“Right fear falls on its face before the Lord” by Michael Reeves
“The right fear of God, then, is not the flip side to our love for God. Moses’s command to Israel in summarizing the law was precisely that God’s people should fear and love the Lord their God.
Right fear does not stand in tension with love for God. Right fear falls on its face before the Lord, but falls leaning “toward the Lord.”
It is not as if love draws near and fear distances. Nor is this fear of God one side of our reaction to God. It is not simply that we love God for his graciousness and fear him for his majesty. That would be a lopsided fear of God. We also love him in his holiness and tremble at the marvelousness of his mercy.
True fear of God is true love for God defined: it is the right response to God’s full-orbed revelation of himself in all his grace and glory.
Evidently, the fear that Christ himself has (Isa. 11:1–3), and shares with us, is the opposite of being afraid of God. Godly fear casts out being afraid. But neither is it a cool, passionless regard of God.
Time and again we have seen in Scripture that believers who have a godly fear tremble before God. Overwhelmed by his goodness and majesty and holiness and grace and righteousness—by all that God is—the faithful tremble.
The biblical theme of the fear of God helps us to see the sort of love toward God that is fitting. It shows us that God does not want passionless performance or a vague preference for him.
To encounter the living, holy, and all-gracious God truly means that we cannot contain ourselves. He is not a truth to be known unaffectedly, or a good to be received listlessly. Seen clearly, the dazzling beauty and splendor of God must cause our hearts to quake.
To appreciate something of this, take a moment to enjoy the following poem by the hymnwriter F. W. Faber (1814–1863). Entitled “The Fear of God,” it is a paean to fear as the intense ecstasy of love:
My fear of Thee, O Lord! exults
Like life within my veins,—
A fear which rightly claims to be
One of love’s sacred pains.
Thy goodness to Thy saints of old
An awful thing appeared;
For were Thy majesty less good
Much less would it be feared.
There is no joy the soul can meet
Upon life’s various road
Like the sweet fear that sits and shrinks
Under the eye of God.
A special joy is in all love
For objects we revere;
Thus joy in God will always be
Proportioned to our fear.
Oh Thou art greatly to be feared,
Thou art so prompt to bless!
The dread to miss such love as Thine
Makes fear but love’s excess.
The fulness of Thy mercy seems
To fill both land and sea
If we can break through bounds so vast,
How exiled shall we be!
For grace is fearful, which each hour
Our path in life has crossed;
If it were rarer, it might be
Less easy to be lost.
But fear is love, and love is fear,
And in and out they move;
But fear is an intenser joy
Than mere unfrightened love.
When most I fear Thee, Lord! then most
Familiar I appear;
And I am in my soul most free,
When I am most in fear.
I should not love Thee as I do,
If love might make more free;
Its very sweetness would be lost
In greater liberty.
I feel Thee most a Father when
I fancy Thee most near;
And Thou comest not so nigh in love
As Thou comest, Lord! in fear.
They love Thee little, if at all,
Who do not fear Thee much;
If love is Thine attraction, Lord!
Fear is Thy very touch.
Love could not love Thee half so much
If it found Thee not so near;
It is thy nearness, which makes love
The perfectness of fear.
We fear because Thou art so good,
And because we can sin;
And when we make most show of love,
We are trembling most within.
And Father! when to us in heaven
Thou shalt Thy Face unveil,
Then more than ever will our souls
Before Thy goodness quail.
Our blessedness will be to bear
The sight of Thee so near,
And thus eternal love will be
But the ecstasy of fear.”
–Michael Reeves, Rejoice & Tremble: The Surprising Good News of the Fear of the Lord, ed. Michael Reeves, Union (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 52–56.
