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)

Propitiation

My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world. (1 John 2:1-2)

By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4:9-10)

One of the words that has become a real problem for those wanting to understand the truth about God's justice and character shows up in these verses. In fact, these two verses are the only place this word shows up in the Bible unless you include the Greek Old Testament where it is translated 'atonement'.

The problem with the way this word is currently used commonly by most theologians and teachers is that it strongly implies that God is, or at least was, in desperate need of appeasement for the offense that our sins caused inside of Him. This appeasement model of salvation is pervasive throughout most of Christianity and also shows up in nearly every other major world religion. However, as I have been learning over recent years this contradicts the clear teachings of Jesus Himself who said unequivocally that there is no difference between Him and the Father.

This clear statement of Jesus presents a powerful argument against the appeasement model which raises all sorts of questions about the real meaning and purpose of the cross of Christ along with how to explain this word propitiation that John uses here. John, more than any of the other disciples, seemed to grasp the true mission and spirit of Jesus and sought to convey that more clearly than any other Bible writer. That is why it seems so incongruent for John to suddenly insert into a letter filled with some of the clearest statements about the purity of God's agape love such a word that many would imply reinforces something different than pure love, unless one is willing to compromise the purity of the definition of agape love.

It is extremely important to approach this study with an open mind and heart and to seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit to discern the truth about Jesus in light of what He Himself taught about God rather than relying on our preconceived notions tainted by centuries of dark assumptions about God. What does this word actually mean and what did John have in mind when He made these statements about Jesus? It is important that this confusion be cleared in our thinking if we are to have confidence in the day of judgment as John asserts we need in 1 John 4:17.

As usual, I start with Strong's definition of the Greek word behind the term used and find this:

hilasmos - atonement, i.e. (concretely) an expiator: –propitiation (Strong's)

Atonement is another word that carries quite a bit of baggage with it similar to propitiation. However there is actually more clarity in this word if its roots are carefully unpacked. This word comes from two English words one of which is very old and obsolete. The obsolete word was 'one' which back in those days was used as a verb. A usage of this word could have been, “I am going to go over to my neighbor and one them with me.” This word 'one' literally meant to resolve differences, to reconcile, to restore peace and harmony between two individuals who had tension or offenses between them. Thus, the current word atonement literally means to bring into harmony two parties that were not in harmony before. This is exactly what Paul spoke of when he talked about our need to reconcile with God.

I looked up the word expiate from Strong's definition on the internet and found this definition:

expiate - to atone for; make amends or reparation for: to expiate one's crimes. (Dictionary.com)

This reflects the common usage of these terms which is no surprise, for that is exactly what dictionaries claim to do, to explain the most common meanings that currently are assumed for words that we use today. But just because the majority of people assume a word means something in no way should be taken to mean that our current understanding of a word is what God intended it to mean thousands of years ago in a different language. I always have to question the real meaning of any word that interferes with the singular truth about what God is like that Jesus came to reveal to the universe.

This is what John has to say in his first letter:

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.

The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

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 1:5; 4:8, 18)

From John's perspective, light and love are synonymous. Because of this there can be nothing in God that in any way resembles or employs the dark ways of His accuser. God does not participate in violence; He does not take offense, for offenses themselves are sin and in God is no sin. Therefore, God has no need to let go of any offense over sin because He has never taken offense to start with.

Most of the problems we have with legal-sounding terms in the New Testament is because many of those words were not actually translated from Greek but were borrowed from Latin versions of the Bible. And Latin is literally the language of law, so it is no surprise that using Latin to convey ideas that did not originate in that language is going to skew our perceptions of what the original author may have been trying to say. Let me go a bit farther in my search for the true meaning of this word propitiation to discover significant clues as to what John was really trying to say here. Following is a definition I found online that exposes the earlier meaning of this Latin word.

propitiation

late 14c., from L.L. propitiationem (nom. propitiatio) "an atonement," from L. propitiare "render favorable," from propitius "favorable, gracious, kind," from pro- "forward" + petere "go to" (see petition). Earliest recorded form of the word is propitiatorium "the mercy

seat, place of atonement" (c.1200), translating Gk. hilasterion.

propitiation. Dictionary.com. Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/propitiation (accessed: August 21, 2012).

