God is Awe

2 Samuel 22 is a psalm in which David is full of the awe of God.  It is submissive but exultant.  It almost has an air of “though he slay me, yet will I trust God.”

There is a theodicy in awe.  Most theodicies are attempts to explain why something is fair or not fair from God’s perspective.  “If God were truly X, then why would he Y?”  But it is not at all hard to explain from within our own perspective of awe.  God is great, we submit.  The serpent said, “you shall be as Gods,” but he used the future tense and it isn’t always meet for us to anticipate and extrapolate.

Awe is a feeling.  It is an utterly necessary feeling.  I will not say that it is “just a feeling” because what we learn in feeling cuts down to the root.  But because it is a feeling does not mean that you can make a system out of it as in Calvinism or in the more arid of the creeds.  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom but not of knowledge or theory.

The scriptures tell us to become as a little child, full of loving trust, but you can’t skip steps.  You yourself must have that childhood experience and move beyond and then move back, these are personal stages not corporate states of Christianity.  If you have skipped the awe you are on very shaky ground.