Feast: Deuteronomy: Fear

#FT22-04
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 13-Oct-22; 77 minutes

description: Fear, undoubtedly the most prominent emotion mankind experiences, can take a toll on health, unleashing doubts, unease, misgivings, angst, frazzled nerves, and multiple phobias. Fear is a mind killer, bringing about craven timidity and paralysis, especially as sinister government-controlled media pumps up fear of Covid-19, helping tyrannical politicians to enforce lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and other heavy-handed tyrannical threats. When people allow fear to rule them, they lose their mind. Fear of God, however, is not mind killing, but inspires a reverential awe of the Creator and faith to obey the covenant. When our forebears on the Sinai disobeyed the covenant, they became paralyzed by fear. Fearing God, on the other hand leads to blessings and a state of well-being. Moses explains that God requires that we fear the Lord God, walk in His ways, serving Him, and keeping His commandments (Deuteronomy 4:1-19), all part of one package. Deuteronomy 8:1-7 instructs people to remember the outcome of the tests which He placed upon them as they traversed the wilderness to determine whether they would keep His life-giving commandments or not, disciplining them as a loving father disciplines his son. Following father Abraham's example, we learn that faith without works is stone dead. The psalmist David wrote many Psalms expressing his fear of God, urging his readers to "taste and see that the Lord is good" (Psalm 34:8), reminding them that "many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord rescues them from all of them" (Psalm 34:19). As David has taught us, when we show reverential fear of God, He responds. Fear of God (the opposite of the carnal mind) is not something that comes naturally but must be learned and practiced.

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transcript:

Fear is perhaps the most powerful emotion we must deal with on a day-to-day basis. It can actually be the difference between life and death. It can make us seem wise and prudent when we use fear properly or instead it can make us look extremely foolish and weak. Fear can take a tremendous toll on one's physical health and could actually drive us crazy if we let it overwhelm us. Fears that plague us can be as insignificant as everyday stresses that just build up day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. Or it could be as powerful as sudden terror at imminent pain and death that leaves us needing a change of clothing.

Fear is an extremely broad subject and we have given it very many names. Our dictionaries are full of fear words and some of them are euphemisms, a way to make these fears seem a lot less difficult or painful. Most of us have doubts that are really fears. Many have unease or anxieties or misgivings. Mothers show concern or worries about their children. Students become apprehensive about grades, teenagers and romantic leads have angst. Athletes get the yips or jitters. They have a case of the nerves or too much tension. Certain people are timid, even cowardly.

Some people have various phobias, those uncontrollable, irrational, and lasting fears. And there are literally hundreds or even thousands of these phobias: from ablutophobia, which is a fear of bathing (you do not want to be around somebody who has ablutophobia), to zuigerphobia, which is a fear of vacuum cleaners. These are mild forms of fear, as far as they go, as opposed to words like fright, dismay, despair, dread, panic, terror, and horror.

None of these fears though touch on another aspect of the emotion, which is awe. Awe is a type of fear. Yet even this facet of fear includes a spectrum of responses from wonder and esteem and reverence to astonishment and consternation and dread and sheer terror. And the way humans react to fearsome things also runs along a spectrum, on the positive side, from exhilaration to amazement, to acceptance, to respect, to veneration. But on the negative side, it runs from wariness to shock, to rejection, to opposition, to flight. And perhaps even to a heart attack and death.

Some of you, those of you who may like science fiction, may have read Frank Herbert's book Dune or maybe you have seen one of the adaptations on the silver screen. All of them contain an interesting saying that the main character, Paul Atreides, is taught. Here is a quote from the book.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me, and when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

That is a philosophy that runs through the book. But I think it is interesting to think about. Later, another saying appears, "I have no fear. For fear is the little death that kills me over and over. Without fear, I die but once."

Now Scripture does not support these sayings in full, but humanly, they do reflect how people strive to overcome fear and convince themselves that they are beyond fear or they have conquered fear, and once they have mastered fear in themselves, they believe that they can do anything that their true selves are capable of accomplishing. But it is the fear that holds one back from accomplishing those things that need to be done. If they fail to conquer fear, they say they die many little deaths every day. It is like being drained of blood by a 1,000 small cuts. So if they die many little deaths every day, over time bringing one to total obliteration. So if you retain your fear, if you allow it to control you, one accomplishes little or nothing because fear holds you back.

