The Modern Jefferson Bible: Christians Embarrassed of Christ

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb 10:31).

I spent quite some time thinking about this verse earlier this morning, and I figured I would share some of my thoughts.

Over the last few years, months, and especially weeks, I have become increasingly concerned that it is our forgetting the truth of this statement—that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God—that lies at the underbelly of many of the modern church’s greatest issues. The God we preach from our pulpits is—how can I put it—too soft. We speak only of grace and nothing of judgment, only of love and never of wrath, and even when we do mention these other things, we get through them as quickly as possible to try to get back to the more lighthearted and uplifting stuff.

Why is this a problem? I think there are many reasons, but first and foremost, it is that in doing this, we are failing to see that God’s graciousness is actually magnified by the severity of the judgment we deserve, and His love is seen most clearly when we firmly grasp how deserve we are of His wrath. Whenever we neglect spending time meditating on God’s judgment and wrath, we actually understand God’s grace and His love even less. By neglecting, overlooking, or speeding through any aspect of who God is, we necessarily bring upon ourselves a limited understanding of God as a whole.

Perhaps democracy has caused us to lose our understanding of kingship and submission. Perhaps we have spoken to often of God as our ‘buddy’ and our ‘pal’ and have lost reverence for Him entirely. I can’t claim to know the source of this neglect, but in truth, I think it all boils down to one heartbreaking conclusion: I think we’ve become embarrassed of God.

Christians Embarrassed of Christ

Have you noticed how, amidst the rise of modern skepticism, Christians ever feel the need to run to God’s defense, attempting to defend His actions and justify them according to the moral understandings of a sinful and skeptical society? People will raise one question about who God is and what He did, and it doesn’t take long to see that we have actually become embarrassed, in many ways, of the various things God has done over history. Yet why should we be?

Why is it that every time a skeptic brings up God commanding Moses and Joshua to slaughter the Canaanites (Num 21:2-3; Dt 20:17; Js 6:17,21), we Christians start stammering and stuttering and offering our defense? “Oh, well…you see, uh…the thing is, it really isn’t that bad…so, uh….” We stammer on and on trying to defend God’s actions, usually to our own detriment.

Now, I do not deny the difficulty of these passages—and I certainly agree that if we sit down and truly understand the text, we can understand God’s goodness behind all of it—but does not our initial reaction say something about how we view God? Does it not suggests that we are in some way embarrassed of what God did in the past, that we wish He hadn’t done it and that we wish it never had to be mentioned? It is like we view God as our rebellious child, and we are relieved He grew out of those days, yet are constantly anxious about the possibility of bringing it back up. Like I said, I’m not denying the difficulty of the passage, but I think our response to the difficulty says more about us than it does about God.

My question is this: If we truly believed God to be good and if we truly feared Him, would not our stuttering defenses cease as we replied with the utmost confidence, “He had His reasons for doing what He did, and it isn’t my part to know all His reasons, for it is I who answer to Him, not He to me”? We have made God so much a servant to man that we think He needs to justify His actions to us, and I think that statement in and of itself addresses one of the greatest issues in modern, cultural Christianity, especially in the rise of modern skepticism.

DETERMINING THE PROBLEM

Recently some friends and I were studying the story of the Flood in Genesis 6-8, and one friend at the table kept trying to lighten the severity of what was happening by pointing to the happy things at the end of the story. Now, I don’t think that my friend was wrong in doing this—I think that we should keep God’s eternal plans in mind, for such is the source of our faith, our hope, and our joy—but at the same time, his doing so highlighted in my mind a tendency I’ve noticed in many Christian circles: So often, that is the only way we know to read Scripture.

Whenever we encounter something difficult, we immediately breeze through it to get to the light at the end of the tunnel. However, I have become increasingly convicted that sometimes Scripture wants us to rest underneath the weight of what is occurring, to feel the heartbreak and to suffer alongside the characters. When we read the story of the Flood and how “Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died” (Gen 7:22), I think we are supposed to feel the weight and the emotion of that, and if we skip too quickly to the rainbow at the end of the story, we have missed the point entirely. If we read God instructing the slaughter of the Canaanites or Amalekites and immediately feel the need to justify God’s actions, I think we have missed the point entirely. Rather than letting God’s Word speak for itself, we want to interject on its behalf; rather than letting God defend His own actions, we feel the need to overlook them in the hopes that people won’t notice.

