Revering God (with Thaddeus Williams)

Why is it often difficult to find pleasure and joy in God? If the chief end of man is to know and enjoy God, why do so many of us fall short? In this episode, Sean and Scott talk with Biola professor Thaddeus Williams about these questions and his new book Revering God. Dr. Williams argues that a deep-dive into the theological understanding of the reverence of God can transform our relationship with God and allow us to live in awe-inspired devotion. 

Thaddeus J. Williams (Ph.D., Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam) loves enlarging students’ understanding and enjoyment of Jesus at Biola University in La Mirada, CA, where he serves as associate professor of Systematic Theology for Talbot School of Theology. He has also taught Philosophy and Literature at Saddleback College, Jurisprudence at Trinity Law School, and as a lecturer in Worldview Studies at L’Abri Fellowships in Switzerland and Holland, and Ethics for Blackstone Legal Fellowship the Federalist Society in Washington D.C. He resides in Orange County, CA with his wife and four kids. 

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Transcript

Sean: At the deepest level, what is the chief end of man? According to our guest today, in line with the Christian tradition, it is to know and glorify God. Yet, for many people, including Christians, God remains a vague, wispy, kind of, supersized projection of ourselves in the sky, or just an impossible-to-please killjoy. How can we find joy in knowing God, when our view of Him is often so inadequate? Our guest today, Talbot professor Dr. Thaddeus Williams, has written an excellent new book called Revering God. And by the way, he is a guest fill-in on the weekly Cultural Update. The goal of this is to talk about, how do we have a robust biblical view of God so we can glorify Him appropriately? Thaddeus, good to have you on, brother. 

Thaddeus: It's a joy to be back. 

Sean: Let's just jump right in. Your last two books dealt with issues like biblical justice and the mantra we hear in our culture, such as following your heart. Those are kind of timely cultural issues. But when I got a copy of this, I was like, "Wow, this is a timeless kind of book.” Why the shift, and what makes this book, Revering God, so unique? 

Thaddeus: Sure, great question. I think a big part of it is, you know, spending four years researching and writing about social justice and all the controversies tied up in that word combo. And then, Don’t Follow Your Heart, writing about expressive individualism and the shape that takes in the culture. I just have this nagging sense there's something underneath all of the issues that are piping through our news feeds. So it sent me on a quest, what are the issues behind the issues, behind the issues, behind the issues? 

Sean: One more time. 

Scott: Yeah. 

[laughter]

Thaddeus: And it all comes down to your view on God. Really, that is the first and foremost question. How we think about the supreme being is going to have sort of a trickle-down effect on how we think about whether gender has an intrinsic meaning or purely a subjective meaning. That's going to have a trickle-down effect on whether we think marriage has a telos, a reason, a built-in purpose, or whether it's purely a human construct. So who God is is the question behind the question, behind the question. So that's why this book sort of completes the sentence that I started in the last two. 

Scott: So, let me go behind the question one more time and ask you…the title of the book here is Revering God. You know, revering, reverence, that's not really a term we use all that often in the broader culture today. Even in Christian communities, we don't really talk about revering God. So, tell us, what exactly do you mean by that, and what does that look like? 

Thaddeus: Sure. I think it goes back to the most frequent command, the most frequent, oft-repeated imperative from the Old to the New Testament, which is in Hebrew, "yirah." Yirah is to fear the Lord, to be awestruck at the Lord, to revere the Lord. It occurs over 300 times in the inspired text. And I think it has something to do with some of the exciting things happening in the field of positive psychology, where you see the science is slowly catching up to the Scriptures on this. There's a researcher just up the freeway from me at UCI named Paul Piff. And Paul Piff has found that people in a state of awe…and he uses various, what he calls, elicitors of awe. It might be a panorama of the Grand Canyon. It might be a shot of the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights. He would induce his study subjects to awe and then measure the results. And he found that in a mental state of being awestruck, people were kinder. They were more altruistic. They were more what he calls pro-social, less self-absorbed, less depressed. So some big findings there. And then out of Arizona State, Michelle Shiota is a positive psychologist. She found something staggering, that if you have people read bad articles just riddled with fallacies and falsehoods, then you subject them to awe. You put them in a mental state of awe. And their cognitive faculties actually function at a higher level, and they're quicker to spot bad arguments and see through propaganda. And so you have this ancient biblical command to be awestruck. And again, the science is catching up with it, where we find that the more awestruck we are…it's sort of like, our bodies need oxygen to thrive. Our bodies need nutrients to thrive. Some of our bodies need caffeine to survive. 

