The Function of Fear

#3: Divine Burning

He will shake heaven and earth, that only the unshakable may remain: He is a consuming fire, that only that which cannot be consumed may stand forth eternal. It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it destroys all that is not pure as fire, which demands like purity in our worship. He will have purity. It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; yea, will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to its force, no longer with pain and consuming, but as the highest consciousness of life, the presence of God.

#5: The Unawakened

Can it be any comfort to them to be told that God loves them so that He will burn them clean? … They do not want to be clean, and they cannot bear to be tortured.

#6: Sinai

And is not God ready to do unto them even as they fear, though with another feeling and a different end from any which they are capable of supposing? He is against sin: insofar as, and while, they and sin are one, He is against them—against their desires, their aims, their fears, and their hopes; and thus He is altogether and always for them. That thunder and lightning and tempest, that blackness torn with the sound of a trumpet, that visible horror billowed with the voice of words, was all but a faint image … of what God thinks and feels against vileness and selfishness, of the unrest of unassuageable repulsion with which He regards such conditions.

#7: No

When we say that God is Love, do we teach men that their fear of Him is groundless? No. As much as they fear will come upon them, possibly far more…. The wrath will consume what they call themselves; so that the selves God made shall appear.

#137: Perseverance

To believe in the wide-awake real, through all the stupefying, enervating, distorting dream: to will to wake, when the very being seems athirst for Godless repose:—these are the broken steps up to the high fields where repose is but a form of strength, strength but a form of joy, joy but a form of love.

#142: The Beginning of Wisdom

Naturally the first emotion of man toward the being he calls God, but of whom he knows so little, is fear. Where it is possible that fear should exist, it is well it should exist, cause continual uneasiness, and be cast out by nothing less than love…. Until love, which is the truth toward God, is able to cast out far, it is well that fear should hold; it is a bond, however poor, between that which is and That which creates—a bond that must be broken, but a bond that can be broken only by the tightening of an infinitely close bond. Verily God must be terrible to those that are far from Him: for they fear He will do, yea, He is doing with them what they do not, cannot desire, and can ill endure.

#143: “Peace in Our Time”

While they are such as they are, there is much in Him that cannot but affright them: they ought, they do well, to fear, Him…. To remove that fear from their hearts, save by letting them know His love with its purifying fire, a love which for ages, it may be, they cannot know, would be to give them up utterly to the power of evil. Persuade men that fear is a vile thing, that it is an insult to God, that He will none of it—while they are yet in love with their own will, and slaves to every movement of passionate impulse, and what will the consequence be? That they will insult God as a discarded idol, a superstition, a falsehood, as a thing under whose vile influence they have too long groaned, a thing to be cast out and spit upon. After that how much will they learn of Him?

#349: Fear

Until a man has love, it is well he should have fear. So long as there are wild beasts about, it is better to be afraid than secure.

From C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology – 365 Readings (New York: Harper Collins, 2001). Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.