To me, the most interesting part of the first quotation is that one line, "Fear is the mind killer." There is a great deal of truth in that if you think it through, especially if a person fears the wrong things. We have seen that at work in our nation over the last two years, three years, Especially within the context of COVID-19. The naked fear of that virus, actually, it was not just naked fear. It was amped up fear that our media, along with our government, forced upon us. But that naked fear of the virus shut down the minds of millions of Americans. For many, there was no thought—fear controlled their minds. There was no considered reasoning about what was going on. No considered reasoning about what the virus was and how lethal it actually was. Yes, it did kill people. I do not want to minimize that. But it was not the terrible scourge that they said it was going to be. But people heard the first bits about COVID-19 and they lost their minds because there was so much fear.

Such a similar thing happens in a fight-or-flight situation. A great natural disaster that suddenly comes down upon one. A battle, you hear about men just freezing, they lose their minds on the battlefield because the fear overwhelms them and they just become virtually catatonic because of the fear. People react instinctively in those cases rather than thoughtfully. They do not use their minds because they are running on their, what you might call, animalistic drives, if you will—self-preservation. So when people allow fear to rule them, we can say, like the quote, they lose their minds. Fear is the mind killer.

Yet God commands us repeatedly to fear Him. We know for certain He does not want us to lose our minds. So why is fear of Him not a mind killer? Why is fearing God constructive and not destructive? What does it produce in us? Those are some of the questions we will answer today, hopefully, to understand the theme of fearing God that pops up frequently in the book of Deuteronomy. You might want to be turning toward Deuteronomy 5. We will be reading part of the end of the chapter, verses 23 through 29. But before I read that I need to give you a little background about the fear of God or the concept of fear in Hebrew. And it is much like our English concept of fear with the exception of the topic for today: the fear of the Lord or the fear of God.

The word for fear is yare’, which has both the connotation of being afraid, like our own English connotation of fear, with a lot of the same range as our English fear. But it also has a connotation of standing in awe. So you have the fear that we normally think of, anything from a mild tremor to sheer terror. But it also has this idea of standing in awe, which English has. We have the idea of fear being a respect, in some cases, but it is not in the same strength as the concept is in Hebrew. Because, like a lot of basic words in Hebrew, yare’—fear—is invested with a great deal of theological meaning, because this is the language in which God revealed a great deal of His thinking. And so the concept of God and our relationship with Him is in these words, many of them, and fear is one of those.

Maybe the best English equivalent of fear in the sense of standing in awe, is reverence. And it is a good word to plug in there, reverence of the Lord, as you read through the Bible and see it. That should probably be among the first thoughts we have when we look at it in context. But as I said, it can imply everything from simple respect to terror. Under this connotation it is both the attitude and the response of a person who recognizes the power and the position of the revered individual, and thus, because of that recognition, a person renders him proper respect and honor.

In the case of God, however, it is ratcheted much higher than simple respect or honor. It is now reverence, devotion. From that point, remember I said that it is both attitude and response, fear implies a response like submission. And with God as the object it describes a proper ethical or covenantal relationship that includes other aspects like belief, obedience, loyalty, and faith.

Now, we are going to see a great deal of crossover in these terms, but what I would like you to take from as much as I have said so far, is that fear is the foundation for all of these. After the one I gave on the first day about hearing, that is the receiving of instruction and then beginning to put it into into practice, we need to have this attitude of fear of the Lord to get us going along these lines so that we can have belief, we can have obedience, we can have loyalty, we can have faith. Fear is that underlying attitude that kind of fuels all of these other things.

Deuteronomy 5:23-24 [Moses is speaking here, or writing] "So it was, when you heard the voice from the midst of the darkness, while the mountain was burning with fire [this is obviously God coming down on Mount Sinai and giving the law], that you came near to me, all the heads of your tribes and your elders. And you said, 'Surely the Lord our God has shown us His glory and His greatness, and we have heard His voice from the midst of the fire. We have seen this day that God speaks with man; yet he still lives.'

Notice, as we go through this, that they acknowledge this, that God came down on the mount and spoke to them. They saw His glory and they did come to the conclusion that man and God can meet face to face and the man can still live.

Deuteronomy 5:25-29 Now therefore, why should we die? [Is that not in direct contradiction to what they had just said?] For this great fire will consume us; if we hear the voice of the Lord our God anymore, then we shall die. For who is there of all flesh who has heard the voice of the living God speaking from the midst of the fire, as we have, and live? [Are you seeing a little bit of fear is the mind killer here?] You go near and hear all that the Lord our God may say, and tell us all that the Lord our God says to you, and we will hear and do it.'

Then the Lord heard the voice of your words when you spoke to me, and the Lord said to me, 'I have heard the voice of the words of this people which they have spoken to you. They are right in all that they have spoken. Oh, that they had such a heart in them that they would fear Me and always keep all My commandments, that it might be well with them and with their children forever!'

