Zoom the camera out. (*)
You reside on an oblate spheroid that spins with a rotational velocity of a thousand miles per hour, every hour, as it has done since ever before hours were defined. It is mostly uninhabitable, and much of it is actively trying to kill you. This spinning ball simultaneously hurtles through the universe at roughly 1.3 million miles per hour, circling a staggering ball of plasma and gas that scorches any planets closer to it or freezes those farther from it. You are one of 8.3 billion members of this spinning cosmic carousel, and even if you could stop the ride, the resulting inertia would vaporize you instantaneously, laughing as it did.
Zoom in a little.
You are essentially a vertebrate bag comprised of fluids and organs. You are constantly losing those fluids and constantly having to replenish them. Your organs are complex beyond your knowledge, and yet they function every day without any guidance or input on your part. You do not control the beating of your heart, the clearing of your veins, or the efficacy of your liver. At any moment, those organs might catastrophically fail and you have no real way of knowing when the toll will be due. Regardless, you still have to feed the cat, pay the bills, and smell the daisies.
Zoom in more. A whole lot more.
Crack open an egg and you’ll find yolk and albumen. Split open an atom and you’ll find quarks, leptons, and enough atomic power to flatten a city. Electromagnetic forces bind your atoms together, gravitational forces keep you from simply catapulting off into empty space, and nuclear forces govern the fundamental subatomic realm that maintains all of physical and chemical matter. These invisible forces are exploding around you every second, trillions upon trillions of them, and they love to dance. The atoms have all paired up to play, shy old gravity is off hiding in the corner, and the magnetics are playing tug of war with the cutlery. You’re invited to the party too, but you forgot to bring the napkins.
Do you feel small yet? Does your universe feel big? What about its maker? You might be pretty big compared to one atom, but how about ten trillion trillion trillion of them? Go stand in the emptiest field in Montana and take a look around. You’re still a few trillion atoms short of a cow pasture.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding.
Psalm 111:10 ESV
Wisdom, said the late Tim Keller, is when you connect two unrelated-seeming ideas.
God, the author of all wisdom, connected Castor canadensis and Anas platyrhynchos, creating the platypus and confounding all of beaver-kind and mother-duckery in one fell swoop.
That same God (still the same author of all wisdom) connected Him and us. He made us in his image, and then just to get the point across he begat (gesundheit) his beloved Son in an image that sure looked a heckuva lot like us (if maybe not exactly like Jonathan Roumie). The wisdom of God connected Him and us, God and man. The Lord of all creation eternally bound his person to us. And he did so entirely unlike the way he connected all those poor, confused beavers and ducks — although the gap between mammals and birds is far smaller than between man and the divine.
Imagine a paintbrush big enough to swath out Kilimanjaro with one stroke. Now imagine a hand delicate and steady enough to place the color in your eyes with that same brush. Look at yourself in a mirror. Understand that the person you see bears an uncanny family resemblance with the God of all creation, the maker and sustainer of life, the architect of beauty and the supreme lord of time and history.
Do you feel glorious? Compared to a platypus, maybe. But from the foot of the Himalayas, you probably get the sense that God’s world is far stranger, older, and more perplexing than whatever you were grumbling about when you woke up this morning.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.
Proverbs 1:7 ESV
A handful of people, throughout time and history, have come to the conclusion that God has had a few opinions on things. Luckily for us, he wrote several of them down. Fellas, we’ve got a book.
What do you think God thinks about all day? Platypuses, apparently. And supernovas. The mating habits of ostriches, perhaps. And you. He thinks a lot about you. Yes, God has opinions about your life and what’s going on. How often do you ask for them?
Do you despise instruction? Do you resent God’s opinions on your life — on your angers, your twisted desires, or the various catastrophes you’d like to make of your life if you could just get rid of that pesky intuition that you were designed with eternity in mind, and that all of life’s pleasures and vices are fleeting shadows in the end? “No,” you cry out, unjustly maligned. “I would never do that. My plans are fantastic!”
(And with such conviction, the blind man paints what sounds like an elephant and hangs it on what smells like a wall.)
