The Fear of the Lord

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast, I am Cory J. Mahler. And I'm Wo. There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit, and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and Understanding, the Spirit of Counsel and Might, the Spirit of Knowledge and the Fear of the Lord, and his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. Today's episode is discussing the fear of the Lord, the fear of God. What does it mean to fear God properly? What you'll find as you as you look at all the examples in scripture, particularly throughout the Old Testament, fear of the Lord is used as synonymous with one who has faith. Someone who was a believer was described as fearing God.

1:29 This is how Jonah described himself. It's how Joseph described himself to his brothers when they didn't recognize him. They both those men describe themselves as having fear of the Lord. It's synonymous with having faith. It means to be a believer. Something that's lost on us in the modern world is the connection between proper fear as it's understood scripturally and what it means to have faith. We think of it in sort of euphemistic terms like, oh he he fears God. Like no. These men actually feared God. They were afraid of God in the traditional sense, which is not the sense of a spooky movie or of you know being afraid of the dark or being afraid of running out of fuel on the highway. It's not that exact type of fear.

2:20 It's a much more Properly oriented relationship to God. So hearkening back to the episode that we did a while back on perfect hatred, it's important to note that when we're talking about these things that today we called emotions, fear and hatred, that you know those are prime emotions or primal emotions. That's not all that they are. When we talked in the episode on perfect hatred, we talked about the fact that hatred is in fact a fruit of the Holy Spirit, proper hatred against those things which are opposed to God. And in that sense, it's not emotional. It's not an emotional response or outpouring. it's relational. If you love God, if you are oriented towards God's things, naturally that flows to a hatred of that which is contrary to God's

3:13 will. The same is true of the of the fear of God. When we say fear God, it doesn't mean hide in terror. It doesn't mean flee as the wicked man when no man pursues. To be afraid of God is to understand your relationship to God as your creator. We're creatures. We are at the bottom. God is at the top. So today we're going to basically be doing another Bible study. We're going to go through a bunch of Bible verses talking about all the manners in which scripture describes fear and examples of it being used. Well, not all the examples, because there is we said there are hunters up and this this could be a a 30 hour Bible study if we went through every single one. They're redundant, but it gets the point across that if you are

3:57 not able to say I fear God, there's something wrong with your faith. And I think today that's largely absent from the way we think We think of our own relationship to God. We think of God as being loving, as being our loving father. A father in a head also naturally inspires fear, properly understood. That's a part of that relationship because there's a hierarchy. Anytime there's a hierarchy, there's fear properly understood. Again, not in the sense of a scary movie, but in the sense of there's something greater above me that can do good or ill. And I understand my relationship to that as one of submission and one of not being able to resist whatever comes from above. And so today we're going to talk about how we properly understand

4:45 what it is to fear, love and trust in God. That's how Luther correctly, I think, explained the first commandment. You shall have no other gods before me. Luther said that means we've fear, love, and trust in God above all things. Fear comes first. And that wasn't just Luther sort of picking words at random. What we find in scripture is that fear comes before love, just as law comes before gospel, it's it's synonymous, it's the same thing. You cannot understand God's love for you if you do not have a proper fear of the God who must love you so that he doesn't destroy you. So that's where we're going to begin. So to start off, we'll turn to Genesis thirty one. I think this is a good place to begin because here we

5:32 actually have fear as a name of God. If the God of my father, the god of Abraham and the fear of Isaac, had not been on my side, surely now you would have sent me away empty handed. God here is called the fear. Yes, it's the fear of Isaac, but fear is properly capitalized in the ESV and some other translations because it is a name of God. This is an attribute of God. God is fearful in the sense that He is something to be feared. And as was mentioned, modern readers, modern listeners are going to have an incorrect incorrect background set of assumptions when it comes to what fear is. And when preparing for this episode I looked up fear in the eighteen twenty eight dictionary to get a better idea of what this term

6:30 used to mean in English. And as we were discussing before we started recording, there's actually a hierarchy given in the definition, and I think it's an important hierarchy for modern ears. This is something we should hear, something we should understand. We have fear, dread, terror, and fright. Now fright is the one that as we were preparing for the show we discussed because fright to the modern ear doesn't really mean worse than fear, dread, and terror anymore. But that's the hierarchy here. And the reason that I want to point out this hierarchy is that the classical definition of fear, one of them in English that has sort of fallen by the wayside, is that fear is a mixture of dread and reverence.

7:19 And so it's important to recognize that that dread, that's the aspect that we're we're really missing today when we think about what it means to fear. And so if we fear God, yes, there's the reverence, yes, there's the respect, these other things, but there is also dread, because God is something that is wholly other from us. I'm not saying in the sense of anti-realism or moral anti-realism, anything like that. That's a different subject. But in the sense of God is Sui Generis. God is different from us. His ways are not our ways, our ways are not his ways. He is above and beyond us to an incomprehensible degree. And so there is a certain response that we would and should have when in the presence of God.

8:17 And in the theological and philosophical literature this has sometimes been called the numinous This comes from a Lutheran theologian called Rudolf Otto. His main book on the subject is actually a good book worth reading. It's the idea of the holy. It's worth noting again what holy means holy means to be set apart, it means to be other, it means the sacred. These are interchangeable terms in this case, but again, God is sui generis, God is Gans Andra, he is this is the holy other God. And that elicits from men who have a proper respect for God, a proper conception of God in so far as the mind of a mortal man can conceive of the infinite, it elicits fear. And so that is what we are talking about today.

9:04 That's what we're going over in Scripture. And as mentioned, Scripture uses the word fear repeatedly. It appears over four hundred times in the ESV's text. The connection between fear and dread is also called out in Genesis nine where it's given context. God said to Noah, the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon the bird of the heavens and upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered. And that's fundamentally what fear and dread is to the beasts today naturally fear us. Now some are less fearful than others, some are too dumb to be afraid. But when you encounter a wild beast, it will be fearful of

9:51 you. It may not be fearful of other things in nature, but it will be fearful of man in the sense that it will naturally understand that you are above it in creation. It doesn't know why, but it knows that you're something dangerous, something that might be a predator, something that could hurt it. It has the sense that it is delivered into your hand. Now, a dumb beast isn't comprehending these things in the way that a man does, but as God said, he put the fear and dread of man in the beast's heart. So it doesn't have to understand. God has given those things into our hands. And the beasts understand that as well as they can understand anything. And the fact that being delivered into someone's hand is is the

10:34 root for that fear and dread is why we should fear God. we are not delivered into his hand. We we're we're held as as his children in his hand, but it's in his hand. he's our creator. Again, he's at the very top of creation. We're not at the bottom because there are many things beneath us, but relative to him, we're less than worms. That's something we'll get into in a bit later in some of the examples. One of the first passages I wanted to call out was from Psalm 19. Before we move on to that, I actually just want to add an anecdote here because very convenient timing. When it comes to the fear of God and particularly the analogue here, the fear of man that animals have, I went down to take care of my chickens a little while before we started recording

11:26 and I went down there and one of them had managed to get out of the pen because every so often they do fly. Chickens can actually fly. They don't really remember they can fly, so they get spooked, they go upward, they get out of the pen, and then they look at the fact they're out of the pen and go, how did this happen? And they can't figure out how to get back back in because again, they don't realize they can fly. But the chickens obviously trust me to some degree, because I feed them, water them, and all those things. I take care of them, and I haven't harmed them. But they are still afraid of me. They will run away if I try to capture them and pick them up, because there is still that fear, they recognize that I

12:08 am something that could very well cause them harm. That is analogous in some ways to man's relationship to God, the fear of God that man should have with respect to God because God the difference between me and the chickens is nothing compared to the difference between God and me between God and man. God is infinite, man is finite. God has absolute control over your life, over what will happen in your life, over the world, over everything. God has control over the universe on the grandest scale, down to individual divisions of cells, the way that quarks interact inside the particles inside atoms. God has control over absolutely everything. And it's the fear of God flows in part from that proper

13:06 understanding of the majesty of God, the power of God, the nature of God relative to man. And so it's good to think of the way that animals interact with man to some degree because it gives us a picture of that sort of fear. It's not always just abject terror. It is a respect due to the power differential, due to the nature of that relationship. And it is because of God's love for us that he reveals all of this to us in scripture. He tells us why and how to fear him, why and how to love him. He tells us that he loves us. It again, he he tells us these things because he loves us and he wants us to fear and love him, in that order. In Psalm nineteen it reads, The law of the Lord is perfect reviving the soul, the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise

13:58 the simple, the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart, the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes, the fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever, the rules of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. And I did that whole passage. You know, you could you could cherry pick just the fear of the Lord is clean and during forever and say, well, you know, obviously fear is good. When you look in context, fear of the Lord is put in a list of synonyms for God's will, the law of the Lord, the testimony, the precepts, the commandments, the rules, the fear of the Lord. Those are our all part and parcel, according to God, of the same thing. So when we say fear God, when God says fear God, like