[laughter]

Thaddeus: And awe is to the soul what oxygen is to the body. It's how we thrive, flourish, and become most fully human. So when I'm talking about revering God, I'm talking about being utterly awestruck by someone infinitely bigger, better, and more interesting than we are. 

Scott: Now, I don't think I'm that different than the average person in the culture today, but I don't get awestruck all that often. I mean, I don't visit the Aurora Borealis every week. I don't go to the Grand Canyon once a month. I admit I've been awestruck by some of the things I see from time to time. But I wouldn't say being awestruck is a regular experience for me or for the average person in the culture. But you're suggesting here that being awestruck with God should be a part of our everyday experience. So help me make that connection. 

Thaddeus: Sure. I think probably the main source of awe in the history of the Christian tradition, I mean, there is awe and wonder at God's creation. You know, that's biblical, looking at the book of nature and how that speaks to divine creativity. Just yesterday, my family and I were at Animal Kingdom out in Florida, and just looking at these towering giraffes outside our hotel window and looking at these zebras running across a field. There's awe in nature as part of the equation, and the studies show that for folks who are battling depression, anxiety, panic attacks—going on a hike, getting out in God's creation, has a measurable effect in dropping rates of anxiety, depression and panic. But the primary area as Christians is the Scriptures. That's where we go to meet God most intimately. And I think of Psalm 119 here, where the psalmist says things like, "Expand my heart to behold wondrous things," or some translations, "Enlarge my heart to behold wondrous things in your law." Now, the premise of a prayer like that is that the psalmist is going to the law, reading their Torah and feeling kind of, "meh," you know, shrug the shoulders. Okay, that happened. Not particularly awestruck. And so, the psalmist is asking the Author of Torah to enlarge his capacity for wonder, for awe, for reverence. And that is a prayer that is repeated over and over. In Psalm 119, I think I counted like 25 times, some kind of request that recognizes the problem isn't that God somehow isn't awesome in His Word. The problem is the dullness of our hearts. And so, we ask the Spirit to go to work to behold wondrous things in His Word. I think that's the primary area where being awestruck happens. 

Sean: So, this is not a self-help book. This is not like help with your loneliness or anxiety or depression. But what you're saying is, when we shift the focus from ourselves and revere and worship and live in awe towards our Creator, which is what we are made for, surprise, we tend to function better. 

Thaddeus: Absolutely. 

Sean: So that's what I love about this. Now, a minute ago, you mentioned God's Word. You lay out with the word "revere," which is great. You and I teach the same class at Biola, and I've seen your notes. They're all acronyms better than I do. [laughs] So I got this book, I’m like…

Thaddeus: If acronyms are good enough for Psalm 119, it's good enough for me. 

Sean: Fair enough. I'll let that one sit. So when I open up the book, I'm like, "Acronym, no surprise here." You spell out "revere" and the first R stands for “reliable.” So what do you think we've lost today regarding the reliability of God and His Word? 

