Two Kinds Of Fear

Deuteronomy 10:12–15

There was a season when the only thing I feared was running out.

Not God. God I avoided. To come near Him was to be seen, and being seen meant admitting what I had become. So I kept my distance and kept my appetite. The next puff. The next pleasure. The next arrangement to get me through the night. My world had exactly one person in it, and I was crowded even so.

Then came the cell, and the Bible study, and Pastor Paul Tan, who did not flinch at anything I told him. It is a strange thing to be handed a lesson book by men who owe you nothing. Slowly the fear turned round. I stopped being afraid of God and started being afraid of the thing that had been eating me.

I still carry that second fear. I hope I always will. There are days when I would not trust myself within arm’s length of my old life. That healthy dread keeps me honest at the counter, honest with SY, honest before God.

But Moses was speaking of the other fear — the reverence kind. And notice what he says it looks like. Not trembling. Walking. Loving. Serving. Keeping His commandments, and — this is the part I nearly missed for years — for thy good. Verse 14 says the heavens belong to Him. Verse 15 says He set His delight on His people anyway. The One who owns everything wanted us.

That is what breaks a man. Not the thunder. The kindness.

So reverence is not a mood I work up on Sunday. It is what I do on Tuesday morning when a Restarter walks into the café carrying the same shame I carried, and I choose to stay, and listen, and not preach at him. Proverbs says the fear of the LORD is to hate evil. I have hated it up close. I know its smell.

Nine years in, I have needed more second chances than I can count — a tenth, a twentieth. And every one has come from the same hand. He was never the danger. He was always the way home.