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Small wonder, then, that our culture is building ever-higher walls to defend itself from the unsettling beauty of God—or even the very idea of beauty. Traditional conceptions of beauty are being dismissed as discriminatory and nonegalitarian, and all things are declared to be equally beautiful. The existence of any absolute beauty is denied as the arts and media simultaneously fear and revel in the perverse, the crooked, and the ugly.
When I read this I immediately thought of the increasing comfort people seem to seek and find in dressing down, as if to dare anyone seeking excellence in personal appearance to not include and affirm them. Is personal mediocrity, or the lowest common denominator, to only ground on which those who fear man rather than God can feel safe?
Right fear does not stand in tension with love for God.
Right fear falls on its face before the Lord, but falls leaning “toward the Lord.”
True fear of God is true love for God defined: it is the right response to God’s full-orbed revelation of himself in all his grace and glory.
Those who “serve the Lord with fear” will “rejoice with trembling”
As a consequence, we must infer that man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God’s majesty.
Only in the light of God’s holiness and majesty do I truly understand how puny, how vicious, and how pathetic I naturally am. In other words, I do not have a true knowledge of myself if I do not fear God.
In fact, all fears are a foretaste. The sinful fears and dreads of unbelievers are the firstfruits of hell; the filial fears of Christians are the firstfruits of heaven.