14:39 this isn't Stone Choir theology. God is literally saying, if you fear me, you know my law. It's the same thing. God lifts synonym after synonym in Psalm 19 for the purpose of making clear that the fear of God is not a emotional principally, it's knowledge. The proper, rightly ordered knowledge of God is itself fear. It is interesting that she would pick that example for explaining that the fear of God can be a synonym for his law, his word, for obeying God, because that is literally the example verse given in Webster's 1828 because one of the and I I I want to point out that you did not actually look at Webster's 1828 before this episode. I happen to have it open, but the eighth definition under fear

15:32 is the law and word of God, and it gives Psalm nineteen nine as the example. Which this is actually something worth noting here. Webster's eighteen twenty eight cites to scripture constantly. It is is probably far and away the top source that is cited for examples of the use of various words. I mean, just looking at this one, the verses themselves are hyperlinks, so it's very easy to see they're all blue. It is almost every single definition of fear, cites to scripture. And this is something that we've lost as a society. If you open up a modern dictionary, it is not going to cite to scripture as often. Academic ones, interestingly, will actually cite to scripture more because, as we have mentioned previously, if you do not know scripture, you are functionally

16:22 illiterate in a Western context. It doesn't matter if you're Christian, if you're pagan, Buddhist, whatever you are, if you are in a Western context and you do not know scripture, you are functionally illiterate. And that definitely shines through when looking at the examples in older dictionaries. Just imagine how terrible things must have been in 1828 when we had a Christian nation and people had to know the Word of God to understand their own language and how they related to others. That sounds like a nightmare. Well, it's it's a good thing we're not Christianizing nations anymore. Another uh psalm that I wanted to highlight was Psalm 111. The works of his hands are faithful and just, all his precepts

17:05 are trustworthy, they are established forever and ever, to be performed with faithfulness and uprightness. He sent redemption to his people, he has commanded his covenant forever. Holy and awesome is his name. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. All those who practice it have good understanding. His praise endures forever. This is a passage that ties into what we'll be talking about in Job in a little bit, how not only is fear of the Lord wisdom and understanding, but it is glory to God to fear him. And again, we talked I talked at the beginning about how this is a relational concept not an emotional one. When you hate that which the Lord hates, as we talked about in the perfect hatred episode, that's not you being angry.

17:52 That is you having a spirit that is oriented in the same way that God's spirit has told us to be oriented against those things which are contrary to God. So when we talk about fearing the Lord, it is giving him glory to fear him. It is not being presumptuous. To not fear the Lord is to be a cocky jerk. I was I was thinking earlier about examples and I I I'm gonna give this example but I realize that it's it's not blasphemous, but it's kind of absurd. I was thinking of the example in Diehard when the cocky idiot in the tower wanted to go in and negotiate with Hans Gruber And he puts his feet up on the desk and he says, Hans Booby. Like they were equals. And Gruber is sitting there just astonished that this idiot could be

18:42 so close to death and not realize it. That man did not have a proper fear of someone who had his life in his hands. Now I'm I Lord forgive me, I'm not comparing God Almighty to Hans Gruber, but that sort of inversion of proper understanding of relationship is when you get your head bitten up. It's you know there are examples in scripture where God himself says don't put yourself at the high place at the table, go at the low place at the table, let God invite you, let the master of the ceremony invite you up to the place of honor. That is the approach that we're to have with God. If you fear and have the dread of God in your heart, you're not going to be cocky. You're not going to put your feet up in the on the

19:25 table and act like you're an equal and act like you can negotiate with God. You're going to come as a supplicant. That is what God wants from us. And by God telling us in scripture that that's what he wants, it then permits him to invite us to the table, to receive us as his adopted children. So none of what we're saying today is about nullifying God's love. It's about making sure that we don't lose the context of who God is. I think so much of modern theology is oriented completely around man. It's all focused on us, on you, on me, on our feelings, on our on our relationships in the small R sense, not in the sense of how we are oriented towards or away from God. And so when Psalm 111 ties the fear of the Lord with

20:16 wisdom and praise and how holy and awesome God's name is. It's all part and parcel. Just as in Psalm 19, the rules and the precepts are part of the fear of the Lord. God's glory is to be feared by us. That is a good thing. We're not saying hide in terror. We're not saying, as God doesn't say, flee and just be mindlessly terrified of me. God says you should have a proper orientation towards me that is one on your knees. You know, it's something that used to be a part of worship in the West, where you know a lot of most churches used to have kneelers. There were periods in the church service where you would literally get down on your knees. And thankfully, like at least in the Lutheran church and in some

21:01 Catholic churches and probably others, there's still kneelers or there there's a bench to kneel at a rail when you receive communion. That is the proper posture of fear. When you get down on your knees, that is a it is a posture, a physical posture of supplication. If we met in person and I said, get down on your knees, you would be deeply unnerved. That's something like you don't know what's going to happen next, but it doesn't seem like it's probably going to be good because the physical orientation of me standing and you kneeling by command is fundamentally one of dominance and then fear on the part of the kneeler. When we kneel before God at the communion altar, it is in fear as well as thanksgiving.

21:46 We are kneeling before the Almighty and receiving his body and blood in our mouths. That is a fearful thing. It is a wondrous thing. It is a gift beyond imagining. But if you just go up there and say, I want that, that's mine. Yeah, it's it's like putting your your feet up on the rail as though you were entitled to these things. These are gifts from the master that are undeserving to any of us. And when they're received, receiving them through the love by which they're sacrificed and offered means fearing the nature of he who's giving these things because God could just as easily have not given these things. In fact, it would make far far more sense for us for God not to give us anything. We know naturally we don't deserve any of the good gifts.

22:31 And that is that's not what we're talking about when we say fear God. We're not saying fear God as a pagan. We're saying fear God so that when you receive his gifts it is in the proper understanding of how much he loves you that you do have to fear him and yet you receive these things anyway. In despite of the infinite disparity between the creator and the creature, all of these things of love are still poured out for us. And so to not fear God is to receive those gifts unworthily if we receive them at all. You mentioned pagan fear, and I think this is a good spot to divide two different kinds of fear, two different senses of the term that we can mean when we use it, and that is what you call the pagan fear would be just blunt fear, fear of

23:26 being squashed like a bug. That's the sort of fear that you would have of a tiger or a bear or trapped in a cave, what have you, something like that. That kind of fear. There is some of that when it comes to God. It's not exactly the same. Yes, God is so high above you that obviously it is worse in a way to stand in the presence of God, you know, as a man of unclean lips say, than to be trapped with a bear, but there is a difference between the kind of fear that we mean when we are speaking of the Christian versus the unbeliever. And I'll just read definition six from the eighteen twenty eight version of Webster's In Scripture, fear is used to express a filial or a slavish passion. In good men, the fear of God is a holy awe or

24:20 reverence of God and his laws, which springs from a just view and real love of the divine character, leading the subjects of it to hate and shun everything that can offend such a holy being, and inclining them to aim at perfect obedience. This is filial fear. Slavish fear is the effect or consequence of guilt. It is the painful apprehension of merited punishment. And so that's the distinction here. There is a difference in the sort of fear that a believer will have with respect to God versus an unbeliever, because an unbeliever does not have a loving father. An unbeliever has an angry God who is going to punish him for eternity, whereas a believer has a loving God who is going to chastise him yes here in time, because beloved children are disciplined

25:15 by their fathers. However, he is a loving God who is doing that for our good, so that is filial fear, that is the fear that a son has toward his father, which is a good thing, as opposed to the slavish fear of the pagan, of the unbeliever, of the atheist. That also ties back into what was said in in Psalm one eleven. This is the glorification of God comes from a proper fear. You can't glorify God if you're just In blind animal terror. The last verse I wanted to pull from wisdom literature is uh from Proverbs 1, yeah, the very beginning of Proverbs. It says to know wisdom and instruction, to understand words of insight, to receive instruction and wise dealing, in righteousness, justice and equity, to

26:00 give prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the youth. Let the wise hear and increase and learning, and let the one who understands obtain guidance. To understand a proverb and a saying, the words of the wise are their riddles. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. I think that last line, fools despise wisdom and instruction, is something that many of us encounter in our own lives. You you're interacting with someone, you're trying to tell them something important that they don't want to hear that they don't understand, you know, maybe it was about COVID vaccines or any number of things. And one of the most common responses that you'll find with some

26:42 people is I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear anything about it. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. What is the exact opposite of that? The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fear of God is God is a blessing. So we're not talking about something that we do, you know, again, not out of animal terror. We're talking about a fruit of the spirit. The fear of the Lord is a fruit of the spirit. If you have the Holy Spirit, you're going to fear God. And so if you are listening or you know someone who has absolutely no fear of God, if they're just going to put their feet up on the table and chat away like they're equals and that's the only understanding that they have that person their faith is in trouble.