Thaddeus: Well, let me just give a few sobering facts. This is from a recent study from the Cultural Research Center that found that just 41% of senior pastors, just 28% of associate pastors, 13% of teaching pastors, and a dismal 4% of executive pastors adhere to a basic Christian worldview. And when I say basic Christian worldview, this isn't, you know, what are the nuances of dispensationalism, or are you an infralapsarian or sublapsarian. This isn't like Theology 500. This is like Theology 101. So George Barna, behind the research, said, quote, "From a worldview perspective, a church's most important ministers are the children's pastor and youth pastor." Well, why? Because, says Barna, "A person's worldview primarily develops before the age of 13." Yet, according to the study, a meager 12% of children's and youth pastors consistently uphold basic, Christianity 101 kind of beliefs. So if you've got a room of 100 youth pastors, according to the study, only 12 of them would have basic Christianity. And so, when it's a top-down problem here in a lot of the church leadership—good reason to send future pastors to Biola and Talbot—you have now, in the pews on the other side of that equation, half of evangelicals agreeing with the sentence, "God learns." So, why a book about the attributes of God and how reliable and trustworthy, how truthful God is? Because you have half of evangelicals saying that God learns. 65% believe everyone is born innocent, in which case there's no such thing as depravity, in which case we don't really need much grace to be saved. 43%, according to the same study, said Jesus was a great teacher, but not God. And the lists—you guys have read these studies before—they just get too depressing the more you go into them. But roughly one in four parents of preteens believe in objective moral truth. Only 25% of parents of preteens believe in objective moral truth. Same number, about a quarter, believe in the personal agency of the Holy Spirit, and the same number, a quarter, believe that life is sacred. And so we need to get back to where belief is being formed. Is it just through TikTok, the stream into our consciousness from whatever's happening on Instagram or Facebook? Is it just what our neighbors say? Is it what our feelings say? That's a dominant epistemology, is you feel your way to truth. And so, in the book, when I talk about the reliability of God, I'm saying we need to look to Him and His word first and foremost if we want to get at truth. 

Scott: So with that, let me go to the last letter in your acronym, that the last "E" stands for “enjoyable.” My guess is that the average person in the local church probably doesn't see enjoyment and God in the same sentence very often. So, what do you mean by that? And how can that become more real for people who…I suspect the average person in our churches really struggles with the idea of enjoying God. I think for a lot of folks, their relationship with God is something that they have to work at, and it takes discipline and commitment. And I have a good friend who has his ministry, it's called "Enjoying God Ministries." And I've asked him, I said, "What do you mean by that? How do you nurture that in the people that you minister to?" That's the question. What do you mean by enjoying God, and how do you nurture that? I think for many people in our churches, that's a tough concept to get their arms around. 

Thaddeus: Sure. Let me frame it this way. A few years ago, an article was released rating the most boring universities by state. 

[laughter]

Thaddeus: I thought, "Oh, that's fascinating. I was a professor at Biola University. I'd like to see where we stand." Biola not only won California as the most boring university, but it was second nationally. 

Sean: Oh my goodness. 

Thaddeus: And it was second only to—what was it? 

Sean: Wasn't it Liberty? 

Scott: I thought it was Liberty.

Thaddeus: It was Liberty. Which, I build a case in the book, Biola is 15 minutes from Disneyland, 20 minutes from the Pacific Ocean, 45 minutes depending on traffic from Hollywood and Los Angeles. You go on to TripAdvisor, and you look up Liberty, and the number one place to visit is the cemetery. 

Sean: [laughs]