Do you resent God’s opinions on your lifestyle? He has them, you know. They’re pretty comprehensive. Do you want to know what they are? If he could tell you, would it matter? Would you change anything about you if he asked? What if he wrote those things down for you? What if he made himself accessible and put his Spirit inside of you? What if he came to earth and lived in real history and told you how it was done?
Only a fool despises change. Knowledge begins when we accept that we are not the masters of our stars. There is only one master of the stars, and his hand is mighty enough to hold swirling galaxies in an endless cosmos; yet small and tender enough to stroke the eggshell-frailty of our human hearts and not crack the shell.
Do you fear him? Fear him enough to change your lifestyle for him? Even just a little?
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.
If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.
Psalm 130:3-4 ESV
Stand before God. No, stand. As in, on your feet. Yes, both of them, preferably at the same time. Can you do it?
Stand before an angry God. He hates sin. The burning of his wrath against sin and all its ilk will echo through all of creation, a nuclear shadow bleached into eternity by the holocaust of his fury and the roiling tempest of his judgement. He hates sin more than anything was ever hated on earth.
There is sin in you. A lot of it.
Does that terrify you? Now imagine a universe where the reigning divine doesn’t hate sin. Where the one enthroned is indifferent to pain. Where this god revels in suffering. Where rape, torture, and all of human agony are a cosmic amusement and diversion; where every beaten and molested child, every whip across the scourged back, every rattling chain and every strangled infant is nothing less than a fragrant offering to this omnipotent Nietzschean horror that loves and delights in sin.
Which prospect frightens you more?
With the Lord, there is forgiveness. Your sin is no less hideous to the God of Abraham, but with forgiveness you gain the hope of rescue and redemption. Through Christ, you can detach your sin from your identity and escape the wrath you rightly deserve. With a god who loves sin, there is only the heel of the boot slowly grinding down for all of eternity; and a mocking voice laughing as you try to imagine that your life ever had any meaning except fleeting pleasure and unyielding pain.
How much better is God’s hatred of sin?
Stand before an angry God. His anger will burn away every ugliness and imperfection through the blood of his Son. Because of God’s anger, you can be the person you know you were always meant to be. Because of his forgiveness, the holocaust of his wrath passes over you and burns only your sin away into forgotten memory.
The fear of the Lord becomes beautiful when breathed to life through his forgiveness.
The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.
Ecclesiastes 12:13 ESV
You will know them by their fears.
Your life and mine would be substantially different if they were defined first and foremost by our fearful devotion to God instead of man. If we woke up every day and remembered our smallness, our vulnerability, our family resemblance to God himself, that we have been forgiven to the uttermost by a God who hates sin and yet somehow still loves us. If we remembered our sovereign Lord, and obeyed him above all other fears.
You and I inhabit a vast and unsearchable universe. We are mortal and frail, and live beneath a terrifying vulnerability at all times. Our very existence is governed by forces we do not understand and likely never will. You are unbearably weak. You are hideously sinful. You can be bountifully forgiven. So yes,
- You are very, very small; smaller than the smallest thing you can think of, and then even smaller still.
And yes,
- God is so very, very big; bigger than the vastest picture you can hold, and then even bigger still. And he calls you beloved when you call his Son the Lord of your life, and yield what you thought was control but truly never was.
So trust in the God who is big, and fear him with a joy and gladness that erupts in praise every day that you live and are forgiven, and are accepted into his eternal kingdom: not as a servant, but as a child. Gather up a picture in your mind of the biggest thing you can, of infinity stretching out in every direction: God is bigger still. His mercy is more. He stands on the side of his people, and nothing in heaven or on earth or under earth can stop the unyielding march of his stampeding lordship that will see every tear erased, every evil dead and buried, and goodness and righteousness enthroned forever.
Know God. Seek God. Yes, fear God.
You have no other or greater duty than this.
(*) - I'm deeply indebted to N.D. Wilson's 'Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl' for this entire line of thinking. Go and read it, then go find some ants and worship our fearful God.