Fear God?

1 Peter 1:13-21-Therefore, prepare your minds for action; be self-controlled; set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: "Be holy, because I am holy." Since you call on a Father who judges each man's work impartially, live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear. For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake. Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.

There are three interlinked commands in this passage of scripture.

• First, that we would live in the living hope- that we put our hope, our confident expectation, in Jesus and in his grace, for salvation.
• Secondly, that we would live in holiness- that by His grace, we would learn to ‘say no to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age.

The third is this;

• that we would live in ‘reverent fear’.

What does Peter mean by this? What does it mean for the believer in Christ to live in ‘reverent fear’?

The whole idea of ‘fearing God’ is something of an ‘elephant in the room’- it is an important and obvious topic that we see in the Word of God that is hardly discussed, because the discussion can make us feel uncomfortable. But the Bible teaches us that God is to be feared; and so we need to wrestle with what it means for us as believers to reverently fear God in the way that this passage of scripture commands.

There is a difference between reverently fearing God and being afraid of God. God wants you to reverently fear Him; He does not want you to be afraid of Him.

Parents will understand the difference. You want your children to not be afraid of you; to know that you desire a close relationship with them; to know that you love them deeply. But you also what them to revere you enough to obey you; that when you say ‘don’t run out on the road’, they take heed of what you say. You do not want them to be afraid of you, but you want them to revere you and live with a healthy fear of the outcome of their disobedience of you. Not a fear that cripples, but a fear that protects and preserves- a fear that will keep them off the road.

So, Peter tells us to live out our lives as believers with a reverent fear. A reverent fear that will keep us off the broad road of sin that leads to our destruction. The evidence as to whether we are full of or lacking in this reverent fear of our Heavenly Father is best revealed to us by our obedience or disobedience in that moment of temptation- in the moment when we are faced with the choice to turn towards God and away from sin or turn away from God and towards sin.

This is how these 3 commandments of this passage of 1st Peter interlink. He wants us to reverently fear Him in a way that causes us to put our hope in Him and His grace and to abandon sin that we may draw nearer to Him, desiring to be with Him and to be as He is- holy. These three commandments are as one.

Peter gives us this reason to live in reverent fear in verse.18;

1 Peter 1:18-19- For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.

To reverently fear God is to treat the blood of Christ and the grace it brings to us as being precious by choosing God over sin.

To do the opposite is the opposite.

Hebrews 10 picks this up;

Hebrews 10:26-29- If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?

There is a difference between reverently fearing God and being afraid of God. God wants you to reverently fear Him so that you would not have cause to be afraid of Him.

The story of the ‘fall of man’ in Genesis is a perfect example of this. God put Adam into the Garden of Eden, and commanded him, as we read in Genesis 2:16-

Genesis 2:16-17-You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."

Evidently, Adam did not reverently fear God enough to keep His commands; he disobeyed and rebelled against God, eating from the fruit of the tree that God commanded Him not to eat from. It was at this point that Sin entered into the world. And as a consequence of this Sin, Adam became afraid of God. He heard the Lord God coming and he tried to hide from Him. We read from verse 9 of chapter 3;

Genesis 3:9-10- But the Lord God called to the man, "Where are you?" He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid…’’

When we disobey and rebel against God, which is what sin is; we demonstrate a lack of that healthy type of fear towards God that causes us to shun sin and unrighteousness.

The difference between one who reverently fears God and one who has cause to be afraid of God is the one who reverently fears God runs to Him, away from sin, and the one who has cause to be afraid runs from Him, towards sin.

John 3:19-20- This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.

Fear God. Come into the light.