Thaddeus: So the fact that we got second place is something I tell my students every semester, wear that as a badge of honor. Why? Because if you read the article, the way happiness, the way fun, the way non-boringness is cashed out is in terms of the party scene. So are you getting tanked? Are you getting hammered? Are you getting fershnickered and waking up in a ditch, wondering where your pants are? This is the standard of if you are having a fun college experience. And Biola proudly ranks at the very, very bottom of that list. And so, I'll explain this to students with a little help from C.S. Lewis, who famously said in his essay The Weight of Glory that we fool about with sex and ambition and alcohol when all the while, infinite joy is being offered to us. Lewis goes on to say, you know, we're like a little kid splashing around in the mud, making mud pies, because we can't even fathom the offer of a holiday at sea. And he concludes by saying we're far too easily pleased. So, when I talk about the enjoyment of God, you know, Piper famously framed this as Christian hedonism with his book Desiring God, a version of Christian hedonism that, you know, if you want to get technical, hedonism is a theory of value that pleasure is the only good. That's not the way Piper's using the term, but he's using it in the sense that God is the highest pleasure to which we can attain. And as he famously puts it, God is most glorified in us when we're most satisfied in Him. And so, Scott, to your question, how do we access that? I think part of it is recalibrating our definition of what it means to be happy. We operate, ever since the Enlightenment, with a highly subjectivized understanding. Happiness is when I feel the buzz. It's when I'm getting a dopamine rush. It's when these certain neurons are firing and I'm getting, you know, oxytocin, and I feel in that moment some kind of buzz. And biblical happiness is just so much more rich and variegated and expansive than that. Where it's possible, think of Paul's commands in Philippians—not a suggestion, a command: "Rejoice in the Lord always. And again, I say, ‘Rejoice.’" Well, this is a Paul who's been beaten within inches of his life more than once, right? He's been lashed, he's been whipped, he's been imprisoned, he's been left for dead, he's been shipwrecked. And he's describing this kind of happiness that is not contingent on c-fibers firing in my amygdala and sending a pleasure message. There's something deep about your enjoyment in God that makes it compatible with heartache, because you know there's meaning in the pain. There's something deep about Christian joy that makes it compatible with frustration, with feeling…I have a whole couple chapters in the book about God hiding, that even when God's hiding from us, that is compatible with deep Christian joy. So I would start there, recalibrating what is our expectation. And if we're shooting for the modern enlightenment concept of a subjective buzz, then we're going to be chronically frustrated that God isn't delivering those buzzes the way he used to in the honeymoon days of faith. 

Sean: Radio talk show host, Jewish Dennis Prager has a formula that's H = NF. H is happiness, N is the number, and F is fun experiences. And happiness equates to the number of fun experiences that you have. And he says, more in a Judeo-Christian way, what if we thought about contentment and meaning and purpose, and, like you say, revering something bigger than ourselves, living for something bigger than ourselves? I would love a study of universities: which students are most content and have a deeper sense of meaning? I think Biola would win that one, or be awfully close, for good reasons.

Thaddeus: Agreed.

Sean: But with that said, one more letter from your acronym, by the way, the V is victorious. I thought that's interesting, because we're so often told today that Christians are on the wrong side of history, that we've lost the culture war, whatever that means. We've lost America. We're on the wrong moral side. Like we're consistently told this from our culture, which can feel defeating in different ways. But you say we're victorious. What do you mean by that? And why highlight that truth in a book about revering God? 

