Trembling

Trembling Before God
Text: Psalm 119:120

OPEN:
Though our modern sensibilities may resist it, trembling depicts an essential movement of the heart before God. In the Psalms, it describes the sinner’s response to powerful experiences of awe, wonder, and fear in the face of the overwhelming majesty of God. If we would understand their songs and nurture the inner life, we too, must learn to tremble before God. As important as it is, trembling, or the experience of awe, is largely absent from our ordinary living.
 We are so desensitized by our own living that we are numb to see the holy.
 Our pace of life can drown out even a thunderous divine voice.
 Movies, professional sports, and other entertainments add a numbing crescendo of contrived excitements that shields us from the holy.
 Our pop-cultural worldview also hinders experiencing awe. By this I mean joining the masses of popular culture who see at best a God who is distant and unlikely to be encountered in the “real world.”
 Many encounter a social barrier to a sense of awe because they are told it simply is not sophisticated to all religion to touch them very deeply or very visibly.

Physical trembling is not our main concern, of course, but I hesitate to put us at ease too quickly, for it seems odd that, while all creation shudders in dread before the power and purity of the Terrifying One, we should rest wholly untouched by his Presence. We should recall that trembling or other physical responses to the Presence of God have often occurred throughout the history of the faith.
 From Belshazzar’s knees clattering together, through Quaker and Puritan revivals, and on up to modern times, many have had a physical response to the reality of God. Not only is such experience common, but it is also widely varied.

To say that trembling before God has often been accompanied by such experiences is not the same, however, as preaching that everyone should respond in the same. Nonetheless, the mind, body, psyche, and spirit are woven together so inseparably that we should expect to be affected as whole persons when we encounter God.

In the Psalms, one of the words that most helpfully explains this experience to us is the word fear. The Hebrew words most often used for “fear” in the OT depict God as one who elicits ultimate respect. Individuals, nations, and nature are urged to fear God; and many, overwhelmed by God, are said to be filled with fear at God’s presence or action.
 To fear God in the Psalms, does not primarily mean quivering in anxiety and terror, but instead describes a profound sense of reverence or awe.

The heart of the experience of fear and trembling is to feel and acknowledge God over against us. God is the Wholly Other. To encounter this Holy One leaves us awestruck. We may respond with great waves of laughter and joy, rolling out of every corner of our beings. Or the awe may strike us silent (e.g. the words in the contemporary song, “I Can Only Imagine”). The Psalms are bursting with majestic, overwhelming images of God. These images can teach us and guide us to recover a lost sense of wonder so that we may awake and truly see God.

I. Creation Helps Us Recover a Sense of Awe of God.
1. One of the main witnesses to holy majesty in the Psalms is the created world itself.

Ps. 19:1-4, “The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where there voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the end of the world.”

 Theologians refer to creation’s witness to God as “general revelation,” but it seems to me that this is too dull a term to describe the grandeur of the experience.
illus:
I left just after my daughter Jordan was born to go preach a revival for Lakeview Baptist Church in Polson, Montana. Montana is profoundly beautiful country. The landscape swims with majestic mountains in western Montana. One particular night the heavens began to shout God’s glory and it stopped me in my tracks. The experience was a dazzling display of the aurora borealis. At the sudden appearance of these “northern lights” I craned my neck backward in wonder, but soon lay flat on my back to try to take in every nuance of light I possibly could. In ever-changing shades of blue, pink, and orange, the lights rolled and rippled, pulsing in waves, shimmering in jeweled arcs across the sky. They left me breathless, caught somewhere between a whispered “Wow!” and no words at all. And I worshipped God.

Another more recent experience took place early one morning outside my home in the country. Some distance from town, the night sky can be brilliant with stars and constellations. This particular morning we woke the children early, made hot chocolate, and sat outside to watch a meteor shower, something akin to colossal sparklers tracing across the sky. It was incredibly glorious and we spoke of the greatness of our creator God.

 Creation declares the glory of God to us in many ways, and we each hear its voice differently.
o The voice may come through surging rivers or crashing seas
o Through the intricate beauty of a rose or the delicacy of
o Through the soaring majesty of an eagle or the scarlet flight of a cardinal.
o Through scowling gray-green thunderheads or through a flaming pink/purple/orange sunset.
2. In the Psalms the creation tells us of God in two ways: through its own response to God and through its witness to others.
 The creation witnesses to God’s inventiveness, wisdom, beauty, and tender care.
[READ Psalm 65:5-13]
 Though the Hebrew singers were moved by the witness of nature perhaps more readily than we are, we can learn to listen more deeply as a way of nurturing trembling in our own hearts:
1) Break down the wall between yourself and creation—it is hard for us to imagine creation responding to God in any way except as a machine. Handicapped by such a view, we can hardly imagine the trees clapping their hands and the hills skipping like lambs in response to God.
 We need to take seriously the clear biblical teaching that nature, like us, does respond to God.
2) Recover your sense of God as Creator.
 Tragically, in our time, even people of faith have had their sense of God as Creator diminished and even destroyed by a wrong response to science. Even those who have not enlisted on one side or the other of the Bible-versus-science war have often been robbed of the majestic images of God’s creative power.
 Fortunately, we can reclaim what has been taken or given away—“open your heart to the powerful word pictures that show speaking the world into being, becoming a sculptor and surgeon spreading out the heavens like a tent, measuring the seas in the palm of his hand, weighing the mountains in balance scales, and much more.” (H. Macy)
3) Pay more attention to nature and cherish its marvels.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes.

