Month: October 2014

For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with the fullness of God.  (Ephesians 3:14-19, NKJV.)

Almost everywhere we hear people talking and preaching about “the love of Jesus.”  Mass media preachers and door-to-door evangelists assure their audiences or “prospects” for “salvation” that “Jesus loves you.”  Invariably they would break out into a spiel about how Jesus died for sinners, how His shed blood cleanses us from our guilty past and evil consciences — about how God’s grace and mercy through Christ covers all our sins, and we are freed from the consequence of sin: death in the “lake of fire.”  We are assured of everlasting life.

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The Lion Handbook’s The History of Christianity (Oxford, England, etc.: Lion Publishing, first edition, 1977, reprinted 1994, page 672), in the section titled “The Next Chapter of History,” begins:

The crucible of history in the last decade of the twentieth century [now the 21st century] takes on a new dimension. For beyond the history of nations and their citizens, it will now have to embrace a history of the created order itself. Have destructive processes been set in train which means that its fate is already sealed? Is there time left for vital change? Can a new sense of responsibility for nature save not only threatened species, and threatened landscapes, but life itself? And where lies the salvation of individual men and women in all this? [Emphasis mine.]

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There are many who believe and preach that Christians should only love God and not fear Him.  To prove their point, they would refer to 1 John 4:18, where it says, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment.  But he who fears has not been made perfect in love.”

There, they say, it is clear that if we love God, we wouldn’t fear Him, because if we fear Him, our love for Him is not perfect.

How do we explain this particular scripture, which seems to contradict other scriptures that, clearly, exhort us to fear God?

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