Rejoice and Tremble: The Surprising Good News of the Fear of the Lord (Union)

by Michael Reeves

When your culture is hedonistic, your religion therapeutic, and your goal a feeling of personal well-being, fear will be the ever-present headache.

The living God is infinitely perfect and quintessentially, overwhelmingly beautiful in every way: his righteousness, his graciousness, his majesty, his mercy, his all. And so we do not love him aright if our love is not a trembling, overwhelmed, and fearful love. In a sense, then, the trembling “fear of God” is a way of speaking about the intensity of the saints’ love for and enjoyment of all that God is.

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.

In other words, the biblical theme of the fear of God helps us to see the sort of joy that is most fitting for believers. Our desire for God and delight in him are not intended to be lukewarm.

Since Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, mankind has chased a particular sort of knowledge: knowledge without God. But the more we have pursued that knowledge, the more filled with fears we have become. We tremble at the terrifying size of the universe and despair at the dark complexity of the human psyche. Without God, more knowledge has not meant more happiness and satisfaction; it has left modern man feeling adrift on a vast sea of fears. At the same time, all that long quest for knowledge has left us profoundly ignorant: ignorant of the Maker and so the very logic of reality, and ignorant of who we are and who we were made to be.

We who love theology need to remember that there is no true knowledge of God where there is no right fear of him. The fear of God is the only possible foundation upon which true knowledge is built: all knowledge acquired elsewhere is counterfeit and will eventually prove itself as such.