God: Our Friend, Not Our Buddy

"People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time."

The words come from the first installment written by C.S. Lewis in The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. They recount the moment when the four children from our world encounter Aslan, the central figure of Lewis' tales. Aslan, Lewis would say, was the result of his imagining what Christ would be like were he to enter a world as a lion.

When the four children meet Aslan, they experience both incredible fear and a sense of loving grace.

Lewis is right that such a mixture of feelings is foreign to many in this world.

I knew a woman who was in the habit of telling me that she hated it that in our Small Catechism, we Lutherans constantly said believers are "fear and love God." "We shouldn't be afraid of God," she would tell me in syrupy tones.

There is a sense in which that woman is right, of course. The central message of the New Testament--and of the entire Bible, for that matter--is that God, the creator of the human race, is for the human race and for us as individual people. In Christ, God is shown to be our friend who dies and rises for us and gives new life to all who will follow.

But God has the power to give us life and take it away and is perfect in righteousness and holiness in ways that should leave sensible people quaking. God is, as the twentieth-century Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich put it, "wholly other," our friend but not our buddy.

The woman who ignorantly railed against fear in God would be the first to fall all over herself in deference to presidents, kings, business magnates, sports heroes, and celebrities, never dreaming to presume being their buddy. Yet she wanted to withhold sensible deference from God.

I doubt that her thoughtlessness is unique. Some people have so bought into democratic ideals and an attenuated Freudianism that makes all people victims that they become insensible to the complete otherness of God.

All we human beings may stand as equals, sinners in need of redemption, human beings counted worthy of Christ's death and resurrection. But all of that makes God even more worthy of our honor, praise...and fear, not less.

I wonder if that woman paid any attention to the introduction and first petition of the Lord's Prayer that she said in worship each Sunday, "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name..." These words, taught by Jesus himself, commend a sense that God is both "good and terrible."

Whenever inclined to see our loving God as a buddy rather than a friend, as someone we shouldn't fear, we would do well to look at Psalm 96:8-10:

Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name...

Worship the Lord in holy splendor; tremble before him, all the earth.

Say among the nations, “The Lord is king! The world is firmly established; it shall never be moved. He will judge the peoples with equity.”