I knew God’s love had to be scary if it were to work. I just didn’t like some traditional descriptions of how to get there. 

Threats were one way. They’ve always been sufficiently scary. The problem is that when you try to work those out as “love,” you end up with really ugly things—at least in any human relationship.

Every claim of the Bible’s story falls apart if God is not love. And all kinds of drastic, unimaginable consequences that could seem like extreme, imbalanced punishments show up in the Bible. Scripture is full of warnings for potential transgressors that sure sound like death threats. In human relationship experience, such things are incompatible with the trust that is love. And they must be—at least on any plane other than the Divine. 

And yet, as humanity relates to God, there is no possibility that love could appear without painful, heavy realities. 

How can something so scary be love? How could something dreadful be trust? 

Communication as Relationship

God is how He relates to us. The perfect communication of Himself is Himself (John 1:1). And if communication is the basis for all relationship, then with what kind of communication can the infinite Divine give Himself to the finite human?

With what kind of communication can the infinite Divine give Himself to the finite human?

Each type of relationship is made unique by its communication. Some messages are not only permissible in certain relationships which may be inappropriate anywhere else, they are likely desirable for the good of the relationship in which they are permitted. (Any number of embarrassing “texts-meant-for-spouses” stories might be inserted here to casually make this point.) 

Parents must relate to their children in ways that are unique to that relationship. Merely being an adult doesn’t qualify one to claim the blend of authority, compassion, and personal responsibility in a child’s life that being that child’s parent does. If you ever experienced the childhood cognitive dissonance of being roundly scolded by a friend’s mom, your experience has embodied this concept. Some things are only OK coming from Mom or Dad. 

Parents—because they are our parents—have messages for us which cannot be rightly understood in any other relationship.

It’s perfectly reasonable to imagine a mother telling her daughter, “We can get ice cream because you did your chores.” It boggles the mind to imagine the same mom telling a fellow adult in line, “You didn’t clear your place after dinner, so only one scoop tonight.” What right has she to make a claim on anyone else’s children—much less, on another adult? 

Parents—because they are our parents—have messages for us which cannot be rightly understood in any other relationship. And for parents to neglect these exclusive parent-child messages—even the uncomfortable, harsh, at times scary kind—would be a failing to love fully on their part. 

Ice Cream Stands × Infinity

Now, make the analogous but infinite leap to God: What demand can God have on me? We are not two equals—adults together in line at the ice cream stand. I’m far more like the child who is rightfully expected to do chores before my hard-working parent spends from their paycheck for my after-dinner treat.

I realize ice cream stands and eternal destinies don’t compare easily; I applaud you for sticking with this overburdened metaphor…because the reality is, I don’t have even marginally as much claim on the Almighty as the child in line does upon their parent. God is morally, categorically, ontologically distinct from us in absolute terms—something that can’t be said of any comparison between two human beings. 

Not only are the claims which God can make upon us in such a relationship equivalently weightier than a parent makes upon their child, He must make such severe claims in order to be loving and trustworthy as God.

God is morally, categorically, ontologically distinct from us in absolute terms—something that can’t be said of any comparison between two human beings. 

In their 2005 song “I Will Follow You Into the Dark,” Death Cab for Cutie recounted the experience of dismissing the faith taught in Catholic school following the claim of “a lady in black” that “fear” was “the heart of love”—and the physical punishment that accompanied that lesson. 

There is a fear of God that has to do with punishment, and while we won’t spend much time ruminating on it, that kind of trepidation should be acknowledged for what it can and cannot offer as we understand the severe love of God. 

The association of human-inflicted punishment with divinely-inflicted punishment is at once fatally flawed and absolutely necessary. 

It’s necessary to correlate the two because—like Divinely-meted discipline—the human-inflicted consequences of our actions have a personal and (to varying degrees) purposeful nature. For example: unless I am being superstitious, I can’t understand anything about the rightness or wrongness of my actions based on something random like the weather; I can learn about consequences through the discipline of a parking ticket, however.

And at the same time, there is a perpetual flaw in correlating God-ordained consequences with man-ordained ones. The problem isn’t with how we view ourselves in this comparison, it’s how the equation paints God. It’s not that we can’t rightly see ourselves as deserving recipients of punishment, it’s that every human punisher is a deserving recipient of retribution themselves. Every human Inflictor is guilty along with the Inflicted. 

God—the Divine judge and enforcer—is no flawed, broken administrator of judgments. From that standpoint, comparisons of earthly, human justice systems will not just always fall short—they’ll leave us with an existential sense of injustice and with resentment for our Disciplinarian. Bruised by a skewed association, we may just follow so many others into the lonely, spiritual dark, and—along with Death Cab for Cutie—“never look back”…

Recognizing Love in the God we can fear doesn’t come from continually cowering at His right to punish our transgressions, any more than the enjoyment of food comes from fixating on the starvation we’d experience without it.

Recognizing Love in the God we can fear doesn’t come from continually cowering at His right to punish our transgressions, any more than the enjoyment of food comes from fixating on the starvation we’d experience without it. Instead, to recognize His love and understand how He is to be feared, we should look at how He has primarily chosen to relate to us. 

