Doves On Distant Oaks

The Fear of Righteous Judgment

When I worked in Washington State, I took a trip to see a geologic formation called the Dry Falls. Today, they are just 400-foot cliffs in the scab-lands of central Washington, but twenty thousand years ago, a giant waterfall five times the width of Niagara Falls spilled over them. Ice sheets from melting glaciers that had dammed rivers suddenly broke free and catastrophic flooding caused parts of Idaho, Washington, and Oregon to be under hundreds of feet of water in just a few days. The 65-mile-an-hour flow over the cliffs was ten times the flow of all the rivers in the world today combined.



Standing along the rim of the cliffs and staring down into the basin 400 feet below, it was hard not to feel a sense of awe. Imagining the volume and speed of the water roaring over those rock faces generated a sense of fear as well—fear for the power of nature at its most violent. All the words translated from the Hebrew word yirah fit the emotion one feels in a situation like that: awe, reverence, respect, and yes, even fear. Yirah has a three letter root word that means "to see." So, we see the power behind our awe and fear.

There are a number of places in the Bible that use yirah in reference to God. Some translations render it as fear, while others as reverence, respect, awe, and obedience. The truth is, they are all correct and reflect the multi-faceted sides of God. Today, we tend to shy away from actually using fear since it implies terror or fright—an anticipation of danger and pain—and we don't like to think of God in that context. However, in doing so, we may actually be obscuring the word's meaning. What we need is a better understanding of what the fear of God means.

There is a well-known story about General Robert E. Lee, a Confederate commander during the American Civil War. He was well-loved by his men, but they also respected him. One day a soldier who had been accused of stealing was brought into Lee's tent to be judged. The soldier sat, sweating and nervously twisting his cap, waiting for the General to arrive. When Lee walked in, he saw the condition of the soldier and had pity. Walking up to him he said, "Don't worry, you'll get justice here," to which the soldier replied, "That's what I'm afraid of."

What we fear is deserved justice. We often talk about how Christians are “saved” when they accept Christ as their savior. However, they rarely talk about what they are saved from. If they do come up with an answer, most often it’s that they are saved from hell. This may be true, but it’s misleading. What they are actually saved from is the wrath of God which sends them to hell.

God’s wrath is directed, righteously so, at the sinner. There is nothing else a God, who represents all goodness, can do. And if you point to only murders, rapists, thieves, and so on as being evil enough to suffer the wrath of God, notice the three fingers pointing back at yourself. We are all sinners incapable of saving ourself from God’s wrath, and that is something to fear.

That's what the fear of God means. We know that God loves us, but we also know he has great power—power enough to create the universe just by thinking it into existence. That kind of power and omniscience sees into the very depths of us and knows all of our sins, which are many and which we are incapable by our very nature to ever overcome. Our only hope is to have our sins covered by Christ.

That’s why the apostle Paul says: “Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men” (2 Corinthians 5:11). We must “persuade men” to follow Christ. All will stand before Christ one day with their sins revealed for judgment. We must persuade all humankind to have their sins covered by accepting Christ as their savior.

Perhaps some good old fashioned fear of our Creator is just what our modern society needs. We should approach God with a healthy sense of fear for his power, glory, and immaculate sense of justice. Else we might just find ourselves swept over the cliffs ... like those ancient waterfalls.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

– Proverbs 9:10

Keywords: Fear, Justice, Wrath

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