From Quiet… The shepherds who pulled the short straw that first Christmas Eve expected what they had always experienced – not much. If they had the late watch, there wasn’t much work to be done – just keep your eyes open in case a sheep wandered off or if a wolf or lion wandered in. I had a job like that in college for awhile. I worked the graveyard shift at a gas station right off the freeway. From midnight until just before dawn, nothing much happened. You can only sweep the floor, organize cigarettes and prep the coffee so many times. And then you just sit there, looking around, trying to stay awake. It’s a pretty easy job, but not exactly engaging.
To Glory… As the story goes, however, on that one night something did happen. And nothing could have prepared them for it. An angel appeared, and the radiance of God’s glory with him. The being had a message about the Christchild’s birth. Then a huge boatload of angels showed up to sing a song celebrating this event.
To Fear… It’s a wonder the shepherds knew to look for a manger after such a visit. My hunch is that as soon as the first angel showed up, all the guys heard was blah, blah, blah. Can you imagine what they went through? They had to be absolutely petrified. God actually showed up in person, with his glory cranked up to the “blinding” setting. If you look at most of the times when God showed up in person to someone throughout the Bible, the apparent first reaction to the experience is fear.
Maybe we should rethink our position on fear and faith. Maybe fear, though we tend to speak of it as another term for deep reverence, actually has something to do with being afraid. How could being afraid be connected to faith in god?
Psalm 111:10 states that fear of the Lord is the foundation of true wisdom. Perhaps this initial reaction is necessary if we should actually take God seriously. In the United States, we have free speech, and state that everybody has a right to speak their mind. But this freedom has also had an interesting side effect: we don’t necessarily respect the person behind the voice. At any particular moment you can hear from about any perspective you choose on the radio and the internet. Most people tune out most of those voices and give attention and allegiance only to those voices they deem valid. Could it be, however, that we equate validity with agreement – that we only really give heed to the voices of those who share our viewpoint?
To fear God is to recognize that the voice speaking isn’t one among equals, but a much stronger voice with much greater power than our own. When we realize Who is speaking, we appropriately should be filled with fear. Fear is good, then, because it keeps the relationship unequal, with One much greater than ourselves on the other side.
At an early point in my relationship with God, I experienced a fraction of his glory. I had never before experienced anything like it. It freaked me out. But I knew it was God, and I trusted that God was worthy of my confidence, so I went with it. It blew my mind in the right way, so that I knew a very big God was all around me. The fear lasted a moment, but then turned to passionate faith. When I experience the same thing now, it does not elicit fear, but serves to strengthen my faith.
To Faith. The good news is that God doesn’t want us to cower every time we consider his visits throughout our lives. Quite the opposite – the more we listen to God’s voice, the more we understand that God is a loving God and desires good for us, the more our fear turns to faith.
May you wrestle with the fact that the all-powerful, all-knowing God showed up on the first Christmas Eve, and still does today. May you tremble as you realize how significant this truth is. And may your fear keep your relationship to God appropriately unequal, so that you discover how much you can trust God to be good and faithful your entire life, now and forever.
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