Moses said to the people, "Do not be afraid; for God has come only to test you and to put the fear of him upon you so that you do not sin."

This is not a comfortable verse of scripture for me, so therefore, not a comfortable sermon for me.

I’ve got a contradiction at each end of the verse and a discomfort in the middle.

Let me start with the contradiction.

I have often struggled with the notion of the “fear of God”. Even though the phrase occurs over and over in scripture, it doesn’t roll off my tongue easily. I’ve always found it hard to reconcile that with the other phrase that occurs over and over “Be not afraid.”

And today we have them both in the same verse.

Do you hear the contradiction in those words?

Do not be afraid, why? Because God wants you to fear him.

Doesn’t seem to fit, does it?

Part of the contradiction that we feel comes from the language barrier.

21st Century Americans don’t speak of fear as a good thing, a positive emotion, we are the brave, the courageous, the strong; fear is for the timid, the cowardly, the weak and we don’t want any part of it.

So it is no wonder that the last 100 years of preaching in this country, and if I were to be honest the last 28 years of preaching in this place in particular, have worked to dance around the notion of the fear of God.

But perhaps the problem is that our world is too narrow, we want to see everything and feel everything in terms of 21st Century America and so we don’t speak or feel the biblical Hebrew.

For in the Hebrew, and even in the NT Greek, the word that is translated as fear has at least two clear meanings.

The first is timidity, cowardice, weakness, the fear of danger, the fear of injury, the fear of failure, the fear of our own revelation to others as being less than they think us to be.

This is the fear that we are familiar with, the fear that paralyzes us and causes us to become defensive and self-centered; it is the fear that we are consistently being told, in scripture, to be rid of.

“Fear not” is the common, repeated greeting to God’s people as they approach God. Don’t be timid, or cowardly, or weak, fear not.

But when we widen the world of our vocabulary we can begin to understand and appreciate the second fear, the other Biblical understanding and usage of the word. The fear of God is the revelation, not of our nature, but of God’s nature and it is better translated to American English by the use of words such as reverence, humility and, best of all when we use it correctly, awe.

Now we still have to fight the common usage, there are many people who toss “awesome” around as a common description of some fairly normal occurrences: a good pumpkin pie is a good pumpkin pie, but there is no such thing as an awesome pumpkin pie.

Awesome should be reserved for those rare and deep and profound moments of awareness of God’s presence in our lives that fills us in the dark and hidden corners of our lives with a light that the fears of the world can not overcome. A birth can be awesome, as can a tragedy; a quiet night with a good friend can be awesome, as can a shared moment of sorrow.

Awesome is that moment when you and I touch and are touched by heaven, that moment when we are so completely in God’s presence and so completely aware of it that we tremble.

Is it scary, is it fearful, is it humbling to be near that light? Yes it is. It is humbling to have ourselves stripped bare before God and ourselves and so the fear of God, the sense of awe will often leave us with no words to describe it.

But that awe, that fear of God, will eliminate all of the other fears, you know the ones that dog us day after day: the bills we owe, the price of gas, the promises we break, the insecurities over our jobs, our relationships, our faith. And it eliminates the fears we have of the future: what will our health be? Will our children be safe and happy? Where will we live? Will we outlive our savings?

These are real fears that we face, concerns that nibble at us until we hear the balance that Moses brings to our lives: "Do not be afraid; for God has come only to test you and to put the fear of him upon you so that you do not sin."

So that you and I do not make the wrong choices, so that you and I do not do the easy thing rather than the right thing, so that you and I do not sacrifice the gift of this day and the people in our lives in exchange for the promise of something better someday.

When we stand in awe before God, when we can see clearly the choices that we have and realize which are the ones that God would have us make, then the other fears fade away and our way is clear, because we are seeing the world as God sees it and wants it to be, not as we see it and want it to be.

And when we don’t?

When we refuse to set aside time for prayer, study, service?

When we shrink our world down to the demands of our jobs and allow everyone else to define who we are and what we should do, allow everyone else to write on our calendars?

We become slaves to our fears.

People will think I’m a bad parent if I don’t . . .

People will think I’m a bad child if I don’t . . .

What if I lose my job . . .

What if I get sick . . .

Those fears diminish us. Our world grows smaller and smaller and smaller and we become less and less appreciative of the beauty of the larger world where our deepest needs are met by God’s love and our worst fears are put aside.

So maybe it is not such a contradiction to say “fear not, fear God”?

Maybe it is a balanced way to say “fear not the things that make you small, but stand in awe before your creator who loves you and will save you from the world and from yourself”.

Maybe that eliminates the contradiction.

"Do not be afraid; for God has come only to test you and to put the fear of him upon you so that you do not sin."

Which leaves me with the discomfort in the middle.

for God has come only to test you

You see I have never been able to buy into the notion of God testing us.

And I know that many of you have no trouble with that concept and that’s great, but I do and I know that a large part of my problem is me and it is personal and I know the reason for it.

There is a narrowness in my vocabulary. I am working at getting over it, but I’m not there yet.

I am, by training and experience a long time ago, a teacher and for me a test is always an artificial instrument that I create in order to discover something about a student.

So the notion that God creates cancers and plane crashes and hurricanes just to discover something about us is not ever going to work very well for me.

Therefore I have always found great comfort in Jesus’ words, when asked about these things, he said “the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.” In other words, bad things happen to good people and to bad people, and God does discover much about us in those bad times, and we discover much about ourselves, but it is not consistent with the heart of God to create pain for his beloved children.

The rain does fall, the bad things of life do come to us all.

And so – in a different sense than just my academic vocabulary - we are tested by the rain and the tragedies and the sorrows, we are challenged by them.

Not artificially like a classroom test, but authentically.

Challenges – tests if the word works better for you – are a part of our daily experience and when God gives the commandments to the people it is just such a challenge.

They wanted freedom from Egypt, they wanted to be God’s people.

And God says: here is what it means to be free, to be my people.

How will you live?

And the challenge echoes in the parable.

God doesn’t force the tenants to do what is right, he sends messengers and they kill them, he sends his son and they kill him. They have the freedom, as we all do, to follow or reject, to embrace or to crucify.

Will our world be as wide as God’s world, or will we think that if we kill or ignore his messengers and his son we will be able to live well in our narrowness?

Will the changes that come to us – the growth of our sense of mission, the ideas that new people bring to our families, our communities and our Church, the challenges to our sense that we are doing enough – will these things fill us with an awesome fear of God or will they infect us with an unhealthy fear of the world?

This I am sure of, from Eden to Clover Hill God has been constantly at work to take narrow and selfish hearts and stretch them in ways that people never thought they could be stretched.

You call it a test, I’ll call it a challenge, but whatever we call it there is this truth: when God touches our lives – individually or collectively – we will be changed, we will either shrink away because the fears of the world have control of us, or we will stretch wider and further than we have ever stretched before.

"Do not be afraid; for God has come only to test you and to put the fear of him upon you so that you do not sin."