Fear

"King Zedekiah said to Jeremiah, 'I am afraid of the Jews who have gone over to the Babylonians, for the Babylonians may hand me over to them and they will mistreat me.'  'They will not hand you over,' Jeremiah replied.  'Obey the Lord by doing what I tell you.  Then it will go well with you, and your life will be spared.'"  
Jeremiah 38:19-20

All I had time to do was to shout, "Stop!"  My son had pedaled his bike off the sidewalk near a busy intersection without noticing that he was just about to end up in oncoming traffic.  Fortunately, he stopped.  The raw emotion of my response left him indelibly marked with a healthy fear of traffic while biking near busy roads, but not an unhealthy fear of biking itself.  Fascinating isn't it?  Fear is neither always bad nor always good.  It really depends upon its object.

King Zedekiah's circumstances placed him in a crisis of faith.  Would he fear God more than men?  God's prophet told him exactly what God wanted him to do, but the fear of what he could see drowned out what little faith he had. The ending of his story was monumentally tragic.  

The writer of Proverbs repeats again and again that, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."  As it turns out, the One who we should fear the most is also the One who loves us the most.  It's this fact that explains why a life oriented in awesome respect of our Creator is the best life that we can live.  Unfortunately for Zedekiah, he made the wrong choice.  What choice will we make?

Grace and Peace,

Tom

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