Fear of the Lord I: Servile and Filial

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Welcome to the Behold Your God podcast, and if you are normally with us, you'll notice things are a little different today.

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Instead of TJ, I'm here with Chuck Baggett, and Chuck is one of my oldest friends.

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We've been friends since college, particularly, I guess, sophomore year is when we really got to know each other.

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Ended up renting a house together most of that time and have maintained a friendship ever since. Chuck is also a co -pastor here at Christ Church.

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And we've asked Chuck during the COVID isolation, we took turns doing

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Sunday morning series, and we asked Chuck if he would take a series that he recently did with us on the fear of the

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Lord, which I think everyone in the church felt was particularly helpful. Certainly such a significant theme and one that's easy to assume, you know, that we know what it's all about.

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You know, like the word faith, we think, well, I understand that. But to have someone just kind of walk us through it carefully is a great benefit to our souls.

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So we've asked Chuck if he would take those sermons and just break it down into a number of podcasts for us.

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So, Chuck, the first time you talked with us about that, you started us in Exodus 19 and the whole issue with Israel before the

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Lord. And God presents himself in such a way as to lead the people, his people that he loves, to fear him.

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So can you explain, just start us off with that context and why?

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Right. So three months have passed since the people left Egypt to the day, the Bible tells us.

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And as they come near Sinai and prepare for the Lord to come down and meet with Moses, they're warned not to touch the mountain.

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And as Moses goes up the mountain, there is thunder and lightning and smoke and sound of trumpet.

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We're told that in chapter 19 before the law was given and again in chapter 20 after it's given. And I think the repetition is to just help us to see that this was not a solitary blast of a trumpet or a single lightning strike, but a cacophony of noise and this constant light show and rumblings.

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And so you can understand why the people respond the way they do. They're terrified and we're told that they trembled.

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They were afraid. And it wasn't just them, but in the book of Hebrews in chapter 12, as the mountain of Sinai and Zion are contrasted, we're told in verse 21 that so terrible was the sight at Sinai that Moses said,

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I'm full of fear and trembling. So when Moses came down from the mountain, the people met him and said, speak to us yourself and we will listen, but let not

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God speak to us or we will die. And it's in that context that Moses says to them in verse 20 of Exodus 20, do not be afraid for God has come in order to test you and in order that the fear of him may remain with you so that you may not sin.

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You know, in that passage that you're pointing out, God tells, Moses tells them not to be afraid.

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And then yet we're told that God showed himself in order that his fear may remain with the people.

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So obviously, either we have a contradiction in the passage, which we don't believe, or we have two different types of fear that are being discussed, one that's forbidden and one that's greatly encouraged.

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We talk about this in two different categories. We talk about servile fear and filial fear.

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So why don't you explain servile fear to us? I read somewhere that Martin Luther came up with these categories.

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I don't remember where I saw that, but the servile fear is from a

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Latin word that means slave. And so sometimes you'll hear servile and other times you'll hear slavish fear. R .C.

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Sproul, defining it, said it like this. The servile fear is a kind of fear that a prisoner in a torture chamber has for his tormentor, the jailer or the executioner.

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It's that kind of dreadful anxiety in which someone is frightened by the clear and present danger that is represented by another person.

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Or it's the kind of fear that a slave would have at the hands of a malicious master who would come with the whip and torment the slave.

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So obviously a terror, terrified kind of fear. We see that in Genesis 3.

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Let me read this passage starting in verse 8. They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the

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Lord God among the trees of the garden. Then the Lord God called to the man and said to him,

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Where are you? He said, I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid myself.

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Yeah, so an example of the servile fear. And in that context it is a perfectly rational response for Adam and Eve to feel they have broken the law of God and they have no atonement, no covering.

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We see their flimsy attempts at making a covering. And so, yeah, they're terrified and they don't want to enjoy what they previously had enjoyed, the communion with God as He came near and walked with them in the garden.

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And so, in reference to God, we could say that a servile fear is the fear that should be felt by those who live in rebellion to God.

