Trembling Love

Fear, Freedom, and the God Who Is for Us

Hobbs

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621898184
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

That we are afraid is no revelation. Only God has the power to calm our fears and to make us courageous. But what happens when God refuses to meet your expectations? What happens when Jesus turns out to be more difficult to deal with, more serious, and more unpredictable than we once thought he was? Will we wait on him to answer us? Will we trust him when he seems to be making no sense? In our hurry to offer each other hope, have we neglected the true nature of the power and strength of God that makes him capable of helping us? In this inquisitive and honest work, Casey Hobbs determines to reacquaint us with the greatness of God and to draw us in to the goodness of God that only Jesus offers us.

1

Spending Time with God

We are conditioned to be afraid.

My generation, the “MTV Generation,” as we are known, has grown up with images of the Challenger’s explosion, the first and second Iraqi Wars, Columbine, September 11, Virginia Tech and gigantic South Pacific tsunamis that take out nearly a half million people in one stroke. We are the kids who played video games for hours on end that had us killing terrorists. I remember my college dorm and the countless hours that were occupied with simulated violence. While we have grown up desensitized to violence, we are also the ones who have been raised to respond to the constant media shock treatments.

Is it any wonder, then, that so many of us feel like we are spinning our wheels in this life? We can so easily see what happens to people who try and fail. Better stay put and stay invisible if taking a step out into the world is as dangerous as dancing in traffic.

So many times I feel like the older brother in Jesus story about the Prodigal Son. He was watching his little brother blow it, again and again, offering no help. Something inside of him must have felt relief that somebody was worse off than he was. It must have felt good to watch his little brother come home caked in mud. He always felt good comparing his life to his brother’s. What a sad, frightened man he must have been.

This cannot be the life Jesus came to give us, can it? Where is the freedom that Jesus told us he would give? Where is the friendship he offers? Have we been abandoned by Jesus and left to this half-life we are so accustomed to, or is there something better for us? We would love to agree that God is “for” us–that he is on our side–but that too seems like an empty promise.

So many of us have experienced unspeakable tragedy in our lives. So many of us look back over decades gone by and recognize our constant failure to do things the way we should. It seems there is no way God could be loving us at the same time that he allows such difficulty into our lives. God may well be good, but his love must have passed us over somewhere along the way. God may be great, but he is not on my side. He is not for me.

The gospel has become good news for other people. Over the years, history has born out the fact that priest after preacher after pastor has not really believed that what he preached was the message he needed so desperately. We may well believe that God loves sinners, but we have long ago abandoned hope that he would love us.

Have you ever felt like that? You look back over the course of twenty, thirty, or sixty years and see nothing but pain and failure. And being convinced of the futility of the past, you are afraid to look at the future. At that point, how do you find hope in the present?

I wonder how much our worlds would change if we could get a hold of the love of God for us. Could we truly be hidden from life’s fears, safe in the refuge of a God who has our best interests at heart? What kind of freedom is on the other side of fear?

“Start with God–the first step in learning is bowing down to God; only fools thumb their noses at such wisdom and learning.”1

There is an assumption in the Bible that only a fool refuses to sit in awe and wonder in the presence of the divine. Living well, it was understood, required an experiential knowledge of God. The Old Testament is full of stories about fools gaining wisdom, and about wise men becoming wiser still. Perhaps the best example is the story of Job.
We meet Job as the richest man in the East. He has a wife, seven sons, three daughters, and a ton of wealth that is measured in camels, oxen, donkeys, sheep, and servants. Job had it all. Most importantly, he was a man who “feared God and turned away from evil.”2 He was a man who was wise at the beginning of the story. And yet, by the time we reach the end, Job is a man infinitely wiser than when he started out.

Why? What happened to Job, that his wisdom so deepened? Was it the immense suffering he endured, with the loss of all ten children, along with all of his wealth? Did he learn from the advice of his friends and his wife, who all along the way pushed him toward a generic form of repentance, specifically designed to coerce God into showing mercy? What was it about Job’s experience that made him a wiser man than when the story begins?

