Does God Scare You?

"Does God scare you?"

There we were, at breakfast on Saturday morning this week:  Chuck, Curt B, Isaac, Jim, and Bobby.  That's when Bobby pulled out this question:  "does God scare you?"

In the slurry that we mixed together in the next ten minutes, we tossed in God's love, his justice, and his holiness.  Why is it that justice and holiness seem to win out so easily, outweighing love, when we contemplate such questions?  Although this isn't quite true, we all seemed to be afraid to say "God doesn't scare me." 

I sat there quietly, thinking about the question but answering it in my mind in a different way altogether.  I answered the question with another question:  "what does scare me?"

After thinking about it for 36 hours or so, here's my reply:

Does God scare me?

No.
How could he? 
Why would he?

The only confusion I have on this point stems from the dividing line that separates "scare" from "awe."

It is impossible to think deeply about the Holy One without wonder and awe, without what Isaiah expressed when he saw the Lord in the year King Uzziah died: "Woe is me, for I am ruined."  Undone.  Incapable of staying composed in the presence of this Other One.

And this is a logical conclusion.  Consider this lengthy, but worthy, excerpt from one of Gerald Schroeder's books:

Science posits that the big bang was the beginning of time and space.  But what about matter?  That is considerably more enlightening, literally.  The big bang did not produce matter as we know it, not any of the ninety-two elements, such as carbon and oxygen, and not the protons, neutrons, or electrons that would eventually combine to make the atoms of those elements.

By a fraction of a microsecond following the creation, the primary material product of the big bang was concentrated as exquisitely intense energy.  There are many types of energy, but the form most manifest microseconds after the creation was electromagnetic radiation -- in simplistic terms, something akin to superpowerful light beams.

 Then, within the first few moments following the creation, as the universe raced outward, stretching space, a transition took place . . . as energy condensed into the form of matter, [a transition the basis for which was discovered by Albert Einstein and codified in that famous equation E = mc squared].

 A minute fraction of those light beams of energy metamorphosed and became the lightest of elements, primarily the gases hydrogen and helium.  Over eons of time, mutual gravitational forces pulled those primordial gases into galaxies of stars.  The immense pressures within the stellar cores crushed the nuclei of hydrogen together, fusing them to form heavier elements and, in doing so, releasing the vast amounts of energy we see as starlight.  These forces of fusion coupled with those of stellar explosions, supernovae, yielded the ninety-two elements that eventually on planet earth would form building blocks of beings that became alive and sentient. 

All this was made from the lightlike energy of the creation.  Now that is a cause for wonder.

Light beams became alive, and became not only alive, but self-aware, and acquired the ability to wonder.  The wonder is not whether this genesis took six days or fourteen billion years or even eternity.  The wonder is that it happened.

Every physical object in this vast universe, including our human bodies, is built on the light of creation.

To elucidate the awesome and humbling implications of this incredible transition of light into life, consider the following better understood transition.  In one hand, I hold a clear glass jar containing the gas oxygen.  In my other hand, I hold a jar of hydrogen gas.  I study the chemistry of these two gases and discover that, under the correct conditions, they can combine to make water.  Water neither looks nor acts like oxygen and hydrogen, but it is made up of them.  When we drink water, we are drinking hydrogen and oxygen in a very special combination.  

In parallel, we humans and all the matter we see about us may not look like the condensed energy of the big-bang creation, but we are.  Einstein's famous equation does not mean that the energy disappears and matter takes its place.  No, not at all.  What that equation states is that energy can change form and take on the characteristics of matter, just as the hydrogen and oxygen remain hydrogen and oxygen even as they change form when they combine to form water.

We are made of the light creation, and no scientist will argue against this.  It's not New Age talk or wishful thinking.  It's established scientific reality.  We, our bodies, were part of that creation.

Awe and wonder are logical reactions.  Coming undone is understandable.  But the word "scare" -- as in "scared of" or "afraid of" -- doesn't work well for me in this context.  To the extent that I believe that creation happened as described previously and that God was the force behind all that, I can't seem to be scared by the One who did all of that and made me possible, viable, and sentient.

So God doesn't scare me, I guess you could say.  But I think I can answer the question even more comprehensively by answering the question that I raised at the outset:  what does scare me?

Failure scares me.
Suffering scares me.
Uncertainty scares me.
Terrorism scares me.
Illness scares me.
Loneliness scares me.

Lightning scares me.

Snakes scare me.  

Work scares me sometimes, when I fret about what's next. 

But most of all, I scare me --

When I obsessively and compulsively question my relevance,

When I feel the need to defend my every action,

When my insecurities rise up to choke out joy,

When I worry that the new contact doesn't like me,

When I question whether my closest friends love me,

When I curse myself out in front of the mirror, 

as I rue and regret my inability to be perfect any single day,

When I cause pain in the life of another,

When I cannot enter into another's pain,

When I want to listen but I can't stop talking,

When I look for another person to blame,

When I can't shake regret over how much I've failed, 

When I can't figure out how to be compassionate,

When I think (and say) I told you so,

When I think I'm better than anyone,

When I point out another's failures,

and I'm glad because I look better,

When I don't have any answers, and 

When I think I have all the answers.

No, God doesn't scare me.  He loves me.  But I scare me.

Wretched man that I am!  Who will deliver me from this body of death? 

Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

P.S.  Gerald Schroeder received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. In nuclear physics and planetary sciences from MIT, the latest of which he earned in 1965.  He worked five years on the staff of the MIT physics department and has been a member of the United States Atomic Energy Commission.  In 2012, he was awarded the Trotter Prize by Texas A&M University's College of Science.  An Orthodox Jew, he lives in Jerusalem and has served as professor at well-regarded universities and is well-published and esteemed.