The Fear of God and True Repentance

The Fear of God and True Repentance

Jay Wegter

Christian apologetics reveal the fallen state of man’s intellect

The raising and answering of ultimate questions is a powerful revealer of the core assumptions and heart commitments of unbelievers. Unbelievers have taken their worldview on faith, but it is an un-validated faith. Everyone must operate from a set of beliefs about the world. These presuppositions supply the basis for their ethical decisions, their goals, and their means of interpreting reality. Their worldview, with its core assumptions, functions as their fixed point of reference—essentially, their default god or functional god. Ultimate questions bring a person’s worldview or core assumptions to the surface so that they may be discussed. The Christian apologist seeks to set up a contrast, an antithesis between the unbeliever’s assumptions and the truth claims of Scripture. God’s revelation accurately and authoritatively explains reality; our human existence and life experience in His world. The natural man is hostile to God’s revelation, and as Christ’s ambassadors, we want to expose this hostility. The unbeliever is an enemy of God in his mind (Col 1:19-21). His worldview is opposed to God’s revelation and he cannot successfully live his worldview because it does not cohere with reality.

It is essential in our Christian apologetics that we stress that the Word of God is utterly realistic about evil, death, suffering, victimization, and injustice. The Bible answers why history is filled with wars which have caused unspeakable horror, suffering, and atrocities. This theological topic of evil and suffering is known as theodicy. Atheists have their own anti-God theodicy. They suggest that the very existence of a world full of evil argues against the existence of an all-wise, good, powerful Creator. They think that they have cornered God when they say that the existence of evil proves at least one of the following statements: 1.) God is the source of evil and thus He is not good or holy. 2.) God does not care about evil and suffering or else He would have stepped in to eliminate it. 3.) God is too weak to prevent the spread of evil, He is unable to remove evil and suffering. But, holy Scripture does not leave us with an open-ended flow of history.

God will ultimately publicly judge evil and make an example of it, revealing its wretched nature. He will eventually round it up, confine it, and punish it eternally. He will redeem a remnant of humanity from sin and evil. God does not create evil. When God made Adam and Eve, He created free moral agents who in their innocence were able to not sin, but also able to sin (they had the power to obey or not obey). He could have stopped evil but He did not. Thus, we ask the question, is suffering so awful and senseless that it has no purpose? Is suffering and its elimination and prevention more important than divine revelation? Those who argue that man should have been created without the possibility of sinning and suffering are actually pressing for a world of inescapably tight determination. That is a world of robotics, not of free moral agents. We are born into this world with original sin; we have wills in bondage to our depravity—enslaved to our sin natures. BUT, this does not remove responsibility and culpability. It does not eliminate moral free agency.

This doctrine of theodicy and free moral agency is vital to our systematic theology. Though in Adam, we sinned away our innate ability of righteousness, our responsibility remains. This is not double speak; it may be a paradox, but it is not a contradiction. Our culpability is proven in the fact that we see moral cause and effect happening around us every day. The consequences of our ethical choices visit us and sometimes with an enduring vengeance. Fallen man is culpable, he has a conscience upon which is written the moral law of God (Rom 2:14-15). Man has a mind which can inform the conscience and the will. According to Romans 1:18-23, God has filled this cosmos with light (a metaphor for the truth about His eternal power, nature, character, goodness, and holiness). God has flooded creation with divine truth. Unbelievers cannot escape this general revelation of God (Ps 19). They ‘float’ so to speak in a sea of God’s general revelation—it is everywhere. Only by studiously suppressing God’s witness in creation and conscience are unbelievers able to say in their hearts, “There is no God,” (Ps 14:1). But, due to the fall in Eden, having sinned away our ability, we do not desire God’s truth in our innermost being (Ps 51:6). We want to live with our backs to God. We cherish the idolatrous notion of personal autonomy from God.

