So also Christ died once for all time as a sacrifice to take away the sins of many people. He will come again, not to deal with our sins, but to bring salvation to all who are eagerly waiting for him. (Hebrews 9:28 NLT)When I misbehaved as a child, my mother would always say, Wait till your father gets home.
What she didn’t realize was that she was not only affecting my outlook on my father, she was also affecting my theology. My view of my father became that of the family policeman, the judge and jury. He would come home and give me what-for for whatever it was my mother was mad about.
It made me dread my father coming home.
And because God called himself a Father, I tended to transfer a few things from my own life over to him that were not necessarily applicable.
It made me afraid of the second coming, because, as the bumper sticker says (kind of), he is coming and he is mad.
We get to feeling like Hebrews 10:28 where it says: There is only the terrible expectation of God’s judgment and the raging fire that will consume his enemies.
Even though we have done what is good and tried our best to rely on him and in his grace, we still are afraid.
You ask someone why did they obey God and become a Christian? And they say, because I am afraid of going to hell.
That is the same attitude of the young man who only obeys his father because his father can whip him. Sooner or later, he is either going to find out his old man isn’t as strong as he thought or he is going to figure that he can’t do anything right anyway, so he might as well have fun. either way, constant fear will make him rebel, not love.
Fear doesn’t work for long. Sooner or later it ceases to be effective. If that wasn’t true, there would be no underground churches in Communist or Islamic countries. They would give up.
But we have to remember. Jesus is not coming to punish us, but to take us home. There is no need to live in fear like a bad kid waiting for his father to come home. The end is not to be feared, but to be anticipated.
That is the Christian view of things. But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ. (Philippians 3:20).
Our God is not coming with his hired thug, Jesus, to whip us for being human. He is coming with his Son to welcome us into his rest.
We do not have to be afraid.
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