[sunday meditations]

1 PETER 1.17

And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile…

Both Jews and Christians taught that God is impartial; that is, he gives to each person as that person deserves without showing any favoritism. The crucial nature of this doctrine is evident in that St. Paul uses it in Romans 2 in his argument about God’s faithfulness. Peter’s mentioning of it here serves as a rhetorical device: of course the Christians call on him as Father the God who judges people impartially. Because of their affirmation in the “yes,” they are then exhorted to conduct themselves with fear throughout the time of their exile. If they were to say, “No, we don’t call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds,” then they would, in a sense, be exempt from St. Peter’s command. Yet before we start building doctrine from this, we must remember that it’s a rhetorical device: St. Peter’s wording isn’t meant to erect a belief system in which calling on different gods exempts a person from the duty to fear the true and living God. St. Peter is merely using this rhetorical device to gain traction with his readers and to locate their thinking and living in the framework of their worship of the God who judges people impartially.

Because Christians are the ones who call upon him as Father the one who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, they—and we—are to conduct ourselves with fear. This language of “fear”, specifically fearing God, can be misleading. A brief look at any dictionary will tell you that fear denotes a negative emotion in conjunction with feeling threatened by danger. Fear has, in our society, become coupled with crippling anxiety. Thus when we speak of fearing God, we invoke images of cowering before him in terror, crippled before him with impenetrable dread. Christians who exalt a flawed perception of God as an Angry Tyrant who relishes punishing the wicked, perhaps quoting like scripture Jonathan Edwards’ infamous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” don’t do much to help reorient our understanding of the phrase. The God who demands our fear isn’t some pissed-off, brutal, sadistic tyrant but one whose greatest disposition towards his world, and especially towards his fallen image-bearing creatures, is not anger but love, manifested chiefly in Jesus: God emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave (as St. Paul says in Philippians 2), and he did what only God could do, standing in for the world and dying on a cross. Indeed, the nature of God’s disposition towards us is seen most vibrantly (and brutally) as we gaze upon Jesus’ face as he hangs upon the cross.

One fears that which he perceives to be a threat; perception is tied to feeling. In the same way, though what it means to fear an axe murderer and to fear God are holistically different, both flow from perception. Our perception of the axe murderer as someone who may hunt us down through an abandoned cow-slaughtering factory instills fear within us. And when we perceive God as he is, the response is certainly fear, but not a fear of the same caliber. When we perceive God in the face of Jesus, and when we meditate upon all that he has done (both pre-cross and post-cross), the response ought to be reverential awe and wonder.

This lies closer to the heart at what St. Peter is saying. Fearing God means being in reverence and awe before him. It’s an aspect of the mind which works itself out in life; thus conducting oneself in fear before God means living in reverence and awe before him. The same kind of language was used in the ancient Roman Empire to speak of fearing the Emperor: living in reverence and awe before him, a reverence and awe which resulted in a life of obedience and honoring him. In the same way, fearing God, an element of the mind, fleshes itself out in actual living as we live in obedience and for his honor and glory.

This life of reverence and awe, manifested in obedience, is to be the Christian’s mode-of-living in the midst of exile. The exile St. Peter speaks of is an eschatological exile, the period between Easter and Consummation, the period in which we move and breathe and have our being. Our behavior in the present, in the midst of exile, is to be marked by obedience before God, living in such a way that we honor him daily in all that we do, putting before us always the Christian hope, being prepared to launch into our inheritance and doing so with self-control in both mind and deed.