Repentance is not what people think it is

Biblical repentance is not mere remorse, nor is it a fresh set of resolutions and it is not turning over a new leaf. True repentance takes God’s side against a man’s sin and against his sinful course. Genuine repentance involves forsaking sin. It is turning from sin to God—it is a 180 degree bi-directional turning to live a Godward and no longer a sin-ward life. Ephesians chapter two describes the fact that it is not merely our deeds that are sinful, but our whole being and orientation with the accompanying motives and intents of the heart. Sin has defiled and corrupted every part of our being. Our natural state is one of hostility to God (Col 1:21). In our unregenerate state, we do not wish to live for God by pursuing His glory and honor. By nature we demand to live a self-directed life; we refuse to be subject to Christ. What about the question of the outwardly moral person doing outwardly moral deeds on his own even though unregenerate? Answer: the biblical testimony is that no one is righteous, no, not one. This totalizing statement is uttered from the perspective that God’s own righteousness as revealed in the Person of Christ is the standard of righteousness (Rom 3:9-19; 10:1-4). Therefore, no man can put forth his acts of human goodness in a way that will obligate God or win His acceptance and favor.

As Christian leaders and shepherds in training, you need to be able to explain to your young men the gravity of these things; the human dilemma and predicament/condition as God sees it. OR, your hearers will never take responsibility for their sin, and as a consequence, they are not ready for conversion. Taking responsibility for personal sin is a means of grace. God’s grace comes bringing repentance. Repentance begins with the willingness and ability to say the same thing about your sin that God does and then repudiate that sin and forsake it—even attaching to its repulsiveness the fact that the sinner deserves to be eternally miserable. But this posture, attitude and sentiment is not manufactured by the sinner who is spiritually dead. The Holy Spirit is sent to convict, to win this guilty verdict in a man’s conscience. He bankrupts the sinner morally—bringing a man to the end of himself and the hopelessness of generating merit before God. He takes away what the sinner thinks he has: ‘a pretty good shot at heaven’. The Holy Spirit is sent to evaporate apathy and presumption. He moves the convicted sinner to the point of desperation which is the polar opposite of apathy. If anyone ever tells you that he doesn’t wish to presume concerning his eternal state—but rather wishes to let God tell them where he is going after death, you are talking to an unsaved person. Their presumption and apathy reveals that they are hostile to God and His purposes. For God is glorifying His grace by hiding sinners in Christ (Eph 1:7, 12; 2:7). These steps of conviction: devastation, destitution, and desperation are the result of the sinner being confronted with who God is. For, God has created the universe as a stage for His moral majesty. He has made the cosmos a backdrop for the display of His burning holiness. He is determined to put it on exhibit to holy angels and redeemed men and women. The creatures made in His image are the essential players in this drama of redemption and wrath (Rom 9:19-24).

For in view of the universe-wide demonstration of His justice and mercy, God has announced that He is to be feared. He is absolutely utterly dangerous (Ps 33:8; 90:11). He is determined to consume as a furnace all that is not like Him in holiness (Heb 10:27; 12:29). Nothing could be more sobering than this: God is a furnace; we in ourselves in our natural state of sin are flammable. But even more, this is a grand demonstration. God has determined that He will display His burning holiness as a consuming fire in a public manner. On Judgment Day, His holy law, His verdict of eternal hell, and the sinner’s conscience and bad record in heaven shall all unite into a flammable conscience-crushing heap into which God shall introduce a spark of eternal wrath. Young adults today upon hearing this cry: “unfair, unfair!!” But this is who God is. He is a consuming fire who has made hell for the devil and his angels (Mt 25:41). We have inherited Adam’s failed probation. We proved that in every generations since the Garden by our defection from God—we have proven that we did not want God’s loving rightful rule over us. We defected to Lucifer and as a consequence of following him, shall, apart from salvation, follow him into hell itself.

