In plenty of weeknight Bible studies, someone reads Proverbs 9:10 aloud, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,” and a woman at the end of the table asks, “So we’re supposed to be scared of God?” Only in one sense. The fear that makes you hide from him is the one the Bible sends away. The fear it asks for is taking God seriously enough that it changes what you do next.
Respect, the answer people usually reach for, is part of it. Where the Bible defines the fear of the Lord, it asks for more than respect, and for something other than the terror that hides.
So are we supposed to be scared of God?
Proverbs 8 is spoken by Wisdom herself, crying out at the gates of the city, and at verse 13 she gives a definition and then her own list.
The fear of the LORD is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate.
Proverbs 8:13 (KJV)
Wisdom gives the definition before the list, and its key word is hate, aimed at evil. The same book says it again in plainer clothes: “fear the LORD, and depart from evil” at 3:7, and at 16:6, “by the fear of the LORD men depart from evil.” Each time the fear leads somewhere, and the somewhere is away from evil.
Wisdom’s list opens with pride and closes with the froward mouth, an old word for a crooked one, and both are easier to spot in other people than in ourselves. The article on “hate the sin, love the sinner” turns on the same point: a psalmist who hates God’s enemies and, in the next breath, asks God to search him.
Moses said it in one sentence at Sinai. The people had just begged him to speak for God instead, “let not God speak with us, lest we die,” and he answered them.
And Moses said unto the people, Fear not: for God is come to prove you, and that his fear may be before your faces, that ye sin not.
Exodus 20:20 (KJV)
Moses tells them to stop being afraid, and in the same breath says God has come so that his fear will be before their faces, with its purpose attached: that ye sin not.
A girl who hides in her room when she hears her father’s car and a girl who will not lie to him even when a lie would be easy both take him seriously. Only the first is hiding from him.
Doesn’t perfect love cast out fear?
It does, and John says which fear he means.
There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.
1 John 4:18 (KJV)
John has just been writing about having “boldness in the day of judgment,” so the torment he means is the dread of that day, the fear that waits to be sentenced. Proverbs calls the other one “strong confidence” at 14:26, and the two belong to different people: one standing before a judge with no defense, and one who knows the judge forgives.
Psalm 130 puts the two in order. The psalmist, crying out of the depths, asks, “If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?” The next line answers him: “But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.” In this psalm the forgiveness is there first, and the fear follows it: the fear of someone who has learned that God forgives. That is why love has no quarrel with it. Love is where it comes from.
What about Jesus saying to fear the one who can cast into hell?
And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him.
Luke 12:4-5 (KJV)
Jesus means it, and he does not soften it: at verse 9 he adds that whoever denies him before men will be denied before the angels of God. He says all of this to his own disciples, whom he calls friends, as he prepares them for the day they will be brought before synagogues and magistrates. In between, he tells them who this God is: the one before whom not one sparrow is forgotten, who has numbered the very hairs of their heads. “Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows.”
The men in the courtroom can only kill the body. The God who counts hairs is the one the disciples answer to, and fearing him is what frees them from fearing those men. Proverbs 29:25 says it in a sentence: “The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe.”
Which way the fear sends you
From the inside, the two fears can feel alike, and the difference shows in where they send you. One sends you away from God, waiting for a sentence: that is the fear John says love casts out, and Psalm 130 is the answer to it. The other sends you away from pride and the crooked word and toward the God who forgives: that is the fear Proverbs calls the beginning of wisdom, and it can stay.
Said plainly, to whoever asks the question next: the fear of the Lord is taking God seriously enough to turn from evil, and it belongs to people who know he forgives. The fear that hides in its room when the car pulls in is the one his love casts out.