The first Christians may not have donned crash helmets in worship, but they certainly understood the sovereignty of God in a way that we don’t or can’t or won’t. Scan the narrative of Acts, reflect on the spontaneous doxologies of Paul or the apocalypse of John, and you quickly come to the conclusion that their God was—frankly—bigger than ours. They knew how to kneel. They understood the “fear of the Lord,” the reverence he deserves, and even the “dreadful thing” it can sometimes be, as the writer of Hebrews says, “to fall into the hands of the living God.”[11]