In the great revolt in the Garden, we switched loyalties and formalized that rebellion by eating the forbidden fruit—spiting God Himself. The radical change in allegiance placed us under the devil’s dominion —we became subject to a malicious creature, as a result of having rejected the rightful rule of our Creator. Now we bear a tragic relation to God’s holy character. We are unrighteous and in ourselves can never be right with His righteousness. In ourselves, we are hopelessly maladjusted to God Almighty. And, even worse, in spite of our alienation from God and the danger of hellfire awaiting us, we are blithe and apathetic—treating our eternal soul like dirt, and spurning our Creator’s offer of mercy in Christ. We will not wake up from our sleep of reprobation unless the Holy Spirit brings deep conviction of sin. God’s absolute comprehensive justice means He must be true to Himself in the condemnation and punishment of those who commit sin. In Isaiah chapter six, the prophet trembles and pronounces himself ruined and undone because he has had a glimpse of God’s moral majesty (His transcendent holiness). The godliest man in all of Judah (Isaiah), by a vision of God’s holiness, was rocked and staggered to the point of pronouncing ruin on himself. How tragic that our churches today are systematically concealing the holiness of God from their congregations.

In the conviction of sin, God ‘does Himself to us’--bringing to bear upon us His holiness so that our depravity is exposed.

There is of necessity trauma to the sinner as a result of being confronted with who God is, and who we are. To be confronted with who God is changes everything; devastation was Isaiah’s immediate response. In the prophet’s own experience, all compromise and apathy were gone. Then, a sense of crushing destitution— he was hit as if with a lightning bolt—the righteousness he needed to stand before God was missing altogether! Instead of holiness, he felt legal guilt awaiting eternal punishment. In our natural state, there is nothing in us stopping our descent into the pit of hell. We are a defiled cumberer of the earth who brings dishonor to God. We deserve to be swept away from the creation as some unclean thing that is polluting our Creator’s world. But God in His great mercy sends the Spirit to convict sinners (Jn 16:8-11). Then, when He convicts, the Holy Spirit produces desperation. When that takes place, our laissez-faire wait n’ see attitude has been replaced by urgency pressing upon us. The heart is smitten with a posture of, “Unless God reveal His mercy, I am gone forever!” “Apart from sovereign pity, I am certainly lost!” The sinner awakened by the Spirit tosses his self-righteous hope overboard—only then will he cast himself on the plank of free grace in Christ.

No one has his heart wide open to the blessed offices of Christ until this devastating conviction by the Spirit passes upon his soul. Any speck of self-righteousness remaining will cause a man to shut his heart to the offices of Christ. Our Lord is the Great Physician ONLY to the sin-sick (Lu 5:32). This all terminates upon who God is and what relationship we bear to Him. For, our lifetime of sin and our clever maneuvers of conscience have worked overtime to raise-up fortresses against the knowledge of God (2 Cor 10:3-5). The men to whom you minister have, for the most part never been devastated by who God is. They view their sin NOT from the vantage point of the infallible omniscient perspective of God who is thrice holy and who is a consuming furnace (Heb 12:29). No, they view their sin as that which beats them up, shoots holes in their self-esteem, attacks their sense of wellbeing, and makes their conscience a place of not infrequent discomfort.

Therefore, because they have never been devastated by who God is, when they contemplate God and the threat of eternal damnation, they are quick to secretly charge Him with unfairness. And then in doing so, they imagine with a few tricks of reasoning they have held God’s reputation hostage by impugning His character. Therefore, they conclude that He is not a threat because they no longer view Him as dangerous. Thus, they do not see themselves as immersed in this battle between truth and error, between good and evil— between destinies of glory or damnation. They think and speak and live as if they are not an eternal object lesson in this drama of redemption and damnation. They have put their consciences to sleep so that they imagine grace positions them outside the battle—beyond the reach of ultimate eternal wrath because they have found a way to hold God’s ways in suspicion—as if their sinful minds project reality instead of God Almighty Himself. No, you are in the center of the battle. Your loyalties are being lived out right now. What you stand for and love is being fixed, hardening like cement. Your servitude to one master or the other is being demonstrated this very moment. There is no neutral territory in this war. There are no sidelines, not a single square inch of neutrality. Thus, God’s plan makes every creature made in His image a player in this battle of the ages. For, every person on that day will prove to be a vessel of wrath or a vessel of mercy (Rom 9:19-24).