Thaddeus: Sure. So the center of those chapters is really the absolute sovereignty of God. God is enthroned over the universe. He's in charge. He's never caught off guard. He's never taken by surprise. And when that consistent biblical truth clicks for us, you know…think of Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel surveying all of his land and all of his kingdom. And he's feeling pretty hefty, pretty powerful. And he is living under the illusion of his own sovereignty, his own autonomy, his own kingship. And then, you know, he goes bonkers for a little while. And then by Daniel 4, you get his admission that God is the capital “K” King of the universe. No one can stop His hand or say to Him, what have you done? His dominion is an everlasting dominion. These passages pop up all over the text in Ephesians 1. The longest run-on sentence in the Bible, Ephesians 1:3-10. God works all things according to the counsel of His will. And so my point when I talk about being victorious, God being victorious, is that it gives us, sort of, this Romans 8 sense of God working all things together for His glory and for our good. And what that does, Sean, is it helps with our catastrophic thinking. One of the most common issues I deal with with students during office hours is catastrophic thinking. This is going to happen. It's going to be the worst. And the sky is falling, and the sort of Chicken Little complex that the sky is always falling, and a lot of doom and gloom. And I remember, almost 10 years ago now, when the Windsor case and the Obergefell case came down from the Supreme Court, legalizing same-sex marriage. At that time, I was traveling the country doing a lot of speaking. I traveled to more than a dozen churches speckled across the country. And I will say that the primary vibe at these churches was catastrophic. It was panic. This is it. The church's days are numbered. They're coming for us. This is the end. It was very apocalyptic, very pessimistic, very hopeless. And so my message to these churches around the country very much is the message of the victorious chapter. It's like, look, through the death of Jesus and His resurrection, He defeated, in an ultimate sense, the forces of darkness, the forces of the present age, the forces of mayhem and depravity and chaos. We are living in that resurrection truth towards the dawning of the age to come. And in those chapters, I walked through Acts 4 where you had a legal ruling, but far worse than Obergefell and Windsor. It was a ruling from the Jerusalem powers that be: shut up about Jesus, or we will shut you up. And this is a credible death threat, because Luke, who's writing Acts, is careful to name the same actors who got Jesus executed. And so, Peter and John are released. They get this legal ruling. We’ve got this gag order. We’ve got to shut up about Jesus, this ultimatum, these death threats. And what does the church do in Acts 4? They get together and they pray. And the first word of their prayer is “despotes.” It's where we get “despot” from in English, which means like a ruler of unchallengeable authority and power. A good translation would be “sovereign Lord.” I think that's the way the ESV renders it. Sovereign Lord. And they go on to start theologically before they even get to what they're freaking out about. So, sovereign Lord, you made the heavens and the earth and everything in that. Then they quote from Psalm 2. It is a theologically charged prayer that is featuring the attributes of God, the sovereignty of God, the supremacy of God over the entire universe to remind themselves that just as Jesus was crucified, and where was God on that day? Their prayer answers, right where He's always been—on the throne. And then they're saying, where is God now that we've got these death threats? Oh, that's right. Right where He's always been—on the throne. So that's one of the ways to really gauge where the contemporary church is at with the bigness of God, with the God worth revering, is how much do we let fear and doom and gloom and catastrophic thinking about politics…this person wins. It's the end, and this war, and everything. If we have that sky-is-falling-down fear, I would argue that's incompatible with a deep biblical understanding of, just, how good and how sovereign God is. 

Sean: So Thad, one last question for you. Towards the end of the book, you really lay out, how do we grow in our reverence for God? So I don't want to steal the thunder of your book, of course, but give us maybe one or at most two practical things for people who say, okay, I got it. I need to develop in my reverence for God amidst my busyness and faulty thinking. What does it look like to do that more strategically, biblically, and thoughtfully? 

Thaddeus: Sure. So in the book, at the end of every section, I list, probably from the front to the back cover, close to 50 really down to earth suggestions that people could dig into, stuff you could do today. And it's really designed to help people. You could read the book. There's 30 chapters. You can read through it in a month, apply some of the practical advice there to bridge your head, all the heady theology, with your heart and then ultimately with your hands, so you're living it. The goal of good theology isn't just to be believed but lived. So let me give just one or two briefly. Something that is very powerful, just in the way God structured the universe, is song, is melody, music, and harmony. And so a couple weeks ago, I was at a Pearl Jam concert. Pearl Jam was playing the LA Forum. And I'm looking around, and it's a worship experience for most of these people. They have their palms outstretched to the sky. They're singing "Jer-e-my spo-o-o-ke in" with their hands raised up, surrounded by people belting at the top of their lungs. And it got people swept up into a sense of awe. Unfortunately, not worshiping the actual God. I think congregational worship is a huge and essential component to forming rhythms and liturgies, themes, and a calendar in our lives, so that awe is built in. And I think singing congregationally is huge. And if I get very practical with this, if I had a word of advice on congregational singing, it would be to the sound engineers and churches around the country, turn it down. Maybe this is the old man in me, like the curmudgeonly guy in his 40s. But the power of corporate worship is that I can hear my wife exalting God next to me. And I can hear Joe the plumber sitting in front of me. Whether he's on key or not, he's exalting God out loud, affirming the same truths about God. And I can hear the little kid behind me singing off-key and glorifying God with everything she's got. There's power to hearing the congregation, not just hearing a face-melting guitar solo and a wall of sound. So I'd say that's number one, corporate worship is important. And number two, I'm just going to land where we started, just getting into the Word. There's a study that I cite in the opening of the book that people who read their Bibles once a week have no measurable difference, no positive outcomes relative to those who never read their Bibles. People who read their Bible twice a week, no measurable positive outcomes. Three times a week, you start to see a few little areas beginning to peak. But for some reason, it seems like at four, when people read their Bible four times, four times plus, then the study showed people become less lonely. They become less angry. They become less addicted to alcohol or pornography. They become less spiritually stagnant. They become more evangelistic. They become better disciples. So I would say if you want to tap into some of this reverence, try to push past that four threshold and see the difference. That doesn't mean you have to sit for an hour four times a week. It's just reading the Bible at all for four times a week, and the research is showing that's where you start to see big payoffs. 

