Albert N. Martin
The foundation of the fear of God is correct concepts of the character of God. The next building block in the fear of God is a pervasive sense of His presence. Something that is pervasive is something that spreads throughout a given area. A key ingredient of the fear of God is a pervasive sense of the presence of God. It is a sense of the presence of God which spreads throughout the entirety of our lives so that there is no place or circumstance in which we find ourselves, but that we are conscious that God is here. And He is here in all His majesty, His holiness and His immensity—He is not “somewhere out there”, but He is right here. The fear of God will always be constructed of this pervasive sense of the presence of God.
I remember years ago hearing a statement by the late Dr. A. W. Tozer. He said, “The most profound word in the human language is God.” You can go to your dictionary to look up a word like “pervasive”, as I did, and it says, “That which is spread throughout.” You can define the word “pervasive.” But try to define “God.” Think of all the thousands of theological books that have been written in all the hundreds of languages throughout the earth, trying to define God. If you could put them all together into one language and read them all, when you are all done you would have to say that we only know the edges of His ways. The most profound word in the human language is God. Then Tozer said, “The most profound fact in all of human experience is the sentence, ‘God is.’” All that the Scripture tells us about Him, He is right now. And then the third thing: “The most profound experience is the recognition that God is here.”
It is interesting to note that in most of the instances where the fear of God is described for us in Scripture, it is described in a context of the realized presence of God. Think about some of the texts we have considered thus far in this study of the fear of God. When Jacob awoke from his dream he said, “Surely Jehovah is in this place; and I knew it not” (Genesis 28:16). We are told that Moses, at the burning bush, “was afraid to look upon God” (Exodus 3:6). Isaiah, when he beheld the Lord in a vision, said, “Woe is me! for I am undone . . . for mine eyes have seen the King” (Isaiah 6:5). If you trace out these illustrations of the fear of God you will find that almost exclusively, they are set in a context where men are experiencing the realized presence of God. God is there, and they know He is there; they know that they are in His presence.
Exodus 3
In Exodus 3, Moses sees the bush burning. He turns aside to examine it, and God speaks out of the bush. When he recognizes that God is there, he covers his face and will not even look upon it. At that point, Moses sensed that God—in the totality of His being, as all that Moses understood Him to be—was not “up there and out there somewhere”, but He was right there, in his very presence. So he hid his face. It was the same with Jacob. He wakes from his dream, and when he reflects upon it he says, “This is none other than the house of God. How dreadful is this place.” Why? “It is dreadful because God is here—and I have been in His presence.” The place is dreadful; and it is made dreadful because the Dreadful One is there.
Even the fear of terror has this thought in it. Remember how Adam answered the Lord when He said, “Where art thou?” Adam responded, “I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid” (Genesis 3:10). As long as Adam could think of God as being off somewhere out there, he wasn’t gripped with that sense of terror and dread. But he said, “When I heard thy voice”—that is, when I knew that all that You were and are as God You were right here, in close proximity to me—“I was afraid.” This tells us that the second essential ingredient of the fear of God is a pervasive sense of His presence. I must be conscious that all that I comprehend God to be is present here in this very place where I sit, or where I stand, at any given moment.
Psalm 139
But there is a passage of Scripture that teaches this truth in a sustained and concentrated way. Psalm 139 describes, probably more clearly than any other text, a man who has right concepts of the character of God, and a man who is at the same time convinced that this God, in His immensity, majesty and holiness, is right here. This man, David, is filled with a pervasive sense of the presence of God. He begins by expressing his consciousness of the omniscience of God, that is, that He knows all things:
O Jehovah, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising; thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou searchest out my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word on my tongue, but, lo, O Jehovah, thou knowest it altogether (Psalm 139:1-4).