The drama will reach its consummation when Christ re-invades human history in wrath and flaming fire (2 Thess 1:7-9). Then, there will be perfect discrimination; He will separate the sheep from the goats. God will publicly punish sin and before the watching universe, He will own those who belong to Him in an outpouring of grace and glory in the presence of His angels (Mt 10:32-33). Now all of this highlights the urgency of salvation. For if God leaves you as you are—just ‘being you’, just being yourself, you will experience damnation forever. How many believe this nowadays? My friends, God’s great tool to reveal our inability and habitual sinning is the moral law of God, that diagnostic tool has not changed. The leading Pharisee in Jerusalem who followed the Law to the letter said this, once the Law truly cross-examined him.

For while we were in the flesh, the sinful passions, which were aroused by the Law, were at work in the members of our body to bear fruit for death. But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter. What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, “YOU SHALL NOT COVET.” But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind; for apart from the Law sin is dead. I was once alive apart from the Law; but when the commandment came, sin became alive and I died; and this commandment, which was to result in life, proved to result in death for me; for sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me (Rom 7:5-11).

As with the conviction Saul of Tarsus experienced, the law is to be pressed upon the conscience ‘killing-ly’ by the Spirit. Under the Spirit’s work, the law applied cuts deep, bleeding furrows, it produces the necessary desperation. He tries to believe and repent, but he cannot. Tears won’t do it. Self-reformation cannot avail— turning over a new leaf won’t do it. In that state the sinner gives up all hope of contributing to his salvation.

Under the Spirit’s conviction, and not before, the sinner realizes that he has nothing with which to trade with God, for even the most humble blessing—much less for the sparing of his eternal soul from hell. The good news of the mercy of God is that grace comes bringing the ability to believe and repent. But, it is always repentance toward God. It is always about repentance bestowed by grace rather than legal repentance (Acts 5:31; 2 Tim 2:25). Before this Spirit-granted repentance is bestowed, the sinner, by instinct, falls back on his meager resources, his impotence. He reasons: “If I stop doing this and this and that, surely that will please God.” But, he cannot muster up true repentance toward God; he keeps bumping up against his own spiritual impotence and inability. But, when calling the elect of God, the Spirit, (after having done His work of convicting, bankrupting, and devastating) pours the gospel into the wounded conscience in order to bring faith in Christ and repentance from sin.

The wonderful news is that God was in Christ reconciling the world by not counting their trespasses against them (2 Cor 5:18-20). But this was because He was counting those trespasses (of all who would ever believe) against Christ, the sinner’s suffering Substitute (2 Cor 5:21). Now sinners who believe place their faith in Christ who was the object of this massive guilt transfer. For this very guilt exchange contains the terms of peace with God. What was our mountainous dilemma before reconciliation? We had orphaned ourselves from God by habitually transgressing against Him. But in His redeeming mercy, God has allowed the penalty of our law-breaking to fall upon Christ (1 Pet 2:24; 3:18). Now this guilt exchange is the basis of peace with God. This monumental guilt transfer planned by God is the foundation of fellowship with Him and for restoration from our ruin and alienation. Right-standing by the gospel focuses upon the urgency of repentance now.

How does God’s sovereign grace square with what Christ requires daily of the believer?