So what God does here is He acknowledges basically that they are right from a very human point of view. Moses was showing here, emphasizing if you will, how the children of Israel were afraid that they would die because of the presence of God. They say, "Who can see God and live?" This is something that we see throughout the Old Testament. This idea that was, I do not know if it was a cultural thing, probably, but that they could not have a relationship with God, they could not talk with God, they could not see Him face to face, and if they did, they would die.

Now if God was in His full glory while He was doing the talking with a human, yes, definitely. But this idea that was floating around that you cannot have a relationship with God, a face to face relationship, was holding them back, and what was holding them back was their fear. They feared God in the wrong way, not in the right way.

I mean, look at the situation as it is here in this chapter, Moses is recounting all these Israelites at the foot of the mountain, God has come down on the mountain. You see the smoke of the burning, all the trumpets going, and God's voice thundering there. This is one of the greatest events in the history of mankind. Most of us would give our eye teeth to have been there; and to see God come down on the mount and to be that close to God and see Him in this physical manifestation of His power, and His law being thundered out with His own voice! That would have been great!

But not to the children of Israel. These are all the heads of the tribes coming, essentially saying, this is what our whole tribe thinks. That you should go up, Moses, and be our mediator and do not let God kill us with His presence. Because the children of Israel were paralyzed with fear. It is a natural human reaction. I am sure we would have it in ourselves even now, even knowing what we know. Hopefully we would not be paralyzed by fear, but we would have a good sense of the fear of God in a right way. That we would feel His power and be drawn to submit to Him. So we cannot blame them. This is very, very human.

But their fear was not the fear of God. It was just fear for their lives. They were fearing that they would die. They were immobilized by terror in the presence of God. Actually, we can probably consider here that there was a great deal of guilt in this fear. They were thinking that if they were in the presence of God that He would strike them down because of their sins. So in their fear was not reverence or devotion. It was just stark terror that was making them go mad. So God relents, He would speak through Moses.

But in verse 29, He complains. He cries out in exasperation. It is an emotional response here. He had done so much for these people in bringing them out of Egypt. He had brought them to Mount Sinai. He was giving them the law and teaching them the way that they should live, and they essentially reject Him. "You're too powerful for us. You scare us, you make us lose our minds! We are so afraid." And so He says here, "Oh, that they had such a heart in them that they would fear Me and always keep My commandments, that it might be well with them and with their children forever!"

His theophany on the mount here was a good thing, a wonderful thing. He was giving them the law. He was making a covenant with them. He was doing all these things that would help them so much, and they said, "God, I don't want to hear it. Not right now, I can't stand You, I can't stand Your presence." And that is why God says, "Oh, their fear is so misplaced. Their fear is all about them. If they would only show proper beneficial fear, the fear that motivates them to do well, they could live. Their children could live. They would not need to be afraid of these other things. They would just fear Me."

Now notice how God puts this. He says, "Oh, that they had such a heart in them that they would fear Me and always keep My commandments." Fear, keep the commandments, "that it might be well with them." And He even adds at the end of the verse, "forever." The blessings and benefits are effects, results. There are consequences. Or we could even use fruit of godly fear and obedience. If you have the godly fear which leads to obedience, then the result is going to be a blessing, benefit—eternal benefit, ultimately.

So, again, we have a process built in kind of very neat steps. We have fear, we have obedience, we have well-being. God does not give us really deep theological concepts to grasp. They are very simple. It is a very, like I said, a neat process. I could put it in three words. I could say fear, obedience, and well-being. Okay, the last one was hyphenated but it is easy to conceptualize that. You start with fear, you go to obedience, and you receive well-being.

That is not hard to understand. These are like alphabet blocks for children. It is not difficult concepts. Kids learn the letters on the sides of the blocks and they begin to put them together and spell out words. And it is these small concepts, the ABC's that lead to greater ones, greater understanding, and pretty soon you have kids that are writing, you have kids that are putting stories together, and before long they are graduating college and doing things in the business world or whatever. But it all started with those very simple concepts on the building blocks.

That is what God does with Israel here. He gives them something very simple to understand. If your heart is right and you can fear God in the proper way, that is going to lead to obedience, and God is going to turn around and it will be well with you. Very simple, very neat. Anybody can understand this, you would think.

Notice what I threw into that last statement of the process. God's very words express where this process begins. "Oh, that they had such a heart in them that they would fear Me and keep the commandments, that it would be well with them and their children forever." This word heart, as we have explained in the past, could be rendered as mind or mindset, or conviction, or attitude. It covers all of those different ways, different aspects of the concept. However we word it, the fear of God is the beginning step and that beginning step is deep within us, at our core. It is our center, it is our heart; it is where our convictions are stored, our attitudes spring, our beliefs come.