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And that should be a fear that's felt by anybody that doesn't know who God is. To know who

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God is, as He describes Himself in Scripture, and to know that you are living in rebellion to Him, and that your sins have not been atoned for, and not feel fear, is irrational.

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It's a foolish response. It doesn't add up. And obviously a person who lives like that is not only living in rebellion, but they are blind to their rebellion.

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Their sin has blinded them to reality as it is. Yeah, if you think about it just in everyday life, if we know a person who lacks natural fears, we don't think of them as courageous.

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If a person, a blind person that's stepping out in front of traffic, you think, well, that's not normal.

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It's because they don't see the danger. If they saw it, they would feel the impulse to pull back.

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If we see a person who has a mental illness, and so there are areas in their life that they don't know to fear things, or even little children who haven't yet learned, it's a mark of something that's lacking.

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And any person, like you said, who has contact with the Holy Creator, but not through a means that He's provided for people like us, it's insanity not to have some fear.

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But what about the fear that the believer is to have, that healthy thing that the

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Bible talks about and links it with happiness so often that we call filial fear. What's that about?

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Yeah, so there has been a change in relationship because of Christ, and in that change in relationship, the condemnation that was rightfully ours has been removed, and so we don't have to stand...

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We don't stand in front of God as our tormentor, and yet there is still a sense of awe as we look at Him.

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He's still God. And we see that in so many ways and in so many places in Scripture, even in the Lord's Prayer.

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Jesus teaches us to pray, Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.

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He's the Holy One, and so we don't stand away from Him and tremble as if He might hit us, but at the same time,

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He's God. But you do see a distinction between those two different types of fear in that the servile fear is terrifying and makes people want to pull back, not come near.

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We don't come to the light because we love our deeds, and they're dark, and we don't want to come into the light.

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But the believer, though God is still fearful, the believer wants to draw near to Him. So there's a distinction between these two kinds of fear, the filial fear being one that draws us to God, and the servile fear making us, in our terror, want to come away from God, stand away from Him.

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Jerry Bridges, in his book, The Joy of Fearing God, tells a parable that I assume he made up that helps to illustrate both of those.

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In his story, there's a man named Butch McGregor who becomes a Marine. In boot camp, this guy who's been a tough guy and strong, etc.,

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is broken down by the drill sergeant. He's made to drop and give push -ups for every little infraction until he's scared to do anything wrong or move until he's told to move.

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And during boot camp, there comes a day when there's a surprise inspection by this general.

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And as the general is making inspections and walking through the barracks, he stops in front of McGregor and catches him with what

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Bridges calls a steely -eyed glance. And the Marine, who's been in terror of the drill sergeant, is really petrified before this general.

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Years later, as time passes, the general has been promoted until he's now,

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I guess, a major general, and Private McGregor is now

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Sergeant McGregor. And he becomes the driver for the same general, and he still holds him in this sense of awe.

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Wartime comes, and they're inserted into wherever this war is, and he drives the general around.

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They're not in actual combat, but there are times when they have to drive through places that are hostile, and there's the possibility of action.

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So the day comes as they're driving along when there is an explosion. They run over some kind of a mine or something, and it detonates.

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The general is thrown from the vehicle, but McGregor is trapped inside the vehicle. And both are wounded, but despite his wounds, the general crawls back and pulls

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McGregor to safety. They both go to the hospital. The general recovers more quickly, and to McGregor's surprise, he comes and visits regularly.

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And McGregor comes to understand that this general actually cares for him. And as time goes on,

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McGregor realizes he cares for the general, and so he still holds him in this sense of awe. He's the general, but he loves the general, and he now wants to serve him with a very different motive than he did before.

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Nothing has changed in some regards. He's still a general, and he's still a sergeant. He still holds him in awe.

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He's still going to say yes, sir, to him. He's not going to be too familiar. But at the same time, something has changed in their relationship, and they both care about each other, and the motives are different.

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And so it's an imperfect parable, but I think it is helpful. It helps us to see how when a person comes to God through Jesus Christ, while there are some aspects of our relationship that perhaps have remained unchanged,

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He's still God, and we're still creatures. There's still an infinite gap between us.

