Chapter 4 :
Contentment
Fear of loneliness and suffering
Part Four
And yes, He DOES discipline and punish us. For a long time I thought that a punishing God was not a loving God – but this is simply not true. A Father that loves His children disciplines them when they do something wrong – because He knows the wrong things will form habits that will hurt them. If your child reaches over to put his hand on a hot stove, you usually hit his hand away. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be very loving! We cannot claim that God really loves us if He is not committed to our holiness and our happiness – and discipline (punishment) is part and parcel of real love. He is a loving Father, not an absent God who lets us suffer because of some universal law. He will punish us when it is for our own good – not enjoying the sorrow or pain we might feel (like a parent) but knowing it is better for us.
Lamentations 3 is an excellent example, for me, of this. Here we see that the suffering and pain was the LORD’s doing, and while the author admits this, at the same time he claims that the ‘unfailing love of the Lord never ends,’ and that the same God who is punishing is the same God who will liberate – because He is good and infinitely wise.
For this reason, to fear the Lord is to hope in the Lord – we fear Him because He is all powerful and can do anything, but we hope in Him because He is good and loves us. This is why the Word can say :
“Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him. Fear the Lord, you His saints, for those who fear Him lack nothing.” (Ps 34:8,9.)
All over the Word we constantly see that the man who fears the Lord, and nothing else, is the blessed man. It is the fear of the Lord which is the beginning of all wisdom (Ps 111:10). It is the unfailing love of the Lord we count on, which makes us fear Him and hope in Him at the same time, with delight and worship.
Lam 3:21
“Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this: The unfailing love of the Lord never ends! By His mercies we have been kept from complete destruction. Great is His faithfulness; His mercies begin afresh each day. I say to myself, ‘the Lord is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in Him!”
So, by fearing the Lord and not loneliness or sadness (or a life of such) is exactly why ‘perfect love casts out fear’. Because, unlike loneliness, with God we can fear what brings us hope and joy. Fear is empty and hopeless when whatever we fear does not give us hope but rather despair. This is because anything else but God can’t give us hope. There’s nothing hopeful about loneliness. If we fear it we are plunged into hopelessness, but if we fear God we are plunged into hope and love which casts out all other fears. In this case, loneliness has lost its power over us when we no longer fear it. We begin to live our lives without it effecting our attitudes, character, and love. We might get it from time to time, but the time passes because the Lord is strong and sustains us and fills us with His hope and joy.
But here I must say where we can still get trapped. We must have the LORD as our hope, for if we are merely hoping for the Lord to bring us a partner to dispel our loneliness then we are still hoping for something other than the Lord. No, we must hope IN the Lord to be our joy rather than believe Him to dish out the appropriate ‘gifts’ for the appropriate ‘need’. The Lord IS our supply, not the Lord ‘CAUSES’ us to be supplied.
