July 27: The fear of the Lord...

2 Chronicles 19:1-20:37

Romans 10:14-11:12

Psalm 21:1-13

Proverbs 20:4-6

I used to think that "the fear of the Lord" meant one was to be afraid of God, and of what He might do to me.  By that definition, He seemed to be, at the very least, Someone I should want to avoid lest I trigger His wrath.  In times of even more sinful bad judgment, I get angry at God, and I blame Him for the bad things I experience.  And I decide He is being unfair, unjust, and I reject Him.  When I read today's reading, I realized I never really did try to understand what the phrase meant...so I looked it up.  One source defined it as a "reverence and awe of God".  Another one went even further, calling it "a continual awareness [one] is in the presence of a holy, just and almighty God".  I liked that.  

Jehoshaphat wasn't perfect - he disobeyed God a couple of times that we know of from the Bible.  But he had a tremendous awareness of the presence of God, whatever his circumstances.  Where worship in the high places and at the Asherah poles was commonplace, he was aware of God through all this - and he removed the high places and the Asherah poles from Judah.  When he appointed judges in the land, he commanded them to be aware of God's presence in the exercise of their duties; he did this again with the Levites and priests tasked to administer the law of the Lord.  And when faced with a vast army and what to man's eyes would have seemed like certain defeat, he was aware of the presence of the Lord enough to cry out to Him for help.  And his awareness of God was contagious - we read that the men of Judah, their wives and children and little ones, stood there before the Lord.  And his awareness of Who God was was so strong and clear that when it came time for battle, he didn't appoint an advance attack party...instead he appointed men to march at the head of the army, to sing to the Lord and to praise Him.

It is interesting how tired I get these days, how intimidated I can be sometimes by the many problems and challenges I face.  It would be great to have such an awareness of God that, like Jehoshapaht, I can meet those challenges singing in the knowledge of God and of His power.  It would be even better to then step back and see the work of His hand, watch Him win the victory.  But it would best of all to be so infected with the fear of the Lord that I would be contagious as Jehoshapat was, as we read that the fear of God came on "all surounding kingdoms when they heard how the Lord had fought against the enemies of Israel"...and then to receive God's rest "on every side".