Now in our Evangelical circles, there is a mild form of hyper-Calvinism which actually bears a resemblance to Hindu-istic pantheism. In that view, the sovereignty of God is redefined as fate or fatalism. For in that fatalistic view, some will be lost and some will be saved no matter what they do, or how they live. Nothing could be further from the truth. What the rising generation of church-goers does not understand is how sovereign grace obligates utterly. Because they tend to see grace as divine leniency, they do not understand its relation to holiness and to the vindication of God’s righteousness at Calvary. Consequently, they tend not to understand that God’s grace produces comprehensive, absolute claims on one’s life.

To pursue holiness as a true Christ-follower means that we are to ‘lean into’ the gap that separates what we are now in our mortal sinfulness from what we will be in glory. As those united to Christ, we have incredible resources for holiness and service (2 Pet 1:3ff.). The doctrines of grace comprise our motivation and enablement to run with endurance, striving according to His power that works within us as we live upon Christ (Col 1:28-29). This direction is of course the very opposite of hyper-Calvinism which is quiet-tistic, passive, and fatalistically resigned. And, that posture is precisely where much of Reformed Evangelicalism lies moored today in ineffectiveness. This fatalistic resignation is a disservice to the knowledge and glory of God. For, He never intended that grace should sow feather pillow armrests for us (Titus 2:11-14). The doctrines of grace give us all of the reasons to put sin to death. Not the least of which is because the outcome is guaranteed for those in union with Christ—God has predestined that they should be presented before Him holy and blameless without spot or wrinkle (Eph 1:4; Rom 8:29; Eph 5:27; 2 Thess 2:14). But, as Scripture states, eternal life is the ‘outcome’ of a life of faith and obedience. “But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life” (Rom 6:22).

Thus, biblical grace is a formula for the energetic pursuit of holiness. But the young men you are ministering to tend to push grace toward softness, toward lethargy—and event toward fatalism. Actually grace calls us to step fully into the sonship script now that God has restored our ability and desire to love and obey Him. This sheds light on the battle between flesh and Spirit. The flesh is always ready to break out in new acts of truancy and defiance against the will of the Spirit. But the Spirit wants our lives to be completely in tune with God’s glory story in Christ. Now success in this endeavor is all traceable the cross. For the cross cancels the penalty of sin for us that we might experience the cancellation of the power of sin in our lives. This is so in order that ultimately the entire presence of sin in our lives might be cancelled upon glorification. So God is saving His people from hell by saving them from their sin. This means that these three deliverances from the penalty, power, and presence of sin must stay joined in our thinking, for in terms of the goal and purpose of grace—they are inseparable.

You live between the cross and the resurrection. The use of your members now (in serving Christ instead of sin) is a declaration that the cross has made you a redeemed child of God (Rom 6:11-13ff.). These three deliverances (from the penalty, power, and presence of sin) must control your life now. For, our God is revealed by how He delivers believers from their sin. Then what follows as a clear mark of knowing God is how you deal with your sin. Is it by means of the massive guilt transfer accomplished at Calvary? Is it by the co-crucifixion Christ accomplished for His own, causing them to be dead to sin and alive to God? Is it in fact by this co-crucifixion, that true believers are able to effectively mortify sin?

Sadly, hyper-Calvinist resignation (passivity, quietism) winds up being a half gospel because it slices the second part of deliverance from the first (it separates the remedy for sin: penalty cancelled, from the design of grace: holiness). Grace as the remedy for sin (penalty cancelled) is separated from grace as driving the very goal of holiness. It is a false notion which suggests that grace has removed the great danger of committing sin. The design of grace is to move us relentlessly, ineffably toward this goal of standing before God in Christ blameless in holiness.

Hyper-grace preachers mischaracterize grace, and in so doing, explain away the necessity of fearing God.

