PERSUASIVE FEAR

Fear is highly persuasive as long as we can see an effective solution. Fear boomerangs when fright outweighs the credibility of the solution. Healthy fear sees God as the holy solution. The "fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," the psalmist wrote (Psalm 111:10, cf. Prov. 1:7). Paul, too, knew the fear that moves our minds to know God and our wills to serve Him. "Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men, but we are revealed to God" (2 Corinthians 5:11).

"Therefore" (οὖν) points us back to verse 10 where Paul spoke of standing before the Judgment Seat of Christ to give an account of his life. We will stand exposed, stripped naked, before the eyes of Jesus on that day. Our thoughts, actions, and motives will be revealed to us by the one who loves us more than anyone. We will know and be known. The fear of His piercing vision drives us to serve Him. The fear (τὸν φόβον) is not the terror of damnation but the reverence of love (BAGD, p.864). We will not go to hell because of His grace, but we will face His judgment because of His holiness. We fear the Lord (τοῦ κυρίου). This is an objective genitive (Robertson, Grammar, p.500). The person of Christ is the focus of our fear.

"Knowing" (Εἰδότες) the fear of facing Jesus we persuade men. The perfect participle is used of completed action that results in a state of existence contemporaneous with the time of the main verb (Burton, Moods and Tenses, p.71). The main verb, to persuade (πείθομεν), is in the present tense, so the state of our knowing is now. We know the fear of the Lord because we have been made known to God. The perfect passive verb (πεφανερώμεθα) means to be revealed or made visible (BAGD, p.852). Already exposed before God, we know the fear of final exposure which drives us to persuade others.

The verb translated "persuade" means to convince or appeal to others (BAGD, p.639). It is a conative present. The persuasion is incomplete. A conative present emphasizes the attempt while leaving the result unknown (MHT, Grammar, 3:63). Living with the knowledge that God will judge us for how we invest our lives, we try to persuade men. We make every attempt to appeal to people. We constantly seek to convince people.

What do we try to persuade others about? What is the objective of our persuasion? Paul leaves the objective unspoken. There are at least a half-dozen options that interpreters have proposed over the years (Meyer, 2 Corinthians, p.523).  Perhaps the most popular interpretation is evangelistic. We are trying to persuade others to become followers of Christ - to become Christians. However, the context is not evangelistic making an evangelistic emphasis suspect. The better understanding is to see the persuasion in terms of Paul's own motivation expressed in verse 9 (Meyer, 2 Corinthians, p.524). Our ambition is to please God, a form of fear, so we seek to persuade others to fear God, and so to please Him.

Motivated by the fear of the Lord we persuade others to fear the Lord.