“And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of
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 today for
your good?” Fear the Lord, love the
Lord, serve the Lord. Sounds perfectly
parental doesn’t it? When we are
children we should have all these things in our hearts and minds. If our parents are loving then we should fear
them in the sense that they know things we clearly don’t know and we should be
reluctant to disobey them in disrespect.
We should love them in return for their love and their lovingkindness,
love in action and we should then serve them from that place of
belovedness. Moses finds the center of
the argument not in the greatness of God as God of gods and Lord of lords but
in what He has done for them. Both are
true, obedience is from love, not fear alone.
John wasn’t jealous of the fact that people were leaving off
following him and going after Jesus. He
wasn’t jealous because he believed in Jesus as greater than himself. John’s job was to point to and prepare a
people for the coming of Messiah and he believed that Jesus was Messiah. We have that same work and our joy should be
not in making disciples for ourselves but for Him. Our goal should be not to attach people to us
but to Him alone. John knew that the
baptism of the Holy Spirit which he proclaimed but perhaps didn’t fully
understand, was the greater work. There
was no reason to believe in John, only in John’s message but Messiah was one in
whom faith should repose. John saw the
relationship of Father and Son between God and His chosen one and knew that
relationship was different from his own relationship with God. Eternal life was the promise and that is only
realized in believing in the Son.
The writer of Hebrews says, “no creature is hidden from his
sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give
account.” Worse yet, the Word of God
exposes the thoughts and intentions of the heart. The fear of God is bound up in these words
and ideas in the same we we have probably all stood before a parent when we
were young and felt that we were exposed for the disobedient children we
were. Shame, however, is not the primary
reason to fall at the feet of God. Jesus’
death on the cross bears away my shame. His
innocence exposes my own sin and yet not for my destruction did He do this
thing but for my life. Jesus is indeed
our great high priest who intercedes for us in the same way the high priest did
but the blood of His sacrifice is once and for all effective for the
forgiveness of sin. What He offers us is
mercy and grace for those who confess their sins, not for those who hide
them.
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