Up to this point, David is describing what he knows about the character of God as an all-seeing, all-knowing God. But how is he looking at it? Is he looking at God’s omniscience as if God were somewhat like a spy satellite, which can take pictures from many miles above the surface of the earth, yet produce photos which reveal the greatest of detail? Is that the concept David has of God—that He is this great, immense, all-knowing, all-seeing God who is up there, out there, somewhere? And that everything I do, like the great eye of the orbiting spy satellite, He sees and knows? Is that the concept? No. Notice the transition in the next verse, verse 5: “Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thy hand upon me.” David is saying that the God who has searched and known him—who understands his thought and knows his every word—knows and understands not like the orbiting spy satellite, from miles and miles away, but He knows and understands him because His hand is upon him. Notice how David goes on to develop this thought:
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it. Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven thou art there: if I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there (verses 6-8).
David does not simply assert that he is unable to flee from God’s knowledge or omniscience—he says he is not able to get away from His presence. He says that no matter how far he could travel in either direction—whether up into heaven itself or down to the grave, to Sheol—God is there. He is not just aware of David; He is there. It is not just that He will see David; He will be there with him. In verse 9, he says, “If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.”
David obviously is not thinking in terms of “bare omniscience”—that God simply happens to know everything. Nor is he possessed of the notion that God is some heartless, formless being without personality, who simply happens to be everywhere. Rather, he says, “Wherever I go God is there, as the personal God whose hand is upon me, whose hand holds me, whose hand covers me.” And he even traces this all the way back to his very conception in his mother’s womb in the beautiful imagery of verse 13: “For thou didst form my inward parts: thou didst cover me in my mother’s womb.”
Therefore the fear of God to David consisted also of this second element, a pervasive sense of the presence of God. It is this sense that will create that awe, that sense of wonder, that sense of reverence that will make even the thought of disobeying such a God, of grieving Him by walking contrary to His will, unthinkable to a Christian. That is why Scripture says that the fear of the Lord is to depart from evil. For if I am living in the sense of the immediate presence of this great God, I will not dare to fly into the face of His holy commandments and His laws.
The Effect of Sensing God’s Presence
How often have we been tempted to do something sinful, and the presence of another person has kept us from it? A child may be considering taking something that is forbidden to him—until his brother or sister walks into the room. If the presence of another creature, who has no power to judge him for his actions, has the effect of radically changing the child’s conduct, what happens to the man who knows he is always in the immediate presence of the One before whom he is accountable for all that he does? Will it have any ethical and moral effect? Indeed, it will.
Suppose you want to find out all the facts you can gather about the Grand Canyon. You have never been there, but you want to learn all about this remarkable national park. You gather all these facts about the immensity, the majesty, the beauty and the transcendent splendor of the Grand Canyon. Suppose you memorize all those facts and even become an expert on the physical properties of the Grand Canyon. The next day, however, all that you have come to know about the immensity, the majesty, the grandeur, and the glory of the Grand Canyon doesn’t affect one bit the way you live. But suppose one morning, you suddenly found yourself saddled up on the back of a ray of light that broke over the eastern coast and, within the snap of a finger, you stood right in the midst of the Grand Canyon. What would happen? You certainly wouldn’t take out your tube of toothpaste and start brushing your teeth! Rather, you would say, “Wow! This is the Grand Canyon! Yesterday, I learned all these facts and figures about it, but this is the real thing! This is the Grand Canyon!” What has happened? Not one of all the facts and figures has changed. You can look out and see the mile or two-mile expanse; you can see the depth; you can see all the features you learned about. But what has happened? You have been put into the presence of the canyon itself. And all the characteristics of the Grand Canyon that you read about suddenly grip you with a sense of awe and wonder. Why? Because it is right there, and you are right in the middle of it.
That is what I am saying about God. You can have all the facts about God—good, biblical and Reformed truths about God. He is holy, sovereign, transcendent, immense, free, boundless and all the rest. But unless you learn to cultivate that all-pervasive sense of His presence, it won’t make much difference in how you live. That’s why some people, who may have a “smaller God” in terms of their theological understanding, but have more of the sense of the presence of God, live a lot better than people who have a “great big God” in their theology, but who have a distant God in their experience.