27:31 Now obviously Jesus, God, the Son of God, came down from heaven, was incarnate by the Holy Spirit, and was made man, and he sat and ate with his friends. We're not saying that that is not God, that is absolutely God. God can sit among us, he can sit across the table and be a friend, and be a brother, and be someone who is close and intimate. This is not a denial of that, because there were also times even in Jesus' earthly ministry before the ascension when the apostles were afraid when the disciples were afraid of what was going on, because although their knowledge of him as the Son of God was imperfect before the veil was lifted from their eyes at Pentecost, they they still knew that he was God and they knew that there was

28:21 things that he could do that no man could possibly do. It's one of the reasons that they believed in him. And when their response to that knowledge was fear. They feared Jesus. They loved him. They loved him as a brother who had lived with them for years. And they feared him because he was God. He was fully God and fully man. And so the love of God and the fear of God are part and parcel. They go together. But they didn't just hang out just with Jesus because he was a fun guy and they liked being around him. They were with him first and foremost because he was God. He was the fearful God who was capable of infinite things. And the fact that he masked that infinite glory, glory that would kill them if they had seen it fully, that was his love

29:07 for them. But the fear always came first in the relationship, even when they weren't necessarily thinking about it. It still was there because they knew that he was God. They feared the Lord and they loved their brother, Jesus, who lived among them. That's what all these passages are talking about. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It's the law of the Lord. It's all of these good things. That's the point of this entire episode. The fear of the Lord is a good thing. We're not saying be terrified like an animal. We're saying that if you have no fear of God, you're missing out on one of God's blessings, and it's such an important one that it's potentially jeopardizing your faith.

29:46 That's the reason that we were devoting an entire episode to this. It's not saying, oh man, you you should be afraid of God. It's terrible. God is glorious. God is perfect. He is infinite. And his love for you is infinite as well. And that is something that's fearsome. And it's okay for a Christian to say that out loud. We could spend hours just going through fear in the wisdom literature, particularly in Psalms, but I want to read one more snippet from one of the Psalms because it highlights this difference between the slavish pagan fear and the fear of a believer. And that's from Psalm one hundred thirty. If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord who could stand, but with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.

30:34 Now obviously this is not the kind of fear that an unbeliever would have, because it says with you there is forgiveness, and it is only believers who benefit from the justification. Yes, all of creation is redeemed in the objective justification, but the subjective justification is applied to believers to believers by faith, and so this sort of fear is the fear that a son has for his father. This is filial fear. This is exactly the kind of fear that we are speaking of with regard to Christians. This is what we should have in relationship to God. We can properly fear God because there is forgiveness of sins. If there were no forgiveness of sins, we could very well still fear God. But it would not be filial fear.

31:22 It would be the fear of God as transcendent, the fear of God as so totally other that we are forever disconnected from him. It's the kind of fear that an animal has of a hunter it is sheer animalistic terror. That is what you would have if there were no forgiveness. But with you there is forgiveness that you may be feared. Which is why God revealed all this to us in scripture. God has given us this knowledge for our edification, for our comfort, for our fear. that's an okay thing to say. God wants you to fear him. And if you understand him, you will. We're gonna get now into Job, which is one of both Corey and my favorite books of of scripture. I I think that the way that Job and God interact is

32:15 a perfect illustration of what we're talking about here. And it also lends into what we're going to talk about at the end about trusting in God, because fear and trust are part and parcel. You know, Cory's chickens fear him and they trust him. They know that when he comes out he's going to feed them and that trust they they can f be confident that they're going to receive treats and they get they're going to receive food and they're not going to be hurt when he's doing good things for them. The fear of him as being over them is also manifest in their trust for the gifts that he gives. That's the same as thing is true for all of us. And I think there's no better example in all of scripture than

32:56 the entire story of Job. I'd recommend you read the whole thing. I just especially recommend even if you want to cut out the the some of the dialogue between Job and his three friends, the first couple chapters and the last four chapters beginning with thirty-eight are really the perfect encapsulation of what we're talking about here. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I want to I want to give some clips from it to give a sense of what it is that God says when he's describing fear being a good thing. And the Lord said to Satan, have you considered my servant Job, for there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one who fears God and turns away from evil? And Satan answered the Lord and said, Does Job fear God for

33:44 naught? Have you not made a hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he has on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his livestock has increased in the land. But put forth pray your hand, and touch all that he has, and he will renounce you to your face. So it's notable there that God specifically holds up his servant Job as someone who fears God and turns away from evil. And Satan's argument against him in the divine council is, well, of course he fears you. Look at all the good things you give him. So this is right here in the very beginning of Job. The fear of God is faith, and it is the natural response to God's blessings. That's what Satan says, and he's right.

34:33 Like Satan's not lying about this. When he says does Job fear God for naught? He's absolutely right. Job was blessed. And I think in a in a recent episode, Corey, you mentioned that the list of all the animals and the servants and all the wealth that Job had marked him as probably one of the richest men on earth. He was profoundly wealthy. And God's response is go ahead, you can go and you can do evil to this man, to my servant, but don't harm him. And so Satan went down and he killed all of his animals, he killed all of his children, he killed all of his servants. The only thing that Job had left at that point was his wife, who was never touched, and his health. And so I want to read next, you know, I'll just I'll

35:20 read from ESV interesting. ESV and ALV are actually very close in this. I preserved a lot of the same wording, which is nice to see. I'm glad that that literalism carries through. After Satan delivered this evil to Job, a servant A servant three servants and each rapidly in turn came and told him and his wife all the evil that had just befell him. Here's Job's response to finding out all his kids are dead, all his servants are dead, all his animals are dead. Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshipped, and he said, Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

36:05 In all this Job did not sin or charge God with any wrong. I think I mentioned this in a previous episode. Imagine you're Satan in this scenario. You you basically make a bet with God that you're gonna torture this man so that he will curse God. You go down, you kill his entire family, you kill all every you take basically take all his possessions. He has nothing but his health and his wife. And after all of this evil, what does Job do? How does he respond? He falls to his knees and he worships and he gives glory to God. Imagine you're Satan. Imagine what a kick in the teeth that is to do the just about the worst possible things you can do to any man. He just found out all his kids are dead.

36:47 All of them, all ten children, seven sons and three daughters, have just been killed. His enemies from other nations have slaughtered all of his servants and all of his livestock, he basically has nothing left. He went for being one of the richest men on the planet, and blessed by God, and protected by God with a hedge, as Satan pointed out, to someone with nothing but his health and his wife. He falls to his knees, he worships God, and he said the Lord gave and the Lord is taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. He doesn't attribute the evil to the Lord. He doesn't give Satan any credit at all. He said, bless God. Bless God for having given me these things. And bless God, even though these things have been taken away from

37:29 me. That is fear of God. Just as God said he had. God said that he had fear of the Lord. And this is a fearful response. When calamity falls whatever it is in your life, you should be equipped by your faith and by your meditation on scripture that whatever happens to you, you should be able to respond to it the way Job does here. Because such a man is unbeatable. Such a man lives his life, every moment of it, in fear and trust of the Lord. Satan has taken everything in in the next passage he takes his health as well. He's covered in sores from head to toe. But even at that, Job still knew that he was in God's hands. Such a man cannot be defeated, because such faith, which is a gift from God, is forever.

38:18 If that is your faith, if you have the faith of Job, there's nothing that can possibly happen in your life that will rob you of that faith. Again, God's giving it to us. God is telling us these things for our edification. God is encouraging us to fear him, such that when calamity befalls, we give thanks for it. How can you possibly have your spirit broken when that is your response to the worst thing imaginable? You have to think that Luther probably had this section among other parts of Job in mind when he was writing the four stanza of Einfesteberg for for those who aren't familiar with it, I'll read it in German and then translate it because I don't like a lot of the English translations.

39:05 Namen Sie uns den Leib, gut er kind und weib, las farin dahin, sie haben keinen Gewinn, das Reich muss uns doch bleiben. And the English translations lose a little bit. the rough translation from the the German would be Let them take our life, goods, honor, children, and wife, let these go. He cannot win. The Reich, the kingdom must remain with us. And so it really is a picture of what is happening to Job here, and it was also of course what was being threatened by the papists against the Lutherans at that time and thereafter for quite a while, and they nearly succeeded in the Thirty Years War, of course. But this is what happened to Job. Satan took his goods, his honor, his children, didn't take his wife,

40:09 notably, although did drive a wedge between them because of her reaction to what happened versus Job's reaction, because of course she says, curse God and die, which is not the reaction Job has, Job has the proper reaction. But this is what happened to Job, and the reaction of Job and the words of the hymn are equivalent. Let these things go, if they do, if it be God's will. Everything works together for the good of those who trust in and love God. We know that from Romans. Satan cannot win. The evil cannot win, because Christ is already one. And so we know, and in later verses in Job, I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at last he will stand upon the earth, and that I will see him with my own eyes,

41:03 I and not another. Satan cannot win, the evil cannot win. All of this works together for good in God's plan. And so even if the worst happens, which the worst very well happens to Job, this is about as bad as it can possibly get. You lose your possessions, you lose your servants, you lose your children, you lose your position, you lose everything, and finally you're afflicted with some sort of terrible disease. That's rock bottom. And he still praises God. That is the correct reaction. That is proper fear Proper fear of God, that is fear directed toward a proper ultimate end, God, instead of fear of these temporal consequences of losing these things in life that yes, they are important. We're not saying they're not.

