“Therefore we make it our aim, whether present or absent, to be well pleasing to Him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive the things done in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men; but we are well known to God, and I also trust are well known in your consciences.” -2 Corinthians 5:9-11
If I were to stand before the Church and make a gospel appeal by quoting the Apostle Paul, saying, “The love of Christ compels me!” I am confident that I would receive an overwhelming “Amen!!!” from the people of God. But what if I decided to preach this verse?
“Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord we persuade men”.
How many in the Church would say “Amen” to that?
Do we know anything about “the terror of the Lord” at all? I’m going to say that I don’t think we do. I’m also going to admit that I myself am pretty much in the same boat as everybody else in the church. The Apostle Paul talks about “the terror of the Lord” as if everybody in his day would simply understand what he meant and would agree with him about it. Certainly the early Church had a taste of the terror of the Lord when Ananias and Sapphira were struck dead after lieing to the Holy Spirit. We read the account in Acts and think it was for them and not for us. How foolish we are!
When you think of what it means to know Jesus, does the phrase “the terror of the Lord” ever cross your mind?
We live in an age where “the fear of the Lord” is almost entirely absent!
We worship a God who has been fashioned in our own image and to our own liking. A God who inspires terror is simply not a God that we are comfortable with!
Why did the Apostle Paul talk about working out his salvation “with fear and trembling”? Why is he talking about “the terror of the Lord?” What did he know about God that we don’t??
Who can say they know anything of what Paul is speaking about here?
Until we know the terror of the Lord, as well as the love of the Lord, we don’t really know God as we should.
If I go back to the 1st Great Awakening In America which was spearheaded by a man named Jonathan Edwards, this “fear of the Lord”, this “terror of the Lord”, is often an element found in his sermons. “Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God”, which many attribute to the beginning of the First Great Awakening in America, is terrifying to read. I heard this sermon preached recently by an excellent narrator who read it before a church, and honestly, it shook me! It was about as scary as could be!!! The fact is, there’s a terrifying aspect to God that is found in the Bible, but almost nobody mentions it anymore. Throughout church history, going all the way back to the Apostle Paul, and then going further back into the Old Testament, this aspect of “the terror of the Lord” is found throughout the Word of God. I’m going to quote this passage at length because it speaks about this part of God that nobody seems to want to talk about today, and furthermore, it is found in the book of Hebrews. This is New Testament teaching!
“For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries. Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. -Hebrews 10:26-31
I’m going to ask the question again. What did the writer of Hebrews know, what did the Apostle Paul know, what did the early church know, what did the Old Testament prophets know, what did Jonathan Edwards who God used in the 1st Great Awakening in America know, that we don’t know today about “the terror of the Lord”?
Many today would simply dismiss Jonathan Edwards as a man who didn’t understand the love of God or the Father heart of God. However, nothing could be further from the truth! In his personal testimony, called “The Narrative of Jonathan Edwards”, it’s easily seen that Jonathan Edwards understood the love of God in a dimension that very few people have ever personally experienced! He knew the sublime sweetness of Jesus Christ and lived in the love and joy of God. But he also had a deep reverential awe of God and often spoke of the terror of the Lord.
I would not hesitate to say that I believe that having a true fear of the Lord is actually a sign of the favor of God on one’s life.
Some of the greatest Saints who have ever lived are those who have possessed the fear of the Lord. Even the Lord Jesus Christ Himself took delight in it!
“And his delight shall be in the fear of the LORD. – Isaiah 11:2
Today various attributes of God that are clearly written about in Scripture, but that people have a difficult time with, such as the wrath of God, are simply dismissed as being beneath God’s nature. We almost seem to be afraid that we will make God look bad if we tell the truth about Him as it is revealed in Scripture! Perhaps we need to stop and ask ourselves, “If this is what God has chosen to reveal about Himself in the Holy Scriptures, why am I unwilling to agree with what He has said about Himself?”
It is extraordinarily dishonoring to God when we misrepresent Him by leaving out the parts we don’t like!
It’s my conviction that “the fear of the Lord” is going to be returning to the Church. Some would like to say that this simply means being in awe of God. I cannot agree with that. When the Apostle Paul talks about knowing the terror of the Lord and thus persuading men, he’s talking about something that is beyond awe and wonder. He is talking about the fact that it is quite literally terrifying to fall into the hands of the Living God! The truth of this helps us to understand what the Cross of Christ really means, what the blood of Jesus Christ is really all about, and how great a love God has given us in His Son that we would be spared the wrath of God that we deserve and instead be forgiven all our sin- And not just forgiven, but loved to the point that we would be made His very own children!
“See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.” -1 John 3:1
It is not inconsistent to know the terror of the Lord and the love of the Lord at the same time. They are both aspects of who God is and our desire should be to know both.
I do not personally believe that I have a grasp of this the way that I should. I certainly have a reverential awe of God, and yes, a certain level of the fear of the Lord, but I can see from the scripture that there are those who have experienced things when it comes to this that I have not. I will very quickly point out three examples.
FIRST, Isaiah was a major prophet of God and certainly knew God well, but we find him coming into an experience of God that is far beyond anything else that he had ever know before. He sees the LORD “high and lifted up” and the train of His robe is filling the temple. The glory of God is everywhere all around Isaiah. We think that if that would happen to us we would be falling on the floor in the Glory, enjoying it all, but Isaiah is not shouting “Hallelujah!” He cries out, “I’m going to die!”
“And I said: “Woe is me! For 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!” – Isaiah 6:5
The Hebrew word for “I’m lost!”, actually could be translated, “I’m going to die!”. Isaiah was fearing for his life because of the glory of the LORD.
SECOND, we read of Job who God considered to be “righteous”. Job thought that he knew God pretty well, and he actually did, according to most standards. But then God takes Job through a terrifying eye-opening view of who He really is in His greatness and grandeur and Job is utterly left in the dust.
“I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”-Job 42:5-6
You cannot walk away from reading the book of Job without getting the impression that God was letting Job know that He was infinitely greater than anything Job had ever imagined!
THIRD, we have the Apostle John. Who knew the love of God like John? He was the one who laid his head on the breast of Jesus at The Last Supper. The gospel that he wrote is known as the gospel of God’s love. John also saw Jesus on the mountain when He was transfigured in glorious light before his very eyes. Who knew Jesus better than John? And yet we find John on the island of Patmos falling at His feet “as though dead” after Jesus appeared to him as the resurrected Christ “with eyes as flames of fire”!
“When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead.” -Revelation 1:17
How easily we read the words given John in the Revelation but how terrifying it would be to actually go through the experience he did! We have not had Jesus show up like that in our lives. We imagine Him strolling along the Sea of Galilee, the little children coming to Him, His hands healing lepers, but who knows the Lord of Glory and has seen a vision of Him like John saw?
“Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne…” -Revelation 20:11-12
Can you read those words and not be terrified? If it were not for the blood of the Lamb we would be annihilated!
All three of these men knew God, but all three of them discovered “the fear of the Lord” in a terrifying way! I think it would be rather strange if we were not terrified by this God. If we truly knew Him, how could we not be? It is because of our lack of vision, our lack of knowledge of who God really is, that we have none of this “Terror of the Lord” that the Apostle Paul talked about.
“Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men”.
May God give us the grace to truly know Him as He is.