The Fear of the Lord, Part One

The idea of fearing God has often seemed strange to me. I understood that in some sort of abstract way we were supposed to fear him. I had read that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and that the fear of the Lord leads to life. But I had also read that we have been given a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control. I had read Jesus’ words, “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” In other words, on the surface (and this is certainly a surface-level view) fear in the Bible seems to be spoken of contradictorily: on the one hand, be very fearful of the Lord; on the other, fear not. As in most cases where the Bible presents an apparent contradiction, the correct answer to the conundrum is, yes. They both are right.

My house church here in Manhattan is going through the Gospel of Luke this year. There is so much in there to unpack, and one of the consistent themes of the gospel is the topic of fear. In this brief series of posts, I will look first at a way to think about fear and then examine a couple of passages in Luke’s gospel’s twelfth chapter which instruct us in the words of Jesus on the topic of fear.

First, my own thoughts on the principle of fear. This is not directly from Scripture, but I believe it is derived from the Bible nonetheless.

Fear, in many ways, functions as a proper acknowledgment of what you are confronting. A few years ago Clara and I went on a backpacking trip with a few friends and family to climb the most secluded 14ers in the state of Colorado. The trailhead is only accessible by train and then you have to stomp into the bush for several miles to get to the base of the peaks. Two of the mountains required semi-technical climbing moves and one required a quite literal leap of faith. The very tippy-top of Sunlight Peak is not a nice smooth rock, but a crazy sharp one that juts out of the north face of the peak. The picture gives an idea of the approach to the top. (Sorry that Blue and I are sticking our butts out, it was intentional.) It is surrounded on three sides by a 1,500 foot drop. And to get to it, you literally have to jump. Not very far, but any jump with a several second free fall and mangled corpse as the reward for messing it up must be approached with caution. And so we approached that jump with caution. We still did it, but we knew it was risky to do it and prepared ourselves for that risk.

This is not a perfect analogy to what it is to fear God, but it drives towards my point for this post which is that fear need not be paralyzing only clarifying. Knowing God’s great power is not meant to keep us in a state of catatonic fear, but to inspire reverence. God is not only the one to whom we cry Abba, Father, but the one who will, after Christ has laid all things at his feet and made him all in all, rule over both heaven and hell. This is no small thing to be trifled with. But very much at the same time, he loves us and knows us intimately and created us for his enjoyment and, as the authors of the Westminster Confession have it, so that we may enjoy him forever. We must hold on to both of these things when we think of God. We need not be afraid to fear. We must not be too fearful to love and enjoy.

Three Weeks, or Thereabouts

Our due date is roughly three weeks from today. Which really means that it could happen any time between next Sunday and five weeks from now. One of the more hilarious movies I have ever seen is Hot Fuzz, a satire on nearly every cop movie of all time by the brilliant British team that gave us Shawn of the Dead and the much less good, Run, Fat Boy, Run. One of the characters in the movie, the fat cop who loves to pretend his life is like a cop movie repeats a few times throughout the film this single line from the Bad Boy franchise: “This shit just got real.” I will now borrow that line for describing my life.

Clara’s second baby shower was the other day. There was one in Colorado for our families and old friends and another here in Kansas for our families and new friends. I already think my unborn child has more stuff than me. He certainly has more clothing. There is baby stuff everywhere right now. It is funny to think of how our house has changed already. Since we only have a two-bedroom, I am sharing my office with Owen, or to be more accurate spatially speaking, he is sharing his bedroom with my office. Where I once had a room all to myself, complete with two bookcases, computer desk, old music posters on the walls, and a futon to sit on for lighter reading, my office now consists of an old desk shoved into a small nook where I can’t really move my chair once I am sitting because I am hemmed in by the desk on one side and filing cabinets on the other. The two bookcases are split between the living room and our bedroom and the futon is in the basement at a friend’s place. Parenthood.