We can see that this fear of the Lord was not a fixed attitude or mindset in these Israelites—but it must be in us. We must always be inclined toward godly fear and work on it in the small and the large decisions of our lives until it becomes a permanent condition of our hearts. That is, we can call this a "God first" attitude that is encapsulated in the first and great commandment. "You shall love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might." And we express our love toward God by fearing Him first of all. And that leads inexorably, as God says here, to keeping His commandments and obeying His voice. But it all starts with that core that we are going to put God first in everything.

And I do not mean just God first in making a decision about something that goes on in your life. So you are getting married or you are going to move or you are going to buy a new car or whatever. Those are the little bit bigger decisions that we make during our lifetime. I am talking about every decisions. As a matter of fact, I am talking about every thought that you have and every word that comes out of your mouth because that is where it starts—in the core, in the center—and we have to have a God first attitude beginning there, at the very root of everything that we do.

Let us flip forward five chapters, Deuteronomy 10, verses 12 and 13. Moses here expands on the simple articulation of the process that we saw in chapter 5 and he adds a little bit.

Deuteronomy 10:12-13 "And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you [this is setting up something that we really need to know. What does God require of us? What does He want to see? What do we need need to be doing?], but to fear the Lord your God [that is the first element there, fear the Lord], to walk in all His ways and to love Him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the Lord and His statutes which I command you today for your good?"

That is all we need for the moment. Here he emphasizes that fearing God is a requirement for those who are going to make the covenant with Him, who are making the covenant with Him, or are already in the covenant with Him. Fear of the Lord is the foundation for fulfilling the other requirements that he goes on to express. Like walking in His ways, that is, following His example. Also fear is the foundation of loving Him. Fear of Him is also the foundation of serving Him or worshipping, giving service, doing His will, His work, however you want to put it. All these begin with fearing Him. And then He gets to that fear of Him is also the foundation of keeping His commandments and His statutes and His judgments. So all our obedience has to be founded in fear of God.

As I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of crossover among these requirements. one bleeding into the other or one unfailingly proceeding or succeeding another, because all of these things come as a package. You cannot leave any of them out without disturbing your relationship with God. I mean, think about it. You say you have the fear of the Lord, but you try to walk in His ways, but you really do not love Him. Suddenly you are missing the mark.

You could do this with any of the other ones. This is one thing that the Protestants have done. They say they fear God, they say they love God, but they do not want to walk in His ways or to keep His commandments. What does that mean? That means what they are doing is basically in vain because they are not keeping the whole package. They are so emphasizing what they think of as loving God, they fail to keep His commandments. We will go to a scripture right now in I John 5 where it says that if they were actually loving God, they would be keeping His commandments. And so they are actually not doing what they say they are doing, and they are really not fearing God, because if they feared God and honored Him in the way that they think they are, then it would lead to submission and obedience because He is so great. So we have got to take it as a whole

I John 5:1-3 Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves Him who begot also loves Him who is begotten of Him. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep His commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome.

Here we have a similar idea expressed in the New Testament. The apostle here, John, not only takes this process of keeping the commandments, fulfilling the first great commandment, but he also writes that it spills over to our love of the brethren, the second great commandment. So he adds something to this that is not necessarily there in Deuteronomy 5 and 10. Notice that the fear of God is not in there. He is assuming that we fear God. But he is talking about that we love Him as His begotten children, His people. And John says that if you really love Him, then you will love all those others whom He has brought into the church of God. So one is loving Him, the other one is loving the brethren, and so they come as a package.

So he is telling us (I believe Bill mentioned this the other day), we often show our love for God by how we treat our brethren. And not only our brethren, but everyone. Maybe we give a little special care to how we treat our brethren because they are our brothers. We have to be close as brethren. But he also wants us to treat our neighbors in the same way, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." He does not necessarily say they have to be converted, you shall love them. So we could go so far as to say that if we lack godly fear, which is the fertile ground of love toward God, we will certainly not express love toward anyone else.

I John 4:20 [he says here] If someone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?

He does not say this, but he is tracing back toward the fear of God and saying that person really does not fear God. He really does not love God because it can be seen in his actions that he does not love his brethren.

I John 4:21 And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also.

What I am trying to do in this part of the sermon is show just how interconnected all of these elements are. And we cannot afford to leave any of them out.

Let us go back to the book of Deuteronomy, this time in chapter 8.

Deuteronomy 8:1-7 "Every commandment which I command you today you must be careful to observe, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land of which the Lord swore to your fathers. And you shall remember that the Lord your God led you all the way these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you and test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not.

So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord.

Your garments did not wear out on you, nor did your foot swell these forty years. [Oh, that would be great if your feet did not swell, not once in 40 years. Hey, small blessing, but it is great.] You should know in your heart that as a man chastens his son, so the Lord your God chastens you.

