On Fear, Hope, and
Trust
December 1, 2020
The Scripture
quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible,
copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council
of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights
reserved.
I’ll tell you the truth. I’ve never
been a big fan of most of the Psalms. Some of them are wonderful of
course—Psalm 23, Psalm 139 (except verses 19-22, which are awful), Psalm 8, and
Psalm 51 among others. But the Psalms are full of complaints against personal
enemies and prayers not that the psalmist will come to love them as Jesus
commands but that God will destroy them. Many of the psalmists seem to be
feeling mighty sorry for themselves. When you read a lot of the Psalms you see
how repetitive they are. Many of them, beginning with Psalm 1, have a
Deuteronomic theology that I resoundingly reject. I don’t take much from many
of the Psalms. Frankly, I can do perfectly well without most of them.
But every now and then I discover a
Psalm I hadn’t known well before to be quite helpful and even quite wonderful.
I had that experience today when I read Psalm 33 as one of the readings for
today in a daily lectionary that I use. It does a couple of very good things.
It answers a question that I and many people have about a central phrase in
Hebrew scripture. It ends with beautiful verses of trust and hope in God. It is
well worth spending some time with.
The central phrase In Hebrew
scripture at issue here is the phrase “the fear of the Lord.”[1]
It appears again and again in the Psalms and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible (our
Old Testament). The Hebrew Bible even says that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”
Proverbs 9:10a. That phrase, the fear of the Lord,
has always bothered me. I’ve wondered, does it mean we’re supposed to be afraid
of God? That’s what it sounds like it means. To fear something is to be afraid
of it, right? Though Hebrew scripture tells me over and over again to fear the Lord, I don’t think of God as something
or someone to fear. I’m not afraid of God, for I know God to be ultimate love,
full of care and grace for me and for all creation. So no, I don’t fear the Lord, at least not in what appears to be
the obvious meaning of that phrase.
For quite some time I’ve struggled
to find a meaning of “fear of the Lord”
other than be afraid of God. I’ve had a few thoughts on the subject. I’ve told
myself that to fear the Lord must
mean something like to stand in awe before the power and majesty of God. I was
delighted then to discover that Psalm 33 expresses that same understanding of
the phrase. To understand how it does that, however, we have to understand
something that at first seems quite unrelated to that question. We must
understand how Hebrew poetry works.
You’ve probably noticed that parts
of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, appear printed in simple prose
form. The text is organized into paragraphs with the first line indented and
the margins justified. The Hebrew text that gets translated and printed that
way is indeed simply prose. Some of the text is printed in what appears to be
verse form. All of the Psalms are printed that way. Much of the text of the
books of the prophets is too. Yet perhaps you’ve noticed that what appears to be
verse has no meter, and it doesn’t rhyme. That’s because Hebrew poetry didn’t
work with meter and rhyme. Instead, it was written in couplets, two lines that
somehow belong together. One line makes a statement, then the second line makes
another statement that is related in some way to the first statement. Psalm 23
begins with a famous example: “The Lord
is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Psalm 23:1. The phrase “I shall not want”
amplifies what the line “The Lord
is my shepherd” means. Because the Lord
is my shepherd, I shall not want. The second statement often restates the first
statement in different words. It may even on rare occasions contradict the
first statement, or at least appear to do so.
Sometimes the second statement
essentially defines the first statement or at least some word in it. That’s how
Psalm 33:8 works:
Let all the earth fear the Lord;
let all the inhabitants of the
world stand in awe of him.
The second statement, “let all the inhabitants of the earth
stand in awe of him,” develops and essentially defines the first statement,
“Let all the earth fear the Lord.”
When we understand how Hebrew poetry works we learn from this verse that to
fear the Lord is to stand in awe
of the Lord.
OK, but that understanding raises
another question, doesn’t it. What does it mean to stand in awe of something?
Google.com defines awe as “a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or
wonder.” Another source, merrian-webster.com, defines awe as “an emotion
variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by authority
or by the sacred or sublime.” We see that fear or even dread may be part of
awe, but they aren’t all of it by any means. Awe is first of all “a feeling of
reverential respect.” “Reverential” means having deep respect for something or
someone. It can include veneration (essentially a synonym of reverence) and
wonder. Yes, it can include what we normally think of as fear, as being afraid,
but it is a whole lot more than that.
The fear of the Lord understood this way is a
particularly apt characterization of the appropriate response to God. What, or
Who, after all is God? God is a reality of power beyond our imagining. God is
the power behind everything that is. God holds everything that is in being and
keeps it from falling into nothingness. God made each of us humans, not in a
biological sense but in a cosmic one. God has the power to destroy us and all
of creation, but God doesn’t do it because God is also love beyond human
comprehension. God is knowledge beyond our grasping. God is both “joyful
darkness far beyond our seeing” and “closer yet than breathing,” to quote the
hymn Bring Many Names by the great Brian Wren. God is the infinitely
more in everything that is yet always with us in our limited, creaturely being.
What’s not to be in awe of? What’s not to fear and love at the same time? Nothing.
Absolutely nothing. So thank you, Psalm 33, for making the connection of fear
of the Lord with standing in awe
of God so clear, so accessible.
Yet that’s not all that’s wonderful
about Psalm 33. Here’s how it ends:
Our soul waits for the Lord;
he is our help and shield.
Our heart is glad in him,
because we trust in his holy
name.
Let your steadfast love, O Lord,
be upon us,
even as we hope in you. Psalm 33:202-22.
In these beautiful lines we see that our relationship to God
is not only one of fear in the sense of awe but also one of trust and hope. We
trust God, and we hope in God. We also learn that God relates to us in what
this Psalm calls “steadfast love.” God loves us, and God’s love is steadfast.
It never falters. It never fails. Our souls are at peace and we are fulfilled
as human beings when we live in awe of God, in trust of God, and in hope in
God. That, after all, is essentially the core message of the entire Bible, or
at least most of it. We find it expresses concisely and beautifully in these
lines from Psalm 33. Thanks be to God!
[1] The
Lord here, typed in small caps
like that, represents the sacred name of God usually transliterated as Yahweh.
I will treat it as a synonym for God, which it more or less is, without
bothering with whether or not Yahweh and God are exactly the same in this Psalm
or elsewhere in Hebrew scripture. I’ll just say this: Originally in Hebrew
thinking Yahweh was the people’s war god. In the sixth century BCE Hebrew
theology evolved to the point of understanding Yahweh as the one universal God
of all people. It most certainly does not mean Jesus. Nothing in the Hebrew
Bible means Jesus.
No comments:
Post a Comment