ADVANCED
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FEAR II TIM. 1:7 We had a rather lengthy discussion on
fear in Bible Study on Friday night.
This scripture says that God did not give us the spirit
of fear. Without even talking about what God did not
give us, let's talk about what He did give us. Now let's ask ourselves some questions. Was Adam's physical body whole, healthy and
perfect? What caused sickness
and a lack of physical wholeness to enter the earth.
The answer of course is sin.
With sin came the physical decay of the human body, disease
and the disruption of our earthly environment which all lead to
physical death. Sickness and physical death were introduced
to the world because of sin. However,
wholeness and life are provided by the sacrificial death of Jesus. Now the spirit of man is the part of
man that deals in the spiritual realm. It is the seat of man's
intellect, will, mind, conscience, and other invisible faculties
that make him a free moral agent and a rational being.
God is a spirit being, but He and Adam had fellowship with
one another. In Genesis 2:19:20, God brought all the animals
to Adam to name. They were
there with one another and the naming of all the animals certainly
indicates that Adam was intelligent.
Adam was spiritually whole, but sin brought spiritual separation
between Adam and God. It
brought spiritual death. Sin influenced the mind of man, the will of
mankind and the conscience of man. Now the soul is the seat of man's feelings,
emotions, desires, appetites and passions. If we can believe that God made Adam physically
and spiritually whole can we concede that Adam was emotionally
whole as well? Whatever
emotions Adam had, they had to be good and in perfect harmony
with all that God had put around him.
I John 4:8 says, that God is love.
So if Adam had any emotion, he had love.
Now if sin affected man's physical body; if sin affected
man spiritually, then sin probably affected man emotionally and
mentally also. In fact
man has a gambit of emotions.
All of these we know are not founded in God.
Some of them are but not all of them.
Sin has perverted some of our God given emotions and has
caused great emotional and mental confusion in mankind.
God made man perfect, but Satan by introducing
man to sin, has caused man to fall from that perfect state. Rom. II Tim. 1:7 said that God did not give
us the spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound
mind. God did not give us fear, He gave us love.
The fear that we experience is a perversion of a natural
God even emotion just as hatred is a perversion of love. What's the bottom line? The bottom line is that we who are born of the
seed of Adam have an emotion called fear.
Did God give it to us? No. Now
we need to talk about that word fear.
There
are several Greek and Hebrew words that were translated as fear. Hebrew
- yird and Greek - phobos - which is holy fear, the awe and respect
for the majesty and holiness of God, a Godly reverence.
The fear of God is a reverential fear, not a mere fear
of His power and righteous retribution, but a wholesome dread
of displeasing Him. As a child I reverenced my mom out of fear.
I loved her and wanted her to be pleased with me, but I
obeyed her more out of fear than out of love. But I John Greek
- Deilia - which is translated fearfulness.
This is the word that is used in 2 Tim. 1:7. This word denotes cowardice and timidity and
is never used in a good sense.
The adjective form of this word is also used in Matt. 8:26,
Mark 4:40, and Rev.21:8. Rev.
21:8 - the cowardly, those who claim to know Jesus but will not
stand for Him in the face of persecution, or who back down from
the challenges of being a Christian, will have their part in the
lake of fire. The
deilia form of fear tends to either immobilize or seriously affect
ones actions. I
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