Fear and Punishment

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. (1 John 4:18)

Over the past few years my understanding of the real truth about God, about how He deals with sinners and about rewards and punishments have radically changed from what I was taught growing up and what mainstream Christianity still teaches. I have come to discover in the Bible and through promptings from the Holy Spirit in my own study that God is very little like what He has been represented to be by those claiming to teach about Him. Rather He is exactly like what Jesus taught and demonstrated in His life while here on earth. I have come to realize the powerful implications of this truth and how much it indicts most of what we have assumed is truth.

Part of what I have learned has to do with how God plans to overcome the problem of evil and the lies of Satan about Him. Satan has done everything possible to deceive us in regards as to what God is like and unfortunately he has largely succeeded, especially among those professing religion. Far from helping to improve God's reputation and seeking to vindicate Him, much of what we believe about God is still reinforcing many false assertions about Him originated in the mind the the great deceiver. Yet through it all God patiently works to bring about a final resolution that will forever settle the issues without ever resorting to employing the tactics and methods of His enemy.

Fear is possibly the primary tool that Satan relies on to keep us in darkness about God. Of course deception is also the main instrument he uses to keep us afraid of God. Through the use of these two elements he has managed to prolong his tyranny for thousands of years even though the results have been tragic and painful. God will never change His tactics for meeting the charges against Him or resort to using force, intimidation and fear to overcome evil. Satan's methods are counterfeits of God's true ways and using them even for a moment would vindicate Satan's claims that they are necessary to keep order in the universe.

However, because all of humanity is deceived in regards to these things we have believed that God indeed does resort to using at least some of Satan's methods for control when things become too difficult for love to handle. But in believing such things about God all we have accomplished is to 'create' a God – a distortion of God at best – in our own image rather than believe the glorious truth about Him that Jesus revealed. God is not the kind of person we have always thought Him to be: arbitrary, harsh, waiting to punish those who reject His love or even One handing out rewards for good behavior. All of this has come as a surprising revelation to me over recent years as I have come to discover the real truth about the amazing character of our heavenly Father.

As I contemplated this verse this morning I was reminded of this and how much my fear of God has subsided over the years. When I was growing up I was so afraid of God's punishment that I came to hate Him secretly. Yet I was so intimidated by His assumed wrath that I was fearful to even admit to anyone or even to myself that I felt that way. I lived under a constant and increasing load of fear, guilt and condemnation trying desperately to somehow appease this angry God who seemed bent on finding any excuse to keep me from entering paradise.

In recent years I have come to realize that not only was my heart and mind filled with myriads of lies about God derived from religion, but that fear itself was my greatest enemy and that it was actually fear itself that was tormenting me ruthlessly. I still have residual pockets of this twisted thinking in my brain that tortures me at various times, for my healing from these many lies is far from complete. But the peace and the ability to even begin to love God spontaneously that I have begun to experience in recent years is in stark contrast to the heaviness of the fear that suffocated my heart for much of my life.

Out of curiosity I compiled a list of translations of the phrase from this verse that gives a broader perspective of the truth embedded here.

fear implies [that we are afraid of] punishment (2001)

where fear is, there is pain (BBE)

The thought of being punished is what makes us afraid (CVE)

fear has torment (Darby, KJV, Webster, MKJV)

fear involves punishment (EMTV, FAA, GW, ISV, NASB95, TSV)

fear has to do with punishment (ESV, GNB, NET, NIV, NRSV)

fear worries about punishment (FBV)

feare hath painefulnesse (Geneva)

fear suggests punishment (GSNT)

fear has punishment (LITV, NHEBYSE, RV, YLT)

fear has always torment (MNT)

fear implies punishment (TCNT)

fear involves pain (WNT)

What began to become obvious to me today is the truth that fear itself is the origin of the punishment and pain that we suffer while making us assume that it is God who is punishing us. Most Christians believe that God is in the punishing and rewarding business, but recently I have begun to realize that the whole system of rewards and punishments is a counterfeit of God's system of life-giving love alone. This truth can be seen from the very beginning of the Bible but has been largely overlooked. The two systems of operation or models for relationships was represented by two distinctly different trees in the Garden of Eden. This truth has long been little investigated but recently was brought to my attention in a book I am just finishing called The Demonization of God Unmasked by Oswald Grant.