God (Or, The Fear of Isaac)

The figure of Abraham represents humanity entering a personal relationship with God; all subsequent expressions of relationship with the God of the Bible flow from this relationship. The communion between mankind and God changes, evolves and grows after this point, but it never abrogates the character of the Divine revealed in this introductory, Abrahamic chapter. 

It is at first hard to reconcile, then, that this is the context where we see the most unthinkable commandment ever given in Scripture. Indeed, God’s pronouncement of the slaughter of a son by his father’s own hand could easily undermine one’s view of the character of this Deity entirely—which is what makes a proper understanding of the episode so crucial. 

What happens between Abraham, Isaac, and God either absolutely confirms or utterly discredits the Biblical God’s claim to be Love Itself. 

In significant ways, the redemptive family of the Biblical narrative begins in this context. After a miraculous, angelically foretold conception, Abraham, the father of the child of promise, received the son, Isaac, through whom the people of God’s faith family would come. The same son’s life is then required by the God who gave him, a sacrifice to be carried out by the father who conceived him. 

God famously intervenes at the last moment, telling Abraham to spare his son because God now knows his loyalty. Of course, a test like this isn’t needed for God to gain information that He already has—nothing is hidden from Him, including the willingness of Abraham’s heart. The case could be made that Abraham himself had something to learn from the experience and that God was merely teaching him a lesson. 

But perhaps an obscure name of God later used by Isaac’s son Jacob suggests that this episode was intended for a different recipient; Abraham’s grandson would name God, “The Fear of Isaac.” 

What happens between Abraham, Isaac, and God either absolutely confirms or utterly discredits the Biblical God’s claim to be Love Itself. 

Abraham was the father of the faith, but Isaac represented the descendants—the members of the faith—and the example Isaac saw in his father would define for every descendent what true relationship to the Almighty required. As he lay on a pyre, bound for slaughter, the only thing Isaac saw that was more astounding than his father’s devotion was his father’s hope. 

Before Isaac’s conception, Abraham had interacted with God’s promises on a level that he could comprehend and manipulate, but it didn’t bring fulfillment. Knowing now the futility of putting his will over eternal God’s will, Abraham’s obedience to God was no longer filtered through the anxiety of what might happen; it was now pure obedience, fueled by the hope of what must happen: 

If God needed to raise a slain son from the dead to fulfill his promise to make a forever family, then He would.

Abraham knew that God would always prove to be the faithful God of life, and that, if God needed to raise a slain son from the dead to fulfill his promise to make a forever family, then He would. 

Isaac saw all of this in his father’s words, in his father’s actions…in his father’s eyes. Isaac understood that in this episode of faith-testing, his father would receive his son back from the dead… but it would be Isaac who died. 

As the firstborn of the family of promise—the people through whom God would change the world—this was the path that the chosen son would have to take, through death and back again. Whatever following this God of his father would mean for Isaac, he knew it meant the literal sacrifice of his own life. 

God can’t introduce us to Himself and demand any less. Meeting God can incur no less cost for us than it did for Abraham and Isaac. And this is no arbitrary requirement: we cannot become united to the God who is infinite self-giving love without ultimately taking on every absolute giving of self. The experience will necessarily call upon us to embody in ourselves at once Abraham’s sacrifice and Isaac’s fear: all that we love must be subjected to Him who gave it; all that we are must be required of us. This is what it is to know the one called the Fear of Isaac. This is all it can mean for us to enter the severe love of God.

And yet, God shows us that He will have us at no lesser cost to Himself. What it means for us to enter the severe love of God turns out to be precisely what it means for God to extend His severe love to us:

Jesus is the Son Who looks into the eyes of His Father and knows that His own death is the only path to life for the promised family of faith; our Heavenly Father is as Abraham, knowing that the ultimate display of His love will mean the death of the Beloved before it will mean resurrection.

What it means for us to enter the severe love of God turns out to be precisely what it means for God to extend His severe love to us.

What if the threats and punishments weren’t the scariest thing about God’s love? Because, honestly, the threats and punishments are only alerting us to the natural result of choosing a bad thing—choosing something outside of His love for us. 

What if the fear surrounding God—the proper fear—comes not from punishment, but from what Love itself will cost us? After all, Isaac suffered no punishment here at the hand of the Almighty; rather, it was in coming into relationship with Him that Isaac was introduced to the One Whom Israel would call Fear.

It is not a fear of what He will do if we sin, necessarily, or of what the consequences will be if we leave Him—such fears of punishment don’t belong to His children (1 John 4:18). No, the Fear we meet as God is Him Who calls us out of ourselves, Who calls us to die to ourselves and see all other loves surrendered. He is the Fear Who calls us to lose everything—even ourselves—as the only way that we might know Him. 

And while this absolute sacrifice is mutual—God Himself gives everything that He might know us—the gesture has a different reality for Him as He enacts it. On our part, the sacrifice happens as we are drawn in to God’s severe love; on His part, God sacrifices in order to draw us into His severe love. In freely choosing to communicate His infinite Self this way, more work is being done on His part—more sacrifice, more giving, more surrender of Self for love of other. 

Whether you ignore it or receive it, God’s severe love is immensely costly. And in either case, that price is not arbitrary. The weight of our God’s unique love is not determined by a Divine whim: the Fear of Isaac is the name of the God who would not love us unless it cost Him everything.