II. The Experience of Trembling Before God Is Evoked by Power, But Also by Overwhelming Love.
1. The images of power are potent and plentiful.
Ps 99, “The Lord reigns, let the nations tremble; he sits enthroned between the cherubim, let the earth shake. Great is the Lord in Zion; he is exalted over all the nations.”
 The Lord is feared for his powerful acts of deliverance—the “terrible deeds” in Israel’s history, most notably the Exodus from Egypt.
Ps 66:1-3, “Shout with joy to God, all the earth! Sing the glory of His name; make his praise glorious! Say to God, ‘How awesome are your deeds! So great is your power that your enemies cringe before you. All the earth bows down to you; they sing praise to you, they sing praise to your name.”

2. Among these wonders of power, however, are also the wonders of love.
 Compelled by love, the Creator uses his power to protect and prosper his people.
 The foreboding holiness of God is anchored in love as the faithful are invited to be like God in holiness (Lev. 19:2) and as they experience forgiveness. “Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.”
 God’s forgiveness causes us to fear him.
Ps 130:3-4, “If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared.”

illus:
Steeped in the Psalms, hymn writer Isaac Watts captured how grace penetrates power when he wrote:
He rules the world with truth and grace,
And make the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness,
And wonders of His love.

When we combine our visions of God’s majesty and of God’s love, we move even more directly toward awe and adoration. Thomas Merton describes this beautifully:
When one becomes conscious of who God really is, and when one realizes that He who is Almighty, and infinitely Holy, has “done great things for us,” the only possible reaction is the cry of half-articulate exultation that bursts from the depths of our being in amazement at the tremendous, inexplicable goodness of God to men.

III. We Are Best Moved to Tremble As We Gain a Vision of God’s Holiness.
This is what overwhelmed Isaiah, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”

1. A vision of God’s holiness, along with an overwhelming sense of divine sovereignty, is at the heart of a right response toward God.
 The idea of holiness in the Old Testament points toward purity and perfection. It refers to what is set apart from the common and the polluted, for the holiness of God cannot tolerate sin—any type of sin.
 So Hebrew religious practices required that worshippers should observe purification rituals and that objects used in worship should be unblemished and pure, whether they be garments or sacrificial animals.
 Holiness can be seen as the very essence of the character of God.
2. Expressions of our trembling before God’s holiness.
1) Worship
illus:
Howard Macy:
“I see the holiness of God as an astonishingly pure, white light, one that we can hardly bear to see, but that is refracted to us through the prism of God’s words and deeds. So what we see as divine love, justice, wrath, faithfulness, patience, and wisdom are simply beautifully refracted rays of the holiness of God. To see this holiness, whether through the prism’s rainbow or directly in its dazzling purity, brings us to awe and worship.

Ps 96:9, “Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness; tremble before him all the earth.”

2) Two-fold Repentance
Isaiah 6:5, “Woe is me….”
a. Sense of being overwhelmed by one’s own sin.
“My sins have overtaken me, and I cannot see. They are more than the hairs on my head, and my heart fails within me.” (Ps 40:12)

“I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.” (Ps 51:3)

“Do not bring your servant into judgment, for no one living is righteous before you.” (Ps 143:2)
 It is right that our understanding of God should bring us to this kind of self-understanding and repentance.
William Temple:
If a man should claim to have had a vision of God which did not bring him to penitence, I should feel very sure that he had had no real vision, or that it was not a vision of the real God.
b. Desire for a pure heart.
 Yearn to be set apart for God, living in the world, but not sharing its corruption.
 This is inviting God to keep on with the work of transformation, of creating within them the holiness they so much desire.
Ps 139: 23-24, “Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
And lead me in the way everlasting.”
Ps 51:10, “Create in me a pure heart, O God,
And renew a steadfast spirit within me.”

CLOSE:
I suggest you find a place outdoors (even if it requires some travel to arrive there) that brings you close up to God's reflection and refuse to move until you tremble with the awesomeness of His presence.