Fear of the Lord

3/14/13                 George                 49

At a McDonald’s, I reached out to a truck driver named George with a question about eternity.  He shook his head slowly – “When we die, we die.  That’s it.  End of story.”  He seemed so hopeless about it, so I asked more about how he had come to that belief.  I felt that surely I could give him some kind of hope, both for this life and the next.  But it seemed that no matter how I approached it, George had some sort of excuse why he shouldn’t believe, from saying he can’t believe in God because of the sin in the world, to questioning the Bible’s origins, to criticizing church people, to complaining about God’s seeming uninvolvement with human suffering.  No matter how we looked at it, the glass was always half empty, never half full.  I soon found out why.  After he complained about how Adam and Eve had been “set up” by God to fail, I asked “If you had the choice that Adam had, only you now have the benefit of hindsight and you know exactly what will happen if you disobey God, would you eat the forbidden fruit?”  “Of course I would” George said.  “Who does God think he is to tell me what to do?”  George had no fear of God.  Like Adam, he isn’t willing to live under God’s rule, yet he complained that God can’t possibly exist because nothing in this life makes sense.  I explained that it never would, because the Bible says that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”.  Nothing will make sense without honoring God as God and allowing Him to take His proper place in our lives.  Yet I realize that even this simple advice didn’t make sense to George.  He doesn’t have even the simplest wisdom that comes with the fear of God.  I know our latest spiritual trends frown upon the idea that we should “fear God”, but George reminds me that it truly is the beginning of wisdom.