1-19

I wanted to relate some musings I've had in the last week or two.

I was reading through Mary's Magnificat. We Protestants are usually not familiar with what that is, so I'll tell you that it's the praise Mary gave to God in Luke 1 when Elizabeth told her she was blessed among women because she carried the Savior. Anyway, one of the lines Mary says is, "His mercy is from generation to generation on those who fear Him."

I need to fear the Lord because I've recently felt the need for the Lord's mercy as much as - maybe more than - anybody on earth, so it got me thinking about that word "fear". I've always wondered at the juxtaposition of fear and love. To fear someone cancels out love, because to love someone necessarily means to make yourself vulnurable to them. Obviously, you can't have a fear of being hurt in some way while simultaneously entrusting yourself to them. The Bible itself says that "perfect love casts out all fear", I think because of that very reason. Perfect love = perfect trust = absence of fear. So when confronted with the phrase, "fear God", I've always substituted the word "reverence" for fear, which I've understood to be more to the point of the expression.

My Bible's concordance shed even more light on it for me. "Revernence" was one of the synonyms, but then there was something else. "Tender conscience". Wow. It struck me as a beautiful way of saying it. To fear the Lord means to have a tender conscience toward Him.

I remember being in high school, and some of my buddies would go out drinking, some even got into harder things. Some guys would talk about having sex, and even name names. Then they would lie to their parents about everything. The game was to see how much one could get away with. During that time, one of the things I remember thinking was, "Don't you love your mom and dad?" The answer was, in reality, not so much. I mean, I'm sure all my friends had a kind of a dormant love for good old Mom and Dad, but not an active, engaged, meaningful love. To have truly loved their parents would have meant to have been trust worthy. To have been trust worthy required a fear of their parents - in the sense of having a tender conscience toward them. The trouble was that somewhere around or not long after the time puberty hit they had begun to harden their conscience, so that by age 17 it was just second nature.

So it is with God. To actively love Him means to have a tender conscience toward His wishes, to obey with a willing heart, to be found worthy of His trust. So love and fear are not juxtaposed at all, but synonymous.

Pretty cool.