In this book which is a very detailed examination of the enormous implications embedded in the wrong tree in particular, it is becoming clear to me that much of what we have long assumed was good and righteous and as emanating from God in our world can actually be traced back to the counterfeit system designed to keep us occupied pursuing the wrong version of 'good'. All of our lives we have assumed that all good comes from God, but clearly as seen in the very name of this tree, the tree that introduced sin and all its consequences into our world, there is a good that masks the fact that it ends up in death.

This tree, The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as the Bible calls it, is representative of the whole counterfeit system of living as promoted by the archenemy of God. This enemy is so smart – the smartest being in the universe other than God, at least at one time – that there is no hope of figuring out his deceptions ourselves. Only through revelations from God Himself can we ever hope to escape the massive labyrinth of lies that we find ourselves in as sinners. Only by choosing to believe that God is right and is the only source of both life and truth can we ever find salvation from the deep darkness and resulting death of sin.

For years I pondered the name of this tree and saw that one of the significant parts of its name was the word 'knowledge'. I could see how many are deceived, particularly through religion into thinking that what can save us is more knowledge. Thus we find ourselves obsessed with gaining more and more knowledge – information that is – and thinking that if we could just know enough accurate information that we could extricate ourselves with God's help from the deceptions of Satan's lies. But this is yet another decoy built into the labyrinth to keep us wandering around in circles caught in the darkness of deception. We do indeed need a knowledge to enter into true salvation, but the kind of knowledge that we must have is a very different kind of knowledge than that proposed in the name of this tree.

Jesus repeatedly told us that we do need a 'knowledge' to escape the trap of sin. But the kind of knowledge that will save us is not so much informational knowledge but is rather a heart-based, relational, experiential knowledge of coming to really know God personally and intimately. Only in knowing God and being empowered to respond positively to His agape love at the heart level can we ever hope to be salvaged and experience restoration from the damage that Satan's lies have caused in our psyche and our perceptions of reality. And while good information is certainly helpful in coming to know God, it can never a substitute for humbling ourselves to embrace the reality of the transforming power of grace and the real truth about God's character of pure love.

This is where Satan has set up his greatest deceptions to keep us from entering into this saving relationship with God. Satan has filled our hearts and the whole world with lies about God designed to make us afraid of Him in every way possible in order to prevent us from allowing Him to speak His truth into our souls that can heal our minds and hearts. As long as we believe false assertions about God we will remain infected and inhibited by fears that are unfounded but that tend to block us from allowing God to heal us and save us. Thus we can begin to see that fear itself is one of the most diabolical tools of the enemy of our souls that keeps us from entering into the salvation that God wants for us to experience.

Notice how closely fear is linked with the idea of punishment in this verse. Because we have believed that God is in the punishing business and we too often refuse to challenge that assumption, we block our own way to perceiving and appreciating many things about God that would unlock access to a far deeper intimacy with Him that would heal our minds and hearts. Fear is always involved in perpetuating lies about both God and punishment. When we insist on embracing Satan's assertions that God is waiting to punish all those who resist His love, we in turn experience the natural consequences of pain and actually create a false reality within our own thinking where we interpret the suffering we experience as being imposed on us by an offended God.

The human mind has the amazing ability to construct false realities and then interpret everything that happens in such a way as to reinforce the assumptions within that counterfeit reality. For an example, consider the terrified cries of the lost in Revelation 6:16 where they fully believe that Jesus is a lamb full of wrath. Such absurdity can only be understood when one begins to grasp the powerful effect that believing such lies about God has on the human heart. When we insist on believing in and promoting a God who is supposedly both agape love while at the same time engaged in using violence, force and fear like His archenemy claims is necessary, our perceptions of reality remain so warped that total nonsense becomes the standard by which we perceive and experience life.

What really got my attention this morning however, was the insight that the torture that we assume is punishment from God is actually inherent in the very fears about God that we choose to cling to in our false assumptions about Him. Fear itself contains all the seeds of pain and suffering that results in the torments of the lost and even in much of the suffering we now experience. The lies about God that are believed so pervert the perception of reality that we too often are completely convinced that it is God who is the source of torture, not realizing that the torment is all coming from the inside.