41:57 That's not what scripture is saying. It's not saying that your children, your wife, your health, your goods, these are all blessings from God. These things are good, but they are not an ultimate good. They are not ultimate goods. They come from God as blessing, and so proper fear is directed toward God as that ultimate good. And that is really if you look properly at the first commandment, that is what you are supposed to do. That is what Job is doing. Job is obeying the first commandment. He is not putting his trust in these temporal goods. He is putting his trust in the eternal good that is God. And that is right fear directed rightly. And when after Job is beset by the sores from head to

42:43 toe, and he's scratching himself with broken potteries sitting in ashes, and his wife is nagging at him, saying, Curse God and I he said to her, You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God and shall we not receive evil? Which is reiteration of what he said previously Previously. You take the good with the bad because it's all blessings from God. The bad things are a blessing from God too. It's not obvious, does make sense. But if you receive it as a blessing as God intends it, God didn't intend for for Job to be cursed here. God permitted evil to befall him, but it was not a curse. And that's something that intellectually I don't think we can process. It's not it's not how we would treat each other typically, although

43:30 I think it's important to acknowledge that throughout all of this, fear is fundamentally a part of headship. In some of the passages in the New Testament talking about the relationship of husband and wife, in one of this specifically says that the wife is to fear her husband in this sense. Not that she should be terrified that she's going to be beaten, that something horrible will be happening to her, but she should have a properly ordered ordered fear of her husband. In the same sense, fear and headship go together. So when Job receives this evil, these bad things, he says this came from God, I receive it in gladness. Even though he was suffering, and after after he was reduced to scratching his terrible sores with pottery.

44:17 He did curse the day that he was born and then his three friends laid into him and you know made his life miserable for a while on top of everything else. having friends who were giving him bad advice and saying things about God that were not true. I want to jump ahead to Job thirty eight, which is where I highly recommend that you begin reading and just read the rest of it. Start in Job thirty eight and read every word of it. I want to highlight a few portions here, but the specific thing I want to call out is that after Job had been bitching at God for a while about having been born, and when God comes to him, now keep in mind, Satan and God had had this discussion. God had permitted Satan to do this evil to Job.

45:02 Job never cursed God, but he did get fed up with how miserable he was. When God comes to him, when he comes out of the whirlwind, what does he say to Job? This is what he says. And then we'll get into what he I'll just highlight up from what he doesn't say. Job, when when God comes to Job and says, I'm God and here's what I'm here to say, he doesn't blame Satan. He doesn't say Satan did this, I didn't you know why are you complaining to me? This evil stuff's coming from somewhere else. He hasn't even acknowledged the evil. Basically what God is about to do to Job is to put him completely in his place. He completely ignores his complaining and his moaning and his whining and he says who do you think you are God in this passage

45:53 puts the fear of God in Job and Job relents Job I'm not going to read that passage, but when you read it you'll see Job repents, he's like, You're absolutely right, I was way out of line complaining, do you, Lord? Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man, I will question you and you make it known to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know, or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted

46:35 for joy? Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, When I made clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed limits for it, and set bars and doors, and said, Thus far you shall come, and no farther here shall your proud waves be stayed. Have you entered into the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare if you know all this. Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion? Can you lead forth the Masaroth in their season, or can you guide the bear with its children?

47:15 Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on earth? Now I skipped a few passages, but what God is saying to Job in all of this is who do you think you are? Where were you when I created the foundations of the earth? When I set the stars in their places and ordained their movement through the heavens? Where were you? You are nothing compared to me. How dare you criticize me? Who do you think you are? This was God's response to Job complaining. I think that that's important. That is God establishing his fearful relationship with all his creatures. God God up front said that Job was without sin. He was blameless. He feared the Lord and obeyed his precepts. And yet when Job mouthed off, he didn't get any credit for

48:08 that. God said, Who do you think you are? And he goes on for four chapters describing his own glory in terms of creation, which is an aside is something that numerous pastors for the past week have been viciously going after Corey for something he wrote a couple of years ago, where Corey made the same argument that the heavens testify to God's glory as God. Well Well, where did Corey get that from? He didn't get it from Odin, as these idiot pastors claim. Corey got it from Job. This is how God talks about himself. When dealing with someone who's acting faithless, who's acting uppity, who's putting their feet up on the table and saying, God booby, God puts his foot down and said, You've got to be kidding me.

48:55 Do you have any idea who you're talking to? The fear of the Lord is oriented around we are not the same. The creature and the creator are at opposite ends of the spectrum. So we'll turn now from the wisdom literature and the writings back a little bit in scripture, although not in time because Job is the oldest book in Scripture to Exodus three. Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father in law Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horib, the mountain of God, and the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, I will turn aside to see this great

49:39 sight, why the bush is not burned. When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, Moses, Moses, and he said, Here I am. Then he said, Do not come near, take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground. And he said, I am the god of your father, the god of Abraham, the god of Isaac, and the god of Jacob, and Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. And here we see that proper fear response from Moses. He is afraid to look directly at God. And of course we have other places and we'll get into those verses about why that is a proper fear to have of looking directly at God. But this is a recognition of, as mentioned earlier, the numinus, of

50:30 this presence of the divine, of God's physical manifestation in the world in a special way, that should induce fear in anyone. In the righteous, in a believer, it is going to induce a certain kind of fear, again that felial fear, a proper respect and dread of God as our Father and as God, as opposed to if God had appeared to a pagan in a burning bush, he would have run away screaming as Moses does in a little bit with regard to the snake. But that is the response of an unbeliever to God is just abject terror. Moses doesn't have the abject terror because Moses believes in God. Perhaps he doesn't believe in God as fully as he will later on after seeing what God does to the Egyptians and what God

51:21 does in the wandering in the desert and the Ten Commandments, etc. But this is a proper fear response from Moses with regard to the presence of God. This is all Awe of God this is reverence for God. This is the kind of fear that God wants us to have in His presence, and yes we do come into His presence still today. No, it's probably not going to be a burning bush, but every time you attend the divine service, you are coming into the presence of God. That is why you go to the divine service. You go to the divine service to be in the presence of God and to receive his gifts. Yes, then in response to that, you offer your worship and praise. But it is first and foremost God coming to his people.

52:14 And so that should instill awe and fear in you when you go to the divine service, because you are in the presence of God. Moses gets a little more ambitious later on in Exodus thirty three when he goes up on Mount Sinai and God is about to give him the ten commandments. Moses said, Please show me your glory. And God said, I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name the Lord, and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But, he said, you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live. And the Lord said, Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by,

52:59 I will put you in a cleft of the rock and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will take away my hand and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen. Now Moses was perhaps a little less fearful here, not sinfully so, but he was he was curious. He said, I I'm standing before you I want to see your face, and God says I'll come as close as I can, but if I show you my face, you'll die. It will kill you to see me. If we properly understand who God is, we understand that if God were to appear in your living room living room, you would be struck dead on the spot. That's God. Moses, I think, probably not arguably, has a higher standing in heaven than any of us will.

53:44 And yet Moses would have been struck dead if God had shown him his face because of the glory of God. Again, it goes back to the passages from Psalms. It is the glory of God which is fearful, and the fear of the Lord is a recognition of his glory. So all this fits together. It's not terrifying emotional response to spooky, scary Hans Gruber god. It is a proper understanding that the Almighty is just that. He's omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. All these words that we had to come up with to try to describe something that's inconceivable. We can't understand what any of those words actually mean. We know that they're just a collection of infinities of different properties. We can't understand.

54:32 And that is why it shouldn't be hard for anyone to be properly fearful of God. So when God says Himself in no uncertain terms, if you see my face, you'll die. You'll be killed if you see me. That's something to be fearful of. And that's something to be thankful for. We have a God who is so glorious that even seeing him would kill us. While that's something that is a a source of fear in the proper sense, it's something to rejoice in. We don't have a measly piddly God. We don't have a god that's just a superhero or part of a pantheon. We have an infinite god who's inconceivably glorious, so glorious that perceiving that glory would cause our physical death. That's incredible. That's amazing. That's the kind of God you want to have.