God is not the orbiting spy satellite. He is the ever-present, personal God. And in a certain sense, He is the very environment in which we live. As Paul said, “In him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). This is not pantheism. But it is a biblical concept that I fear that we know too little about experientially. And this sense of the presence of God is an essential ingredient of the fear of God.
God’s Presence with Abraham
Let us consider two illustrations of how this pervasive sense of God’s presence has its practical effect upon the life of the man who learns it. In Genesis 17:1 we read, “And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, Jehovah appeared to Abram, and said unto him, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be thou perfect.’” That is, “Walk in the constant awareness of My eye upon you, My presence with you and your relationship to Me being the all-important thing in every circumstance. And be thou perfect.” Here is the moral and ethical implication for a man who believes what is revealed about the character of God and cultivates an all-pervasive sense of the presence of God: he will live a life of obedience to that God. And this is exactly what we see in Genesis 22, when God commanded Abraham to take Isaac, the son of promise, and to kill him. Just as Abraham is about to do the very thing which God told him to do, God prevents him from carrying out the act. Notice what God says to him in verses 11 and 12: “Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me.”
God’s Presence with Joseph
Then there is that classic example in Genesis 39. Here is this handsome young man, in Pharaoh’s court, beholding all of this moral filth on every side. He is a normal young man with normal heterosexual desires, and he begins to receive overtures from Potiphar’s wife. Joseph rejects her initial overtures, but she persists, until one day, in absolute frustration, seeing that everyone else is out of the house, she actually lays hold of Joseph physically. It is in the midst of this intense period of testing that Joseph reveals what it was that preserved him through the trial. Joseph says to Potiphar’s wife in Genesis 39:9, speaking of his master, Potiphar, “He is not greater in this house than I; neither hath he kept back any thing from me but thee, because thou art his wife: how then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?”
The first step into any sin, when there is definite inducement to sin, is to eradicate any sense of the immediate presence of God. Think about it. Many of the sins we commit would be prevented or stopped by simply the presence of another human being. If you are having a spat with your wife, what happens when a fellow human being, not even necessarily a Christian, comes to the door? The presence of another human being is enough to check your words, and suddenly you can become very sweet. Or you could be cheating at school and think that nobody sees you. As soon as the teacher stands over your shoulder, however, you stop. Why? Because of the presence of another human being. What effect would it have upon us if we had an all-pervasive sense of the presence of God? We see what it did for Joseph. It kept him from sin.
God’s Presence a Restraint against Sin
This is why, even in the New Testament, we are called to live lives of ethical and moral purity, and we are called to live such lives motivated by the fear of God. We see this in Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians: “Having therefore these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God” (II Corinthians 6:15-7:1). We are to carry our holiness to perfection in the climate of the fear of God, a climate which has as one of its indispensable elements this all-pervasive sense of the presence of God. Why should I strive to cleanse myself from every defilement of spirit? Because God is here; He sees and knows and is grieved with whatever is unlike Him and is a contradiction of His holy character. He is not “out there somewhere”, but He says, “I will dwell in them and be their God.” And Paul says in the light of that promise, let us carry our holiness, our sanctification, on to perfection in the climate of the fear of God.
The fear of God is the chief part of knowledge. That fear is first of all founded upon right views of God’s character, and secondly constructed of this all-pervasive sense of His presence. Do you know something of this fear? If you are a Christian, then surely your heart cries out, “Lord, I thank you for the little I know; but, oh, how precious little it is!” Isn’t this the explanation for so much of our shoddy living and so much of our spiritual deficiency? We have conveniently learned to push the Grand Canyon out to Arizona instead of standing in the midst of it. May God help us that we shall walk in His fear.
This is only a small part of a series of sermons on the fear of God, preached by Pastor Albert N. Martin. The sermons were transcribed, and will soon be available online in this form.