Paul alludes to this truth in Romans. But, according to thy hardness and impenitent heart, treasurest up to thyself wrath, in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God. (Romans 2:5 Darby) What I have come to realize is that the wrath anyone will experience, either on the final day of judgment when the real truth about God is finally revealed, and even much of the suffering we experience now that we attribute to God's punishing us, all comes from false ideas about God that we cling to inside of us. As we interpret life through the filters of these lies that God is intending to use violence against us at some point, the very seeds of that pain of torture are being stored away inside our hearts and minds that will spring up to bear the fruit of self torture. But that torture is all based on what is inside of us and in no way comes from the God of agape love.

When we experience torture or pain or discomfort in the presence of God's holiness, it is never because God desires for us to suffer that pain. The problem is always that whenever sin – lies about God and the resulting distrust that it produces in the heart – encounters increased revelations about God's true character of love and goodness, otherwise known as His righteousness, the dissonance created between our perceptions of Him and the real truth about Him results in resistance. And any electronics person will tell you that when a resistor experiences too much power that it results in overheating and eventual self-destruction. The very same is true of our resistance to the truth about God's agape love. That is why Paul says in this last verse that wrath is experienced when God's righteous judgment is revealed.

Again, I must remind us that judgment is yet another word that has largely been distorted and misunderstood. The way God uses the word has nothing to do with condemnation, for John 3:17 makes it explicitly clear that God is not in the condemning business. Rather, condemnation is a reaction of the human mind to dissonance when two opposing ideas cannot be reconciled inside our heads. Thus when we insist on clinging to lies about God's love and then come face to face with the truth of God's love, the dissonance between these two opposing forces creates immense pain and suffering and in the end will be the cause of eternal death for all those who are lost.

This truth is not only radical but is sadly rejected outright by the vast majority of people, both Christian or otherwise. But it still remains truth even if only a small minority choose to embrace it. It is a life-transformational truth that will alter the way we perceive reality and has the potential to open up our own hearts to experience God at much deeper levels than was possible previously. The more we choose to embrace the truth about God's singular character of agape love, the more we come into alignment with Him and are healed and saved by the revelation of that love to our hearts, particularly in contemplating the life and death of His Son Jesus Christ.

As John so clearly stated in the surrounding verses to the one we started with, God is love. He also stated categorically that the core message of the gospel – the good news about God – is the truth about what God is really like.

This is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is Light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5)

The implications of this verse is still opening up my perceptions in more and more areas of my own beliefs about God. As I come to see that many things that I still assume about God must be challenged in the light of emerging revelations about Him from His Word, the more my heart is beginning to open up to experience His presence and healing in my own soul. I am coming to realize that much of what I still believe about God has been derived from the wrong source – the tree that our first parents ate from and that perverted their whole perception of reality and what God was like. Ever since then we have lived under the delusions of Satan's lies about God, and only through the direct intervention of the Son of God can we come to be restored into the life-receiving relationship that we must have in order to live in the eternal life that He wants for us to enjoy in Him.

Years ago I began to realize through personal intense experience that my greatest enemy was fear itself. I wasted much of my life fighting against the things, the people or the situations that made me afraid until I began to realize that it was my own fear itself that was torturing and sucking the life out of me, not the things or people that made me afraid. Becoming aware of this I began to turn my attention toward focusing on God and the real truth about His character during the times when I was most tormented by fear and I found to my amazement that the fear could not remain in the presence of such power. I had begun to tap into the real power of agape love, a love that is unconditional and cannot be diluted in the slightest by anything we do. That was the whole point of what happened at the cross. Jesus demonstrated that nothing humans or demons could do to hurt Him could dampen His love and forgiveness even for a moment. And this truth will in the last days be the liberating revelation that will enlighten the whole world with the glory of God before the end finally comes. (see Revelation 18:1)

And we have come to know and to believe the love that God has in us. God is love, and the one who resides in love resides in God, and God resides in him. By this love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment, because just as Jesus is, so also are we in this world. (1 John 4:16-17 NET)