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At the same time, things are very different because of who we now are in Jesus Christ, and we who were far off have been brought near, and we're told that we can now serve

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Him without fear. So knowing the love of God and not just the immensity of God, reaching us through Jesus Christ doesn't shrink our amazement at Him, the awe that we feel, the reverence.

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It ought to expand it exponentially that a God that majestic and transcendent is also the

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God that has stooped so low to a proud man, that I can never get over His bigness, and I can never get over His goodness.

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If we keep those together like the Bible has them, then they do produce in the garden of our hearts this wonderful plant of a childlike loving reverence for their

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Father, where we remain amazed at God and His grace for the rest of our lives.

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Yeah. I think about the incident with the disciples and Jesus as they're crossing the sea, and Jesus goes to sleep in the boat, and there's a storm that comes up, and some of the disciples who are fishermen are afraid the boat's going to be swamped.

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They're scared. And they wake Jesus up asking Him, Don't you care about us? And Jesus calms the sea.

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The winds are gone. The sea is now still. And the disciples look at Him and say,

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Who is this that even the wind and the seas obey? So there's an amazement. There's obviously awe, but it doesn't make them want to run away from Him.

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He's just demonstrated it. I do care for you. He rebukes the winds and the waves, but it doesn't diminish their sense of awe.

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It increases it. Yeah. And really this, the fear of the

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Lord that Chuck's been talking about, the Bible, we know that in Proverbs, again in Psalms, the

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Bible presents this not only as a central aspect of all true religion, that we have such a sight of God as He really is revealed in Scripture, that we never lose the awareness that He is the transcendent one or the holy one or the altogether different one who is above us.

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But it talks about that, particularly in Proverbs. It isn't just at the heart of Christianity.

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It's the very foundational stone. In other words, I mean, we talk about this a lot in the podcast. And, you know, as pastors here, we try to follow this order.

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What a man believes about God then affects everything else in his religion. So to save time, we start at the right place.

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But that's really where the fear of the Lord is, you know. For a man to see God as He really is with eyes opened by the gracious work of the

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Holy Spirit and the Scripture, in a sense, comes alive, and it's not just religious words on a page.

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And He is in the grip of those truths. It is the fear of the Lord that's being birthed in him.

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And it's the beginning of all real spiritual wisdom. Let me read a few verses that Chuck's pulled together for us.

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One of the most obvious, Proverbs 1, verse 7, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction.

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Proverbs 9, verse 10, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the

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Holy One is understanding. And one of my favorite verses, one that I memorized early on as a believer, Psalm 111, verse 10,

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The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and a good understanding have all those who do

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His commandments. His praise endures forever. So, for the believer, not just standing back aware that I have no right to draw near to Him, but even more frightening, in a sense, is the awareness that you have been given as a completely free gift through the life and death of Christ.

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You've been given the gift of drawing near to this uncreated, infinitely glorious, incomprehensible being.

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Being in the grip of that is the beginning of knowledge and wisdom, and it becomes the foundation of everything else that flows in our response to God.

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How would Martin preach the series of sermons on the fear of the Lord? I heard, I think in the 70s, and it may have been here that I heard the illustration about a man learning his

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ABCs. This isn't exact, but he talked about a man who wanted to learn how to read, an adult.

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And not only does he not know how to read, he doesn't even know his letters. And so you can imagine this man has a friend who is very learned.

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He says he's a professor, and he has a PhD and lots of other letters behind his name.

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And he not only knows how to read, he knows how to read big words. And he can get these graduate theses and read them and understand the concepts that are being presented and all the big vocabulary words that are being presented.

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He grasped all of them. And so the illiterate man asked the professor friend to teach him to read.

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And the professor agrees and pulls out one of these big, heady theses and drops it in front of him and says, there, start there, just read.

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And the man looks at it, and he has no basis to read that.

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It's not just that the words are too big and too hard. He doesn't even know his letters. And the professor is forgetting that while he can read those words and understand the concepts, it is because he has not left behind the very basic things that he learned when he was a child, the

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ABCs. All the big words and all the big ideas are formed by those foundational things.

