When Words Fail

How do you speak of One of whom no human word or words can contain? One who says rightfully and rhetorically of Himself, “To whom will you compare me?” (Is. 40.25)

I guess you try to go beyond words. Use words to point to something infinitely further.

He is great like nothing else is great. Greater than the greatest that anything or anyone ever will be. He is the mountain range that towers over top of the Himalayas. The light that shines brighter than the brightest stars wrapped around the sun and shining at their brightest. He is that series of notes strung together, more beautiful, melodic, poetic and angelic than our brains can register, than our ears can even hear. He is the colours that sit on a canvas that our eyes aren’t even capable of seeing, much less our minds capable of understanding what it is we see.

He is simply infinitely greater than all that the language of greatness can convey. Maybe that is why John resorted to speaking in precious stones, “And he who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian, and around the throne was a rainbow that had the appearance of an emerald” (Revelation 4.3)

To Live MUST Be Christ

Seasons of suffering do not always produce our clearest and most logical thoughts. The coming together of things like shock, sadness, anger, and confusion can sometimes lead to some wildly unhealthy and even irrational conclusions and decisions. And yet, I would argue that those difficult seasons of our lives can also end up being the moments when we see things with a surprising amount of clarity.

THE MONTH OF FEBRUARY

On February 4th, 2024, I went to the hospital to have a lump looked at. I expected to be home that evening with some medication to take care of a very mundane diagnosis. However, things do not always happen as we expect them to. That initial visit began for me a cascade of tests and appointments. The emergency room visit led to an ultrasound; the ultrasound led to another doctor’s appointment; that appointment led to a meeting with a specialist; the meeting with a specialist led to surgery; surgery led to more tests and scans; tests and scans led to lots of waiting, and all of which together led to the longest month of my life. Ill have you know that in my little part of North America, February is routinely the coldest month of the year, which seems to always make it the longest month of the year (even with only 28 or 29 days). As it would happen, February 2024 was the warmest February my town had experienced in ages, but the longest February I had ever lived.

Pretty early into the journey of tests and appointments I became aware of the expected diagnosis, and it wasn’t great. The effect of this knowledge was a flood of emotions and a spinning mind. I quickly called my elders team to request relief from preaching for the foreseeable future because I was finding myself unable to focus on anything except the situation before me. For days on end, I did nothing but walk. I would set out in the morning into the mountains and spend 8 hours of the work day walking in silence down dirt roads, petitioning the Lord and trying to come to grips with the likelihood of a shortened life. If you would have asked me in those days while I was walking those long dirt roads, if I was thinking clearly, I probably would have said “Unlikely.” Even while I was going through it, I could recognize in myself the list that I began with: shock, sadness, anger and confusion. This cocktail of emotions had me far too preoccupied to be imparting much wisdom or making any life-changing decisions. And yet, as I look back on my journal entries from that month, I realize that in some ways I was thinking about my life with a clarity that I’d never had before.

I won’t make a habit of sharing my journal on the internet, but for the sake of the topic let me share a brief exert. February 6th, while sitting on a flat rock on a mountain side with a Bible flipped open to Mark 8.34 and Philippians 1.21 on my mind, I wrote, “I have never been more sure that death is real. I have never been more sure that Jesus lives. This season of life has changed death for me. And it has changed life for me. To die is inevitably a gain. And to live must be Christ. Anything less makes no sense. If God died for me, if He lives, if I will be raised up with Him, if He is all satisfying, good and sufficient, how could He have half of me and the world have the rest? How could fear and worry have any place in me? How could my life not be surrendered completely in joy? Either I would I have missed who Jesus is and what He has done and promised, or I have would have failed to believe it.”

THE POWER OF facing your mortality

If you haven’t guessed yet, I was diagnosed with cancer. As I type here on the morning of March 11th, just over one month after the original diagnosis, I have been declared cancer free. I still have some hoops to jump through, but for the most part I have a clean bill of health, for which I am thankful beyond what words can even express. Maybe some what oddly though, I am also thankful for everything that has led up to this point. I wouldn’t trade February 2024 for anything. It was this trial and all the pain and uncertainty it entailed that led me to thinking about the gospel in ways that I pray I will never recover from.

You see, before this whole cancer thing, death to me was just other people’s reality. As a pastor I would go deal with it on their behalf, but it never felt too real for me personally. It was something abstract, even kind of theoretical. The result, I realize now looking back, was a very cavalier following of Jesus. No real urgency. No Psalm 42 like desperation. No comprehensive surrender. And it makes sense, because without a real sense of death and just how certain it is and deserving of it we are, how can we ever truly appreciate the life Jesus came to give us?

So, there I was, just casually following Jesus, trusting more in myself then not. Following Jesus at a safe distance. And then cancer hit, and suddenly death felt like it was on my doorstep, or I on its. For the first time the end felt absolutely real; my life felt fragile and finite, and the gospel, and in particular the cost of following Jesus, made more sense than it ever had.

