Someone recently brought up the subject of Christians serving God out of fear, and that they are afraid of their deity. This “notion,” of course, sparked outrage amongst the Christians who interacted with this idea. “We ARE NOT afraid of God! We love him and worship him. We love him because he first loved us!” On and on their proclamations of loyalty and love, alongside their denials of fear towards him go. And if one were to stop at their proclamations, they indeed may believe the topic in question to be an invalid one. Their proclamations are, on surface level, nearly convincing. However, it is when one observes many a Christian’s actions that this idea that Christians indeed do fear their deity gains footing, and those claims of not being afraid of their deity lose ground.
I’ve witnessed this fear of God firsthand as a Christian from fellow Christians. A fellow pastor absolutely lived in fear of God. He often told the story of how he preached the first time when he was 17 and did well. After preaching a few times, his confidence grew, to where, according to him, he was relying on his own ability, rather than relying on God to do his sermons. So, of course, God being the jealous, angry dick that he is (my words, not his) had to take action. After all, here was this young whippersnapper, come out of nowhere, preaching these good sermons without enough of his strength and help having been sought, so immediate action had to be taken, lest this young preacher continue to rely upon himself. The weapon used by the loving – but jealous sky daddy? A horrific, debilitating migraine, meted out lovingly as correction, of course.
The next time this young Christian preacher preached, God showed up – not to help him, not to feed the poor, or heal the sick – no, nothing like that. He showed up to hand out a horrific migraine to this young man in order to punish him for preaching without relying heavily enough upon him, for relying too heavily upon self. Of course, you can surely understand why it was necessary for God to take such harsh, definitive action – after all, he must be relied upon in all things. And to emphasize just how much this struck fear of God into this man’s heart: this smiting by God took place 50 years ago, and to his day, he still has a bottle of Excedrin Migraine tablets in his desk.
And the scary sky daddy saga continues, and this time with yet another fellow pastor. This particular pastor claimed that if you sinned once you became saved, God would literally kill you! Yep, you read that right. Get saved, sin, and Abba, Daddy God will kill you. Best not sin, or, better yet, best not get saved in the first place.
And one more example of the Christian’s good and loving sky daddy, and yet another one that I worked with in the ministry. This time it was a lay person turned ministry worker, but holy hell, what it took to get him to become willing to work in the ministry. He claimed that God had been calling him into the ministry for a while, but he had been looking the other way. Finally, his loving heavenly daddy’s patience had reached its limit, and in anger, he decided to get this guy’s attention, and let him know once and for all that he wanted him in the ministry.
The guy worked at a large retail bulk store that had a gas station. He worked at the gas station, and when he walked out to the pumps one day, an elderly man who was driving up to a pump had a medical emergency and became unconscious. In doing so, he ran over this Christian man whose attention God was trying to get, then somehow, put the car in reverse, and backed over him, running over him twice. Naturally, he was in critical condition. He was rushed to the hospital, where he would be for weeks, and would have multiple surgeries. He was finally released, but still needed more surgeries and months of physical therapy. Eventually he was able to return to work, and physically was for the most part back to normal.
Now you might thing he was lucky or fortunate or that the doctors and medical staff who helped him get back on his feet were heroes. Of course, he has a slightly different version of what happened. His version is that he had been running from God’s calling on his life (remember Jonah and the “whale”?) and that God finally had it and decided to bring his running to an end. In his version, God intentionally directed that car to run over him – twice, in order to get his attention, and to get him to be willing to go into the ministry.
These few examples were all people that I worked with in the venues in which I was a pastor. There weren’t many people in the ministry associated with the three churches – probably a dozen or so. And yet, there they are – all those examples of just a few Christians fearing God. And I can assure you – I did not hold the lottery on Christians who were afraid of God.
Despite the many outcries to the opposite, Christianity is rife with many who do serve their deity out of fear. They are not just within the walls of where I worked as a pastor – they exist wherever there are Christians. They are prolific within the Christian population. And why wouldn’t they be? Their holy book is riddled with examples of this God they worship getting angry and jealous and acting on those emotions and killing likely billions of people, including women, children – both infants and unborn, and even animals. In some instances, this angry deity even orders the deaths of trees.
And lest anyone proclaim that it was the enemy, or people who worshiped other gods (as if that would justify the horrific atrocities God ordered carried out against them) who were at the receiving end of God’s anger, there are numerous incidents where it was God’s most faithful who found themselves on the receiving end of God’s deadly anger. They faced horrible torture and at times, narrowly escaped the death that God wanted to mete out to them. The Old Testament is rife with examples of God killing and torturing his own – his chosen people. From outright death to agonizingly slow deaths due to famine, wherein God declares that children will eat their parents and parents will eat their children. If this is how God has treated his own (parents eating their kids?!), why wouldn’t Christians fear him? The examples are many, but I will stop with these, and leave them as examples of why this deity, if the bible is to be believed, should indeed be feared. Which brings up a good point – that being that the bible admonishes the reader over and over to “fear not,” while simultaneously giving that same reader a plethora of reasons to indeed fear.