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And the fear of the Lord is like that. We don't graduate from it. We move from it to understand perhaps other things, but we understand those other things because we understand this foundational element.

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We don't leave it behind. Yeah, I think that's really, I think foundation is such a great picture for that.

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I think I probably as a young believer used to think of the fear of the Lord as kind of, imagine scaffolding around a building when you're, you know, so this big church building we have, we had a lot of scaffolding around it when the brickers were building up, and it's a double story building, so they had to go pretty high up.

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But the thing with scaffolding is it's only for the beginning, and once its purpose is served, you remove it.

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But the fear of the Lord is not like that. Imagine a man who used to pay a lot of attention to the passages that describe the fear of the

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Lord, but as he grows older as a Christian, he starts reading old writers, you know, Puritans, 18th century guys, starts reading, you know, maybe he reads

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Calvin, maybe he reads Berkhoff and all these big brains. And he can teach now, and he can discuss things.

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It is so tempting for us to believe the lie of the enemy that now that you can discuss election and justification and regeneration and the order salutis, and what about ecclesiology and eschatology and all these ologies, it is so easy to wake up in the morning and think, you know what,

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I don't need the fear of the Lord like I used to, you know, and you forget that the

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God you're talking about in every doctrinal discussion is infinitely beyond us, you know, in majesty and worth.

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And it ought to, you ought to be able to hear a man's fear of the Lord in the way he handles doctrines, not just in what he believes, but in the way he handles them, the way he speaks of them.

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There ought to be that gripping beauty, humility, you know, that flows sweetly through all of that.

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Yeah, would you say, would you agree that if a person is growing in knowledge on those subjects, all those ologies you mentioned, but there's not a parallel growth in the fear of the

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Lord that obviously it's affecting the head and the heart's not coming along for the ride? Yeah, yeah, so if we labor to do what's necessary by the grace of God to cultivate a fear of the

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Lord that He's put in us in the new nature, which we'll talk about in further talks, the new nature sees

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God for who He really is and now gets it, you know, and He gets us, and the fear of the

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Lord begins to grow. But if we cultivate that at the same rate that we're cultivating, you know, just that normal growth of knowledge, you know, that we expect to see in a believer, then we're on safe ground.

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But once we quit cultivating that, then what you find is men with great theology, but who are no longer in the grip of God, and really that, you know, that's almost worse than a guy having bad theology.

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You know, because you hear him and he says great things, but his heart is so unlike Christ's that you think, well, if that's what truth does, if that's what your doctrine does for you,

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I'm not interested in it, you know, so it's a dangerous thing. I think part of the danger is that we learn those things and we are kind of amazed at the idea, but we don't really worship

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God in those things, you know. The new thought does not prompt us then to turn to God and say, wow.

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Who were the Puritans? Is the reputation deserved? And is there anything they had that you and I might need?

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Are you interested in knowing the Bible? Are you interested in knowing Christ? Do you want someone to attend to the care of your soul?

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Then you're going to want to get to know the Puritans. To learn more about Puritan All of Life to the

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Glory of God, visit Mediagracie .org or click the link in the description below. Chuck, thanks for being with us for the first of a handful of episodes on this theme.

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There really is just so much to say that even if we were to spend, you know, months on this, we would just be scratching the surface.

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Countless verses in the Bible, each of them requiring, you know, really meriting just time at the feet of the king asking him, why do you talk about the fear of you at this point?

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You know, how does it fit into this passage? And God, how do I make room for that in my life?

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So we will talk more about this topic in coming podcasts. But today we want to close with a prayer like we've been doing recently.

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And this one's by Matthew Henry. Henry writes, Oh God, you are my God. Early will

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I seek you. You are my God and I will praise you. My father's God and I will extol you.

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Who is a God like you? Glorious and holiness, fearful and praises doing wonders. Whom have

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I in heaven but you? There is none upon earth that I desire besides you.

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When my flesh and my heart fail, you are the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

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You made me for yourself to show forth your praise. God, be merciful to me, a sinner.

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Oh, deliver me from the wrath to come through Jesus Christ who died for me and rose again.