Let me try to explain. In Mark 8.34 Jesus lays out the requirements of anyone that would want to follow Him, and it is nothing short of everything. He calls them to deny themselves and take up their crosses, which is to essentially say, “You must throw your life away and recklessly abandon yourself to God.” That is a steep price to follow. It couldn’t be any steeper. Who on earth would pay that price? Well, only the one who understands the value of what they are receiving. Jesus goes on to say in the next verse, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” In other words, what is being received in the relinquishment of our lives is not just some added happiness, it is life itself. True life, eternal life, new life in Christ. A gift of infinite value!

Well if you are receiving something that is worth more than anything, what happens to the cost of that something? It disappears. And when the value of the life Jesus offers is understood, then the cost of following Him is no longer even worthy of being called a cost. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer so perfectly put it, “Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life worth living.”

THE COST, NAY, THE GRACE OF FOLLOWING JESUS

Here’s the thing, I had loved and followed Jesus for many years. I had contemplated and rested in the Gospel for many years. But I had always wavered in how much of my life I gave to Christ and how much I held back. Simply, because while never really comprehending the reality of the death I deserve, I had never understood the value of and felt the consequent gratitude for the life that Jesus gives. But when death became for me a real reality and an immediate possibility, then the abundant life that Jesus died to give me (the already and not yet) finally appeared as the real, invaluable, undeserving, and infinite gift that it truly is. And when that happened, the incredible cost of following Him dissolved into worship. It became the only logical response. The cost, as Bonhoeffer explains, was transformed from cost into grace.

It is probably good that I wasn’t operating heavy machinery last month. But in terms of thinking about Jesus and about my living and dying, I don’t believe I have ever thought so clearly as when I sat on a mountainside and paraphrased for myself the apostle Paul, “To die is inevitably a gain. And to live must be Christ. Anything less makes no sense.”

Emil Brunner and the Fear of the Lord

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom” (Ps. 111:10). A familiar verse to those of us who have been in and around the church for some time. In fact, so familiar and seemingly straightforward that we commonly quote it to other Christians, refer to it in conversations, and even send it out as an encouragement or reminder to friends (I am a little surprised that I don’t see it on more t-shirts and coffee-mugs). Still, at least for myself, along with being a familiar verse it has also always been a kind of bewildering verse. Because while the argument is simple enough, that the fear of the Lord precedes wisdom, the question always remains, what is “the fear of the Lord”?

Be honest for a minute, how many arguments have you been in (lets call them robust dialogues) about whether the fear of the Lord is respect or terror; admiration or trepidation? You don’t have to answer that out loud, because I actually can’t see or hear you anyways, but I will assume that at least some who are reading this have had those dialogues. The Lord knows that I have. And to be honest, though I have earnestly argued in those times from one side or the other, for most of my life I have not been exactly sure who is more right. Of course, to the unredeemed the fear of the Lord must be mostly if not entirely terror. How could it be anything else when you are in the cross-hairs of God’s judgment? But is there not that kind of fear also mixed in with the worship and admiration of those who have been rescued out of His judgment?

A Fuller Picture

The fear of the Lord is not the only perplexing phrase found in Scripture. The Bible is full of them. In fact, there are so many words and concepts in the Bible that are difficult to unpack that sometimes I wish God had just included a lexicon in the back. It would have been a huge time saver and cleared up a lot of discussions. But alas, He did not. And so, for our own good (and truly for the delight of our souls) we are left to become students of the Bible; to search the Scriptures in an effort to put together fuller understandings of the biblical language, and also to read and learn from those who have gone before us and done much of that searching and putting together already.

All that to say, one of the most impactful and biblical definition of the fear of the Lord that I have ever come across is from the 20th Century Swiss Theologian, Emil Brunner, in the first volume of his three-volume dogmatics set, The Christian Doctrine of God. In his chapter on the holiness of God, while Brunner is discussing God’s incomparableness and his transcendence over and above his creations, he writes this beautiful and insightful passage,

“Man is not equal to God: he is indeed a creature, not the Creator; he is a dependent, not an independent, personality. Therefore, one cannot stand on a level with God and have fellowship with Him as if He were just one of ourselves. We must bow the knee before him…The creature should bow the knee in reverence before the Holy God. This humble recognition of the infinite distance between God and man is the “fear of the Lord”: that fear of the Lord which is the “beginning of all wisdom” (Prov. 1.7). This is the expression of the feeling that we are wholly dependent upon God, and that He is in no way dependent upon us.”[1]

Isn’t that wonderfully said? When I read that some months ago, I remember feeling like for the first time I had a picture of the fear of the Lord that was beyond the age old of debate of either respect or terror. Brunner makes the picture so much fuller than that, and he does so by putting together a couple of important biblical concepts.

Consider this passage for a moment and at least two of the components that Brunner sees as essential to a biblical fear of the Lord.

