Terrified By God

Look!  The Lord is coming from his dwelling place; he comes down and treads the high places of the earth.  The mountains melt beneath him and the valleys split apart, like wax before the fire, like water rushing down a slope.  Micah 1:3-4

Jewish prophets were adept and colorful in describing the enveloping hugeness, the terrifying power of the God of the universe.  When God comes the earth explodes, splits, melts, and liquefies. The things we think of as huge and immovable--mountains, for example--melt beneath God. God is like a consuming fire, like an overwhelming flood, like a bone-rattling earthquake.

When I picture what the prophets describe as the coming of God, I feel for a moment the terror I felt when I was a tiny girl and saw my dad coming my way with "that look" on his face. The steely-stern look said I was in some kind of trouble, but since I was a child new to the world, I didn't know what would happen. Fear welled up and overtook my whole body. How is it that God can so terrify us (and that we in turn can so terrify our children)?

Is it a good thing to be terrified by God? Can we truly love someone who frightens us?

I grew up in a country where people were at times terrified by the spirits, but they also considered themselves clever and able to trick the spirits. It was an odd mix of powerlessness and game-playing. In the writings of the Hebrew prophets I don't see this paradox. God stays constant and is not a trickster, nor can we pull a fast one on Him.

So, what does it mean to have a God so huge, so powerful, so overwhelming that the very elements would be overcome by his coming?  And how do we reconcile these pictures with the friendly, harmless and toothless God that our current society likes to imagine?