Therefore you shall keep the commandments of the Lord your God, to walk in His ways and to fear Him. For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, that flow out of valleys and hills."

That is all we need. We get the idea that He is bringing us into a blessing.

I hope you caught in my reading of that, that I kind of dwelled on verse 5. Let us read again. We can call it the shell or the casing for the instructions in this chapter. "You should know in your heart that as a man chastens his son, so the Lord your God chastens you."

The shell or the casing for this instruction here is child rearing. It is parenting on His end. He is bringing up children, He is rearing them. The Lord disciplines His children. That is, He has a way, He has a discipline that He imposes on His children and expects them to follow. Some of it is chastening. Yes, some of it is spanking our little heinies because we have been bad. But there is also a lot of regimentation so that we can understand simple concepts in a formalized manner.

There is also a great deal of instruction and guidance and other things that a normal parent would give to a child. The chastening here is just kind of a code word for all those things that God does to make sure we walk in a certain way that as our Parent He approves and wants for us because He loves us. Parents do not chasten, discipline, or whatever their children if they hate them. Think about what is going out in the world. They are really not showing their children any love by not giving them any discipline.

God though, is the great Parent, and He gives us a great deal of discipline. He wants us to be disciplined not only in our actions, but He wants us to be disciplined in our speech and He wants us to be very disciplined in our thinking. A lot of the discipline that He gives us is mental, or we could call it spiritual or what have you. But He is giving us information. He is helping us to understand. He is very involved in making sure we have the right thought processes. And fear of God comes in right at the beginning of this because that sets the tone for how we think. I mentioned this earlier. He wants us to fear Him from the very beginning, at our very core. And if we fear Him properly, then those other things that we do have a greater chance of being correct, of being pleasing to Him, and of moving us along the line or through the process of being spiritually mature.

And that is what I am getting to here. We can see that if we look at this through the lens of child rearing that God saw the time in the wilderness, those forty years, as Israel's infancy or adolescence—infancy, toddlerhood, whatever—all the way up to, let us say, leaving the house. It was their childhood and He was instructing them as simply as He could and hoping that they would latch on to these instructions with the proper fear of Him and that they would, as they went through the wilderness toward the Promised Land, become more mature. So He considered that time as the time when parents instruct and test and chasten children to aid in their maturity.

In this scenario, we could see the crossing of the River Jordan equating to crossing into maturity, like having graduated high school or something along that line, where they are mature enough that now they can live in the Land.

Now for us, the crossing into the Land over the River Jordan is a foreshadowing of us crossing into full spiritual maturity in the Kingdom. And that is why the book of the law, Deuteronomy especially, is so important because it gives us the spiritual and intellectual discipline that we need to have in order to enter the Kingdom of God. But it is all couched in the Israelites and the wilderness journey and getting ready to cross over Jordan. Verse 6 then, "Therefore you shall keep the commandments of the Lord your God, to walk in His ways and to fear Him."

Verse 6 admonishes the people that if they want to be mature, if they want to reach their goal, obedience and fearing God are essential. If they want to reach their potential and if they want to enjoy the abundance and prosperity that God offers as the objective of the covenant, that is, for them it was going into the land, for us it is entering the Kingdom of God, they must do their part.

God is a God of grace, but He is also a God who brings other people up. He brings them as close as He can to His level. He wants them to mature, He wants them to be able to think on their own. He does not want them to be toddlers anymore that always have to be wrangled like a bunch of cats. He wants them to be able to be set out on a path where they are seemingly alone and make the right decisions and reach the goal, seemingly on their own, using the things that He has taught them. And this requires the fear of God. You know why I know this? Something James said in James 2. I will just give it to you right here: Faith without works is dead.

James 2:14-18 What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? [Oh, Luther hated this. Luther really hated this.] If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of food, and one of you says to them, "Depart in peace, be warmed and filled," but you do not give them the things that are needed for the body, what does it profit? [does not do anybody any good] Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. But someone will say, "You have faith, and I have works." [James replies] Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.

James says I am going to win because faith is built through works. You can have faith. That is great, you believe. But if you are not showing it by works, if you are not doing good for anybody, what does it matter? As he says, it is death.

James 2:19 You believe there is one God. You do well. [great, kudos to you, gold star] Even the demons believe—and tremble!

Look at that, that is a fear word. The demons know that God actually does exist and they have been blown back to earth by the power of that Being. They know how strong God is, they know how wise He is. They know how powerful He is and how He has got everything set out the way He wants it and He is going to follow through and fulfill everything that He said—and they are afraid because they know. They have faith. They have more faith than some professing Christians because they know He follows through and He accomplishes what He sets out to do. So they have, "a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and fiery indignation which will devour the adversaries." (Hebrews 10:27) That is the fear of Satan and his demons. They know that now and that is why they tremble.