55:21 Because that sort of God can overcome all of your evil, all of your own personal sin, which is why he came on the cross to do precisely that. It took a God that fearful to be able to sacrifice all for our sins. So this is about the gospel too. This is about the good news of what God has done for us. A lesser God couldn't have done enough for our sins and the sins of the world. It took a God this fearful to be able to do what was necessary for us to in the resurrection be able to see him face to face. As As Job said, he knew that his Redeemer lived and he would see him with his own eyes. Job was talking about the resurrection. The resurrection of the body was not some prophecy that came midway

56:07 through the Old Testament. It was known by every believer from Adam on. They knew that they would die according to the curse, and they knew that they would be restored anew in the flesh, and that they would see God with their own eyes, and not be struck dead, as was the case throughout Scripture in this life prior to judgment day. Before judgment day, if you see God, you're dead. After judgment day, those who see God will see him with their own eyes, with our own eyes, and we will live and we will live in eternity with God in perfection, where his glory will still be fearful because again this fear is not a product of the fall, it's not a product of sin. When God in Job described his glory in creation, describing how fearful

56:53 he was in the six days of creation, that demonstrates the fear is not something that is a product of sin. It is a product of the disparity between the creature and the creator, which is preserved in heaven. It's preserved in the new earth. That is the dichotomy, that is the headship that exists according to God's proper order. Before we leave Exodus, there's one other instance of fear that highlights a point we've been making, and that's from Exodus twenty. Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning, and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood far off and said to Moses, You speak to us, and we will listen, but do

57:37 not let God speak to us, lest we die. Moses said to the people, Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of him may be before you, that you may not sin. The people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was. And we see both kinds of fear and one of the reasons for the fear here in these verses. Initially the people are afraid, and that is a proper response. They see God's majesty descend on this mountain. That is a fearful thing, that is terrifying, and they are in fact terrified. And so they ask Moses to have God speak to him, and then Moses speak to them, because Moses is not terrifying, in the way that God is, at least. And so Moses tells them: do not fear, do not have this

58:28 reaction of abject terror to God. God is not displaying His Majesty to destroy you until you make the golden calf, but that's a separate matter. God is showing His Majesty so that they will fear God, have proper reverence, dread of him, that they may not sin. And that is one of the reasons to fear God. That is one of the chief reasons to fear God. You have fear for God, so that you will not sin, it is one of the reasons you will attempt to avoid sinning. Because if you sin, you incur God's wrath, and that is a fearful thing, and so if you have proper fear of God, you will attempt to avoid sinning. Yes, of course, you are still going to fall, you are fallen, you are still corrupt, you have original sin, you will not be

59:21 perfect in this life. But if you have that proper fear of God set before your eyes, the indwelling of the Spirit will give that to you, if you have faith, if you are a Christian, that fear of God will keep you from some sins. That is part of your sanctification, is developing that proper fear of God, that proper reverence and dread for God, in order to over time through sanctification, diminish the rate at which you give in to temptations. And in case of some sins, to simply drive them out of your life, you won't drive out all, but you will be able over time with the help of the Spirit to drive out some sins, and that is one of the chief purposes of this fear of God that all believers should have.

1:00:12 There's one more passage from Exodus that's worth mentioning. It comes immediately after Moses came down off Mount Sinai. He came down with the two tablets of testimony in his hand. As he came down from the mountain, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God, and Aaron and all the people of Israel saw Moses, and behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him. But Moses called them, and Aaron and all the leaders of the congregation returned to him, and Moses talked with him. Afterward all the people of Israel came near and he commanded them all that the Lord had spoken with him on Mount Sinai. And when Moses finished speaking with him he put a veil over

1:00:50 his face. Now, Moses didn't even look at God's front, he looked at his back after he had passed. So much glory was present in that moment that it was terrifying for the people of Israel to look at a man who had looked at God. That's the that's the transitive property of the fear of the Lord. That degree of radiance and magnificence i we don't have the words for it. We don't know what that would even look like. And yet Moses had to veil his face so that they could be around him and not be terrified. This is something that is also exemplified in another passage from Isaiah 6. At the beginning of Isaiah's vision of heaven. So this wasn't he didn't he wasn't physically in pr in the presence of the Lord.

1:01:37 It was a vision. Isaiah writes, In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings, with two he covered his faiths, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory. And the foundations of the threshold shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke, 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.

1:02:18 Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar, and he touched my mouth and said, Behold, this has touched your lips, your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for. So here Isaiah has a vision of God, he sees God in heaven, and he says, Woe to me, I am undone. He was utterly terrified to see God. He knew that it was the end of him. Unlike Moses on the mountain, because he was not physically present. He was not killed. But even at that, the the angel of one of the seraphim came to him and touched his tongue and said your sin is atoned for. That reconciliation was necessary for him, even the vision to be able to be in the presence of God.

1:03:02 He was rightly terrified of what he saw because he saw God in his glory, something that no man is equipped to see. We see the similar reaction in the New Testament when John is given a vision of heaven in Revelation, he writes, Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest, the hairs of his head were white like white wool like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined on a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came

1:03:46 a sharp two edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength. When I saw him I fell at his feet as though dead, but he laid his right hand on me, saying, Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of death in Hades. Write therefore the things that you have seen, those that are and those that are to take place after this. So this was John seeing in heaven Jesus Christ, seeing the second person of the Trinity. I think just as an aside, read that passage in John 1 and tell me this is not the picture of masculinity. God is not a wimp. Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God, is not a wimp.

1:04:32 He is not a mild man. He's so terrifying that when John saw him, he dropped as though dead. You know, Isaiah in his vision was at least able to spit out woe as me. John didn't even get that far. He dropped like a sack of potatoes and Christ had to come to him and touch him and said, You're here for a purpose. We have almost totally lost this sort of reaction to anything in the modern world. And unsurprisingly, this is one of the consequences of the Enlightenment. And we don't harp on the Enlightenment because we just hate the Enlightenment. That's not the point. We point out the enlightenment in so many of these episodes because it really is the nexus, it's the proximate cause, it is the fount from which so much of this flows.

1:05:28 Because the enlightenment attempted to subject everything to human reason. And if you subject everything to human reason, there are some things that you will simply have to jettison or ignore. And one of those, of course, is mystery, because if something is a mystery, it is by definition not subject to human reason. If you subject it to human reason, it is no longer a mystery. And so there are aspects of the Christian faith that are mystery. There are things that we cannot understand, there are things that we cannot reconcile with our limited abilities. Perhaps God will explain them to us one day, perhaps we don't need to understand. Whatever happens, that is in God's good judgment, that is in his

1:06:20 order, his design. But in addition to getting rid of mystery, you have to get rid of things like the numinous, you have to get rid of things that are outside the realm of human reason, that are above and beyond it. And there are many things like this. If you go out into creation and view the beauty of God's creation, you cannot entirely reduce to reason why you believe, why you know those things are beautiful, because it is not purely a matter of reason. Beauty is beyond reason. There are metaphysical truths that are beyond human reason. They have existence that is prior to and above our reason. And so when it comes to the glory of God, when it comes to being in the presence of the divine, when it comes

1:07:21 to this proper reaction of falling down dead before God, we do not have that anymore as part of our culture, because it has been ruthlessly driven out over time Over time by the cult of reason. And so this is something that the modern reader has to come to with different eyes. If you bring your preconceptions, your presuppositions that were instilled in you by a post-Enlightenment culture by rationalism, you are going to miss a great deal of what scripture is telling you, and you are going to miss a great deal of any old book. Because Because there are things in those books that you will simply not understand because they are so alien to you because of the background information that forms your view of the world.

1:08:14 And your view of the world, if you have this post enlightenment view of the world, is very much an impoverished view of the world, because you do not recognize that there are things outside of reason, things outside of so-called science. One just brief example is what we would call qualia, and that is the perception of something that is intrinsic to a person, so for instance, the best example yellow is a color. Yellow is a certain wavelength of electromagnetic radiation. That's how it works. It hits the eye, certain wavelength you see yellow, because it activates certain cells in the eye. But it's more than that, because your conception of yellow in your mind is something distinct from that physical reality.

1:09:12 It is above and beyond it. It is a metaphysical truth. Incidentally, it is proof that materialism cannot be true, but that is a discussion for another time. That's something that the modern mind hates, because it cannot be reduced to the material, because the post-enlightenment thought, the schema in which we are operating in the modern world wants to be able to reduce everything to matter. Because if it's matter, it can be reduced to reason. If it's matter, I can poke at it until I understand it. And that is not how this works. That is not how God works. There is no amount of poking at God that you can do that will make you understand God fully. And so your reaction to God properly is one of fear.

1:10:01 There is a mystical element to it, not advocating for mysticism, but there is a mystery to it, because God cannot be fully understood. He is wholly other. He is above and beyond us. And so we have this proper response to God, this proper relationship to God when we recognize this chasm between us, this vast difference between the finite man and the infinite God. And there there are some authors who have captured some aspect of this the unknown, the uncanny, the the numinous. And in some cases, it's actually been horror writers who have captured some of this. Well Lovecraft captures some of that because that is a lot of what his horror is about. It's the the unknown. It's in the opposite direction, of course, because he was an atheist.

