Joy Akin to Fear
Friday, July 8, 2011 at 9:40AM 
I wrote yesterday that this week’s chapter in Christianity and Liberalism by J. Gresham Machen had it’s glorious parts. Here’s the proof:
Religion cannot be made joyful by simply looking on the bright side of God. For a one-sided God is not a real God, and it is the real God alone who can satisfy the longing of our soul. God is love, but is He only love? God is love, but is love God? Seek joy alone, then, seek joy at any cost and you will not find it. How then may it be attained?
The search for joy in religion seems to have ended in disaster. God is found to be enveloped in impenetrable mystery, and in awful righteousness; man is confined in the prison of the world, trying to make the best of his condition, beautifying the prison with tinsel, yet secretly dissatisfied with his bondage, dissatisfied with a merely relative goodness which is no goodness at all, …. unable to forget his heavenly destiny and his heavenly duty, longing for communion with the Holy One. There seems to be no hope; God is separate from sinners; there is no room for joy, but only a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation.
Yet such a God has at least one advantage over the comforting God of modern preaching — He is alive, He is sovereign, He is not bound by His creation or by His creatures, He can perform wonders. Could he even save us if He would? He has saved us — in that message the gospel consists. It could not have been foretold; still less could the manner of it have been foretold. That Birth. that Life, that Death — why was it done just thus and then and there? It all seems so very local, so very particular, so very unphilosophical, so very unlike what might have been expected. Are not our own methods of salvation, men say, better than that?…. Yet what if it were true? …. God’s own Son delivered up for us all, freedom from the world, sought by philosophers of all the ages, offered now freely to every simple soul, things hidden from the wise and prudent revealed unto babes, the long striving over, the impossible accomplished, sin conquered by mysterious grace, communion at length with the Holy God, our Father which art in heaven!
Surely this and this alone is joy. But it is a joy that is akin to fear. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Were we not safer with a God of our own devising — love and only love, a Father and nothing else, one before whom we could stand in our own merit without fear? He who will may be satisfied with such a God. But we, God help us — sinful as we are, we would see Jehovah. Despairing, hoping, trembling, half-doubting and half believing, trusting all to Jesus, we venture into the presence of the very God. And in his presence we live.
Reader Comments (1)
Oh yes, this was an excellent passage. I marked a little star beside this. Usually I will write down good quotations in a journal, but this one was so long, I haven't done it.