James 2:19-22 They believe—and tremble! But do you want to know, O foolish man, that faith without works is dead? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar? Do you see that faith was working together with his works, and by works faith was made perfect [or complete or we could use the word mature]?

I went through seven sermons or whatever on Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac and James encapsulates that into one verse, so much better at that than I am. Two verses. Abraham did not just have faith. He did not just believe that God would do what He said. He went through the works to show God that he believed Him, that he was convicted by Him that God had his and Isaac's best interests at heart and He would do what He said He was going to do. Because He said, "Hey, he's going to have millions of descendants. He's going to have kings spring from him. His nations are going to be great."

And so Abraham did a little bit of thinking based on his fear of God and his knowledge of God and what He could do. And he said to himself:

"Abraham, God is setting this up so you can prove your faith that you will follow Him no matter what He says, what He asks of me. Because I know God, I know His character, I know what He does. I know what He's promised. I know that He is a God who will do what He says. He never lies. And if He says, 'Abraham, Isaac is going to be a father of many nations and kings.' Okay. That means my son survives. There is no other way this happens. So we are going to do what He asked us to do. It may seem weird. It actually may seem ungodly that He would ask for child sacrifice. But I know that's not what He's asking. The test is not for Isaac. The test is for me that I will do what God wants me to do. And if it is this terrible thing that He's going to turn around, it's not going to be terrible in the end. It sounds terrible at the beginning. But it's not. I know that because He promised. So I will go through with it and He'll tell me what He wanted me to learn at the end."

And he did. God said to Abraham, "Now I know that you love Me and you'll do everything that I ask of you." That was the test. That was the answer Abraham needed to understand why God had done that. It was just a way that God could prove to Abraham that he was truly faithful and that he was doing good, doing right. And of course it was pleasing to God that he was right in that way, that He knew Abraham would follow through in a proper way. So He says, "Now I really know that you are faithful, that you love Me.

James 2:22-24 Do you see that faith was working together with his works, and by works faith was made perfect? And the Scripture was fulfilled which says, "Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness." And he was called the friend of God.

He had already shown that he believed God, but the work that he had to do by taking Isaac up the mountain and strapping him down to the altar was a work that proved his faith. And it matured Abraham because now it was not just a matter of faith in the heart or in his head. It was a faith that he demonstrated in the world through his actions. "You see then that a man is justified by works," he says. He is shown to be upright, shown to be righteous by his works and not by faith only.

Have you ever thought of it this way? That you could tell thousands of people that you have faith, but nobody knows it until you do do something with it. Faith, in many respects, at least the way the Protestant world looks at it, is all internal. It is all in one's head or heart. And so people can go to these modern services in the Protestant world and they can stand in the mosh pit and do this stuff and they think they are demonstrating their faith, but they are not. They are not doing the works, they are not doing the obedience of God, they are not loving their brethren. And how do we know that? Exhibit A: look at the world in this so called-Christian nation. It is going down the drain into the sewer as we speak.

James 2:25 Likewise, was not Rahab the harlot also justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out another way?

Yes. She demonstrated her belief, her conviction that God was with Israel. She demonstrated it by helping the spies. It was something she did. The spies did not come to her and say, "Oh, I believe, I believe." Great! We are going to put a red thing down your outside window here so everybody knows. And then turn around and she has got her whistle up, "Police, police! Here, they are." No, she demonstrated it by doing an act of faith in saving the spies and that is what God requires of us. He wants the fear of God that we have in us, at the core, working to demonstrate our faith. He does not want the fear just to be inside. He wants it to motivate us, to push it to the outside and do all these things that He asks us to do.

So remember, as I mentioned early on, the fear of God is both an attitude—that thing at the core—and a response to God's majesty and character. Back in Deuteronomy 8, Moses emphasizes the response. It is the response to witnessing and remembering God's powerful, loyal, consistent leadership each step of the way.

I want to get back here to Deuteronomy 8. Remember what I just said. Moses emphasizes the response. Notice how he puts this.

Deuteronomy 8:2 "And you shall remember that the Lord your God led you all the way these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you and test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you will keep His commandments or not."

That is the response. He wants a response to witnessing and remembering God's powerful, loyal, consistent leadership each step of the way. He wants us to look back from time to time and notice and remember all the ways God has helped you get to the point in your conversion where you are now. That is the first thing.

Deuteronomy 8:3 "So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord."

