Lifting the Veil
The Hebrew word yirah mentioned 44 times in the Old Testament means both “to fear” and “to see.” The essential choice of life is to open our eyes to available opportunities, and to fear the consequences of avoiding that reality. “To see or not to see?” – that is the question. The single most important goal in life is to have clarity in our relationship with God, to live in reality. Be afraid of waking up one morning and saying to yourself: “What did I do with my life?” When a human being experiences yirah, that experience directly awakens a spiritual consciousness just as an alarm clock awakens a sleeping person. Compared to the moments of yirah, we may, indeed, be asleep much of our lives. When overtaken by yirah, we experience a tremendous spiritual reality that is ordinarily hidden from us. Yirah gives us a direct experience of the Transcendent in that very moment, pointing our hearts directly to God. The world of things we perceive is but a veil, but when it is lifted at times we express wow. It was Albert Einstein who said ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.’ The Psalmist got there before Einstein when saying “I place God before me always.” Psalm 16:8. Invite someone to take a closer look at Christ and his church.