My parents are incredibly excited to be grandparents as every friend, family member, casual acquaintance, waiter, barista, bus boy, gas station attendant, hotel desk worker, construction zone sign holder, and door-to-door salesman that they have encountered in the past six months would tell you. We knew we were in trouble when they first visited us in El Paso after we had been married for a few months and our friends made the mistake of bringing their six month old baby boy to our apartment. They were in full on grandparent mode. They did a good job of not pressuring us, but it was always known that Brooke and Alan would gladly accept news of our first offspring.

Now it is really just a waiting game. And I can’t wait to meet him. I can’t wait to hold him and kiss his little face and sit and stare at him for hours at a time. I just spent some time on youtube watching videos of babies doing cute and abnormal things. By myself. I don’t know at this point what it feels like to be a father, what that little child nearly oblivious to your existence can mean to you, but as the day approaches I feel like I am getting a closer approximation. And then a day will come when Clara gives me the signal and I break all traffic regulations getting to Topeka with my heart pounding out of my chest and we go into a room as two and leave it as three. Incredible.

Heaven is for Real

My Uncle Scott gave me a copy of this book when Clara and I visited him in Arizona a couple of months ago. I had heard of it, but had not planned on reading it. I imagined it would be too cheesy for my refined tastes. I promised I would read it, though, when the semester ended and I was able to engage in that pleasure of leisure reading again. Clara read it on the plane ride home from Phoenix and told me it would be well worth the two hours it would take me to read so I put it in the back of my mind.

And, indeed it was. I read the book this morning from cover to cover (not saying too much here, it literally did take less than two hours), but I slowly felt my defenses draining as I read on.

                                                                                                                                                                                   

I will not give away too much in the way of storyline or detail here, but the book is about a toddler named Colton Burpo who suffered a burst appendix and who a few months after a life-saving operation and prolonged hospitalization began dropping hints to his mom and dad that he had an out-of-body, heavenly experience. He overcomes his parent’s skepticism by providing details about, for example, the nature of the Trinity and his mother’s earlier miscarriage that there is no way he could have known otherwise. The story is told by the boy’s father, a Wesleyan pastor from a small town in Nebraska named Todd Burpo.

As I read on, my incredulity faded. I won’t go so far as to say that I believe the story wholesale, but I do believe that something happened to that little boy. I get nervous when people talk about heaven. Too often it degenerates into hallmark-esque platitudes that have less to do with scripture than with wish-fulfillment. But this book never did that. Some of the boy’s ideas about Jesus are classical Sunday school images, but others digress in interesting and possible ways. Colton’s father, and the stories narrator, Todd, seems skeptical at first about what his son is telling him and doesn’t seem to be the type of person who would imagine outlandish spiritual experiences as a routine part of a believer’s life. He believes something unique happened with his son, but he believes it happened nonetheless.

It is difficult to know exactly how to analyze this book. Getting an advanced degree in English teaches you to critique a certain type of book, namely high literature or literature written for an audience of very few. This book is not high literature. It avoids, therefore, the type of analysis that I am able to give to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, a book I am reading at the same time as Heaven is for Real. And this is intentional. This is a story designed for everyone, for children and adults to read with wonder, amazement, and perhaps a bit of doubt or reasoned apprehension. A child psychologist or a pop culture historian could dissect this book through their own convoluted lens and come up with some explanation for Colton’s visions and frame them nicely within a strict materialist framework. But my Christian faith prevents me from doing this myself. I believe in the reality of a future with God the Father and his Son and my Savior, Jesus Christ. And, therefore, I also believe that Colton Burpo just may have seen what he claims to have seen. The door is open to that possibility.

One of the more refreshing things about this book, and one which had little to do with the precise nature of Colton’s experience/vision, was the emphasis his father put on having faith like a child. And, moreover, how important this is to Jesus, how delighted he was to have little children brought into his presence and how much he loved them. Indeed, this seems Colton’s own overriding lesson from all of this—“Jesus really, really loves the children,” he keeps telling his father. Sometimes it is easy to forget, in this grownup world of theology and church planting and determining God’s will for our lives that what he really wants from us is faith like a child. Faith in stories, faith in his bigness, faith in his conquering love for us. For to such as these, belongs the kingdom of God (Mark 10:14).