So the fear of God is also a response to hearing the wisdom of God's Word. You hear the wisdom of God's Word, and the fear of the Lord, that core attitude, responds to what you have just heard and begins to act because you believe it because it comes from God Himself.

Deuteronomy 8:4 [How does the fear of the Lord respond in this case?] "Your garments did not wear out on you, nor did your foot swell these forty years."

The fear of God that is in you responds to seeing God's miraculous acts during the course of your salvation. You know things that have happened in your life that could only have been done through the agency of God. That He worked for you. He did something. He healed you. He gave you certain things that you needed just at the right time. Oftentimes it is like a job or somebody will say, "Hey, I've got a car. You need it? I hear you've been bicycling around town." And you know that God was a part of that miraculous act that gave you a blessing. Let us go to verse 5. This is the last one of these.

Deuteronomy 8:5 "You should know in your heart that as a man chastens his son, so the Lord your God chastens you."

The fear of the Lord, therefore, responds to experiencing and learning from God's instructive discipline, the correction that He has given to us when we needed it. And if we have the proper fear of God, we take that correction in the spirit of His love and accept it and move forward. If we stop to think about all that God does, the full extent of His providence to bring us into His Kingdom, we cannot help but realize how awesome He is, how powerful He is, how caring He is. And therefore revere Him for His grace and lovingkindness.

He wants us to sit down and meditate on this on a frequent basis. Not on our problems, not on all these things. You can do that, yeah. But He would really like us to think about Him and our fellowship with Him, our relationship with Him, and realize just how much He has done. And even though our responses to Him are often so feeble, He accepts that and He works with us and He tries to bring us into a fuller relationship with Him.

Let us get the perspective of one of the men who knew God best. This is Psalm 34, speaking of David. And as the great poet of Israel, the great psalmist, he wrote these things down for us. God inspired him to write all these songs and they express his core, if you will. I have been using that term throughout this sermon, but Psalm 34 is an expression of David's fear of God—something to learn from. We could call this psalm "The Manifold Blessings of Fear."

David, in this scenario had gone from the frying pan into the fire. This is the time when Saul was searching about the wilderness of Judah for David and David was hiding in caves and doing what he could to stay away from from Saul. So he flees from Saul and he ends up in Gath. Now remember, you know another person from Gath. His name was Goliath. He was a champion of the city and he had killed Goliath a few years before. And so he was persona non grata in Gath. They wanted his head and Achish very much wanted his head.

In I Samuel 21:12, the chronicler there says that David was very much afraid of Achish. (That is another one of those understatements in the Bible.) Achish probably had a bounty on David's head and here, David, fleeing from Saul, is now in the court Achish. He had a prime opportunity here, Achish did, to get rid of Israel's hero and avenge Goliath of Gath. So David was in a quandary. What does he do? He has got enemies on the right. He has got enemies on the left. How does he get out of this situation? Well, as it says, David feigned madness. He acted like he was insane so that Achish would deem him mad and therefore consider him harmless and let him go. And that is what happened. The ruse worked and David fled back into the wilderness, only having to deal with Saul again. That was the life of David for you.

Now, David gave God the credit for his deliverance from Achish. Perhaps God inspired David to act crazy. But God protected him in perhaps dozens of instances along the way before he got to Gath, and while he was in Gath, and while he was running away from Gath. So David concludes that God camped around him and delivered him because he feared Him.

Psalm 34:1-14 I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul shall make its boast in the Lord; the humble shall hear of it and be glad. Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt His name together.

I sought the Lord, and He heard me, and He delivered me from all my fears. They looked to him and were radiant, and their faces were not ashamed. This poor man cried out, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps all around those who fear Him, and delivers them.

Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who trusts in Him! Oh, fear the Lord, you His saints! There is no want to those who fear Him. The young lions lack and suffer hunger, but those who seek the Lord shall not lack any good thing. Come, you children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord.

Who is the man who desires life, and loves many days, that he may see good? Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking guile. Depart from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.

So he looked at the situation that he had just come out of and he meditated about it. He thought it through and he saw that there was a process going on here. That God responded to his fear of Him. His fear of the Lord made him trust in God and he prayed to Him. He says, "This poor man cried out, and the Lord heard him."

See, that was a response of his fear of the Lord and God responded to him. That is how it works. We show the proper reverential fear of God and we come to Him for the help that we need and He responds. That is how the covenant works. It is the agreement that He has put down there for us to enjoy this great fellowship with God, who backs us up even when we are in a corner. Even when we have gotten ourselves into that corner, He is still there to help us. And looking back at it, he was just, "Wow, I can't believe that I came through that unscathed. I had to look a little weird and have spittle dripping from my beard and all that. But hey, I'm back! Saul, come on! Have at me again. I trust in God."