We always go back to the starting point: who is God? There are things about God that are scandalous to the minds of 21ˢᵗ Century men. Modern men chafe at the thought that we were created to worship. They have not thought through the Creator-creature distinction (i.e. God’s absolute ownership of, and purpose for, what He has created out of nothing). You are the thought of God, He wanted a creature like you to know Him and find your all in Him. I love the Edwards’ sermon, “The End for which all Creation Exists.” In that remarkable message, Edwards stresses that nothing men or angels can do will thwart God’s purpose—that purpose being that the creation shall bring Him glory, for even the wrath of man shall praise Him (when He pours out His wrath on their wrath. See Psalm 76). How this troubles us, that God is glorious in judgment as well as in grace. He will hang sin on the gallows forever—displaying it as pernicious, as folly, as destruction to the image of God—as that which disintegrates the soul. Edwards’ sermon reminds us that the entrance of sin does not thwart God’s purpose that the entire creation, in spite of sin, will bring glory to God. His wrath against sin is part of what is known as the ‘grand demonstration’ described in Romans chapter nine. Professing Christians who have little fear of God tend to push the doctrine of God through a grid of consumerism—as if God exists for our needs and cravings, and as if God requires a public relations lift from us—as if the need for a ‘PR upgrade’ will allow our view of God to conform to 21ˢᵗ Century sensibilities.

God’s present toleration of vessels of wrath is a part of His grace being shown to vessels of mercy (something practical atheists cannot envision for a moment) (Rom 9:22-24). Human history when viewed from eternity is but a blink—a brief drama between the two bookends of eternity past and eternity future. But the consummation of history will redound to the glory of God. The infinite wisdom of the divine decree (though revealed only in part to our finite minds) shall shout the divine perfections forever—in all of God’s works of creation and providence, and in both His judgments and mercies, He will be exalted. This present grand demonstration is a drama witnessed by angels now. How puny is man—as we consider that as creatures of dust and ashes, both sin and redemption shall (in God’s actions) put God’s excellence and perfections on display. God’s administration of grace is educating angels as the manifold wisdom of God (Eph 3:10).

Our man-centered religious expressions eschew the trauma of true conviction of sin; of devastation, destitution and desperation because sinful man does not wish to face who God really is.

Some of what we are studying here is very appropriate to our Christian apologetics. God upholds all reality—it is His world, not the illusory world of the sinner’s imagination. Can you envision what the Day of the Lord will be like? Millions of individuals who have fabricated a false reality will be hit with God’s reality like a sledgehammer to the temple. The cry in Revelation six is, “Who is able to stand?” Oh then those individuals will wish that they had been willing to be devastated by the knowledge of God in this life, for it will be too late to repent.

How, in our apologetic response, do we answer the objection: “How can we be totally responsible, and God be totally holy if He uses sin for His purposes?” First, God upholds the universe every moment, yet He lives outside of the time, space, mass continuum. God lives outside of time, and He is sovereignly in control of all things—even over the evil acts of men. We cannot understand this because we imagine His sovereignty is causing things to happen (including sin) rather than ruling over the free acts of men. One way to better understand this is to picture a toxic polluted river being directed by its river banks to a particular holding pond. The engineers did not produce the toxins, but are directing and restraining the flow until it can be contained and eliminated. Though we come into this world totally depraved, and bearing original sin, we are free moral agents who are not compelled from the outside, but are responsible for all of our ethical choices. In our thinking we are darkened (loving and preferring darkness) but our consciences are imprinted with the light of God’s law written there (Rom 2:14-16).

Thus, the whole course of human history is not God making people do depraved things. No, the flow of history is primarily made up of what theologians call ‘secondary causes’. In other words, the unfolding of human history is made up of the free acts of men. God’s providence (His sovereignty) rules over all. “The heart of the king is as channels of water in the hand of the Lord; He turns it whichever way He pleases” (Prov 21:1). This is amazing—a paradox. God accomplishes His purposes but does not violate the freedom of our acts. This is a cause to marvel that God’s sovereignty makes your choices truly your own decisions, and He makes those choices to be significant in time and eternity. Consider that from the tower of Babel to the wonders of Greece and the Roman Empire, to the final campaign of the Antichrist, the free acts of men (secondary causes) propel history forward—though God claims sovereign rule over the deeds of His creatures. His sovereignty over evil is a major part of understanding His omnipotence. For history will prove to be the record of the honoring and the dishonoring of God (and what happened to each individual as a result of that honoring or dishonoring of God).

