In many ways, a biblical fear of the Lord is largely absent from churches and societies today. We’ve lost a sense of God’s awesome power and glory. Many people think that we can worship God in a manner of our choosing—it doesn’t matter what we sing or what our liturgy looks like. The idea that we must consecrate or prepare ourselves to meet with the Lord seems legalistic and unnecessary. When it comes to God’s commandments, well, then he is more like a friend who advises us than our Master who commands. He’s someone we can choose to listen to or ignore as we see fit. Almost as if our relationship with God is one of equals, a relationships that we can manipulate and control for our purposes.

Perhaps as Christians we’ve grown so used to the good news of the gospel and an emphasis on the love and mercy of God, that there’s a real danger that we’ve reduced God to a size where we don’t really need to worry about him. We can sin and do as we like, and he will forgive us (at least, that’s how we easily think). As a challenge to such thinking, Old Testament passages such as Joshua 3—4 remind us that the Lord is the living God. He is not someone to be trifled with. He is not an idea or the figment of Israelite imagination. He is worthy of our worship. He is to be feared.