1:10:57 And so for the atheist, well that's the proper response, because the unknown, for some For someone who does not believe in God, well, it's it can be only sheer terror. Because something that is incomprehensible so far and above you that it is utterly alien is terrifying if there is no God. God for the believer is not terrifying. Yes, he is dreadful, but that is a different thing. That is paired with reverence, that is again that filial fear of God. And it it's just something that we have lost in the modern world. And so we read these things, and with modern eyes we miss so much. I'm not saying you have to go back to being an ancient to understand scripture, no, that's not it. But you do have to be careful when you are reading these

1:11:47 things to assess your own presuppositions, your own priors, and make sure that you are not bringing something to the text that isn't there. So see what it is saying. Form your worldview from Scripture. Don't bring your worldview to Scripture and then try to squish Scripture into a little box. The fear of God is a good thing, and the fear of God is based in large part on the fact that God is other. God is above and beyond us. He is God, He is infinite. You are finite. You can contemplate that, you can meditate on it, and you should, that is an important thing to do. Meditation in the sense of Christian meditation, which is to meditate on something, not to clear your mind. If you clear your mind, you're just making room for demons to

1:12:40 move in, so never do eastern meditation. But Christians should think about these matters. Because the fear of God runs all throughout scripture. And if you look at it as just oh, it's the word fear, and then you move on. No, think about it. Think about what that actually means. What does it mean to fear God? Look at the reaction of those in Scripture who come into the presence of God. They fall on their face, they drop down to their knees. They but cry out in terror that they are of unclean lips and they are in the presence of God. We have seen God and not died, and that is an alarming thought. This is the right reaction to a proper fear of God. Both you and I are very fond of posting the meme that

1:13:31 I made with the judgment day with Jesus and the angels coming back and judging that the pagan pantheon and I superimpose the words every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess. That will be a day of fear for everyone. Two different kinds of fear. For believers, we will fall to our knees in fear and thanksgiving. Pagans won't have thanksgiving. They will have only fear, but they will fall to their knees and they will confess Christ just as we will. Only it will be too late for that to be a saving confession. It will be a damning confession. Nevertheless, they will be compelled to confess with their lips that Jesus Christ is Lord, and those will be their final words before they are cast into eternal destruction.

1:14:18 That's fearful. That's and it's Corey. I think you meant an outstanding summation of all this. How did we get here? The enlightenment let us put reason above everything. And if you can understand something, then you don't need to be afraid of it, because you can put it in its proper category, or you can taxonomize it and you can say, okay, it gets this flags, I'm gonna call it this sort of thing. I understand it now. I don't need to be afraid. God doesn't fit in any of those boxes. God doesn't fit anywhere. God is too big to fit. Literally. Again, we don't have words for how big God is. It's just it's God. There's God and there's everything else, and the everything else is what God created.

1:14:59 And so when our reason attempts to rob God of his fearful majesty, it turns God into something less than God. And if you're worshiping a God who is less than God, it's not the God that you're going to be kneeling before on judgment day. That God is a fearful, infinite, unknowable God. That God is the God who will judge me. That God is the God who died for your sins on the cross. Fear is our acknowledgement that we are creatures in this hierarchy and that the Creator is he who made us, who redeemed us, and who calls us to be enlightened and sanctified by his word. Just to sum up this part about fear, I want to read another passage from Deuteronomy ten that I think summarizes all this perfectly. And now Israel, what does the Lord your God require of

1:15:52 you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of the Lord, which I am commanding you to-day for your good. Behold, to the Lord your God belong the heaven of heavens, the earth and all that is in it. God is referencing back or forward in this case, I guess back in both directions, you know. God's outside of time. We'll talk about that some other time, that time is part of creation. So when God operates in time, that's according to his goodwill, but it's not because he's stuck there. It's not that God has to do things in certain order, which is why on the night on which Jesus was betrayed, he broke

1:16:38 the bread and said, This is my body. That wasn't a forward looking statement. It actually was his body. It was Christ's crucified body that would be crucified the next day. God is outside of time. When he operates within it, sometimes it doesn't make sense. But when God says that everything belongs to him in this passage in Deuteronomy 10, that's hearkening back to his proclamation to Job, to say, I made everything. Who are you to question me? In this passage, love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul is something that Jesus quotes. Jesus references this as the law, as proper fear of the Lord, of faith in God, is this is the manifestation. To love God is to fear God.

1:17:25 As notable at the beginning of that, God requires of you to fear the Lord, to walk in his ways, to love him, and to serve him. Love comes third in that list. Fear, walk in his ways, and love. When the modern so-called Christian tries to put love before everything else, it upends the God that is revealed in Scripture. God begins with fear. And God testifies in Job and in Genesis as well. The creation of the universe is fearful. I mean, we can't even comprehend what it's like for God to be creating everything that we know, from the smallest scale to the largest, neither of which we can conceive of. And those are finite. Those are measurable, those are concrete, and yet they're still beyond our

1:18:12 minds. What God did in creation is far beyond anything that could fit in our minds because that's how God works. And so it is a natural, properly ordered response to fear that God. If you don't fear God, you don't know the true God. It's as simple as that. When we try to subject everything to human reason, we don't just miss the proper relationship of man to God. We also lose a proper understanding, a proper perspective on many of the good things that flow from God, on many of the gifts God gives to us. For instance, I'll just give one example. If you attempt to reduce love to reason, if you attempt to reduce it to material, if you attempt to explain it in a materialistic framework, you are going to destroy it.

1:19:08 You are going to utterly misunderstand it, and you are going to miss the entire point. Because love is not simply a matter of neurochemistry. It is not dopamine and serotonin. I could explain all those pathways and how that works and and which chemicals are released when you do certain actions, whether it's a hug or other things. That's not what love is. Love is something above and beyond that. And we are actually starting to get into some proof of that on the physical side because when you start looking very specifically at when a thought originates and when an action starts, we start running into problems of causation because it starts to look like you're doing things before you think them.

1:19:59 Which is of course proof that materialism is false, but to return back to the issue of love, if you try to reduce your relationship with your wife to neurochemistry. You're going to get divorced, is really the the long and the short of it. That relationship is not going to last if you start to reduce it to that. Yes, you can take those things into account because you're not a spirit, a ghost piloting a meat suit, as some atheists and others, particularly Gnostics, will attempt to argue. You are your body. You are body and soul, also mind, but that's a separate matter. You cannot reduce these things to the purely material. You cannot reduce them to reason. You cannot subject them to the limited human understanding understanding post enlightenment.

1:20:51 That's not how this works, and if you do it you will destroy it. And so in the small case, as it were, with relationships between human beings, if you try to reduce them in this way, you will destroy them, you will not understand them. You will miss the real import of what they are. And on the grander scale, you will do the same thing with your relationship to God if you attempt to reduce it simply to reason, if you attempt to put God in a box, because you will no longer have God. You will have your conception of God, and your conception of God is imperfect, your conception of God is inaccurate, your conception of God is an idol. And so if you attempt to use these post-Enlightenment presuppositions and priors,

1:21:42 if you attempt to use human reason to say, this is God, He sits in these little boundaries that I have made, because I can understand these boundaries, and so I am comfortable with them, if you attempt to do that, you no longer have God, you have an idol. You have violated the first commandment, you have probably ceased to be a Christian. At least you will, if you continue down that path. And so this is why it is vitally important for Christians to come to the text of Scripture and see what it says, not to import the things the world has told us that it has to mean or cannot mean. The scripture should form your thought. Your thought, your reason, your limitations should not form scripture. So to wrap up we're gonna be bridging a little bit from

1:22:34 fearing God to talking about in particular what we shouldn't fear. And in a minute, Corey is going to read from uh the ALV in Matthew 6, where Jesus tells us not to worry about tomorrow, not to worry about where food is going to come from, and so forth. I think that that is an important part of properly understanding fear because if you fear God properly, you don't fear anything else. And that's one of the that that's probably the chief benefit apart from doing what God says is that when you are fearful of God, nothing else can matter. Job understood that. Job understood clearly that all the good things he had came from God. And when those good things went away, God was still God. So he had nothing to fear.

1:23:26 That is a key part of this. And I think that it's something that we are particularly going to have to grapple with in our own personal lives in this decade as the world gets worse and more dangerous, as the actions of the state and the actions in our churches and our communities and our own families get worse for us, we are going to be confronted with fear that Jesus condemns. And I think that in particular pastors who are called to proclaim the whole counsel of God have become so fearful of proclaiming the parts that are might might get them into trouble that at some point they are devolving into idolatry because they don't believe Jesus' words here. When Jesus says you don't need to worry about where your

1:24:18 next meal is gonna front come from, I'll take care of you. How many of our pastors are like, oh, I can't say that? I might lose my job. Well There's a pragmatic concern, and there's a right way and a wrong way for a pastor to preach these things. Nothing that we're saying here is saying just a YOLO into your life and be as stupid as possible and trust that God is going to take care of you. That's foolishness. That's not what we're advocating. However, if proclaiming the whole counsel of God means that bad things happen to you? Is that a reason not to do them? Is the reason that you might lose your job a reason not to obey God? Is your job an end, or is it a means to an end? Is a is it a gift that God has given you?

1:25:07 Just as Job had been given all the gifts of camels and livestock and servants and children, when those were taken away, Job was still Job and God was still God. Job still ate, despite being reduced to nothing. He didn't starve to death. God continued to take care of him, as Jesus promises here in Matthew 6. And so when we are confronted with situations in our own lives where there may be material consequences for being faithful, there's a time and a place to be judicious about how you approach these things. But ultimately, if you can't tell the truth because you're afraid that you might not be able to feed your kids, that is faithlessness to God. You have a vocation to keep them fed. God has promised He will keep them fed.

