Does being forgiven by God cause us to fear Him less, or to fear Him more? Perhaps it’s both.
Psalm 130:4 tells us this about God: “But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.” To one way of thinking, this seems backwards: why does knowing that God has forgiven us make us fear Him more? Shouldn’t we fear Him less when forgiven? It depends on what we mean by fear.
For me, getting Psalm 130:4 to make sense with the order of forgiveness and fear required a re-thinking of repentance. My conclusion was: the one who has not been forgiven has not repented, and the reason they did not repent was that they did not fear God. They did not understand Him properly. They might be afraid of God, but that’s not the kind of fear referred to in Psalm 130.
In contrast, the one who has been forgiven has repented, and they repented because they understood it was the best thing for them to do, out of a fearful respect for God. A proper understanding of God’s character makes us turn to Him with our guilt, rather than run away from Him. We should not be afraid of God, where we are motivated to be passive – avoiding mistakes that would anger the one we fear. We should fear God in that we revere Him and respect His authority, and therefore actively seek to please Him.
A lot goes into repentance. When we pray and ask for forgiveness, it’s often a simple prayer made with the proverbial faith of a child, but there are a lot of assumptions we make when we say that prayer. Every prayer of repentance directly or indirectly acknowledges some or all of these things:
1) God as the source of the law, the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong
2) Him as the righteous judge who is personally offended by our sin
3) His omniscience, knowing we cannot hide our sin
4) His uniqueness, as there is no other God to turn to
5) His steadfast love for us, knowing He bore the cost of our sin, therefore enabling us to approach Him
6) His compassion for us, since He lived as a man
7) His power and willingness to heal us of sin
8) His consistency of character: that He is not arbitrary
If we don’t implicitly or explicitly believe these things, why would we repent and ask forgiveness from God? Why would we expect to get it? Exploring that set of statements could fill multiple volumes of theology books, but we don’t need that knowledge. In His grace, He honors our simple, heartfelt confessions. He paid the price for all our inadequacies – even when we don’t fully understand our own prayers or who we’re praying to. The Spirit pleads with the Father on our behalf[1]. Mercifully, our forgiveness is based on His faithfulness to us, not on our detailed theological knowledge. 1 John 1:9 tells us: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
Even our faith is imperfect, but His faithfulness bridges the gap between our childlike faith and His omniscience. He knows all our doubts and all their answers. We come as we are, but with fearful respect, and are forgiven.
Only through acceptance of the cross, where Christ’s atoning blood was shed for us, can God in His Holiness commune with us. Only through forgiveness will the Holy Spirit come and live in us. Only by tasting of His goodness do we really know what He is like, not before. And if we never repent, we don’t learn what it tastes like, we only know what you’ve been told about God, and we might not have been told the truth.
Psalm 130:4 shows us that genuine repentance leads to forgiveness and gives us a better appreciation of who God is. As we experience Him more, we live Psalm 34:8 for ourselves:
“Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!
Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!”
[1] Romans 8:26-27
Driving Toward the Morning Sun 