Last week I posted some introductory thoughts on fear, followed by a three-part series on fear in the Eden accounts in Genesis, starting here. Today I want to share a couple of brief concluding thoughts on fear, particularly from the perspective of how we should live differently in the light of what we have learned.
My first conclusion is that fear is not from God. I’m inevitably reminded once again of 1 John 4:18:
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.
If we take it as axiomatic that God is love, then it seems to me we have to conclude from this verse that there is no fear in God, and that when we fully apprehend the true nature of God as love, there is no more room for fear.
There is a trap we can easily fall into here: beating ourselves up because we feel afraid, and assume we must therefore somehow be guilty of cutting ourselves off from God’s love. We need to remember that the voice of accusation and condemnation is not the voice of God. The voice of the God who is love is a tender whisper of invitation out of our fear and towards the fulness of his fear-dispelling reality.
That being the case, perhaps a good question we might often ask ourselves in any given situation, and especially when thinking about God and our relationship to Him, is “What am I afraid of here? Where is this fear coming from?”
My second and perhaps most challenging conclusion is that rightness is not a good indicator of closeness to God. Adam and Eve eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was all about being able to discern right from wrong, and look where it got them: living in fear and shame, blaming each other and hiding from God. Pretty much where we’ve been living ever since.
I like to feel that I have right information and right understanding, whether when considering the things of God or in life more generally. Of course, I’m not suggesting we should abandon all desire to know the truth. But the problem comes when being right takes priority over being one with others and with God. This is a huge challenge to me, because it means I need to learn to more often say “It doesn’t matter” or even just “Okay” instead of insisting on dogmatically stating and defending my opinion.
To put it very bluntly, if my being right leads to or justifies my killing of others (bearing in mind that Jesus put angry outbursts on a par with murder), it’s not worth a jot. Love – God’s kind of love, which looks like compassion, self-sacrifice and forgiveness – is much more important than being right.
Given this understanding of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Jesus’ injunction about not judging others (Matthew 7:1) takes on a whole new light. I suggest he gave this instruction not only because God alone is a righteous judge, but also because he knew that when we judge, we enter into the satanic blame game and, in so doing, create and maintain separation between ourselves and others and between ourselves and God.
In the final analysis, then, perhaps it comes down to this: am I prepared to lay down my desire to be right for the sake of union with God and my fellow man? If that feels like a massive sacrifice, perhaps that’s a sign that my mental circuitry still needs some more Holy Spirit reconfiguration.
[ Image: Gabriela Ferreira ]