Sean: You know, Thad, you and I went to undergrad together at Biola, and then grad school at Talbot at the same time. 

Thaddeus: Yeah. Class of 1972. 

Sean: [laughs] Yeah, whatever. I mention that because earlier in the interview, Scott had mentioned that he's not often awestruck. And maybe that's because he listens to 60s and 70s music rather than 80s and 90s Pearl Jam. Could be at the root of it, but I digress. 

Scott: The Beatles and [The Rolling] Stones, they're the epitome of music. 

Sean: [laughs] Love it. 

Thaddeus: [laughs]

Sean: Hey, with that said, your book does such a good job of just saying, who is God? What are we made for? And we see hints of that in a Pearl Jam concert. We want corporate identity. We want a transcendent experience. But how much more powerful can that be if it's rooted in the one true God with brothers and sisters in Christ? This is a whole other conversation, but sometimes I'll take my students and I'll give them pop Christian songs that we sing that are very, like, anthropocentric, human-centric, and then theocentric songs about God's character, and how so much of our worship is about how we feel, and our experience and our journey. And I was in a church in Israel, maybe four or five years ago. And we were in a church near Bethesda, and about 20 of us held hands and sang, "We Exalt You," and I just spontaneously broke out in tears and was moved by that experience. Part of what you're saying is, we've lost that, and we need to get back to it. Love your book. 

Thaddeus: So, real quick—if I could just interject really quickly. My very first semester as a full-time professor at Biola, I participated in an interterm session that teamed up professors from across the university. So I was on a team with a psychology professor, an art professor, and we just gave students sort of this crash course in thinking biblically about everything. And so, we would watch Christopher Nolan's Batman movie, and we'd analyze it from different angles in the Christian worldview. The final night, we were in Calvary Chapel on campus, and everybody stood up, linked hands, and we sang the benediction. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” And in the context of thinking biblically about all these diverse spheres of knowing, all these diverse spheres of being human, and then tangibly incarnating with our voices this awe and reverence for the God who's supreme over all of it. I was just like you, man. I was crying like a baby, truly awestruck at the size and supremacy of God. So we need more of that. 

Sean: Amen to that. I hope your book Revering God becomes a classic like Knowing God and others. I think it is timely, but I also think it's timeless. Always good to have you on, my friend. Hope people will pick up a copy of Revering God, and we'll have you back on soon. Thanks for joining us.

Thaddeus: Hey, it's a pleasure. 

Sean: This has been an episode of the podcast Think Biblically: Conversations on Faith and Culture. The Think Biblically podcast is brought to you by Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. We have programs online and in person in spiritual formation, Christian apologetics, marriage and family, and more. We’d love to have you join us. Please send in your comments or ask questions to us, which we are now answering, as many as we can, in our weekly Cultural Update. You can email us at thinkbiblically@biola.edu. Please consider giving us a rating on your podcast app. Quite literally every rating just helps grow the podcast and train more people to think biblically. We appreciate you listening, and we will see you this Friday for our weekly Cultural Update. In the meantime, remember to think biblically about everything.