God's Name is to be Feared
I believe we all want to be respected by other people. We desire for them to associate goodness and righteousness with our name. Then, because we want to be respected by others, we don't want them to try to pull a fast one on us and try to deceive us in some way. However, this tends to happen quite a bit when we are doing business with others, even with some people we know. I am afraid this happens to God all of the time, too.
The prophet Malachi found a lot of ways that God's people were not treating God well, and He called them out on those things. (Malachi 1:14) He told them that a deceiver would be cursed by God for taking a vow, having a good male from his flock, but then bringing to the Lord a blemished animal instead. God is a great King, and He doesn't deserve to be treated like that. His name.is to be feared among the nations of people around the world. There is a great lesson here for all of us, as believers.
We are all supposed to respect God as our great King. We should never try to deceive Him by telling Him one thing and doing another. Of course, He sees right though these things when we try to pull one over on Him, but we still do it sometimes. We act like we are giving a tithe of our income, but we are not giving a full 10%. We sing our praises to the Lord, but we are not really giving Him praise from our heart, just our lips. These things are very disrespectful to God. It shows we are not really fearing His great name.
If we don't fear His name and treat God with honesty and respect, who will? Surely the unbelievers will not decide to fear the Lord unless they see it in us, and they are impressed by how are are honest with God and give Him heart-felt praise and worship. Therefore, when we don't fear the name of the Lord as we should, we are a great stumbling block to the unbelievers around us. We could be the one who gives them a reason not to trust the Lord, and that could cause them to miss eternal life. Let's make sure we don't find ourselves guilty of that.
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Tomorrow, I intend to read Malachi 2-4.