If you were to rank what you fear most, where does the Bible land? If it’s not right near the top, your soul is in peril. Where you will be ten years from now in your theology, and where your soul will be ten thousand years from now, will be governed in part by how much you fear God’s Word today. Before you dismiss this as outlandish bibliolatry, please hear me out.
To my shame, I have never been a big fan of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. So many greater minds than mine have praised it, benefited from it, and extolled it that I assume I’m just dense to the message, for whatever reason. I’ve read it two or three times, trying to see what I’m missing, but it just doesn’t do a lot for me.
Bunyan wrote other works, however, and one of those is called The Fear of God. In the second chapter, Bunyan reminds us that to fear God is to fear His Word, i.e., Scripture. A child who doesn’t listen to what his parents say, or who pays no attention to her parents’ directions, at root does not acknowledge her parents’ authority. It’s not that she doesn’t just fail to fear her parents’ directions; it’s that she doesn’t listen to her parents because she doesn’t respect them. The same is true for us with God and His Word. In a later chapter, Bunyan writes, “This, therefore, teaches us how to judge who fears the Lord. They are those who learn, and who stand in awe of the Word… Those do not fear God who do not love good doctrine, who give no place in their souls to the wholesome truths of the God of heaven revealed in His testament, but rather despise it and its true professors.”
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