STARTING WITH HUMILITY

The first component is humility. Fear of the Lord is made up of the kind of humility that comes from seeing God as completely transcendent and wholly separate from mankind in His holiness: “The King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Tim. 6.15-16). It is made of the kind of the kind of humility that comes from seeing the absolute incomparable nature of God, and the creatureliness of man; from seeing God as Creator and people as His created beings: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? (Ps. 8.3-4). It comes from the kind of humility that sees Isaiah, a prophet of the Lord upon encountering the Lord, proclaiming judgment upon himself because of his absolute unworthiness: “Woe is me! yFor I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” (Is. 6.5).

If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, then the humble admission and recognition that we are in no way equal to God is the beginning of that fear. Or to say it another way, the first essential part of the fear of the Lord is knowing that He is the Lord and that we are not.

FROM HUMILITY TO REVERENCE

The second component is reverence. Now a person might say that reverence is humility, but I would argue that they are not quite the same. People standing in the presence of God might be humbled; they might finally recognize their level of importance in comparison to Him; they may even bow their knees to Him as Paul says will be the case (Rom. 14.11). But in that moment, those knee bowers may still fail to stand in awe of Him and show Him the kind of deep honour and respect that is caught up in the term reverence. Without a doubt, reverence and humility are deeply connected. Reverence requires humility and it comes out of humility. Still, it is not the case that wherever you find humility before God, that reverence can just be assumed. And so, Brunner identifies reverence as another essential piece, “The creature should bow the knee in reverence before the Holy God.”[2]

The fear of Lord is not only recognizing the infinite chasm between us and God, it is following that recognition to a place of worship. It is recognizing not only His otherliness but also His worthiness. It is prostrating our lives before Him because we have seen not only his separateness but also His goodness. It is saying with Psalmist, “Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!” (Ps. 95.6)

HUMBLE REVERENCE

All that to say, if Brunner is right (and I believe He is), for the believer the fear of the Lord is not simply respect, and it is not just plain fear. It is more then both of those. It is recognizing how transcendent and wholly other God is, not sharing His glory with any, and so recognizing how worthy He is of all of our praise. It is in Brunner’s own words, humble reverence. Or in the words of the elders in the throne scene of Revelation 4, “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created” (Rev. 4.11).

To finish where we began, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom” (Ps. 111:10).

[1] Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God (Westminster Press: Philadelphia, 1946), 162-163.

[2] Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God, 163.

He Is Not Suprised By Your Brokenness

Have you ever thought that you were too muddy to come to Jesus? Like He was going to be caught off guard and ultimately offended by the messiness and griminess of your life; by all those past mistakes as well as all the habits that your still roommates with today?

I will just assume your answer is a yes, just like it was at some point for most of us (all of us) who have ever come to Jesus. That begs the next question, are we so naive to think that Jesus knew/knows everything about us, except how rotten we were/are? The Bible says wild things like this: that God knows the number of hairs on our head; that He has searched us and known us, down to the thoughts in our mind; that He knew before the foundation of the world that we would be made holy in His sight and that we would do good works that He had prepared for us to do. And yet, you think He didn’t see or realize that we all were or still are some broken down raggedy old train wrecks?

Remember what Jesus told Peter? It was a harsh reality for Peter, but it should be like music to the ears of the souls of those who realize they are just like Peter. Matthew 26.34, “Jesus said to him, ‘Truly, I tell you, this very night, before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.’” Jesus knew! He knew exactly what Peter, His own disciple, was going to do. He knew it and He still loved Him. He knew it and He still went to the cross for Him. He knew it, and He still showed up after He had stepped out of that tomb, to restore Peter to Himself.

Don’t be so foolish to think that Jesus is in the dark as to the darkness in your life. He is all knowing, which means He knows the good and the bad. He knows exactly where we have been, what we have done, and even what we are still going to do. He knows the ugliness and He knew it before He went to the cross, and He still went for us. He knows it and He still loves us.

If our sin has ever been a stumbling block for us in coming to Jesus let it be so no more.

Remember Peter.

And then remember Jesus, “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5.8)

Economy of Generosity

The apostle Paul’s parting words to the Ephesian elders: “In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’ (acts 20.35). Could Jesus (or Paul) say anything more counter cultural to our culture today, particularly that last part? We might not like to admit it but practically speaking, don’t most of us live as if the opposite is true? That it is more blessed to receive than to give?

The materialism that invades our lives is not about how many material items one is able to distribute but how many he/she is able to accumulate. The aim of the American dream is not about another person’s prosperity but about one’s own. And its not about one’s own prosperity for the sake of enriching other people’s lives, its about prosperity for the sake of enriching one’s own life.

Yet clearly, based on Paul’s quotation of Jesus, God’s economy works so radically different than ours. It always about the other. It’s always about giving over receiving. And ironically its in this upside-down economy of generosity that one finds himself/herself truly blessed. Or according to the Swiss theologian Karl Barth’s favourite translation of blessed, the one who gives rather than receives is truly the lucky bum.