When this definition, the mercy seat, is applied to explain the word propitiation, a whole new door is opened up to understand what John was really trying to say about the mission and purpose of Jesus' death. A good understanding of the Old Testament sanctuary and its services is very helpful to know what this is talking about, for the symbols embedded in that system reveal enormous truths about the whole plan of salvation that are often misunderstood. But even more important is that we examine the sanctuary system from the perspective of first immersing ourselves in the teachings and life of Jesus and what He said about His Father so that the symbols and protocol carried out in the sanctuary services that were shadows of Jesus and His ministry for us with God can be more clearly perceived.

Without going into great detail at this point, the Mercy Seat was the central place on the most sacred piece of furniture in the whole sanctuary, located in the Most Holy Place where the most intense revelation of God's presence was manifested. It was on top of the Ark of the Covenant which had underneath its lid (the Mercy Seat) the (1) 10 Commandment Law on the tables of stone, (2) the Rod of Aaron that had budded miraculously and (3) a jar of Manna preserved from the time when God had provided food every day for the Children of Israel when they were wandering around in the desert for forty years.

Once a year on the most important and solemn day in the whole Jewish calendar called the Day of Atonement, the high priest after going through a routine of thorough ritual and physical cleansing took blood from a sacrifice representing the sins of all the people from the whole year into the Most Holy place. There in the intense presence of the Almighty God the priest sprinkled this blood of Atonement on the Mercy Seat to represent the cleansing of the sins of all God's people who had likewise gone through a number of days of ritual cleansing and heart searching to putting away of all sin and ill feelings from their own hearts. This was to bring about at-one-ment between God and His people.

This whole process was representative of humanity's desperate need to be restored back into trust and harmony with the Holy God from which we have been estranged so that we can be reconnected fully to the Source of life from which we have been largely alienated since Adam sinned in Eden. This Mercy Seat demonstration in the sanctuary service was to reveal to us one of the most important elements of Jesus' ministry for humanity. But unless we understand Jesus' relationship to the Father and believe Jesus' own words that the Father feels no different about us than Jesus does, we will be susceptible to false insinuations about God that will confuse us at best and will generate fear in our hearts instead of the necessary trust and love that John speaks so urgently about in his letters.

If we substitute the phrase mercy seat in place of the word propitiation in these verses, it starts to become easier to see what John was trying to say about the purpose and motives that prompted Jesus to lay down His life on the cross. In no way was Jesus seeking to appease an angry, offended Deity in heaven like the pagans believed about their gods. Rather, Jesus was seeking to appease an angry, offended humanity that was filled with resentment, bitterness and hostility toward a God they had been led to believe had threatened to use violence against them and whom they blamed for all the pain and suffering taking place in this world.

The blood of an atonement offering sprinkled on the Mercy Seat represented the blood of Jesus splattered over the ground and all over the cross and even over the streets of Jerusalem when angry sinners had finally gotten their hands on the God they hated so deeply as they vented their rage against Him in every way they could to intensify His suffering. Yet to the amazement of all who were thinking at all by the time it was over, it was noticed that throughout all of that ordeal they had never been able to entice or induce even one hint of resentment, bitterness or desire for revenge on the part of Jesus. (see 1 Peter 2:21-24)

The cross of Christ is the clearest demonstration of the non-violence of God. The cross of Christ reveals that nothing we can ever do to hurt God can in any way diminish His passionate love for us in the slightest. The cross of Christ and the spirit He demonstrated toward all of His enemies clearly reveals that God never takes offense but rather has always viewed all of us with nothing but pure compassion, love and forgiveness even while we were His enemies.