1:25:57 If you If you think disobeying God is going to win you points, it will with the world, but it won't with God. And so we're gonna end with this and I'm gonna end with a a personal story about something that I dealt with in a much smaller manner than Job that I think illustrates how this stuff all ties together Therefore I say to you, be not anxious for your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor yet for your body, what you shall put on it, is not the life more than the food, and the body more than the raiment. Behold the birds of the heavens, that they do not sow nor reap, nor gather into barns, and your heavenly Father feeds them, are you not of much more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to

1:26:42 the measure of his life? And why are you anxious concerning raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they do not toil nor spin, yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so close the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, you of little faith? Be not therefore anxious, saying, What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or with what shall we be clothed? For after all these things the Gentiles seek, for your heavenly Father knows that you have need of all these things, but seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added

1:27:26 to you. Be not anxious therefore, for the morrow, for the morrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient to the day is its own evil. So in Matthew 6, Jesus talks about anxiousness, not so much fear, but I think that fear is typically how it manifests among us when we're afraid that, you know, I have to take care of myself, I have to feed myself, I have to clothe and shelter and all these things. And I And that's functionally true, but it's not ultimately true. If you fear and trust in God, you know that those things come from him. That is what Job knew. When those things were taken away from him, what did he say? He said The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.

1:28:12 God pours out his bounty on all of us every day, and we should be thankful for it and we should be acknowledging it because the manner in which those things are delivered is another testament to God's glory. The fact that especially and we're so blessed to live in the West where we have relative peace, we have relative security, we have relative prosperity, frankly, that exceeds almost all times and places in history. Even at this late hour where things seem to be getting ugly. We're still well off today. And I think one of the things that as as we face harder and harder days, the reason we're talking about this today is that this is gonna get more and more important in your own life, in your

1:29:01 faith, in your relationship with God. If you are confronted with your children dying, you losing your home, are you going to curse God and die? That's what the world says to do. You know, when when something terrible befalls a Christian, the atheist mocks and says, Where's your God now? why didn't your God save your wife or your child or whatever you've lost, horrible losses that are are heart wrenching. When you trust in God, you know that those gifts were from Him, and as long as they last we enjoy it. And when they're gone, we give thanks that we had them. And we give thanks for whatever's coming next. We don't know what's coming next, but we know that it will also come from God. And so when I want to end with a personal story.

1:29:49 Uh we we say I and we and us more than I would like on this show. We don't want this to be a show about us. The story I'm about to tell is a personal story because I'm an expert on it. I lived it. I was there. I I know what it was like I'm not telling it for the sake of self-aggrandizement. I'm not telling it for the sake of saying, Oh, I'm great. You should be like me. The purpose of sharing this particular story is to illustrate that when one has the particular sort of faith that we're trying to emphasize, when bad moments in your life arrive, you will have confident faith that God will take care of you no matter what. So my story is this. On January 27th, 2020, it was about two months into COVID becoming

1:30:38 a thing that was well known. I'd been tracking it for about two months. I was already making uh you know plague doctor memes at the end of January. I knew it was going to be a big deal, even before most people had heard anything about it. I think it was either a Friday or Saturday. I was sitting in my living room, probably watching something on TV and and playing on my computer. My dog got feisty, wanted to go outside, wanted to play for a bit. And so I took him out and we went out the sliding door in the backyard and I live on kind of a steep hill and it was January. It was snowy. It wasn't too cold, so I didn't have to bundle up, but the ground was slippery. And because of how steep the hill was, when what I did

1:31:20 I I grabbed I think either a stick or a frisbee to play with him just to run him around for a few minutes. I threw the it was a frisbee, I remember. It was a frisbee. I threw it once and he ran down the hill after it 'cause he's got four legs and he's unbeatable. He's a super athlete. So he just charged down the hill one after it. I had to be more careful so I wouldn't fall on my butt and hurt myself. So because of how slippery it was and how steep it was, I decided to stomp all the way down the hill, basically planting my heels with every step to make sure I had good purchase and wouldn't lose my footing. But it's steep enough that I had to do it in a hurry, so I kind of half ran, half stomped down the hill,

1:31:59 got to the bottom where it was flat, stopped. He brought the Frisbee back, I threw it once or twice more, and the last time I threw it, it went off to the right, he ran off to the right to run after it. As I was standing there sort of watching him, not really thinking about it. It dawned on me that something was wrong. I couldn't tell what it was. I I like it wasn't there was no sensation, there was no thought. It was just I could tell I was missing something and it was beginning to concern me. It's like, did I leave the gas on? It was just there was there was something wrong. I didn't know what it was. And so I had this sort of sense of ill, ill at ease, dis-ease. As I was trying to figure out what it was that I

1:32:46 was missing, what it was that I didn't know, I felt my dog tapping on my left arm on my left uh thigh. And that confused me because he was still off to my right. I was watching him get the frisbee run around. But he was tapping on my my leg. I looked down and it was my arm. It was my hand tapping against my leg, basically swinging in the wind like a wind chime. I thought, huh, that ain't right. So I reached out. I tried to move it. My arm couldn't move at all. It was completely dead. I grabbed my left wrist with my right hand, picked it up, totally dead. At that point it was not my arm at all. It was it was just an appendage attached to my shoulder. It was, you know, meat, but it had nothing to do with

1:33:33 me anymore. You know, my wrist was was flopped down totally dead. Zero motion. I thought, wow, this is some sort of medical condition. I'm gonna have to address this pretty urgently. So standing at the bottom of the hill, my third first thought was I need to get back inside because this is a medical problem. I don't know how much warts it's gonna get, but I need to get inside so that I at least have the opportunity to call for help before I'm incapacitated. It was just my arm. Everything else was working, but I didn't know what it was, and that's a bad sign. So I called the dog. Thankfully he listened to me and came up with me. As I marched back up the hill, I hung on to my my dead arm because I realized it was sufficiently dead that if

1:34:18 I moved up the hill with the speed I intended, I was rubbing running the risk of actually dislocating my my shoulder because I knew it was just gonna flop around like crazy. So I hung on to it, basically I carried myself and I carried my dead arm up the hill. Got back inside, went back into the living room as I was standing there, my arm started working again, partially. It was still felt a little funny, but I was able to move it again. I go, oh great, you know, whatever that was, maybe it was a nerve problem. Kind of came and went. Obviously I was still concerned I gotta figure out what's going on, but momentarily I had the use of the arm again. So I I remember I grabbed my iPad and I walked back

1:34:58 to my bedroom, which is a long way away. Part of what I was thinking was that I might be having a stroke. If I'm having a stroke, do I take aspirin or not? I wasn't sure at the time what to do. But I thought, you know, like I'll just I'll go back to the bathroom and get aspirin if whether I was gonna take it, I was gonna have it in hand and look in the mirror to see if my face was drooping or anything. So I carried the iPad back to my bedroom. It's probably about 120 feet away. Look in the mirror, face looks fine. I speak out loud to see if I can talk. I was able to speak okay. So I'm like, well, I'm not sure what's going on. Maybe it's a stroke, maybe it isn't. And I wanted to pick up the iPad, I think, to look

1:35:40 at like stroke symptoms online because you know, even in a medical emergency I want to be analytical. I realized that my arm was dead again and I didn't have my iPad. So I walked back down the hallway and find found a halfway down the hallway, the iPad was laying on the ground. So at some point I had dropped it from my hand, which had died again. I didn't even know it. So well, that's strike two. Something's definitely wrong here. Picked it up, went back towards the living room and the arm came back kind of again. So I went back to the living room, set the iPad down again, went into another bathroom to look at my face because I'd been moving around for a bit, and look in a at a better mirror more closely, the left side of my face was starting

1:36:21 to droop a little bit, and so I tried speaking out loud again. I was still able to speak, but I was pretty sure I was having a stroke. And so I walked into the living room, and this is the point of the story, what happened next. I had realized at that point I'm having a stroke. I'm gonna be going to the hospital today. Before I called nine one one, I said a prayer. It was like a ten, fifteen second prayer. I remember very clearly I I bowed my head and I began the prayers I begin every prayer, no matter what, with thanksgiving. I will not pray without first thanking God for something. Sometimes it's dumb. Like it's not I'm not talking about big ticket items, you know, whatever, like eating or anything.

1:37:07 I don't pray unless I thank God first. So as I was standing there with a dead arm, knowing that I was almost certainly having a stroke, I said, Dear Lord, thank you for the use of this arm for these many years. If it is your will that I regain the use of this arm, please guide me through whatever I need to do next to get help. Uh please help the doctors to figure this out. And if this is gonna get worse and if I'm not going to be healed or if I'm not gonna recover, if I'm not gonna survive, please strengthen and preserve my faith unto the end. Amen. And then I called 911. And the reason I did that was that I knew that the doctor wasn't gonna save me. Nine one one wasn't gonna save me. I wasn't gonna be a paramedic.

