Whom have you so dreaded and feared that you have not been true to me, and have neither remembered me nor taken this to heart? Is it not because I have long been silent that you do not fear me? – Isaiah 57:11

 Today's Scripture Reading (September 6, 2020): Isaiah 57

For the United States, the Season of Fear has arrived. In the United States, the season reoccurs every four years on a regular schedule. In Canada, it is a little less stable, but if I listen to the rumors, Canadians may also be entering into their fearful season. I wish I knew if it had always been this way, or if this is a relatively recent development in history. It is a product of democracy. The season is instigated by the act of choosing who it is that will lead our countries. It has the potential of being a positive process, but usually, it quickly devolves into why we should fear one candidate for the nation's highest office more than the other. And so, we go to the polls, not to make a positive choice, but to choose the one who causes us to fear the least, and often characterizing the ones we don't support with over the top descriptions describing the monsters that they are. And every season, the fear seems to grow.

The biblical idea of the "fear of God" contains a healthy element of respect. To the contemporary ear, fearing God seems like a foreign idea. We love God and want to serve him. But there should also be an element of fear and respect present in our worship. For instance, I love storms. There is something beautiful about watching the majesty and power of a thunderstorm and seeing the bright flash of lightning. I love being able to not only hear but feel the thunder. But I also respect and fear the power of the storm. I know the damage that it can cause if I am not careful and find myself in the wrong place. The fear of God is similar. We love him, but we also recognize and respect, or fear, his power.

Isaiah's message is that the people have found something else that they fear more than God.  And because they fear something else more, they have chosen to serve the demands of that something and place their trust in this "other." Isaiah mentions the god Molek in the passage, but there are also allusions to other gods and powers. And the question that rings out throughout this passage is, "who is it that you fear more than God?"

I doubt that anyone who reads this blog fears Molek more than God. But that does not mean that we are immune to the problem. In the society in which I live, even inside the church, people fear poverty more than God. And so, despite the inscription on American currency professing a trust in God, the reality is that we trust in money. We fear being powerless, and so we often trust power, wherever we might be able to find it, rather than God. We fear isolation, which usually translates into the trust of friends, and sometimes results in sexual promiscuity so that we won't be alone. Whatever it might be that we fear will always influence the things in which we trust.

But no matter what we might fear, the core of Isaiah's message is that if we fear anything more than God, then we are misled. And we need to get back to fearing, and therefore trusting, God above anything else. And that means that we need to examine ourselves and take an inventory of the things that we fear.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Isaiah 58