People don't like to talk about fearing God today. It seems to some like an oppressive, even primitive idea. But for the Christian, nothing is sweeter than the fear of the Lord. In J. Gresham Machen's What is Faith? (which I just finished reading with a friend today), faith and fear in the face of death is presented in the most biblical and comforting of terms:
Even the Christian, it is true, must fear God. But it is a new kind of fear. It is fear, at the most, of chastisement and rebuke, not of final ruin; it is a fear, indeed, rather of what might have been than of what is; it is a fear of what would have come were we not in Christ. Without such fear there can be, for us sinners, no true love; for love of a saviour is proportioned to one's horror of that from which one has been saved. And how strong are the lives that are filled with such a love! They are lives brave not because the facts have been ignored, but because they have been faced; they are lives founded upon the solid foundation of the grace of God. If that is the foundation of our lives, we shall not fear when we come to the hour that otherwise we should dread. It is a beautiful thing when a Christian who has received Jesus as His Saviour comes to the moment of death; it is a beautiful thing to fall asleep in Jesus, and, as one enters that dark country of which none other can tell, to trust the dear Lord and Saviour and believe that we shall there see His face.
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