Countless events in history are instructive for the world and for angels. What a sobering thought designed to instill deeper fear of God that every life will prove to be an eternal object lesson in the grand demonstration. Oh how this should make us do violence to enter heaven. How this should deepen our understanding that the holy character of God is revealed in sowing and reaping—that His unbending righteousness energizes the sowing and reaping principle. The Governor of the universe cannot be mocked (Gal 6:7). His moral universe exhibits moral cause and effect—sowing and reaping. This law is unbreakable: we will reap far more than we sowed and will reap far longer than we sowed. Our harvest, as a result of how and what we sowed, will be an eternal object lesson to the rational universe. If we have sown thorns, we awake to a field of thorns stretching to all horizons—and we will lie down in thorns forever. God has said that those who sow to the flesh shall from the flesh reap corruption (Gal 6:8).

God is not mocked; every man’s harvest will be a public event. The consequences of sowing to sin or righteousness shall become evident to all. If men only let this sink in, they would drop everything and run to Christ. God’s mercy in Christ is so vast. Think of it, in this massive guilt transfer at Calvary, there is sowing and reaping. Christ reaps the consequent eternal penalty His people have sown by their sinning, and His people reap the righteousness He has sown. This is incredible news, but people would rather have a donut and a latte than life in Christ—how great is the darkness! God is saying to all sinners worldwide, “I am willing to make peace with you now by having my only begotten Son reap the hell and wrath and death that you have sown that you may reap the righteousness He has sown on behalf of sinners.” What God has done in Christ are the terms of peace with God. The gospel of the cross of Christ invades our self-worship and ruin—the cross puts a stop to our self-destructive course of habitual sin. Today is the day of salvation, flee into Christ the refuge. If you don’t, you are keeping your enmity against Me; you don’t fear or revere Me, you spite Me and slight my grace.

For believers, here is the startling part, what you have just heard and read is all about the fear of God and why it leads to repentance. But, we do not tend to look to the fear of God as a source of joy, but we should. Here is the reason why: the fear of God is the source of matchless joy because it is by fearing God that we enter into the greatest exultation for Christ’s work of propitiation. You see, deep joy will evade you until you can celebrate God’s just and holy character. Isn’t it sad that the seeker church, the hipster pastor, and the church growth movement is robbing their members of joy. By sanding off the sharp corners and points of the doctrine of the holiness of God, there is nothing left to poke and pierce the sinner’s conscience. But this removal of the offense of the cross is done in order to make Him acceptable to consumers, but congregants are left with a half gospel. As a consequence, they are robbed of true joy, and at the worst, robbed of the genuine gospel.

We reiterate: the fear of God brings joy. The sinner must be smitten with deep wounds by the justice and wrath of God before the ‘oil’ of the gospel can be poured into those wounds. Otherwise, there is but shallow conviction and shallow conversion because the conscience was never devastated by a sight sin in the presence of who God is. We can unite this central blessed doctrine to our apologetics by emphasizing that this whole life is a grand demonstration, for history is a stage upon which God’s moral majesty is to be revealed. Humans exist as players on this stage. They play the part decreed for them, yet their choices are free and are their own. Pharaoh was raised up by God so that God would make His own glorious Name known through the Egyptian king’s obstinate actions (Rom 9:17). Yet, this pharaoh had the power and ability and freedom to release the Jews at any time. But every instance in which he thought about fully releasing them, he stuffed that feeling down inside, forgot about Yahweh, and imperiously demanded that he keep his Jewish slave force for himself. Yes, the wrath of man shall praise Thee! But for believers, we live because of Christ and will enjoy endless glory with our Lord because God is glorifying His grace forever in the giving of Christ for the unworthy (Eph 2:7ff.).