.

God bless,

TFOTF

Links:

(1) The fear of the Lord is your friend part 1

(2) The fear of the Lord is your friend part 2

(3) The fear of the Lord is your friend part 3

(4) Atheist’s accidental description of the value of a spanking

(5) Po Bronson in Newsweek