Shouldn’t we believe that God treasures what we do, however feeble, however immature, however bungled and blundered it is? For though what we do is most certainly not faultless, it is any father’s joy to count his children as blameless.

A devotional writer from a bygone era believed it was crucial to carefully distinguish faultlessness from blamelessness, for while we cannot live faultlessly in this world, we may live blamelessly. Even the best deeds we do cannot be faultless when we ourselves are so very imperfect and when this world is so firmly arrayed against us. Yet we may still remain blameless before the Lord, even in light of our many imperfections.
A fictional illustration may serve. Let’s suppose a day came when my father, a landscaper, was hired by one of our neighbors to design and install a garden. He dutifully sat before his drafting table to create the design, he visited the nursery to purchase the plants, he stood in the garden and began to create the shape of the different beds. But then a serious illness overcame him and he was forced to remain indoors for days or weeks.
And though at the time I was merely a child, I was a son who loved his father, so took it upon myself to surprise him by completing the project on his behalf. I studied the plans as carefully as I could, I carved the shape of the different beds, I put down a layer of topsoil, I planted the ferns and hostas, the roses and euonymus, doing my absolute best to lay them exactly where the plans dictated. When my father recovered sufficiently to venture out-of-doors, I led him to that garden and happily presented the work I had done for him.
His reaction was both joy and concern. He felt great joy that I had attempted to serve and please him, that I had done my best with the little knowledge and minimal skill I possessed. But he felt concern that the job was done more poorly than he would have done it. He noticed that the flower beds were not quite the right shape, that the edges were ragged, that many of the plants and flowers were a little out of place. He knew that he still had work to do in order to make it right.
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Psalm 130:4 teaches us is that forgiveness is the fertile soil for growing a right fear of God. Without God’s forgiveness we could never approach Him or want to. Without the cross, God would be only a dreadful Judge of whom we would be afraid. It is divine forgiveness and our justification by faith alone that turns our natural dread of God as sinners into the fearful, trembling adoration of beloved children.

Psalm 130:4 is one of those verses that makes your eyes screech to a halt on the page: “But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.” It sounds all wrong. “But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be loved” would make sense. So would “But with you there is judgment, that you may be feared.” But that is not what it says.
Stranger still is the fact that the psalmist just doesn’t look afraid of God. Quite the opposite. Straight after v. 4, he goes on to write of how “his soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen [wait] for the morning” (Ps. 130:5–6). He fully embraces the fact that “with the Lord there is steadfast love” and “plentiful redemption” (Ps. 130:7).
That is because the fear of the Lord that Scripture commends and which the gospel produces is actually the opposite of being afraid of God. See, for example, Exodus 20, where the people of Israel gather at Mount Sinai: “Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood far off and said to Moses, ‘You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.’ Moses said to the people, ‘Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of him may be before you, that you may not sin’ ” (Ex. 20:18–20, emphasis added).
Moses here sets out a contrast between being afraid of God and fearing God: those who have the fear of Him will not be afraid of Him.
A Filial Fear
The right fear of God is, quite explicitly, a blessing of the new covenant. Speaking of the new covenant, the Lord promised through Jeremiah: “I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me forever, for their own good and the good of their children after them.
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The Everlasting Man (Christian Heritage Series) by Chesterton, G. K. (Author). Chapter 2 of Part 2: “The Riddles of the Gospel.” One can argue as to which chapter in this book is the most important, but surely this would be one of them. While only 13 pages in length (in the 1955 Image Books edition that I have), it is loaded with wonderful truths. It was this book especially that helped C. S. Lewis to abandon his atheism and convert to Christianity.

It was Francis Bacon who once said: “Some books are to be tested, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Many of us have our favourite books in this regard. And Charles Spurgeon said this about the matter:
Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them, masticate and digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analysis of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride come of hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be, ‘much not many’.
Not just books, but authors as well need to be regarded in a selective fashion. Some are good to briefly read and then move on from, while other authors you keep going back to, over and over again. Obviously for me G. K. Chesterton is one such author.
I just looked it up, and in nearly 200 articles I have written about, referred to, or quoted from Chesterton on this website. As I keep saying, he is one of my all-time favourites, as he would be for so many others. Just yesterday I featured a number of quotes from his 1925 classic, The Everlasting Man: billmuehlenberg.com/2022/07/23/chesterton-and-the-everlasting-man/
One Chesterton fan just sent in a comment with one of his fave quotes from the book (thanks Steven). But it made me think I need to pen another piece of quotes from this amazing book. The quote he mentioned came from a chapter I did not quote from at all yesterday, and it is such a vital chapter.
I refer to Chapter 2 of Part 2: “The Riddles of the Gospel.” One can argue as to which chapter in this book is the most important, but surely this would be one of them. While only 13 pages in length (in the 1955 Image Books edition that I have), it is loaded with wonderful truths. As I noted in my earlier piece, it was this book especially that helped C. S. Lewis to abandon his atheism and convert to Christianity.
So this book – and this particular chapter – is well worth quoting from. The whole chapter of course should be read, but let me offer some select portions of it.
“We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a most merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character. This is, I venture to repeat, very nearly the reverse of the truth. The truth is that it is the image of Christ in the churches that is almost entirely mild and merciful. It is the image of Christ in the Gospels that is a good many other things as well….” p. 190
“A man simply taking the words of the story as they stand would form quite another impression; an impression full of mystery and possibly of inconsistency; but certainly not merely an impression of mildness. It would be intensely interesting; but part of the interest would consist in its leaving a good deal to be guessed at or explained. It is full of sudden gestures evidently significant except that we hardly know what they signify; of enigmatic silences; of ironical replies. The outbreaks of wrath, like storms above our atmosphere, do not seem to break out exactly where we should expect them, but to follow some higher weather-chart of their own. The Peter whom popular Church teaching presents is very rightly the Peter to whom Christ said in forgiveness, ‘Feed my lambs.’ He is not the Peter upon whom Christ turned as if he were the devil, crying in that obscure wrath, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’.” p. 191
“If there is one aspect of the New Testament Jesus in which he may be said to present himself eminently as a practical person, it is in the aspect of an exorcist….”
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