1:37:52 I was in God's hands. That's something that I know all the time. You know, it's not something that you're always conscious of, but it's something you should reflect on. And I'm thankful that prior to January twentieth, January twenty seventh, twenty twenty, I had thought about being in God's hands because when I was having a stroke, my first thought wasn't, Oh, I gotta fix this problem. My first thought was, I'm up a creek and there's nothing I can do about this. I gotta go try to get help. But n the only way I'm gonna make it is by God's grace. So before turning to the state, before turning to nine one one, I turned to God. And after I hung up and it was funny, when I when I called nine one one I said, uh, I think I'm having a

1:38:41 stroke. Yeah, at that point that's where my speech was and that was kind of confirmation, so the operator didn't really argue with me. It's like okay, where what's your address? And it came up and took about eight minutes for the ambulance to get there. I went outside, I locked up the house So my dog wouldn't get away. I think I texted a friend to say, Hey, can you come get my dog? I'm gonna be at the hospital for a while. And by the time the ambulance got there about eight minutes later, arm was completely dead, I could barely speak at all, my face was severely drooping. It was a severe stroke. It was I would have been permanently debilitated if I had not been healed. And so they took me to the local hospital, uh, they did

1:39:23 a quick MRI, I think, and within about fifteen minutes they said, Yeah, you're having a stroke. And I'll tell you, you know, secondarily another value of me sharing this story, there's a drug called TPA. You don't need to know what the name of the drug is, but there's a claw busting drug that if it's administered within like the first ninety minutes or so, I think ninety minutes to two hours, is the absolute outside of when they can administer it. It's a super clot busting drug that will just bl break up the clot and minimize the amount of brain damage you suffer because the reason my arm was dead was that I had brain damage. You know, if the clot gets broken up quickly enough, that can be temporary, goes on long enough or the clots move around, if

1:40:03 there are more of them, it could be permanent, it could very easily kill you. But they said do you want to take aspirin or do you want the the b the drug and he said, Give me the drug, give me the drug. Well, I couldn't say anything because I couldn't. I was just sort of I I could I could kind of struggle to the point of getting out a single word, but it was not really articulable speech. They gave me the drug and within about 90 minutes it knocked some of it out and uh they kept me for about twenty four hours because one of the risks of the drug is brain bleed hemorrhage, so I had to be under neurological analysis once an hour for twenty four hours, which was itself worse than the stroke. Getting woken up every hour and being poked and prodded is is

1:40:44 pretty much torture. It's sleep deprivation. I don't recommend it. By the time I got out of there I was I was good to go. My arm was working again, I could speak again. Uh my speech was probably ninety nine percent. My arm was interesting, I could still move my arm. I got full function of the arm back within I don't know three hours, but virtually no sensation. It took a year and a half for the sensation to come back. And basically my arm was just tingling like it was waking up for a year and a half. It's still kind of tingling to this day. And unfortunately, you know, for a new podcaster, I have brain damage. You probably hear me s occasionally stumble over words, you know, use the wrong wrong wrong word once once in a while, like I'm

1:41:26 doing right now in the sentence. I didn't used to be like that. I used to speak with perfect clarity like Corey's does. I was so precise in my speech at all times that on the rare occasions, I'm by rare I mean like once a year, once every other year, when I might misspeak in front of friends, they would literally interrupt me to stop and laugh and point at me and mock me for making a mistake. Which wasn't cruel. Like it would be cruel to do it to most people, but my s the precision of my speech was so r reliable that I kinda came across as an android just in terms of never making a mistake. So my friends would get excited that I would actually show I was a human being. God has since spared me any sort of vanity for that, that's

1:42:08 long gone. So if I hadn't told you, I think you probably most people wouldn't notice. Uh if you had heard if we had been recording before I had had the stroke, you would definitely be able to tell the difference. I certainly can. I find it very aggravating uh to do anything imperfectly. And especially when, you know, m kind of the purpose of me being here is to speak clearly, to fail to do that to the my best ability. Well, this is my ability now. So it is what it is. I am absolutely not complaining. God gave me my arm back. He gave me my ability to speak without sounding like I was a vegetable. Yeah, my brain worked fine the whole time. I just couldn't spit any words out. I could barely mumble a single word with great effort.

1:42:46 And it didn't last long enough that I really got upset about it. It was it was still a novel experience, so I would never call myself any sort of stroke survivor or anything like that. what happened to me, although the stroke was severe but The recovery was was very swift. And I I'm I'm eternally thankful to God for sparing me. You know, if God had not given me my arm back and my voice back, I couldn't complain. I certainly deserve far worse than that. And so I'm thankful to have been put back together as well as I have been. Everything that we have is a gift from God. My ability to use my arm to speak, your ability to do everything that you can do, all the stuff that we take for granted, all of those things are gifts from God.

1:43:31 And so part of the reason for telling the story is that if you lose something temporarily, permanently, remember to give thanks for everything else. In addition to giving thanks for the for the cross to bear of something that will help maybe straighten your life out in a way that you needed. Uh certainly did in my life. Give thanks for the stuff that still works. If you're blind, you can still taste food. You know, if you can't move your arm, you can do something else. There's always something to be thankful to God for. And that's part of the reason that we focus this episode on fearing God. If you fear God, all these other bad things that happen, they're nothing by comparison. Are you gonna if you fear God, are you gonna fear starving?

1:44:17 Of course not. You can't fear starving if you fear God, because the God that you fear has promised to take care of you. And that taking care of you includes perhaps starving. As stupid as that sounds, but we know the people sometimes starve, Christians sometimes starve. If the worst befalls us in our own personal lives, we must still fear, love, and trust in God above all things, above the food that's not in our bellies, or whatever abilities that we've all ha lost, whatever things that we had and we don't have, whatever people are taken from us, if we give thanks to God, none of that can be seen as anything more than a painful reminder that we live in a fallen world. The reason I'm talking about this experience today again is not to

1:45:07 say anything good about myself. Everything about that experience, my response to it, was come from God. It was completely outside of myself. I'm not saying, oh, I have good faith, be like me. I'm saying believe in God in the manner that Job did, in the manner that I'm trying to describe in that moment. You know, if I tell an atheist, yeah, I was having a stroke and I wasted fifteen seconds talking to Sky Daddy before I called 911, they would say that's completely retarded. When seconds count, why on earth would you pray to your imaginary God? As a God fearer, as a Christian, I knew that the opposite was true. Why would I bother calling 911 if I wasn't going to turn to God? So in that moment, it was the only possible choice that I

1:45:52 had. It wasn't a burden. It wasn't scary. I was never scared through any of it. I knew that God was going to take care of me. Even if it got worse, even if I died, I was still going to be in God's hands. That is what you should believe so that when the time comes, that is what you can feel. Because if these doctrines, if these understandings are not part of the way we view the world when everything's hunky dory, when you're sitting in your living room listening to a podcast, then later on when you're by yourself and something terrible happens, you won't have laid the found foundation and the groundwork to be able to approach that issue in a God-pleasing manner, in a manner that shows that you fear

1:46:39 God. Dealing with these things in this manner is a godly order in our lives. It is how faith is to be manifest, to fear God, to love God, to know that God will take care of us no matter what. It's something that used to be part of the Christian life. We used to focus on our death a lot more. Memento Mori used to be an important part of the Christian life. Graveyards used to be right next to churches. When you go to church of the same church that your family has gone to for generations, you're walking past their dead bodies. The unbeliever finds that incredibly morbid. The believer knows that the vast majority of Christian f burial grounds, the feet are facing east. Why east? He's gonna appear in the sky everywhere once with the promises that

1:47:27 he's going to come from the same place that we saw him go up. And so Christians in the West face to the east in death because we know that our bodies have been planted in hope of the resurrection. And hope doesn't mean I don't know if it's going to happen. Hope is for the Christian is certain. I hope in the resurrection. I don't know if I'm gonna wake up tomorrow. I don't hope for that. I mean, I'd like to. I I I hope in in the small h sense, but my hope is not in waking up tomorrow. My hope is in the God whom I fear, who's given me all these things, who's given you all these things. If you think about these things now when the pressure isn't on, when you're on your deathbed, it's going to be easier for you.

1:48:11 And that's why Corey and I speak about these issues. That's why we talk about these doctrines that are neglected. Because all these places where Satan is trying to weasel into our lives and saying, oh no, you need to be afraid about losing your job, about not being fed, about health concerned, about having a stroke, about being on a ventilator, that's what should terrify you. No. If you fear God, none of the rest of that stuff can take hold of you because there's no room. You're in God's hands. Job knew that. He knew it before Satan came and killed his entire family, except for his wife, killed all of his servants, killed all of his animals. Job believed it, and God credited to him as righteousness.

1:48:51 So when Satan came and killed everything, what was Job's response? It's the response that we should all have when we're confronted with every day, with the good or the bad. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord. Amen.