So often, we breeze through the darker passages of Scripture to get to the lighter ones, and so it should be no surprise at all when we have forfeited the fear of the one true God for a base-level, mild admiration for a sugar-coated God we have made in our own image. We love studying Philippians, but we hate studying the Prophets. We love studying the Beatitudes, but we hate studying the Woes (unless we are applying them to others). We love ‘studyinig’ Jeremiah 29:11 (though we often misuse it), but we hate even reading Jeremiah 29:1-10. We love Ezekiel 37, but we hate Ezekiel 23. We love applying Philippians 4:13 to ourselves, but we stray away from 2 Corinthians 11:22-29. We mock Thomas Jefferson for editing the Bible to contain only the things he approved of, yet we do that each and every day when we refuse to acknowledge the hard passages and reduce the fear of the Lord to mere reverence or respect.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO FEAR GOD?

This brings up another issue: What does it mean to fear God? Despite growing up in church my entire life, I didn’t realize how prevalent a theme the fear of God was throughout Scripture until I truly began to start deeply, deeply studying it over the last few years, but Scripture is saturated in this concept. Yet when we speak of the fear of God in church nowadays—if we speak of it at all—usually we speak of it as nothing more than respect or reverence, and I have actually heard preachers verbally say out loud that it is nothing more than just that.

Yet tell me this: When Adam and Eve heard the sound of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day shortly after eating the forbidden fruit, do you think they merely admired God? As Noah heard his neighbors and family members pounding on the door of the ark as the floodwaters surged around them, do you think he merely respected God? Do you think that it was mere reverence for His Father that left Jesus sweating blood in Gethsemane? Do you think we will merely admire Christ in His return, when He comes in power to lay waste to the nations and judge the world? Should we admire, revere, and respect God? Yes, yes, yes! But “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” and we need to remember that. The Bible says “fear,” and I think we would do well to take it at its word.

It is at this point that many people might say, “Well, the Greek and Hebrew actually imply moreso ‘respect’ than ‘fear.’” I’ve studied the Greek and Hebrew, and I can say that the words mean “fear,” and that’s why translators have consistently translated them in such a manner throughout the years. There is a genuine call in Scripture to fear God, but I think we have become so fearful of fear itself that we have entirely distorted what this means in order to exchange it for its Walmart-brand knockoff. But do not be mistaken, we are certainly called to fear God, and this fear, I believe, is something that should cause us to tremble and shake inside, not because we will be judged—those who are in Christ need fear no such thing—but because of who God is as Judge. I do not think one can open-heartedly study Scripture without leaving it with a genuine fear of the Almighty, for He is vaster and greater and so much bigger and more powerful than we could ever convey with human words.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

Most people nowadays want some sort of practical takeaway from an article like this, and while I think that is a good testament about how consumer-driven Christian culture has become, I will entertain it nonetheless in this instance, for I think that one takeaway is fairly straightforward.

It is no wonder to me that the modern Christian struggles with stress and anxiety just as much (if not more) than the rest of the world: It is because we serve a small god. Not that God is actually small; we have simply stripped Him of all the things that make Him big. Jesus says, “Do not be anxious about your life” (Mt 6:25)—and proceeds to demonstrate the severity of this command, saying not to be anxious even about your most fundamental needs—but because we do not fear Him and because we have lost sight of Him as King, we are quick to justify our anxiety alongside the rest of the world, coming up with excuses for why we have no choice but to feel anxious. (This doesn’t merely happen in regard to anxiety. People are consistently coming up with excuses as to why they have no choice but to commit certain sins, and it all stems from a lack of the fear of God.)

If we do not fear God above all things, then we will by necessity fear other things more, thus losing the anchor of our soul and forfeiting ourselves to the crash waves and tumultuous torrents of the world around us. But I will remind you again of what the Scriptures say: the fear of the Lord is the beginning of both knowledge and wisdom alike (Pr 1:7; 9:10), for only in truly fearing God do we gain a true perspective of the world and of life.

When you recognize that the God we serve is the One who created all things, the One who can destroy the earth by the command of His mouth, who will one day stand in judgment over all things, that really puts things in place. However, on the flip side of things, when you only read the easy passages of Scripture, you lose the fear of God, and in so doing, you abandon a great portion of what makes God, well, God. But when you see how big and fearful God is, you begin to see He is the only thing that really matters, and when you see you can trust Him, all those anxieties in your life—no matter how big or small they may be—will pale in comparison to His glory. For when you live in the fear of God, you need never fear anything else at all.