Fearing God

Upon recent conversations and a campus crusades meeting tonight something has been on my mind. Should we fear God? What is all this talk of fear and trembling in the bible?

Before I go into this I want to make clear that in none of my posts will I make clear that I have answers or that I know I am right. I am on a journey, as we all are, towards ultimate love, peace, and spirituality. This means I ask questions and I have doubts and in this particular post I am essentially asking a question.

Should we fear God? Through conversation and things of the sort, it has been made apparent to me that when the idea of fearing God enters the conversation is when the idea that the world is a bad place enters. Recently I have heard things such as the idea that we should all fear God because he is a dangerous God and has struck people down on previous occasions accounted for in the Bible and just tonight I heard that we should be asking the question of why God has not consumed our world because it is such an evil and corrupt one.

The idea of fearing God has always been fairly foreign to me. Growing up I was taught of the love and infinite grace and mercy of God but now I am expected to grasp a concept that seems to be the opposite of where I feel that I'm at. An even bigger reason I cannot seem to grasp this concept is that it seems to be a very flawed system of evangelism. I dont know how you can expect people to listen to what your saying if your saying to worship this guy that will strike you down and punish you if you sin, when clearly, we all sin.

I think the idea behind "fearing God" is supposed to be rather than fearing him we should respect him. This is what I have been told. The example normally following this definition is a father and son relationship. The son fears the father because the father is authoritative over the son and if the son disobeys the father punishes. I believe this is a flawed example. When was the last time you saw a greedy rich guy being "punished" by God? As a matter of fact, when was the last time you saw anyone being "punished" by God? Clearly the world is flawed and corrupt, and clearly the corrupt ones reap all of the worlds benefits. But I believe the key word here is "worlds". The corrupt and the greedy reap benefits of this world and this, to any christian, is essentially meaningless.

It seems to me that in the context "fearing God" has been used around me recently, it has been a way for some to escape reality. They talk of how everyone should fear God because this world is corrupt and wrong in its ways, but it seems that the only way we will ever see a change in the world again will be through love, not through fear or something of the sort. Maybe instead of preaching of the fear of God, we should be telling of the love of God, and how if we love God we love our brothers and sisters of this world. This seems like it could contribute more to Gods kingdom than these scare tactics.

Lastly, I wanted to address something that was shared during crusades tonight. The last thing the speaker for the night said was that anyone attending this university that were true christians and living that out were his heroes because we were surrounded by enemies of the cross. I believe this to be a very offensive statement. Jesus loved all and we are to be like Jesus. Regardless of what this statement was trying to prove, we should love and respect our brothers and sisters whether they are christians, atheists, muslims, or agnostic. An enemy implies a battle against and the truth is we want them on our side at all cost. Brothers and sisters, we are all united by the cross.