Job himself gives the answer after wrestling with God, and seeing him face to face. “I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”3

The story of Job is about a man encountering God and being changed. It is about a man struggling with his own devastating situation and asking God “why?” And it is about a man who feared God having an encounter with God. When God shows up, his grace is on display in his willingness to reveal himself as he truly is. In the end, it is the greatness of God that changes Job.

If Job was made a wiser man, a man we might say today exhibits wholeness, by encountering God, in all his greatness, I wonder if the same might happen to us today. I wonder if, in leaving out the fear of God from our common language and practice, we might be subjecting ourselves to all kinds of foolishness. That we might long ago have traded the fear of God for the fear of something less than the Almighty.

Before we go any further, it is crucial to make a distinction between the fear of God and fear of what he might do to us. The type of fear that transforms us from fools into people who can, with a small degree of accuracy, be called wise is different from a fear of consequences. The fear that might make us wise, that might transform us, is a fear that simply puts life in its proper perspective.

John Calvin once wrote that, “men (and women) are never . . .
touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God.”4

While this all might be true, it is at this point that we could really use some good news.

To be loved is to say that someone else is for us. We can depend on them. We are on their side and they are on ours. They rejoice with us and they listen to us complain. They are a safe haven amongst the dangers of life. We can be ourselves, with nothing to hide, around the ones we love. There is nothing sweeter than being in the company of those who are for us.

The message of the gospel is that God loves us. God is for us. Martin Luther wrote: “Every thought of Christ which does not begin with the assumption that God is only God for me, Christ is only Christ for me, condemns itself.”5 It is not enough just to believe God is up there in some general sense. It is not enough to cling to an abstract deity in times of need. It is not enough to have God at a distance. Our story begins with a God who is not only God, but God for us. I am still trying to wrap my mind around this thought. I think if I get a hold of it, I might look different. I might not be so afraid.

God is God for our sakes. Jesus is the God-man for us. There is great freedom available in this simple truth, though such simple truths have a way of taking a lifetime to understand.

There can be no better news than the message of the gospel–God is for us.

And that is especially good news if God is first God.

I wonder sometimes why I am more afraid of people calling to collect on student loans than I am of the living God. But I suspect that has something to do with the fact that I do not often enough encounter him.

What would change if we had the courage to meet God? Could we handle a glimpse at the backside of his glory, like Moses? And if we came to understand just a bit of his kingship, how would such an encounter change us?

And what if, after we have paused long enough at his altar to feel our knees shaking and the earth beneath us trembling, we heard him say something so shockingly beautiful it might just change us forever?

Could we ever walk away unchanged?

1. Prov. 1:7. Message Translation.

2. Job 1:1.

3. Job 42:5–6.

4. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 39.

5. Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center, 47.

2

Encountering an Earnest God

I will never forget the feeling I had when I first saw the Grand Canyon. How incredibly vast and endless it was! Even as my mom hid her face when her husband and three boys took turns spitting over the edge (a must, for aspiring tourists!), I could not believe my eyes. “Grand” was such an understated term for a twelve-year-old boy looking down a mile into the center of the earth. I felt like a slight breeze might send me flying over the edge and I would fall forever. The feeling was unbelievable. It was terrifying. It drew me into the mystery of creation. That encounter was unforgettable.

Through the passing of time something has happened to my sense of wonder. I have grown up. As I think back to that first encounter with the terrible and alluring gulf, the facts are easy to access. Over the yea...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Spending Time with God
• Chapter 2: Encountering an Earnest God
• Chapter 3: Waiting on Jesus
• Chapter 4: A Wild Spirit
• Chapter 5: Fearless Love?
• Chapter 6: A Love that Proves Itself
• Chapter 7: Compelling Love
• Chapter 8: A God Who Has Been There
• Chapter 9: The Fulfilled Law
• Chapter 10: The Suffering of the Divine
• Chapter 11: Love that Reaches to the Depths
• Chapter 12: The Difference Between Jesus and Obi-Wan Kenobi
• Chapter 13: If Jesus Is For Us, Why Did He Leave?
• Chapter 14: God Became Family
• Chapter 15: Hope and Disappointment
• Chapter 16: God’s Love for the Unloveable
• Chapter 17: Joining Together Head and Heart
• Chapter 18: The God Who Is For Us
• Bibliography