Psalm 2:11
the more you know
Serve ye the Lord with fear: and rejoice unto him with trembling. (Psalm 2:11 DR)
We are all familiar with the expression familiarity breeds contempt, which idiomatically means that the more used we get to something, the less importance or respect we afford it. But sometimes the idioms we use are not exactly understood, for while we recognize the truth of the statement, we rarely ask why that is the case.
For why should something become less important to us the more familiar it is, or why should we treat something with less respect the more we know about it?
Part of it is simple sloth, in that it takes effort to continually treat something or someone with due honor, and we are wont to seek the path of least resistance. We often ask what is the least amount of effort I can give to achieve X or Y?
Another part is that we tend to treat commonalities in a common way; that is, with casualness and flippancy. The way you might behave around close family members in your home is generally different than you would with strangers in a public place.
And to be sure, there is a certain manner in which formality and its trappings have a time and place. The more distance there is relationally, whether in terms of familial relations or class or whatnot, the more formality and outward decorum is usually called for and appropriate. To treat a business client in the same manner as you would a sibling would be weird and off-putting.
But by the same token the closer we get to someone generally the less formality there is in the relationship. The way I acted and spoke to my wife while we were courting was in many respects markedly different than how I act and speak to her now that we are married. The familiarity that we now have means that I cannot maintain a relational aloofness that would be appropriate in relationships with greater distance.
But the flipside to great relational familiarity is a concomitant increase in duties. This is true in every relationship in that the closer you become the more obligations you have towards the one you are familiar with. Thus while I am most familiar with my wife, I also have the greatest duties and obligations to her, and as a corollary am required to give her the greatest respect.
It is the neglecting of the attendant duties which come with relational nearness that gives rise to the contempt engendered by familiarity. For in our fallen nature we want the goods of something without the effort of obtaining them in a virtuous way. Thus in our relationships we want to have the closeness and familiarity with others and the goods those bring without the obligations attendant upon that relational nearness.
We even do this with God, especially in our current era. We desire for Him to be loving and good and to give us all the goodies we want, but we want that closeness without the sacrifice of our desires, which is what is actually required for us to be close to God, for he is (as the scriptures say) a consuming fire which will burn away the dross of our lives as we draw near to Him.
There thus is created this strange and disordered religious current in which we treat God with outrageous contempt by means of this familiarity. We want all the “good” parts of God, so to speak, like love, compassion, etc., but without the "“bad” things like judgment, sin, sacrifice, etc. We behave like God’s people in the desert:
And they remembered that God was their helper: and the most high God their redeemer. And they loved him with their mouth: and with their tongue they lied unto him: But their heart was not right with him: nor were they counted faithful in his covenant. (Psalm 77:35-37 DR)
The Psalmist speaks thus to the rulers of the world to serve God with fear, and to rejoice with trembling. The expansion portion of the parallelism can seem odd; what does it mean to rejoice with trembling? Aren’t those two opposite things? St. Augustine expounds the seeming dichotomy:
Very excellently is “rejoice” added, lest “serve the Lord with fear” should seem to tend to misery. But again, lest this same rejoicing should run on to unrestrained inconsiderateness, there is added “with trembling,” that it might avail for a warning, and for the careful guarding of holiness… And this is expedient for you, that you lord it not with rashness, but that you “serve the Lord” of all “with fear,” and “rejoice” in bliss most sure and most pure, with all caution and carefulness, lest you fall therefrom into pride. (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 2, 9.)
As we draw nearer to God, there is thus a double-sided movement in our hearts. As we come to know God and become more familiar with Him there is a greater intimacy, as it were; we are given the mind of Christ (cf. 1 Corinthians 2:16) and come to see the world more and more as God does; our minds are transformed so that we know more and more God’s perfect will (cf. Romans 12:2). In this we come to cry—by the Holy Ghost within us—“Abba (Father)” (cf. Romans 8:15) as adopted sons.
But on the flipside as we come to know God more we become more and more aware of our own infirmities. We are freed from sin not so that we can live as we please, but so that we can be slaves to righteousness rather than slaves to sin (cf. Romans 6:18). God’s greatness and glory looms ever larger the closer we draw to Him, and the honor and love and gratitude which we owe to Him increases as the grace we receive increases (cf. Luke 7:47).
I found this great background and really liked the colors, so I decided to make something with it. I found a fun font and precomped it and then applied the Motion Tile effect to it so that I could space it evenly and animate the position more easily. I duplicated and reversed it and then drew a matte in the middle so that the text would be revealed in the box as it passed through on either side.
Simple stuff, but fun.
Enjoy.
Serve ye the Lord with fear: and rejoice unto him with trembling.
(Psalm 2:11 DR)
View a higher quality version of this gif here: