I read a lot, and there’s so much great stuff out there to read that I’m going to start a series of blog posts sharing my top 5-10 highlights from my current reading.
Hopefully these posts will entice you to read more and give you insight into whether a particular book is worth reading or not.
My top highlights from Rejoice and Tremble by Michael Reeves
Moral confusion is not the root of our anxiety: our moral confusion today and our general state of heightened anxiety are both the fallout of a cultural loss of God as the proper object of human fear.5 That fear of God (as I hope to show) was a happy and healthy fear that shaped and controlled our other fears, thus reining in anxiety.
Anxiety grows best in the soil of unbelief. It withers in contact with faith. And faith is fertilized by the fear of God,
The biblical theme of the fear of God helps us to see the sort of love toward God that is fitting. It shows us that God does not want passionless performance or a vague preference for him. To encounter the living, holy, and all-gracious God truly means that we cannot contain ourselves. He is not a truth to be known unaffectedly, or a good to be received listlessly. Seen clearly, the dazzling beauty and splendor of God must cause our hearts to quake.
the right way to think about God is not to think of him primarily as Creator (naming him “from His works only”). For if God’s essential identity is to be the Creator, the ruler, then he needs a creation to rule in order to be who he is. But God existed for eternity before he ever created, and he existed with complete self-sufficiency, depending on nothing to be who he is. He is not a God who needs anything (Acts 17:25). He has life in himself (John 5:26). He is a se (from himself). And that being the case, argued Athanasius, we cannot come to a true knowledge of who God is in himself simply by looking at him as Creator. We must listen to how he has revealed himself—and he has revealed himself in his Son, making known that revelation in all the Scriptures. Our most basic definition of who God is flows from the Son who reveals him.
“To fear the Lord and his goodness, and to fear him for his goodness; to trust in his power and faithfulness; to obey his authority; to delight in his will and grace; to love him above all, because of his excellencies and beauty;—this is to glorify him.”
Since Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, mankind has chased a particular sort of knowledge: knowledge without God. But the more we have pursued that knowledge, the more filled with fears we have become. We tremble at the terrifying size of the universe and despair at the dark complexity of the human psyche. Without God, more knowledge has not meant more happiness and satisfaction; it has left modern man feeling adrift on a vast sea of fears.
To fear God is to enter that blessed divine life. You naturally expect that the fear of God would make you morose and stuffy, but quite the opposite. Unlike our sinful fears, which make us twitchy and gloomy, the fear of God has a profoundly uplifting effect: it makes us happy. How can it not when it brings us to know this God?
The fear of the Lord is the only fear that imparts strength. This is an especially vital truth for any who are called to some form of leadership, for the strength this fear gives is—uniquely—a humble strength. Those who fear God are simultaneously humbled and strengthened before his beauty and magnificence. Thus they are kept gentle and preserved from being overbearing in their strength. (Significantly, Peter pairs “gentleness” with “fear” [“respect,” φόβος (phobos)] in 1 Pet. 3:15.) The fear of the Lord is, then, the medicine for what Luther saw as the two main faults of pastors: But let us call these two faults by name: softness and harshness. Concerning the former, Zech. 11:17 says: “O shepherd and idol, you who desert the flock.” Concerning the latter, Ezek. 34:4 says: “With force and harshness you have ruled them.” These are the two main faults from which all the mistakes of pastors come.Pastors or not, all of us are temperamentally inclined to lean one way or another. Some are natural rhinos: strong and thick-skinned, but not gentle. Others are more like deer: sweet and gentle, to be sure, but nervous and flighty. The fear of the Lord corrects and beautifies both temperaments, giving believers a gentle strength. It makes them—like Christ—simultaneously lamblike and lionlike.
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