Not Into Temptation | God Is Glorious

Traveling at the speed of light (186,000 miles a second), you would encircle the earth seven times in one second and pass the moon in two seconds. At this speed it would take you 4.3 years to reach our nearest star and 100,000 years to cross our galaxy. There are thought to be at least 100,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe. It would take 2,000,000 light-years to reach the next closest galaxy and 20,000,000 to reach the next cluster of galaxies. And you have still only just begun to explore the universe. All this was created when our God simply spoke a word. In fact, Isaiah tells us that he marked off the heavens with the breadth of his hand (Isaiah 40: 12). It’s a spatial metaphor for a God who exists outside space, but it gives us a sense of the scale of God: the whole universe fits into his hand. Hold your hand up: the universe is that big to God!

The answer to the fear of man is fear of God. We need a big view of God. To fear God is to respect, worship, trust, and submit to him. It’s the proper response to his glory, holiness, power, love, goodness, and wrath. The appearances of God are often described in the Bible in terms of brightness, fire, and brilliance. Think of the heat of the sun, with nuclear reactions within it creating a blinding brilliance even millions of miles away. Yet there’s an intensity and substance to God’s glory far beyond that of our sun. God wraps majesty and splendor around him like a cloak (Psalm 93: 1). “To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One” (Isaiah 40: 25). For the Christian, the fear of God no longer involves terror. He’s our Father, and we come before him with confidence through Christ (Hebrews 4: 14– 16). But we can never get chummy with him. He remains a consuming fire. “My flesh trembles for fear of you,” says the psalmist. “I am afraid of your judgments” (Psalm 119: 120).