Thought
I’ve been praying for wisdom lately and I’ve also been praying for theophany. I really want that experience where God’s presence physically manifests itself. I haven’t gotten it yet, but I’ve had deeper revelation into what I’m asking for.
Let’s start with Wisdom. Proverbs says that fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Great. Now I’ve gotta figure out what the fear of the Lord is. I’ve been told and long believed that it was simply obeying His commandments, but I now realize that is part of the result and not the actual act of fearing the Lord. If obedience is the result of our fear then I find myself back at my original question of what is the fear of the Lord.
I’ve also been reading the book Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer. In it he has a chapter on the Transcendence of God. He makes the point that people have the tendency to put things on a scale. Worms < humans < angels < God. That sort of thing, but this is the entirely wrong thinking. The transcendence of God states that He cannot be measured on any scale and that the worm is just as far from God as is the Angel. No created thing comes close to Him since He was never created. In the bible when men have encountered the manifest spirit of God they have fallen to the ground or flat out fled in terror. Moses hid behind rocks and was only allowed to look upon God’s shadow as he passed by the mountain because the sight of Him would have killed Moses. Tozer makes the point that encountering the Lord reminds us that before Him we are nothing more than mere dust. Makes sense since the bible describes men as being made from the dust of the Earth. I think the fear of the Lord has a large part to do with how we see ourselves before Him. We are dust before the Creator of all and though we bear His likeness and breathe His breath we are just as easily returned to our original form as we were made into our current ones.
I think the fear of the Lord is our realization that we are nothing. Our very existence is sustained by and through Him while He is entirely self-existent. I think this might also be why Moses was able to say that he was the most humble man on earth. He had experienced the awesome terror of a being who’s perfection serves only to remind us of our own great imperfections. He knew exactly where he stood, or didn’t stand, before the Almighty. Nobody else at the time, to my knowledge, had experienced the same thing Moses had.
I am thankful for the revelation I have had, but I refuse to be satisfied by it. I will seek and get my theophany in this life or the next.
