Fear God and give Him glory

saying with a loud voice, "Fear God and give glory to Him, for the hour of His judgment has come; and worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and springs of water." – Revelation 14v7

When you read the accounts of judgement in Revelation it is a scary thought. The whole earth is literally coming apart. Billions are dying, the ecology is breaking down, and mankind are just getting worse and worse. Those things can certainly bring about thoughts of fear and dread.

The angel with the gospel redirects our focus – ‘Fear God and give glory to Him.’ It seems to me like the angel is saying, ‘You think this is bad? Don’t worry about all this, instead you need to fear God because His justice is about to really be poured out. The only solution is not to worry about all this mess, but just turn to God and glorify Him.’

Man’s tendency is to look at the symptoms instead of the cause. We tend to think that a plaster and a tablet will sort out almost any problem. We don’t really want to get to the root of the problem.

The same thing is true when it comes to spiritual matters. When circumstances get bad we seem to want to fix the circumstances instead of the problem. Instead of this the angel tells us that we should be focused on making things right with God, getting to the root of the problem.

More often than not we have to the problems that we have because we forget to fear God and then glorify and worship Him.

We may not face any less challenges and trials if we learned to fear God and give Him glory in every situation, but our perspective on them would change dramatically.