But notice what he says, "Taste and see," he recommends, "that the Lord is good." Let is put it in modern terms. David says, I have come through all of this. God helped me. I prayed to Him. He came and squashed my enemies. He got me out of the situation. So he says, Skeptical? You think that that did not happen? Or do you think I am just writing a story here, embellishing the truth that God did not do that? I got myself out of there by acting weird? He said, No, try it on for size. Try fearing God, put it into practice, test it, see if God will respond. I guarantee you, you will like it.

God will always supply what you need. He says, You will not lack any good thing, if you just try to fear God in the right way. Trust Him.

Verse 11 gets to the heart of godly fear. He says, "Listen!" (Remember that sermon? I gave it just like four days ago.) Listen, he says in verse 11, "Come, listen to me, you children, I will teach you the fear of the Lord." He was teaching them through his example here. He was teaching them that the fear of the Lord must needs to be something other than knees knocking because God is God. It has got to be a response that we trust Him when we get into a scrape or that we need something desperately or that we want to grow in a certain area. Look, God will respond to you just like He did to me [David]. We just need to, in a way, put it to the test. We need to make it work in our lives by actually doing it. It cannot just be an attitude. It has to be a response that we actually trust Him and in our faith we do the right works, we do the works that show our faith.

One commentator on this in verse 11, concluded, "The first lesson in the school of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. If you want to be wise, if you want to be skilled in living, if you want to please God, learn the fear of the Lord."

It is not something we have naturally. We have the quaking and terror part that the children of Israel had around Mount Sinai, but we do not have the proper reverential fear of God naturally. Romans 8:7 should be ringing in our ears at this point, "The carnal mind is enmity against God." If you want to, look at it this way: Godly fear is the exact opposite of the carnal mind's enmity. We are supposed to be using the fear of the Lord to drive out the carnal mind.

That is the motivating factor. The fear of the Lord is the motivating factor that will begin and continue to help us to react in a godly way, rather than a carnal way, because we want to fear and please God. The spiritual mind, the one with the fear of the Lord, loves God, exalts God, reveres God.

And so David concludes that godly fear must be learned. It is not something natural to us. And if we want to have eternal life and good in the end, we must learn it. It has to be one of our first lessons and lessons that we practice over and over and over again. So what does David tell us to do? He tells us to live godly lives. That is the first thing he says. We have this problem, all of us: get control of your tongue, the things you say. Then he says, stop sinning, Do good to others. Be a peacemaker.

So what does he say there? We do have a problem with what we say, but the tongue and the stop sinning there, "depart from evil," a lot of that has to do with our bodily sins, if you will, with the sins of our body. And then it goes out from there to doing good for others. Take care of yourself, your problems that are yours, and then go and start showing the love of neighbor—doing good. That is what Jesus did. He went about doing good. He did not have to get rid of the sins of His own, His own sins. He just showed us by His example this second part of doing good. It goes on, be a peacemaker. We just talked about that a few weeks ago in the Beatitudes. If you want to be a child of God, be a peacemaker.

In other words, what David is saying here is that we have to grow in righteousness and godly character, and that is the process of learning to put God first in everything, gradually reducing human nature's grip on us so that we look to God first in everything. Those are the two perspectives: human nature's perspective and God's perspective. Human nature's way and God's way. And we have to reduce the first and ramp up the second.

And let me tell you, learning to fear God does not come easily because our human nature is going to fight this with everything it has got. It has got to be worked at. It must be a discipline and we must practice it over a long period of time so that it will grow. Its use is a vital cog in our spiritual maturity. And if we want to become like God, we have to begin practicing the fear of God.

Let us conclude in II Corinthians chapter 6.

II Corinthians 6:14-18 [he says] Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with lawlessness? And what communion has light with darkness? And what accord has Christ with Belial? Or what part has a believer with an unbeliever? And what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For you are the temple of the living God.

As God has said, "I will dwell in them and walk among them. I will be their God, and they shall be My people." Therefore "Come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord. Do not touch what is unclean, and I will receive you. I will be a Father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty."

II Corinthians 7:1 Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.

So God has called His people to be separate, to become holy. He separated us from the world, from unbelievers, from Satan's grip. He has called us to be living stones in His spiritual house, and He not only walks among us, but He lives in us. We are God's handpicked people, His children, the ones that He works with most closely.

Our response must be to give our full attention to Him and what He is doing to us, with us, and among us. We must get rid of defiling sin and pursue holiness in every circumstance of our life. And the medium, if you will, the means that we do this is through the fear of God. If we do not have the fear of God, we will not be holy. We will not be complete and spiritually mature without it. So out of deep reverence for God, let us please Him and worship Him in everything.

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